Quotes about weather
page 4

Ulysses S. Grant photo
Agatha Christie photo
David Dixon Porter photo
Jimmy John Liautaud photo

“I changed the rules for allowing people to buy into my system as a franchisee. I explained in detail how tough running a Jimmy John's can be. I explained the long hours, the unforgiving weather, the late nights, the weekends, and all of the sacrifices that go along with the industry.”

Jimmy John Liautaud (1964) Jimmy John's Owner, Founder, & Chairman

How a 19-year-old turned a sandwich shop into a billion-dollar business
Business Insider
1983-09-08
Kate
Taylor
http://www.businessinsider.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-jimmy-johns-2016-9

Grover Cleveland photo

“The ship of Democracy, which has weathered all storms, may sink through the mutiny of those aboard.”

Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) 22nd and 24th president of the United States

Quoted in The American Mercury (1961), in a letter from Cleveland to his law partner, Wilson S. Bissell, February 15th, 1894. https://books.google.com/books?id=BIsqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22The+present+danger%22+cleveland+bissell&dq=%22The+present+danger%22+cleveland+bissell&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj68-CIhenSAhXpCMAKHdsXCKQQ6AEIHjAB.

Halldór Laxness photo
Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein photo

“There were many reasons why we did not gain complete success at Arnhem. The following in my view were the main ones. First. The operation was not regarded at Supreme Headquarters as the spearhead of a major Allied movement on the northern flank designed to isolate, and finally to occupy, the Ruhr - the one objective in the West which the Germans could not afford to lose. There is no doubt in my mind that Eisenhower always wanted to give priority to the northern thrust and to scale down the southern one. He ordered this to be done, and he thought that it was being done. It was not being done. Second. The airborne forces at Arnhem were dropped too far away from the vital objective - the bridge. It was some hours before they reached it. I take the blame for this mistake. I should have ordered Second Army and 1st Airborne Corps to arrange that at least one complete Parachute Brigade was dropped quite close to the bridge, so that it could have been captured in a matter of minutes and its defence soundly organised with time to spare. I did not do so. Third. The weather. This turned against us after the first day and we could not carry out much of the later airborne programme. But weather is always an uncertain factor, in war and in peace. This uncertainty we all accepted. It could only have been offset, and the operation made a certainty, by allotting additional resources to the project, so that it became an Allied and not merely a British project. Fourth. The 2nd S. S. Panzer Corps was refitting in the Arnhem area, having limped up there after its mauling in Normandy. We knew it was there. But we were wrong in supposing that it could not fight effectively; its battle state was far beyond our expectation. It was quickly brought into action against the 1st Airborne Division.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Concerning Operation Market Garden in his autobiography, 'The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery' (1958)

Nile Kinnick photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Paul Simon photo

“I get all the news I need from the weather report.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

The Only Living Boy in New York — released as a single in 1969
Song lyrics, Bridge over Troubled Water (1970)

Theodore Wilbur Anderson photo
George Gissing photo
Obafemi Martins photo

“Things have taken time to get used to, the weather's not great and people seem to drink beer all the time, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be playing.”

Obafemi Martins (1984) Nigerian footballer

Martins on settling in Newcastle. [August 8, 2007, http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2002390000-2007380294,00.html, Obafemi is a real shooting star, The Sun, 2007-08-18]

Geovanny Vicente photo
Halldór Laxness photo
Ian McDonald photo

“It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather.”

Source: Desolation Road (1988), Chapter 23 (p. 116).

George S. Patton photo

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies and establish Thy justice among men and nations.”

George S. Patton (1885–1945) United States Army general

Though Patton commissioned this prayer and ordered 250,000 copies of it printed with his signature, it was actually composed by Chief Chaplain James H. O'Neill http://www.pattonhq.com/prayer.html Review of the News (6 October 1971)
Misattributed

George Mason photo
Richard Hovey photo

“Fair weather weddings make fair weather lives.”

