“Liir didn’t know what to say to that; he wasn’t sure what husbandry was.“Animal husbandry,” Trism explained, though in the noise of the bar, Liir couldn’t tell if he said Animal or animal, the sentient or the nonsentient creature.“Training for military uses,” said Trism at last. “Are you slow, or are you falling in love with me?"”

“What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.”

“So all this time you thought I was a vampire?' Edwart whispered furiously, pulling me a few inches to the left.'Sure,' I said, 'you know, the lion falls for the lamb...''What?''Sorry. It's easier for me if I explain things in animal terms.”

“Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed into his scalp. Chistery said, "Well, we'll wail while woe'll wheel," and he cried along with Liir.”

“I know that man started animal husbandry thousands of years ago, and I think it’s disgusting. Men and animals should never be allowed to marry. Or have sex. And maybe not even engage in necking, unless it’s a man and a giraffe.”

“To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.”