Quotes

Ma raised her eyes to the girls face. Ma's eyes were patient, but the lines of strain were on her forehead. Ma fanned and fanned the air, and her piece of cardboard warned off the flies. "When you're young Rosasharn, everything that happens is a thing all by itself. It is a lonely thing. I know, I 'member Rosasharn." Her mouth loved the name of her daughter. "We're gonna have a baby, Rosasharn, and that's something to you lonely and away. That's gonna hurt you and the hurt'll be a lonely hurt, and this here tent is alone in the world, Rosasharn." She whipped the air for a moment to drive a buzzing blow fly on, and the big shining fly cirlced the tent twice and zoomed out into the blinding sunlight. And Ma went on, "There's a time of change, and when that comes, dying a piece of all dying, an' bearin' an' dyin' is two pieces of the same thing. And then things ain't lonely anymore. And then the hurt don't hurt so bad, cause it ain't a lonely hurt no more, Rosasharn. I wished I could tell you so you'd know, but I can't." And her voice was so soft, so full of love, that tears crowded into Rosasharn's eyes, and flowed over her eyes and blinded her.

And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt, nor water, nor calcium. He is all of these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than it's analysis.