“Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?”

“As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?”

“The greed for fruit misses the flower.”

“I think that's why they have so many religious freaks in the airports...they even keep the flowers behind the counter. 'Go, go my children...be fruitful and annoy.”

“The master dwells in the substantial and not in the superficial. Rests in the fruit and not in the flower.”

“Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?”