Doctorow

It was a great stinking congress garlicked and perfumed in its own perspiration.

The great Edison himself, the man who invented the twentieth century, had theorized that irreducible particles of life-charged matter, which he called swarms, subsisted after death and could never be destroyed.

In his mind the meaning of something was perceived through its neglect.

The old man's narrative would often drift from English to Latin without his being aware of it, as if he were reading to one of his classes of forty years before, so that it appeared nothing was immune to the principle of volatility, not even language.

He knew the principles of photography but saw also that moving pictures depended on the capacity of humans, animals or objects to forfeit portions of themselves, residues of shadow and light which they left behind. He listened with fascination to the Victrola and played the same record over and over, whatever it happened to be, as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event.

It was evident to him that the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless process of dissatisfaction.