“Thanks to the moon, the ground in front of me was well-lit, and I wondered if this were the reason God created and placed the moon up there in the first place, so girls like me could effortlessly sneak out in the midst of night, or maybe so their fathers might catch them. ...I prayed that God put the moon up there for the first reason and not the second.”

“The big reason why folks leave a small town,' Rant used to say, 'is so they can moon over the idea of going back. And the reason they stay put is so they can moon about getting out.'Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere.”

“Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.”

“I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important.”

“[I] wondered if he was looking up at that same moon, far away, and thinking of me as I was thinking of him.”

“When the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him.”