“The ... office was decorated in early American Earth Mother, with spider plants, hemp wall tapestries, and beeswax candles.”

“I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how—although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform—he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider’s abdomen.”

“Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.”

“Two women, one nigra and one white, whose voices were part of me, whose hands had comforted, soothed, and taught. One a pine-knot torch and the other a scented beeswax candle against the darkness of my ignorance and fear. Both gone.”

“Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”

“And then again, I am no longer quite such a good-looking young fellow that tapestries leap off the wall in my honour.”