Richard Hovey (1864–1900) American writer

Act i. Sc. 3.
The Marriage of Guenevere (1891)

Richard Dawkins photo

“Don't ask God to cure cancer & world poverty. He's too busy finding you a parking space & fixing the weather for your barbecue.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/358514912789676033 (20 July 2013)
Twitter

“[Pelsaert laments] “the utter subjection and poverty of the common people-poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woe.” He continues: “There are three classes of people who are indeed nominally free, but whose status differs very little from voluntary slavery-workmen, peons or servants and shopkeepers. For the workmen there are two scourges, the first of which is low wages. Goldsmiths, painters (of cloth or chintz), embroiderers, carpet makers, cotton or silk weavers, black-smiths, copper-smiths, tailors, masons, builders, stone-cutters, a hundred crafts in all-any of these working from morning to night can earn only 5 or 6 tackas (tankahs), that is 4 or 5 strivers in wages. The second (scourge) is (the oppression of) the Governor, the nobles, the Diwan, the Kotwal, the Bakshi, and other royal officers. If any of these wants a workman, the man is not asked if he is willing to come, but is seized in the house or in the street, well beaten if he should dare to raise any objection, and in the evening paid half his wages, or nothing at all. From these facts the nature of their food can be easily inferred… For their monotonous daily food they have nothing but a little khichri… in the day time, they munch a little parched pulse or other grain, which they say suffices for their lean stomachs… Their houses are built of mud with thatched roofs. Furniture there is little or none, except some earthenware pots to hold water and for cooking… Their bedclothes are scanty, merely a sheet or perhaps two… this is sufficient in the hot weather, but the bitter cold nights are miserable indeed, and they try to keep warm over little cowdung fires… the smoke from these fires all over the city is so great that the eyes run, and the throat seems to be choked.””

Francisco Pelsaert (1591–1630) Dutch merchant, commander of the ship Batavia

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7
Jahangir’s India

Kent Hovind photo
Dennis Skinner photo

“The Hon. Gentleman is making pretty heavy weather of the fact that he was kicked out of this gentleman's club for 20 days. I call it a gentlemen's club.”

Dennis Skinner (1932) British politician

Speech http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199192/cmhansrd/1992-02-28/Debate-1.html in the House of Commons (28 February 1992)
1990s

Stephen L. Carter photo

“A cemetery is an affront to the rational mind. One reason is its eerily wasted space, this tribute to the dead that inevitably degenerates into ancestor worship as, on birthdays and anniversaries, humans of every faith and no faith at all brave whatever weather may that day threaten, in order to stand before these rows of silent stone markers, praying, yes, and remembering, of course, but very often actually speaking to the deceased, an oddly pagan ritual in which we engage, this shared pretense that the rotted corpses in warped wooden boxes are able to hear and understand us if we stand before their graves.The other reason a cemetery appeals to the irrational side is its obtrusive, irresistible habit of sneaking past the civilized veneer with which we cover the primitive planks of our childhood fears. When we are children, we know that what our parents insist is merely a tree branch blowing in the wind is really the gnarled fingertip of some horrific creature of the night, waiting outside the window, tapping, tapping, tapping, to let us know that, as soon as our parents close the door and sentence us to the gloom which they insist builds character, he will lift the sash and dart inside and…And there childhood imagination usually runs out, unable to give shape to the precise fears that have kept us awake and that will, in a few months, be forgotten entirely. Until we next visit a cemetery, that is, when, suddenly, the possibility of some terrifying creature of the night seems remarkably real.”

Source: The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002), Ch. 50, Again Old Town, I

Van Jones photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Dafydd ap Gwilym photo

“God is not so cruel as old men tell us: nor will God cut off the gentle soul of a man for loving a woman or a girl. Three things are loved by the whole world: women, fine weather, and good health, and girls are the fairest flower in Heaven next to God Himself.”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Nid ydyw Duw mor greulon
Ag y dywaid hen ddynion.
Ni chyll Duw enaid gŵr mwyn,
Er caru gwraig na morwyn.
Tripheth a gerir drwy'r byd:
Gwraig a hinon ac iechyd.
Merch sydd decaf blodeuyn
Yn y nef ond Duw ei hun.
"Y Bardd a'r Brawd Llwyd" (The Poet and the Grey Brother), line 37; translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym (trans. Nigel Heseltine) Twenty-Five Poems (Banbury: The Piers Press, 1968) p. 42.

