“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.”

“All of it seems like noise and false light, and all I want for tonight is quiet, the black and gray of a summer night, and a girl in a pink dress, beside me forever.”

“Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he sleeps and sleeps when he rises to face this life,and that together they are only one man sharing a heart that always labours, hands yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?”

“I sometimes wake in the early morning & listen to the soft breathing of my child & I think to myself, this is one thing I will never regret & I carry that quiet with me all day long.”

“Unwillingly Miranda wakes,Feels the sun with terror,One unwilling step she takes,Shuddering to the mirror.Miranda in Miranda's sightIs old and gray and dirty;Twenty-nine she was last night;This morning she is thirty.Shining like the morning star,Like the twilight shining,Haunted by a calendar,Miranda is a-pining.Silly girl, silver girl,Draw the mirror toward you;Time who makes the years to whirlAdorned as he adored you.Time is timelessness for you;Calendars for the human;What's a year, or thirty, toLoveliness made woman?Oh, Night will not see thirty again,Yet soft her wing, Miranda;Pick up your glass and tell me, then--How old is Spring, Miranda?”

“Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.”