“Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.”

“Time passed, unknowable amounts and I had no sense for it. There was just the blanket and grass, the cold of rain and the heat of Lilly like a small sun beside me, and we lay there until the clouds left and the SimStars reappeared.”

“You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.”

“Look upon me, Mistress. Watch as I wither!”

“songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely.”

“All around me darkness gathers, Fading is the sun that shone, We must speak of other matters, You can be me when I'm goneFlowers gathered in the morning,Afternoon they blossom on,Still are withered in the evening,You can be me when I'm gone.”