“Encouragement from any source is like a drop of rain upon a parched desert. Thanks to all the many others who rained on me when I needed it, and even when I foolishly thought I didn't.(acknowledgements in The P.U.R.E.)”

“She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.”

“When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day.”

“Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain.”

“I like to think that when I fall,A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,This shelf of books along the wall,Beside my bed, will mourn for me.”

“Thunder crashed, lightning ripped across the sky, and we stayed on the bench with our arms around each other even though rain fell in heavy drops around us. I didn't mind getting soaked because it felt as if Blake needed me, and I wanted him to.”