“Starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into hammered silver. Like thousands of tapers in the chapel, just blown out but still glowing.
If one could drown in the grass… it might be the best way to die.”

— Gregory Maguire, book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Gregory Maguire87

Novelist 1954

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“In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 385 et seq.

“Listen! what is life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one’s road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner…
Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset.”

H. Rider Haggard book King Solomon's Mines

Source: King Solomon's Mines (1885), Chapter 5, "Our March into the Desert"

“Briefly, the scientists working the Oregon coast found that sand could be controlled only by the use of one type of grass (European beach grass) and by a system of follow-up plantings with other growth. The grass sets up a beachhead by holding down the sand in an intricate lacing of roots. This permits certain other plants to gain a foothold. The beach grass is extremely difficult to grow in nurseries, and part of the solution to the dune problem involved working out a system for propagating and handling the grass.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

"They Stopped the Moving Sands" part of a letter to his agent Lurton Blassingame, outlining an article on how the USDA was using poverty grasses to protect Florence, Oregon from harmful sand dunes (11 July 1957); the article was never published, but did develop several of the ideas that led to "Dune"; as quoted in The Road to Dune (2005), p. 266
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