Landscape consists in the multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist in a given space at a moment in time.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers.

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.

Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.