Faces in the Water - Pg 202

   I wrote to death; Dear Death, I said, formalizing our relationship, and the leavings of light wastefully spilled were strewn on the lawn and the park.

Faces in the Water - Pg 201

   Sun and shade are tricks and I trust nothing and I understand why we fear the telephone, why, although we have cut the cables, we still lift the receiver and wait for the voice we dread; and I understand mirrors and try to track the point in their depth when we become nothing.

Faces in the Water - Pg 189

   I waited patiently for him to perform a miracle... the face of the world stayed the same, the sick were not healed, the roof did not dissolve and let in the stars.
   Eric taught me to dance.

Faces in the Water - Pg 170

   Their minds were planets in their private sky and their behavior gave little evidence of their real night and day and the pull of their secret tides; their heavenly collisions storms floods droughts and seasons of strength.

Faces in the Water - Pg 159

   When you have been in hospital long enough you tend to lose the urgent need, taken for granted in the "outside world," to express disbelief; it seems pointless, even a presumption, to burst out with cries of "That's not true" when you realize that truth is the indestructible foundation of the foundation of the foundation and needs no defense anyway.

Faces in the Water - Pg 145

   Alice died in the night, in great pain. There was a comfort for us in knowing that the nurse on duty had a reputation for laying out the dead with care. They said she made Alice look beautiful; a touch of cotton wool here and there, her cheeks full and flushed and delicately made-up, her hands clasping fresh flowers. If one had known Alice only in the daytime as the prim hard-working maid of the ward, one would have thought that should she chance to wake and find herself wearing lipstick and rouge she would be shocked. But we had seen her in the night and heard her thrilling extravagant tales, and surely, we thought, no one would have been more pleased to spend the longest night of all transformed, though mildly, as a Jezebel.

Faces in the Water - Pg 139

   She had known many of the patients for years and was loved and trusted by them and her attitude was usually one of happy sarcasm where words which came from her as sarcasm and mockery, a habit which she had perhaps acquired when learning to impress and obey the dictatorial matron of years ago, seemed in the air to undergo a transformation, to be fused with her abundance of vitality and sympathy so that they arrived without seeming to hurt.

Faces in the Water - Pg 138

   She told me once, in a moment of confidence which she always regretted... after her first day on duty, she cried most of the night and resolved, though she never kept her resolution, to submit her resignation and leave the appalling place and become a nurse in a general hospital where the patients were not shamed and abused because of their illness and where you could at least see what was wrong with them and prepare a neat dressing with ointment and clean white bandages to soothe and heal, and with no difficulty keep the patient quietly trapped in bed. But here at Cliffhaven or any mental hospital you had to provide your own bandages from within yourself to bind wounds that could not be seen or measured, and at the same time it seemed you had to forget that the patients were people, for there were so many of them and there was so much to do. The remedy was to shout and hit and herd.

Faces in the Water - Pg 130

   I merely dreamed that a letter would come addressed to me, a love letter, that I would take it to my room and read it again and again and memorize it and pore over the handwriting and try to imitate it and change my own ink to green if the handwriting were in green ink. But who would write me a love letter?

Faces in the Water - Pg 128

   I could not remember people and if I met them in the street and they spoke to me as if they had been friends I learned to talk to them without knowing who they were.
   "Who was that?" I would say afterwards to my sister who accompanied me on these outings. And we would laugh, making fun of my memory, and we would talk together of my "country mansion" and wonder what had caused me to forget so much. In the attempted sharing of childhood reminiscences I experienced not a surge of recollected incidents and delights, but a vast invasion of loneliness. Again I could not remember, but this time, afraid to face the emptiness, I pretended memory and no one guessed.

Faces in the Water - Pg 128

   My books in the bookcase and the shelves around the wall seemed to have absorbed more damp and decay in my absence, as if human contact with them had been an antidote to disintegration; little worms with black eyes had settled on the ends of the pages and begun a marathon meal that they must have thought would never be interrupted, as if the books had told them to devour devour at all costs since whoever had experienced a spiritual hunger for them had long since departed or died.

Faces in the Water - Pg 119

   And meanwhile in fits and starts the brothers caper palely up and down and arouse no laughter, not in the self-absorbed who are mad because they live so close to their own skin and its many-celled domes that are besieged with echoes from the striking moon.

Faces in the Water - Pg 114

   I seldom read my book yet it became more and more dilapidated physically, with pictures falling out and pages unleaving as if an unknown person were devoting time to studying it. This evidence of secret reading gave me a feeling of gratitude. It seemed as if the book understood how things were and agreed to be company for me and to breathe, even without my opening it, an overwhelming dignity of riches; but because, after all, the first passion of books is to be read, it had decided to read itself.

Faces in the Water - Pg 110

   I guessed that Louise was living in a horror story more alarming than any found in science-fiction paperbacks; she had discovered the inescapable subject and object of all horror--man himself.

Faces in the Water - Pg 107

   I belonged now to the raging mass of people and the dead lying, like rests in the music, upon the ground. I knew the mad language which created with words, without using reason, has a new shape of reason; as the blind fashion from touch an effective shape of the sight denied them.