But this made it all the more fun for her, a pleasant game, when at lunchtime she entered one of the glorious delicatessens of Flatbush and shopped for her Prospect Park spread. The privilege of choice gave her a feeling achingly sensual. There was so much to eat, such a variety and abundance, that each time her breath stopped, her eyes actually filmed over with emotion, and with slow and elaborate gravity she would choose from this sourly fragrant, opulent, heroic squander of food: a pickled egg here, there a slice of salami, half a loaf of pumpernickel, lusciously glazed and black. Bratwurst. Braunschweiger. Some sardines. Hot pastrami. Lox. A bagel, please.

∆ William Styron, Sophie's Choice (1979) p. 97

With the coming of spring Prospect Park, so close at hand, became Sophie's favorite refuge––wonderful to recall...In the pollen-hazy light, dappled in shades of gold-flecked green, the great towering locusts and elms that looked over meadow and rolling grass seemed prepared to shelter a fête champêtre in a scene by Watteau or Fragonard, and it was beneath one of these majestic trees that Sophie, on her free days or on weekends, would deposit herself...

∆ William Styron, Sophie's Choice (1979) p. 96

When I was a little girl I would lie in the dark of my room and listen to the sound of the horses' feet in the street below––they did not have too many motorcars in Poland then––and when I would go off to sleep I would hear the men blow the trumpets on the clock tower, very sad and distant, and I would wonder about time––this mystery, you know. Or I would lie there and think about clocks. In the hallway there was a very old clock on a kind of stand that had belonged to my grandparents, and once I opened the back of it and looked into it while it was running and saw a whole lot of levers and wheels and jewels––I think they were mostly rubies––shining in the reflection from the sun. So at night lying there I would think of myself inside the clock––imagine anything so crazy from a child!––where I would just float around on a spring and watch the levers moving and the various wheels turning and see the rubies, red and bright and as big as my head. And I would go to sleep finally with this clock in my dreams.

∆ William Styron, Sophie's Choice (1979) p. 85

...as I sat there––something about the dawn made me think of America and how the light would come up slowly over the eastern coast, miles and miles of it, the Atlantic, and the inlets and bays and slow tideland rivers with houses on the shore, all shuttered and sleeping, and this stealthy light coming up over it all, the fish stakes at low tide and the ducks winging through the dawn and a kind of apple-green glow over the swamplands and the white beaches and the bays.

And I kept thinking of the new sun coming up over the coast of Virginia and the Carolinas, and how it must have looked from those galleons, centuries ago, when after black night, dawn broke like a trumpet blast, and there it was, immense and green and glistening against the crashing seas. And suddenly I wanted more than anything in my life to go back there.

∆ William Styron, Set This House on Fire (1959), p. 499-500