The Doloriad

looking into her bruised face the schoolmaster thought that the history of the world was the history of cruelty, that it had never been anything else: they limped along the great curve of extinction, one foot in the void, dwindling each year and it was cruelty that made them cling on, pain and the paining of others that kept them moving

...the way that the words hung together to produce meaning had a logic that he could not follow, and sometimes he thought that this was because they spoke in images, immediate, sensuous images, that their minds had escaped the temporal relationships that had defined the language of the past and instead they lived in an eternal, causeless present, a world of pure simultaneity.

...and one day the rain would wash them away entirely, the sounds of the dead city and her memories of them, and then the Matriarch would finally be free of it—the past and its language.

(...) the sinewy brown lines that marked the distinctness of her brother's leg from the world around it, blazoning the simple ownership that is the gift of a border, were lost, and what had been the leg and whatever had belonged to the leg alone dribbled away into the earth. She could no longer tell what was leg and what was dirt.

When Agathe reached for the hatred, all she found was a small black stone that she held in her mouth and pushed around with her tongue.

...the story of the city was always a story of disintegration.

...her pores are so small that her complexion is positively matte, and she's already read The Critique of Pure Reason, and, whats more, understood it too.