“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.”

“We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing.”

“We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.”

“We haven't been too bad, have we?""No, nor enormously good. I suppose that's the trouble - we haven't been much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of awful thi...”

“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. Youve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.”

“No," said a voice, "the only thing wrong on a night like that is that there is a world and you must come back to it.”

“Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else.”

“Her eyes reversed into herself, to watch the secret heart of herself pounding itself into pieces against the side of her chest.”

“God bless the lawn mower, he thought. Who was the fool who made January first New Years Day? No, they should set a man to watch the grasses across a million Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa lawns, and on t...”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”