“Your soul is a chosen landscapeWhere charming masked and costumed figures goPlaying the lute and dancing and almostSad beneath their fantastic disguises.All sing in a minor keyOf all-conquering love and careless fortuneThey do not seem to believe in their happinessAnd their song mingles with the moonlight.The still moonlight, sad and beautiful,Which gives the birds to dream in the treesAnd makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy,The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.”

“A bird cried jubilation. In that moment they lived long. All minor motions were stilled and only the great ones were perceived. Beneath them the earth turned, singing.”

“In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

“Before everything happened I wished i had double voice box like a song bird so I could sing two songs at once, the way a bird can harmonize with itself. I wanted to sing crystal clear notes. I wanted to sing them one after anther in ascending order. And at the same time I wanted to let another fountain of notes descend from my heart.”

“All the day I held the memory of you, and woveIts laughter with the dancing light o' the spray,And sowed the sky with tiny clouds of love...”

“Mrs. Ramsey, who had been sitting loosely, folded her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.”