“The dark, twisting clouds that had settled over Vendona’s streets seemed to open up and glide past the winking moon. The wind moaned slowly as it died while the trees began dancing with a melody only known to nature. The city became alive, and time raced forward as the sky warmed slightly. It was no longer snowing.”

“While wishing a beautiful snowing for the streets of your city, do not forget also to wish a warm house for the homeless!”

“Their language was an old wild language. They had known incredible loves and dark adventures and the twisted streets of alien cities. They had known the green breaking waves of the sea, and the green aisles of the silent forests. They had known war and death and fierce, cruel elation.”

“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.”

“Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (...) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice.”

“The tree that never had to fightfor sun and sky and air and lightbut stood out in the open plainand always got it share of rain,never became a forest kingbut lived and died a scrubby thing.Good timber does not grow with ease.The stronger wind, the stronger trees. ”