“Insects all business all the time.”

“All futurity wears the head of an insect.”

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimson-weed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping Charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother’s hand on your check. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A Sunflower, four more one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

“...the one and only time in his career he'd been tempted to draw his weapon was when a swarm of gnats had descended on him in the motel parking lot. And what was so wrong about killing all the insects? Who cared if the frogs died with them? The only thing frogs were good for was keeping the insect population down, and clearly they were lousy at that.”

“When there is no one to teach you life will show you. All you have to do is pay attention.People unfortunately rarely take the time to sit back and evaluate. Their too busy being busy.”