The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. - John Updike

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons — at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.

...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.

Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.