Sweet peas should smell. Half the point of growing sweet peas is to cut them for the house; they should fill a room with an almost painful olfactory inarticulateness. But most sweet peas smell of nothing. This does not stop them being beautiful, but they are like food with no flavour.

Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

I think probably one of the important things that happened to me was growing up in Idaho in the mountains, in the woods, and having a very strong presence of the wilderness around me. That never felt like emptiness. It always felt like presence.

The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.

The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back; Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.

A little child paddles a little boat, Drifting about, and picking white lotuses. He does not know how to hide his tracks, And duckweed's opened up along his path.