“Hermione looked far and far and George was a midge and a leaf was the size of a house and an acorn-cup would shelter herself...for...I am a tree planted by the river of water...I am in the word tree. I am tree exactly.”

“Nothing held her, she was nothing holding to this thing: I am Hermione Gart, a failure.”

“There was a zone she had not explored. She could use the same counter, the same sort of password that she used with all these people, but she had passed over in the twinkling of an eye into another forest. This forest was reality. There, the very speaking of the words, conjured up answering sigil, house and barn and terrace and castle and river and little plum tree. A whole world was open. She looked in through a wide doorway.”

“She wanted George with some uncorrelated sector of Her Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life here, there. She wanted George to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost incarnation, a wood maniac, a tree demon, a neuropathic dendrophile...She wanted George to make the thing an integral, herself integrity. She wanted George to make one of his drastic statements that would dynamite her world away for her. She wanted this, but even as she wanted it she let herself sink further, further, she saw that her two hands reached toward George like the hands of a drowned girl. She knew she was not drowned. Where others would drown-lost, suffocated in this element-she knew that she lived. She had no complete right yet to this element, hands struggled to be pulled out. White hands waved above the water like sea spume or inland-growing pond flowers...She wanted George to pull her out, she wanted George to push her in, let Her be drowned utterly.”

“I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.”

“I am not Undine for Undine or the Little Mermaid sold her glory for feet. Undine (or the Little Mermaid) couldn't speak after she sold her glory. I will not sell my glory.”

“I am the last leaf on the tree, and the wind is blowing.”