"Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas: Wasn‘t it silly that the names of his heroes all began with an A, the very first letter of the alphabet, the story‘s beginning, and the long syllable of a scream? The schoolmaster couldn‘t remember his name, but he would have liked for it to begin with the final letter. ZdenÄ›k, perhaps, or even better, ZlatomÃr."
"It would be a long, hungry winter, Jan concluded, and the image of a centipede crawled into his brain and buried its flat head in the soft gray matter."
"As Aquinas waded through the sea of green ferns, Franta heard the roaring of applause, the strange, inhuman howl that is the emergent property of crowds."
"Hovering in front of him, [Franta] could see the faint aureole that hung about Aquinas, and it struck him then that this was not something that happened all at once but was rather something accrued over time, like the layers of sediment that eventually turn into rock, successive generations of painters slopping it around his beaming face until one day, suddenly, it‘s there: a silty halo that he can‘t get rid of, a saint‘s stink."
"She was aware of the disordered nature of her mind, the connectedness of substances, the extreme similitude of objects, the thin boundaries between times and places, so easy to get lost between, and she remembered the phrases their uncle had whispered when she‘d told him those things: associative loosening, cognitive drift."
"As the camera swung back to the school therapist the television went black. Suddenly they saw themselves reflected in the screen, a family in negative, and they didn‘t like it at all."
"It was the blunt promise of her anatomy: the slack mouth and the round pig eyes; the antiquated languor of her fat white hands—these small acquiescences all pointed to the answer of a question never asked: a great pale feminine yes." ?
"There is an ancient agreement between the glass and the light that allows one to pass through the body of the other without hesitation. Today she was the glass and the glass was in her; her head was a great flat plane and the sun slithered through her brain and received no alteration; she was an infinite disk and she could not see where she ended and the whiteness of the void began."
The Doloriad: A Novel | 
