“There was always an uncertain promise dangling in the future like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic bough.”

“A single red bucket dangled from a single spoke like the last fruit of summer, or like autumn's final leaf.”

“The future is uncertain but the end is always near.”

“The first rule about the low hanging fruit principle is to always watch out for low hanging branches, they’re the ones to take it away from you.”

“The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer.”

“Youth, health, wealth and beauty are meant to be fuel, to be burned in pursuit of pleasure, and not fruit to be pickled in anticipation of some future famine. (Hang on a minute and I'll get my sequins out and give you a quick rendition of 'My Way')”