There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.

The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos (ed. Harvard Common Press, 1973) - ISBN: 9780876450734