The page numbers are taken from the Vintage paperback edition of Reading in the Dark (1997).
"On the stairs, there was a clear, plain silence." (p. 5)
"...lino from which the original pattern had been polished away to the point where it had the look of faint memory." (p. 5)
"The dismembered streets lay strewn all around the ruined distillery where Uncle Eddie had fought, aching with a long, dolorous absence." (p. 34)
"So broken was my father's family that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire." (p. 42)
"I felt we lived in an empty space with a long cry from him ramifying through it. At other times, it appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it." (p. 43)
"...I imagined the living rats that remained, breathing their vengeance in dull miasmic unison deep underground." (p. 80)
"When we came into the kitchen, my mother looked up and the whole history of his family and her family and ourselves passed over her face in one intuitive waltz of welcome and then of pain". (p. 136)
