“There's a little pond, in a small town in Poland, where they used to dump the ashes. The pond is still gray, even half a century later. I've heard it said that the holocaust had no survivors, that even those who managed to remain technically alive were so irreparably damaged, that their spirit, their soul, the person that they were supposed to be, was gone forever. I'd like to think that's not true. But if it is, then no one on Earth survived this war.”

“Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.”

“Who likes the little little duckies in the pond? I do, I do, I do, a-chicka quack quack.”

“But once you throw a stone, there are ripples in the pond, even if you remove the rock.”

“Harvest moon:
around the pond I wander
and the night is gone.”

“There were some things that needed to be said even if the person you were saying them to didn't understand; words that must be released from their trapped place where their flapping to get out could cause internal damage.”

“To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”

“An adequately designed spillway is critical to pond management. The purpose of the spillway is to carry surplus water from the pond, away from the face of the dam. It may consist of a mechanical control, such as an exit pipe installed in the base of the dam where it will empty below the dam site.”

“This object of great beauty—even in its stricken condition—went down with a terrifying roar…a sound that survivors later described as the most bloodcurdling they had ever heard.”

“The original Jethro Tull was a 19th century English agriculturist who invented a seed drill you see… the first automatic process where by small holes were made in Mother Earth and even smaller seeds were deposited one at a time and neetly covered over as a cat does after having being naughty.”