--Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
But I believed God was there for Michael that night, hovering in the window. I don’t mean a hallucination; I'm not speaking figuratively; I mean that what was in the window that night for Michael was as real as the skin on his face. He'd stepped outside of our tenuous collective reality and into alternate space, a space where God was a shape, a newly decipherable language.
--Greg Bottoms, Angelhead
She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.
--Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses
Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast Of Champions
And yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
--James Joyce, Dubliners
“If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder."
"I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest."
--Chris Adrian, The Great Night