“To a BoyBoy,you are a hidden watering place under the treeswhere, as the day darkens, gentle beasts with calm eyesappear one after another.Even if the sun drops flaming at the end of the fields where grass stirs greenlyand a wind pregnant with coolness and night-dew agitates your leafy bush,it is only a premonition.The tree of solitude that soars with ferocity,crowned with a swirling night,still continues in your dark place.─Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato”

“In a cool solitude of treesWhere leaves and birds a music spin,Mind that was weary is at ease,New rhythms in the soul begin.- In a Cool Solitude of Trees”

“Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass. Right now. This was the future turning into the past. One thing becoming another. Like a flame on the end of a match. Wood turning into smoke. If only we could burn brighter. A barn roaring in the night.”

“Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses.”

“...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.”

“It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.”