"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
— Isak Dinesen

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay."
— Robert Frost

"Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold."
— S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)

"It's amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing."
— Scott Westerfeld (Peeps)

"People only worry about the uncanny for about a week; that's the end of their attention span. After that, suspicions turn into shtick."
— Scott Westerfeld (Peeps)

"I love my virginity to the apocalypse."
— Scott Westerfeld

"I feel more helpless with you than without you."
— Adrienne Rich

"...you look at me like an emergency"
— Adrienne Rich (Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972)

"...Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls"
— Adrienne Rich

"It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws."
— Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)

"I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it."
— Oscar Wilde

"Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there."
— Elizabeth Bowen