“Death glided by, shadowless, among the empties on the grass.”

“Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes.”

“And when like her, oh, Saki, you shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made One — turn down an empty Glass!”

“In the empty mountains
The leaves of the bamboo grass
Rustle in the wind.
I think of a girl
Who is not here.”

“I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”

“Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?”

“He was, she thought, as beautiful as a young god, lying on his side among the grass and flowers”

“Ah! Postumus! Devotion fails
The lapse of gliding years to stay,
With wrinkled age it nought avails
Nor conjures conquering Death away.”

“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see — not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”

“Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble.”