eleventeen

“He began to suspect another, deeper layer of time, a time of stone and cloud and tree to which the time of clocks and calendars was a gross mockery cobbled up by savages. He felt the ways of men fall from him like sundered shackles.”
― William Gay, Provinces of Night

“There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn't put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they'd seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night.”
― William Gay, Provinces of Night

“What advice Phelan could possibly have given him. All these myriad differences between the world he was discovering and the world he’d been taught. There was nothing in Yeats or Eliot or Browning to cover this: had the situation been reversed, Phelan would probably have been coming to him for advice. He wondered how Eliot would have fared against the look in Sutter’s dead eyes.”
― William Gay, Twilight

“And then Jesus says, 'Well, watch this' - "
"Really? Well, watch this?"
"That's biblical language."
"If your Bible is written by Henry Montague.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue