The Overstory: A Novel

the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

as if he, too, might have another hundred years or two to document what time hides forever in plain sight.

What the boy wanted the black box to do was innocent enough: return him to the days of myth and origin, when all the places a person could reach were green and pliant, and life might still be anything at all.

She sighs long and slides down into the way things need to be. “It’s good to be cooked for.”

He hears his dead undergrad mentor quoting Mark Twain. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. “In the field. I seem to have gotten a little lost.”

The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below.

There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.

Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all

But the humans have her in their grip, and she’ll never get free again.