DWill wrote:I had expected to be seeing Rufus throughout the book,

I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they’re walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty. Now, you remember that. If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.”

Book 1, Chapter 1

Twice he had been awakened by the violent accents of the Italian film,

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

Then Leona looked across the table and smiled at him. His heart and his bowels shook; he remembered their violence and their tenderness together

But with his hands on Eric’s shoulders, affection, power, and curiosity all knotted together in him—with a hidden, unforeseen violence which frightened him a little; the hands that were meant to hold Eric at arm’s length seemed to draw Eric to him; the current that had begun flowing he did not know how to stop.

and he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city.

He had never associated Rufus with violence, for his walk was always deliberate and slow, his tone mocking and gentle

Book 1, Chapter 2

liked the sound of their talk, soft and laughing, or else violently, clearly, brilliantly hostile; she liked the life in their eyes and the way they treated their children,

They were surrounded by a violence of cars, great trucks, green buses lumbering across town, and boys, dark boys, pushing wooden wagons full of clothes. The people on the sidewalks overflowed into the streets.

A Negro girl came toward her, a girl with red, loosely waved hair, who wore a violently green dress and whose skin was a kind of dusty copper.

Vivaldo hailed a cab and they got in—as, she could not help feeling they had been expected to do—and they began to roll away from the dark, the violent scene, over which, now, a pale sun fell.

“What a funny girl you are,” he said. “You’ve got a bad case of penis envy.” “So do most men,”