Spring, which germinated in the earth, moved also with a strange restlessness, in the hearts of... women. As the weeks passed, inextinguishable hope, which mounts with the rising sap, looked from their faces.

No, one couldn't make a revolution, one couldn't even start a riot, with sheep that asked only for better browsing.

It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.

The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

I have written chiefly because, though I have often dreaded the necessity, I have found it more painful, in the end, not to write.