“The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.”

“There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.”

“The walls of books around him dense with the past formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.”

“Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring.”

“The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.”

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.”

“In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.”

“Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.”

“The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.”