Tyler Collins

“The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea's black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach. He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tide-pools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship's light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“He gave a formal sort of bow, more Italian than English; and I went down the rock staircase to the path through the ilexes. I had to wait till evening in Subiaco for a bus back. It ran through long green valleys, under hilltop villages, past aspens already yellowing into autumn. The sky turned through the softest blues to a vesperal amber-pink. Old peasants sat at their doorways; some of them had Greek faces, inscrutable, noble, at peace. I felt, perhaps because I had drunk almost a whole bottle of Verdicchio while I waited, that I belonged, and would forever belong, to an older world than Leverrier’s. I didn’t like him or his religion. And this not liking him, this halfdrunken love of the ancient, unchangeable Greco-Latin world seemed to merge. I was a pagan, at best a stoic, at worst a voluptuary, and would remain forever so.

Waiting for the train , I got more drunk. A man at the station bar managed to make me understand that an indigo-blue hilltop under the lemon-green sky to the west was where the poet Horace had had his farm. I drank to the Sabine hill; better one Horace than ten thousand Saint Benedicts; better one poem than ten thousand sermons. Much later I realized that perhaps Leverrier, in this case, would have agreed; because he too had chosen exile; because there are times when silence is a poem.”
― John Fowles, The Magus

“It is not that I have no past. Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. In the long country, cut with ran, there is somehow nowhere to begin.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

“The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling bursts of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth's heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside and bright and quick in the dry path of the storm channels and shaping out the sockets in the rock and hurrying from ledge to ledge down the slope shimmering and deft as eels.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West