“If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.”

“Green means you're green with envy. Green means you wish you were me.”

“Indeed the Book of Job avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts can only say, ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can only reply or repeat ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something that would be worth understanding.”

“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.”

“I understand I have no place here. I understand I am lost in the god's eye. I understand I must find my purpose or I will go mad in this green, godless place.”

“The Guardian's headline is 'How Going Green May Make You Mean.' We're inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way—that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony.”