“In this forlorn state
I find life dreary indeed:
if a stream beckoned,
I would gladly cut my roots
and float away like duckweed.”

—  Ono no Komachi

Source: Helen Craig McCullough's translations, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985), p. 206

Original

Wabinureba mi o ukikusa no ne o taete sasou mizu araba inamu to zo omou

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "In this forlorn state I find life dreary indeed: if a stream beckoned, I would gladly cut my roots and float away l…" by Ono no Komachi?
Ono no Komachi photo
Ono no Komachi 15
Japanese poet 825–900

Related quotes

Ono no Komachi photo

“So lonely am I
My body is a floating weed
Severed at the roots.
Were there water to entice me,
I would follow it, I think.”

Ono no Komachi (825–900) Japanese poet

Source: Donald Keene's Anthology of Japanese Literature (1955), p. 79

Haruki Murakami photo

“I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Thy braes were bonnie, Yarrow stream,
When first on them I met my lover;
Thy braes how dreary, Yarrow stream,
When now thy waves his body cover!”

John Logan (1748–1788) Scottish minister and historian

The Braes of Yarrow

Alfred, Lord Tennyson photo

“She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson Mariana

"Mariana" (1830)
Context: With blackest moss the flower plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all;
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable wall.
The broken sheds looked sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

“I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Josh Billings photo

“I kno plenty ov folks who are so kondem kontrary, that if they should fall into the river, they would insist uopon floating up stream.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

Josiah Gilbert Holland photo

“So I take my life as I find it, as a life full of grand advantages that are linked indissolubly to my noblest happiness and my everlasting safety. I believe that Infinite Love ordained it, and that, if I bow willingly, tractably, and gladly to its discipline, my Father will take care of it.”

Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–1881) Novelist, poet, editor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 115.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal photo

“I tend to believe whatever you decide to look for you will find, whatever you beckon will eventually beckon you.”

Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965–2017) author, a radio show host and producer, and filmmaker

As quoted in [Roberts, Sam, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Children’s Author and Filmmaker, Dies at 51, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/style/amy-krouse-rosenthal-dies-modern-love.html, 22 November 2019, The New York Times, March 13, 2017]

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“… the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Voltairine de Cleyre photo

“The moonlight rolls down like a river,
The silence streams out like a sea;
And far where the eastern winds quiver,
My farewell goes floating to thee.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

And Thou Too (1888)

Related topics