The Recognitions - pg. 677

The panoplied figure reached the landing in one fall, taking a long time, so it seemed afterward to those who saw it happen; and making a good deal less of noise than they might have expected, hitting head-on at the turn, attacked by shadows leaping to meet a moment when the whole room silenced and all the eyes were brought into one equation, the quick eyes stilled, and the still eyes of the wart hog, the face in the youthful portrait, the blind eyes of Valerian stretched on his rack and the all-seeing eyes of the pale underclothed figure in the middle of the low table, those and the eyes in the tapestry, turned in the other direction, alerted.

- There, of course, I disagree with Dante, came on a voice from the far end, restoring the unconscious balance, rescuing what was alive from what was not; and enough voices to deliver one another from the isolation from separate identity took up and spread in a slow wave toward the broken weight poised on the edge of the landing, whose clinging shadows leaped away as it moved, and repeated their concerted attacks as it fell from one step to another, stifling it in their last embrace at the bottom.