"What if he was the city?"

"Perceptual capillaries filled the entire indoor space, superexfoliating, dully aching, all of them translucent, and all of them [his] own; or had the shopping center shrunk, in all that sick sensation of tininess, until it fit in [his] ear and reduced the thousand sounds to auditory dots, compressing them, in the shell of his cranium, into the pure white rushing of a lifeless ocean?"

-from page 216 of the Picador edition of "The Twenty-Seventh City," the 1988 novel by Jonathan Franzen.