“That night Flora wanted to eat watermelon.”

“Ivan had contrived somehow in the dark of night to replace every watermelon in the watermelon patch with a gravestone, and every gravestone in the engraver's lot with a watermelon”

“Watermelon-it's a good fruit. You eat, you drink, you wash your face.”

“If there are segregated plates of fruit, I suggest a four-to-one ratio of non-watermelon to watermelon. Look, they know you want it. YOU know you want it. So if you conspicuously avoid it, that's an admission right there: guilt by omission.”

“When the watermelons were as large as a child's head, the women boiled them, but they collapsed into a tasteless green mush that no one could eat, not the children, not the cow.”

“The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world'd luxuries, king by grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.”