Winston S. Churchill photo
Fran Lebowitz photo

“I doubt there’s ever been a true thing said on Fox. Maybe the weather report, maybe not.”

Fran Lebowitz (1950) author and public speaker from the United States

Ruminator Magazine interview with Susannah McNeely (August/September 2005).

Bob Dylan photo

“A change in the weather is known to be extreme; but what's the sense in changing horses in mid-stream?”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Blood on the Tracks (1975), You're a Big Girl Now

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo

“Nought cared this Body for wind or weather
When Youth and I lived in't together.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

" Youth and Age http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Youth_and_Age.html", st. 1 (1823–1832)

Ray Bradbury photo
Benoît Mandelbrot photo
Francis Escudero photo

“True or not, this man who is married to the Star for All Seasons will remain an all-weather friend to me, and to most of us.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2013, Speech: Nomination of Senator Ralph Recto as Senate Pro Tempore

Jim Morrison photo
Ambrose Bierce photo
Ahmad Sirhindi photo

“Every person cherishes some longing in his heart. The only longing which this recluse (meaning himself) cherishes is that the enemies of Allah and his Prophet should be roughed up. The accursed ones should be humiliated, and their false gods disgraced and defiled. I know that Allah likes and loves no other act more than this. That is why I have been encouraging you again and again to act in this way. Now that you have yourself arrived at that place, and have been appointed to defile and insult that dirty spot and its inhabitants, I feel grateful for this grace (from Allah). There are many who go to this place for pilgrimage. Allah in his kindness has not inflicted this punishment on us. After giving thanks to Allah, you should do your best to ruin that place and their false gods… whether the idols are carved or uncarved. Let us hope that you will not act slow. Physical weakness and severity of the cold weather, comes in my way. Otherwise, I would have presented myself, and helped you in doing the job. I would have liked to participate in the ceremony and mutilate the stones…”

Ahmad Sirhindi (1564–1624) Indian philosopher

Maktubat-i-Imam Rabbani translated into Urdu by Maulana Muhammad Sa’id Ahmad Naqshbandi, Deoband, 1988, Volume III pp.707. This letter was also written to Shaikh Farid alias Nawab Murtaza Khan who had reached Kangra in November 1620 to conquer the fort and desecrate its temples. Jahangir had followed the Nawab in order to celebrate the victory by sacrificing cows and building a mosque where none had existed before.
From his letters

Brian W. Aldiss photo

“One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

Report On Probability A (1968)

Anton Mauve photo

“.. it is really beautiful here with that freezing weather. o you should see now the distance, and the fields with their black earth and flat shadows it would strike you, how lovely the sun is shining in the Betuwe.. (translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018)”

Anton Mauve (1838–1888) Dutch painter (1838–1888)

(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Anton Mauve, uit zijn brief:) ..het is hier zo mooi met dat vriesende weer. o je moest thans de verschieten eens zien, en die akkers met zijn zwarte aarde en vlakken schaduwen dat zou je frapperen, heerlijk schijnt de zon in de ..
in a letter to Willem Maris, 1860's; as cited in 'Zó Hollands - Het Hollandse landschap in de Nederlandse kunst sinds 1850', Antoon Erftemeijer https://www.franshalsmuseum.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/zohollands_eindversie_def_1.pdf; Frans Hals museum | De Hallen, Haarlem 2011, p. 31
1860's

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“But all sorts of things and weather
Must be taken in together
To make up a year,
And a sphere.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Fable http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/fable.htm
1840s, Poems (1847)

Thomas Hardy photo

“This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

" Weathers http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/2735, lines 10-11, from Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

