If Nothing Else, I Will Have at Least Written This Sentence: Sentences from an Unwritten Novel

How to explain to a stranger how one can live in the grip of a feeling conveyed in a book?

He understood, despite not wanting to understand, how people were unfortunately capable of almost anything.

He could only see the paintings.

For him, the digital image became more believable than the actual event, and hovered in the gray, folded layers of his mind like an oversaturated, iridescent hummingbird.

She used to feel like she inhabited her life; now, she felt like a visitor.

His daily life-experience was best described by a persistent thought which tried to filter its way through his head as he walked along Michigan Avenue, how each car in this morning's rush hour seemed to flow directly into him and disappear within the dark, echoing forests of his past instead of harmlessly passing by him, as if he were a portal from which nothing ever returned, though the image of every object hovered before his face, in his wide line of vision, as if on the event horizon of a massive black hole, making it difficult for him to see what was coming and where he was going.