"The men felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

On "Maria" again

"These tints of feeling indeed were doubtless but the iridescence of his idleness, and they were presently lost in new light from Maria."

--Henry James, The Ambassadors, 12.iii