Alex Salmond photo
Wilfred Thesiger photo
Willa Cather photo
Jerome K. Jerome photo
Glen Cook photo
Robert Frost photo
Kent Hovind photo

“I think what happened: the mammoths were up there chopping on their tropical flowers. It was a beautiful day, and it began to snow super cold snow. They had never seen snow before. One of the mammoths looked at his buddy and said, "Herman, this is peculiar weather we're having here. What is this white stuff falling out of the sky?" "I don't know, but let's get out of here." They started running around trying to find a place to hide and the snow got deeper and deeper and deeper and they got stuck in the snow standing up, and they couldn't even fall down. How many of you have ever been in a snow drift so deep you couldn't even fall over? Ever been in one of those? I think that's what happened to the mammoths. People say, "Well the mammoths have long hair. They're designed for cold weather." No, mammoths are not designed for cold weather. A lot of animals in the jungle have long hair. It is hot there. If the temperature is seventy degrees, long hair is just simply a decoration. There's a lot of things about the mammoth that shows that they were not designed for cold weather. There's a whole section just in this book about mammoths showing that they were not designed for cold weather. You can read all about that. For the mammoths, some of them ended frozen standing up. It was in super cold ice, perhaps 300 degrees below zero!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Brandon Boyd photo

“You're about as reliable as paper shoes in bad weather.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Light Grenades (2006)

Neville Chamberlain photo
Abby Sunderland photo

“After the week of stormy weather, she set sail under sunny skies, on a glassy sea with a big swell running.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 63

John Ashbery photo
David Cameron photo
Elizabeth Bisland Whetmore photo
Shappi Khorsandi photo

“I'm actually going on holiday to India next month, and I wanted to know what the weather was gonna be like there, so I phoned my bank.”

Shappi Khorsandi (1973) Iranian born comedian

Live at the Apollo (Series 4 Episode 2, December 2008)

Richard Holbrooke photo
Eliza Farnham photo
Georgia O'Keeffe photo
Frederik Pohl photo

“It was a nasty day in late December, just before the holidays. The weather was cold, wet, and miserable—well, I said it was London, didn’t I?”

Frederik Pohl (1919–2013) American science fiction writer and editor

Waiting for the Olympians (p. 255)
Platinum Pohl (2005)

Conor Oberst photo
Andy Rooney photo

“President Reagan must be happy over how bad the weather's been this winter, because its the one thing no one's blaming on him. Theres nothing television news likes better than bad weather, and we sure get a lot of it in the United States.”

Andy Rooney (1919–2011) writer, humorist, television personality

[Andy Rooney, w:Andy Rooney, 8, Weather, Years of Minutes, 2003, PublicAffairs, 978-1586482114]

Dennis Miller photo

“Listen, the weather is just like Hillary's explanation for her war vote: we just don't know, do we?”

Dennis Miller (1953) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actor

The Buck Starts Here (17 June 2007)

Cecil Day Lewis photo

“Is it birthday weather for you, dear soul?
Is it fine your way”

Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972) English poet

Birthday Poem for Thomas Hardy (1949)

Eric Hoffer photo

“The neurotic listens to weather reports about Small Craft Warnings, and he thinks: They're talking about me.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

Wallace Stevens photo

“Out of nothing to have come on major weather,”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: p>But to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather,It is possible, possible, possible. It must
Be possible. It must be that in time
The real will from its crude compoundings come,Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike,
Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,The fiction of an absolute — Angel,
Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear
The luminous melody of proper sound.

Francis Escudero photo
Kenneth Grahame photo

“Look here, father, you know we've each of us got our line. You know about sheep, and weather, and things; I know about dragons.”

The Boy to his parents AMK SENİN
Dream Days (1898), The Reluctant Dragon
Context: Look here, father, you know we've each of us got our line. You know about sheep, and weather, and things; I know about dragons. I always said, you know, that that cave up there was a dragon-cave. I always said it must have belonged to a dragon some time, and ought to belong to a dragon now, if rules count for anything. Well, now you tell me it has got a dragon, and so that's all right. I'm not half as much surprised as when you told me it hadn't got a dragon. Rules always come right if you wait quietly.

