Leafs Quotes - Page 21

• Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Fall, Men, Cities

  "The Flies". Play by Jean-Paul Sartre, Orestes to Electra, Act 2, 1943.

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• The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes.

  Ray Bradbury

  Eye, Breathing, Silence

  Ray Bradbury (2013). “Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales”, p.34, Harper Collins

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• If Broadway was a river running from the top of Manhattan down to the Battery, undulating with traffic and commerce and lights, then the east-west streets were eddies where, leaf-like, one could turn slow circles from the beginning to the ever shall be, world without end.

  Amor Towles

  Running, Light, Circles

  Amor Towles (2011). “Rules of Civility: A Novel”, p.84, Penguin

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• Life is not so simple. There are many futures. The life of a single person is like a great tree: every branch, every twig, every leaf is a possible future.

  David Gemmell

  Simple, Tree, Branches

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• Merely to live without a pain Is little gladness, little gain, Ah, welcome joy tho' mixt with grief-- The thorn-set flower that crowns the leaf.

  Dan Simmons

  Pain, Flower, Grief

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• I am a part of all you see In Nature: part of all you feel: I am the impact of the bee Upon the blossom; in the tree I am the sap that shall reveal The leaf, the bloom that flows and flutes Up from the darkness through its roots.

  Madison Cawein

  Nature, Impact, Roots

  Madison Julius Cawein, “Penetralia”

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• I leaf through the ancient philosophers and find my newest discoveries there.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Discovery, Philosopher, Ancient

  Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1972). “The First Circle”

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• Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.

  William Faulkner

  Sleep, Bridges, Long

  William Faulkner (1946). “The Sound and the Fury: And As I Lay Dying”, New York : The Modern library

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• How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Life, Fall, Fugitive

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1907). “The Writings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich: Poems”

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• What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather.

  Herman Melville

  Fall, Character, Voice

  Herman Melville (1971). “Pierre, Or The Ambiguities: Volume Seven, Scholarly Edition”, p.69, Northwestern University Press

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• All perfect things are saddening in effect. The autumn wood robed in its scarlet clothes, The matchless tinting on the royal rose Whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked. Love's supreme moment, when the soul unchecked Soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows, These hold a deeper pathos than our woes, Since they leave nothing better to expect.

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox

  Autumn, Clothes, Perfection

  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2012). “Leafs On An Idle Breeze - My Inspirational Poems (Annotated Edition)”, p.658, Jazzybee Verlag

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• A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth. Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Country, Pain, Ignorance

  "Main Street". Book by Sinclair Lewis, 1920.

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• The gentle wind, a sweet and passionate wooer, Kisses the blushing leaf.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Sweet, Kissing, Wind

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1859). “The poetical works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. New complete ed., with illustr, by J. Gilbert”, p.15

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• No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

  John Keats

  Summer, Nature, Light

  'Hyperion: A Fragment' (1820) bk. 1, l. 7

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• I can almost imagine a happiness without her, the ability to let her go, to feel our roots are connected even if I never see that leaf of grass again.'

  John Green

  Roots, Leaves Of Grass, Imagine

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.274, A&C Black

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• A faint blush melting through the light of thy transparent cheek like a rose-leaf bathed in dew.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Light, Rose, Dew

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• My dream of happiness: a quiet spot by the Jamaican seashore . . . hearing the wind sob with the beauty and the tragedy of everything. Sitting under an almond tree, with the leaf spread over me like an umbrella.

  Errol Flynn

  Dream, Wind, Tree

  Errol Flynn, Jeffrey Meyers (2002). “My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Autobiography of Errol Flynn”, p.413, Rowman & Littlefield

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• Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them.

  John Muir

  Fall, Drinking, Earthquakes

  John Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1979). “John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir”, p.95, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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• The green earth sends her incense up. From many a mountain shrine; From folded leaf and dewey cup She pours her sacred wine.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Wine, Mountain, Cups

  John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Worship Of Nature”

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• Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.

  Beth Kephart

  I Love You, Falling In Love, Tree

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• On leaf of palm, on sedge-wrought roll; on plastic clay and leather scroll, man wrote his thoughts; the ages passed, and lo! the Press was found at last!

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Men, Media, Age

  John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Library”

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• One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them. Filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present : like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know, but I t felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between roof-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Memories, Thinking, Lakes

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• This was one of those perfect New England days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  Summer, Country, Flower

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• So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops its head into the shop. What! no soap? So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

  Samuel Foote

  Humorous, Cutting, Garden

  Quoted in Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy (1825).

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• One of the oldest secrets of alchemy is that every living thing, from the most complex creatures right down to the simplest leaf, carries the seeds of its creation within itself.

  Michael Scott

  Dna, Secret, Creation

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