“It is, after all, that old process which Katherine Mansfield once described as ‘going out and looking at a tree and coming back plus the tree.”

“... I am more of an ambler. I once overheard my old boss in Dublin describe me as very "hello trees, hello flowers." It was intended as an insult and it fulfilled its brief; I was insulted. I had little interest in greeting trees and flowers but nor did I treat life as a treadmill, on which it was vital to keep fleeing forward in order to avoid being sucked off the back and out of the game.”

“For it is the young tree grown out of the old root which shall illuminate what the old tree has been in its wonders.”

“My favorite tree is the Joshua tree, which is named after me. Well, it will be, once I change my name to Joshua.”

“Young Bingo was too busy introducing the mob to take much notice. They were a very C3 collection. Comrade Butt looked like one of those things that come out of dead trees after the rain; moth-eaten was the word I should have used to described old Rowbotham; and as for Charlotte, she seemed to take me straight into another and a dreadful world.”

“So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all—plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”