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“The Rainbow Stories,” William T. Vollmann, ©1989

“Late at night you could walk down Lincoln Street along the border of the Park, and there were always cars and vans and buses parked there, their windows blackout-curtained by plastic, by stacked up boxes, by junky possessions, and sometimes you might see a light flash briefly inside one of those carcasses, like a firefly inside the mouth of a dead horse;…” p.51

(Describing a prostitute): “Her breath stank and the whites of her eyes were yellow. (To footnote:) “Here is the definition of an unfortunate profession: one whose practitioners become unfit for it in proportion of their practice of it.” p.85

“”Do I truly hear self-righteous buzzing, or am I dreaming?” said Nebuchadnezzar, so sarcastically that the very air of the throne hall seemed to acidulate.” p.169

“Her crown of fire had only grown brighter since he had seen her last. All her life she had lived in the darkness under dark red raspberries of flame, and she basked amidst the purple thorn-stalks of flame and watched the smoke pass across charred black worlds. She ruled the fire-pools under the leaves of flame, under the steep Hell-slopes of raspberries, the fire-foliage as thick as moss where mineral-flames budded steamy and green or shot up like Indian pipe or witch’s broom. In a streak of flame she ascended through dim and smoky terrors, little imagining that she soon must confront the gazes of angels.” p.188

“Treading high above the sea, stepping on stairs of red volcanic rock slippery with the slime of life (rainwater, mud, rotten yellow fruits), Meshach ascended the green mountain, since the orange one had failed him. Smells of coffee and pepper made him dizzy. The air was mist, so full of oxygen that he needed to take only shallow breaths. The ocean was bluish-green. The coastline was pleated and severe. He saw a rainbow over the sea; he breathed in the rich rich clouds. He passed blue flowers that smelled like fermenting apples. He ducked through a shiny tunnel of trees. The rain-forest smelled of marmalade.” p.198-199

“The bubbles in my friends’ yellow beers as they tilted the bottles to their mouths on after the other seemed to me indescribably COOL, like jazz solos performed with glass instruments of perfect subtlety.” p.205

“The night was marvelously clear, as if varnished in epistemological peppermint.” p.207

“I felt the same fear that even the expert drug abuser has when the dose is too great, and controlled consciousness disintegrates, the soul whimpering as it senses that it is now strapped to the electric chair of destiny.” p.217

“XXIV Death naturally screens itself with superstition. I remember being taken to see Fort Ticonderoga by my parents when I was eight, and my sister Angela was five, and discovering a glass case containing two children’s skeletons, with the legend TWELVE-YEAR-OLD-GRAVE. For a long time after this I dreaded becoming twelve. But there was nothing that I could do about it. I kept getting older. In point of fact, I lived past becoming twelve, and Angela died at six, so there had been nothing to worry about.” p.265

“I looked into the moss-grown pits of her nostrils, like a men’s entrance and a women’s entrance into the marble temple of her skull.” p.300

“He and his friends from Yale carried in a bucket of giant clams which they had gathered on the beach. Jenny dumped the clams into the sink at once and began scrubbing their shells with soapy steel wool to get rid of every subversive germ; in Jenny’s world, as in Marisa’s, every alien must be sterilized. She steamed the biggest ones, who sighed futilely through their excurrent siphons; the rest I popped into the freezer for five minutes to weaken them so that their numb adductor muscles would be unable to resist my knife; already sick from the long oceanless ride in the trunk of Adam’s car, they cracked open in easy surrender to their sushi doom.” p.322

“Their eyeballs rolled when they moved, as if their optic nerves were fraying and loosening like the wires in car stereos after the car doors have been slammed and kicked for years and the cars have gone in some junkheap caravan over fifty thousand miles of dead roads full of gravel and broken glass.” p.339

“The Continuum of Chill According to Moritz, the number of hours elapse since death can be computed by subtracting the rectal temperature from 98.6° Fahrenheit, and dividing the result by 1.5″ p.358

“”Life’s pretty good, except that it sucks,” he said.

“It sure sucks,” said Sky Boy. “It really does.”” p.409

“As always, there was a quantum of sterile improbability in this night world, which made everything clean because nothing was real. He might have been in some crumbling dream of ancient Rome. He passed desiccated scraps of newspaper, bricks, squashed dark garments disposed like dead dogs. He was coming closer and closer to the belly of the lizard, where the overpass met the dirt.” p.420

“So I came to consider him a very measured person, particularly because in the REsearch interview he spoke as though he were slowly assembling paragraphs, bolting one sentence to the next with moderate redundancies in the grammatical design so that no matter what editing torque the transcript was subjected to, it would not lose its information value:..” p.446

“”What if the machines were conscious and did recognize each other? What would they think about then?”

“Well, you have to infer that they think in the same terms that a person thinks: pretty much in terms of their limitations…” p.458

“Here no one died or came to life, even in the burning mornings when anyone could feel a thrilling quality in the sunlight, which derived from Mexico as did vanilla extract.” p.492