“Me, I was still in the pygmy hippo in a skirt, singing lusty songs about Solomon's private life and a giant stone back and forth through the air as I climbed out of the quarry at the edge of the site.”

“Hippo in a skirt: this was a comic reference to one of Solomon's principal wives, the one from Moab. Childish? Yes. But in the days before printing we had limited opportunities for satire.”

“Joseph Beringer...dances around behind me singing some poorly rhymed and slightly dirty song about my [racing] odds at my skirts.'I don't even wear skirts,' I snap at him.'Especially,' he says, 'in my daydreams.”

“The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart.”

“Sense is the song you sing out into the world, and the song the world sings back to you.”

“Ede had been pregnant not quite the full term: eight months, two weeks, four days. She had lapsed into an extended silence - partly because she was still in mourning - still enraged and afraid of speech. And partly, too, because the child itself had taken up dreaming in her belly - dreaming and, Ede was certain, singing. Not singing songs a person knew, of course. Nothing Ede could recognize. But songs for certain. Music - with a tune to it. Evocative. A song about self. A song about place. As if a bird had sung it, sitting in a tree at the edge of a field. Or high in the air above a field. A hovering song. Of recognition.”