“If he was wood, he was a flail, and I was grain on the threshing floor.I was a thousand grains, my thoughts blown like chaff. All that was left was the taste of salt.”

“Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.”

“You may thresh a hundred thousand bushels of grain, / But more than mine your belly will not contain.”

“a wise woman puts a grain of sugar in everything she says to a man, and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.”

“It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?”

“No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.”