“Therefore, neither confide in nor depend upon a wind-shaken reed, for “all flesh is grass” and all its glory, like the flower of grass, will fade away. You will quickly be deceived if you look only to the outward appearance of men, and you will often be disappointed if you seek comfort and gain in them.”

“You ought to see it when it blooms, all dark red flowers from horizon to horizon, like a see of blood. Come the dry season, and the world turns the color of old bronze. And this is only hranna, child. There are hundred kinds of grass out there, grasses as yellow as lemon and as dark as indigo, blue grasses and orange grasses and grasses as rainbows.”

“You sleep with a dream of summer weather,wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain.Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass and rainy air. The plastic table on the terracehas shed three legs on its way to the garden fence. The mountains have had the sense to disappear. It's the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse.Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,docks in a pool of shadow all its own.That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.”

“She was thinking that the grass really could be greener on the other side of the fence. It depended on who wa standing in the grass. Maybe you had to go take a look”

“The grass withers, the flower fades, but Cosmic Ordering stands forever.”

“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud--that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee--that you do not care to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others.”