“And see the rivers how they run/through woods and meads in shades and sun/sometimes swift and sometimes slow/ wave succeeding wave they go”

“Sometimes you catch the wave. Sometimes the wave catches you.”

“We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.”

“All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find withanother, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not changeyou. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when youare looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness orfrustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty aboutsomething by blaming him, but you won't succeed in changing whatever itis about you that is making you unhappy.”

“Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun, And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run; Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air; Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.”

“Belief in Jesus does not come by the waving of a magic wand. It comes by hearing the word of God through Jesus.”

“...but grief, he'd discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then 'moved on' (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves - waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.”