already

"I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer--and what trees and seasons smelled like--how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich."

"You can boast about anything if it's all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast."

"The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be covered with lupin and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is mre blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of Calfornia poppies. These too are of a burning color--not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of those poppies."



"And it never failed that during the dry years people forget about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."

""When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."

-John Steinbeck: East of Eden