The grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. Many politicians promise green, green grass by blending niceties with delusion and by using alluring confidence tricks. They voice attractive tales and tell things, people like to hear. But the post-factual grassland often appears to be parched and barren. ("The grass was greener over there")

It’s hard to safeguard a genuine life course, when love tips over from endearing care into tedium, through laziness of imagination or loss of interest, and the storyline becomes barren and desolate, insipidly dull, turning into a threadbare act with the same trite modus operandi. “The same procedure as every year, James!” ("Things needing to be changed")

He fell on his knees on that barren ground, Staring at the sky. And the sky opened up for him by raining. With the rain, every drop of his tear was washed down filling the cracks beneath. nobody got to see his pain and agony. And yet again he remained a mystery that was never solved.

The seeming legitimacy that existed in mind a second earlier vaporized before they could be carried out, leaving the air barren.

She says, "Do you have any rubbers?" I say, I thought she was barren. "Sure, I'm sterile," she says, "but I've had unprotected sex with a million guys. I could have some terrible fatal disease." I say that would only be a problem if I wanted to live a lot longer. Fertility says, " That's how I feel about my giant credit card debt." So we have sex. If you could call it that.

A night of crying has silenced me. This morning it seems the whole world is against me. I've never before felt so barren, so empty. I've never before thought the daylight to be ... my enemy. My enemy.

This book is written in a barren period of loss with an attempt to move forward towards substance.

I will erase this world of yours with such magnificence of my presence that your vision will remain no more, your eyes fading to darkness and your soul barren before me, in my grasp that I shall corrupt to a slave of mine.

Approaching the Start of Civil ExamsPerhaps I was once a young Chinese scholarapproaching the start of civil exams,my mind grown weary and sad from seclusionwith books on syntax and poetic style.All that I knew were the mist-covered mountainsand sweet white blossoms of mountain applesthat grew in the valleys of my province.But I had been gone over six yearsbusy with studies in the Heavenly Cityempty and thin despite my work.I showed my verses to an older poetwho told me a truth I longed to believe:all knowledge is futile and barrenwhich does not open the love of your friends.

I should have asked why any room in the house was better than home to me when she entered it, and barren as a desert when she went out again—why I always noticed and remembered the little changes in her dress that I had noticed and remembered in no other woman’s before—why I saw her, heard her, and touched her (when we shook hands at night and morning) as I had never seen, heard, and touched any other woman in my life?

It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.