Benoît Mandelbrot photo

“How could it be that the same technique applies to the Internet, the weather and the stock market? Why, without particularly trying, am I touching so many different aspects of many different things?”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)
Context: How could it be that the same technique applies to the Internet, the weather and the stock market? Why, without particularly trying, am I touching so many different aspects of many different things?
A recent, important turn in my life occurred when I realized that something that I have long been stating in footnotes should be put on the marquee. I have engaged myself, without realizing it, in undertaking a theory of roughness. Think of color, pitch, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics. Chemistry is filled with acids, sugars, and alcohols; all are concepts derived from sensory perceptions. Roughness is just as important as all those other raw sensations, but was not studied for its own sake. … I was not particularly precocious, but I'm particularly long-lived and continue to evolve even today. Above a multitude of specialized considerations, I see the bulk of my work as having been directed towards a single overarching goal: to develop a rigorous analysis for roughness. At long last, this theme has given powerful cohesion to my life … my fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact, very late in my life.

Woody Guthrie photo

“I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

"Notes about Music" (29 March 1946) http://web.archive.org/19991001055247/www.geocities.com/Nashville/3448/music.html also quoted in A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (2000) by Bryan K. Garman, p. 244
Context: I have hoped as many hopes and dreamed so many dreams, seen them swept aside by weather, and blown away by men, washed away in my own mistakes, that — I use to wonder if it wouldn't be better just to haul off and quit hoping. Just protect my own inner brain, my own mind and heart, by drawing it up into a hard knot, and not having any more hopes or dreams at all. Pull in my feelings, and call back all of my sentiments — and not let any earthly event move me in either direction, either cause me to hate, to fear, to love, to care, to take sides, to argue the matter at all — and, yet … there are certain good times, and pleasures that I never can forget, no matter how much I want to, because the pleasures, and the displeasures, the good times and the bad, are really all there is to me.
And these pleasures that you cannot ever forget are the yeast that always starts working in your mind again, and it gets in your thoughts again, and in your eyes again, and then, all at once, no matter what has happened to you, you are building a brand new world again, based and built on the mistakes, the wreck, the hard luck and trouble of the old one.

F. Scott Fitzgerald photo

“All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

"The Jelly-Bean"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Context: The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman's hand on a tired forehead.

Roberto Clemente photo

“Me like hot weather, veree hot. I no run fast cold weather. No get warm in cold. No get warm, no play gut. You see.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted and paraphrased in "The Scoreboard" https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=bkEqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=000EAAAAIBAJ&pg=4731,2918286 by Les Biederman, in The Pittsburgh Press (Friday, June 10, 1955), p. 30
Baseball-related, <big><big>1950s</big></big>, <big>1955</big>
Context: "I no play so gut yet," the Puerto Rican star tried to explain yesterday. "Me like hot weather, veree hot. I no run fast cold weather. No get warm in cold. No get warm, no play gut. You see." Clemente likes Forbes Field and Connie Mack Stadium the best of all the parks he's played in but has a strong dislike for Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds because of the crazy bounces the balls take as they ricochet off the walls.

Bill Bailey photo
Maxfield Parrish photo

“There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you.”

Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) American painter and illustrator

Letter to F.W Weber (1950); published in New York—Pennsylvania Collector (8 August 1991)
Context: How do ideas come? What a question! If they come of their own accord, they are apt to arrive at the most unexpected time and place. For the most part the place is out of doors, for up in this northern wilderness when nature puts on a show it is an inspiring one. There seem to be magic days once in a while, with some rare quality of light that hold a body spellbound: In sub-zero weather there will be a burst of unbelievable color when the mountain turns a deep purple, a thing it refuses to do in summer. Then comes the hard part: how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, air and space, there is no such thing as sitting down outside and trying to make a “portrait” of it. It lasts for only a minute, for one thing, and it isn’t an inspiration that can be copied on the spot...

