Vol de Nuit

Antoine de St. Exupery's writing is a masterpiece. Practically every page has a phrase to reread, or a description to ponder:

Somewhere, too, the planes were fighting forward; the night flights went on and on like a persistent malady, and on them watch must be kept. Help must be given to these men who with hands and knees and breast to breast were wrestling with the darkness, who knew and only knew an unseen world of shifting things, whence they must struggle out, as from an ocean. And the things they said about it afterwards were--terrible! "I turned the light on to my hands so as to see them." Velvet of hands bathed in a dim red dark-room glow; last fragment, that must be saved, of a lost world. (p. 38-39): Vol de Nuit (Night Flight)

h/t Dolce Bellezza