“This parched evening seasons the night with remembrances of rain.”

“She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.”

“Even the rain in its night singing, / the night rain in its forgetting, / is a kind of light.”

“Encouragement from any source is like a drop of rain upon a parched desert. Thanks to all the many others who rained on me when I needed it, and even when I foolishly thought I didn't.(acknowledgements in The P.U.R.E.)”

“summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat;it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.”

“Here it was like wind or rain, a sign of the seasons, just part of the weather-- another element of this country that took hold of her, even as it eluded her grasp”