Algernon Charles Swinburne photo

“If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather”

"A Match", line 1.
Poems and Ballads (1866-89)
Context: If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pasture or gray grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.

John Ruysbroeck photo

“You should watch the wise bee and do as it does. It dwells in unity, in the congregation of its fellows, and goes forth, not in the storm, but in calm and still weather, in the sunshine, towards all those flowers in which sweetness may be found.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Spiritual Espousals (c. 1340)
Context: You should watch the wise bee and do as it does. It dwells in unity, in the congregation of its fellows, and goes forth, not in the storm, but in calm and still weather, in the sunshine, towards all those flowers in which sweetness may be found. It does not rest on any flower, neither on any beauty nor on any sweetness; but it draws from them honey and wax, that is to say, sweetness and light-giving matter, and brings both to the unity of the hive, that therewith it may produce fruits, and be greatly profitable. Christ, the Eternal Sun, shining into the open heart, causes that heart to grow and to bloom, and it overflows with all the inward powers with joy and sweetness. So the wise man will do like the bee, and he will fly forth with attention and with reason and with discretion, towards all those gifts and towards all that sweetness which he has ever experienced, and towards all the good which God has ever done to him. And in the light of love and with inward observation, he will taste of the multitude of consolations and good things; and will not rest upon any flower of the gifts of God, but, laden with gratitude and praise, will fly back into the unity, wherein he wishes to rest and to dwell eternally with God.

Colum McCann photo

“Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather.”

Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: All Respects to Heaven, I Like it Here
Context: Hours and hours of insanity and escape. The projects were a victim of theft and wind. The downdrafts made their own weather. Plastic bags caught on the gusts of summer wind. Old domino players sat in the courtyard, playing underneath the flying litter. The sound of the plastic bags was like rifle fire. If you watched the rubbish for a while you could tell the exact shape of the wind. Perhaps in a way it was alluring, like little else around it: whole, bright, slapping curlicues and large figure eights, helixes and whorls and corkscrews. Sometimes a bit of plastic caught against a pipe or touched the top of the chain-link fence and backed away gracelessly, like it had been warned. The handles came together and the bag collapsed. There were no tree branches to be caught on. One boy from a neighboring flat stuck a lineless fishing pole out the window but he didn't catch any. The bags often stayed up in one place, as if they were contemplating the whole gray scene, and then would take a sudden dip, a polite curtsy, and away.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson photo
Bill Bailey photo

“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, The Turquoise Lament (1973)
Context: Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards of integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better. I can bend my own rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them. I can recognize the feeling. I've been there a lot of times.
From now on, Lawton Hisp was not going to have a very nice life. They might never come after him, but it just wasn't going to be very joyous from now on.
Happy New Year, Mister Hisp.

“My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

As quoted in "Age of unreason" by Jeannette Baxter in The Guardian (22 June 2004) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard
Context: The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.
These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove — or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts.

Robert Frost photo

“Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Directive (1947)
Context: Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it…

G. K. Chesterton photo
Jair Bolsonaro photo
Camille Pissarro photo

“I am hard at work, at least I work as much as the weather permits.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

I began a work the motif of which is the river bank in the direction of St. Paul's Church. Looking towards Rouen I have before me all the houses on the quays lighted by the morning sun, in the background the stone bridge, to the left the island with its houses, factories, boats, launches, to the right a mass of pinnaces of all colors.. .Yesterday, not having the sun, I began another work on the same motif in grey weather, only I looked more to the right [603]. I must leave you for my motif. I have a room on the street. I shall start on a view of the street in fog for it has been foggy every morning until eleven o'clock—noon. It should be interesting, the square in the fog, the tramways, the goings and comings..
Quote in a letter, Rouen 11 October 1883, to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 40
1880's

Ernest Hemingway photo
Heinrich Heine photo
James K. Morrow photo
Amanda Gorman photo
Théodore Guérin photo
Stephen Wolfram photo

“[In] Ancient Babylon... they were trying to predict three kinds of things.... where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win or lose a certain battle; and they had no idea which of these things would be more predictable than the other.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)