“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”

“Sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody. I guess that’s the job I do.”

“It burned me from within. It quickened; I was with book, as a woman is with child.”

“That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.- Book VI, 54.”

“What more could one ask of a companion? To be forever new and yet forever steady. To be strange and familiar all at once, with enough change to quicken my mind, enough steadiness to give sanctuary to my heart. The books on my shelf never asked to come together, and they would not trust or want to listen to one another; but each is a piece of a stained-glass whole without which I couldn’t make sense to myself, or to the world outside.”

“In Scandanavia, 'Iverson finds that the whole spectrum of pollen deposits is altered when (in early Neolithic times) ... the first farmers appear. Cereal pollens increase. Plants of oak woodland lessen and disappear; birch pollen increases rapidly -- it is one of the trees which can come in after an extensive burn. For the pollen record, the effect of early agriculture is as severe as a shift in climate.”