The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of e… - William T. Vollmann

Expressiveness in others enriched Mrs. Singer's confidence in her own interpretations, possibly because a certain fear that she had not accomplished anything in her life left her all the more desirous of discovering easy clues to less consequential questions.

It is the occupation of politicians to deny this ubiquity, nay, universality of corroded hearts, to discount the barren laboriousness of all paths. Reduce corporate taxes, they say, or redistribute the wealth of the parasitic class to the desperate class, and then all who matter can cross the Jordan together and enter into a new land of happiness whose prior inhabitants will dissolve into sea-colored ghosts of dust.

and the water and the grass and the white ripples on grey water, and white clouds among grey clouds and the wrinkled young silver skin of the water and life-bright lichens on black branches and on the still, bright river, a man and woman slowly poling their log canoe and the spiderweb (golden-green seed-wings already growing above the darker leaves of maples this early in August) and the smell of evergreens and the living grass, then the dying grass, brighter than an Indian basket