How many oceans have vanished in sand, how much sand has been prayed hard in the stone, how much time has been wept away in the singing horn of the seashells, how much mortal abandonment in the fishes' pearl eyes, how many morning trumpets in the coral, how many star patterns in crystal, how much seed of laughter in the gulls' throat, how many threads of longing for home have been traversed on the nightly course of the constellations, how much fertile earth for the root of the word: You -- behind all the crashing patterns of the secrets You --
Another fall, another turned page: was something of jubilee in that autumnal beginning as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer?
~ Wallace Stegner in ANGLE OF REPOSE