Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow and Farewell - pg. 186

'Far set in fields and woods, the town I see spring gallant from the shallows of her smoke, crag'd, spired, and turreted, her virgin fort beflagg'd.' And as I read I stole occasional glances at Tupra and saw that he was enjoying it, even though he didn't like Stevenson's poetry. 'There, on the sunny frontage of a hill, hard by the house of kings, repose the dead, my dead, the ready and the strong of word. Their works, the salt-encrusted, still survive; the sea bombards their founded towers; the night thrills pierced with their strong lamps. The artificers, one after one, here in this grated cell, where the rain erases and the rust consumes, fell upon lasting silence.'

Who knows, perhaps no one had read to him since he was a child.

2666 - pg. 73

Which led Espinoza to remark that he'd be damned if the cabbie hadn't just quoted Borges, who once said London was like a labyrinth - unintentionally of course. To which Norton replied that Dickens and Stevenson had used the same trope long before Borges in their descriptions of London. This seemed to set the driver off, for he burst out that as a Pakistani he might not know this Borges, and he might not have read the famous Dickens and Stevenson either, and he might not even know London and its streets as well as he should, that's why he'd said they were like a labyrinth, but he knew very well what decency and dignity were, and by what he had heard, the woman here present, in other words Norton, was lacking in decency and dignity, and in his country there was a word for what she was, the same word they had for it in London as it happened, and the word was bitch or slut or pig, and the gentlemen here present, gentlemen who, to judge by their accents, weren't English, also had a name in his country and that name was pimp or hustler or whoremonger.

Count Julian - pg. 63

as the mulatto girl whirls round and round the stage,
overcome by the contagious, epileptic frenzy of the
drums: her brassiere barely concealing the volcanic
eruption of her breasts, her little triangular island
of satin indicating, unmistakably, the precise location
of the treasure-trove: fifteen men on dead men's chest,
yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!: the rough sea chanties
of freebooters, the imperishable magic of Robert
Louis Stevenson!: her torso writhing, her hip swaying:
in slow, persistent, dialectical, rotary motions: a corkscrew
or a propeller: in the limbo between being and nonbeing:
the epicenter, the bottomless navel, the recruiting post
for the human legion!: pleading for masculine help with
parched lips, provoking a sudden flux of blood with her
frenzied eyes: accompanied by the musical erection of
a throbbing Negro rhythm, the repeated muscular contractions
apparently bringing an orgasm: taking the blow and
enduring the torture with the heroism of the defenders
of Numantia: waves and floods of water that increase
and multiply, crash down, inundate, penetrate, penetrate:
suggestive hypothesis that converge on the focal point
of the dogma and crystallize to announce the glad tidings:
it's coming! it's coming!