"Anyone who says that David has sinned," goes one passage in the tractate Shabbat, "is nothing other than a sinner himself".
"The whole night you and she make wild, passionate love," goes one fairly typical passage.
If I could go from one passage to the next according to the narrator's thought associations and drifting memories, I could compose almost in the way an abstract painter might choose to place shapes and colours around a canvas.
Correct tempo is ascertained, wrote the famous father, by finding one passage that can go one way and no other: not faster, not slower.
So goes one of the most memorable passages in Carmen Maria Machado's short story "The Husband Stitch".
So goes one of Flannery O'Connor's most enduring quotes, a salty twist on a dominical passage from the Book of John.
It's going well until one passage about evil things happening when we turn away from Jesus, like "the creation of Islam".
"I will be on medication for a long time," one passage went.
One passage goes, "At length he walked around to the deer's head and, reaching into his pants, struggled for a moment and then pulled out his penis.
"Someone is also humming the passage," he went on.
The performance went on smoothly despite some omitted passages.
