Evelyn Collier, Chapter 6, p. 103
2009, The Best of Me (2011)
“You can always tell an old battlefield where many men have lost their lives. The next spring the grass comes up greener and more luxuriant than on the surrounding countryside; the poppies are redder, the corn-flowers more blue. They grow over the field and down the sides of the shell holes and lean, almost touching, across the abandoned trenches in a mass of color that ripples all day in the direction that the wind blows. They take the pits and scars out of the torn land and make it a sweet, sloping surface again. Take a wood, now, or a ravine: In a year's time you could never guess the things which had taken place there.”
Company K (1933)
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William March 12
United States Marine, novelist, short story writer 1893–1954Related quotes
The Time of the Turning
Song lyrics, OVO (2000)
“The grass is always greener over the septic tank.”
Title of book (1976)
The summary of the Joy In The Merely Real sequence (October 2009) http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Joy_in_the_Merely_Real
Context: If dragons were common, and you could look at one in the zoo — but zebras were a rare legendary creature that had finally been decided to be mythical — then there's a certain sort of person who would ignore dragons, who would never bother to look at dragons, and chase after rumors of zebras. The grass is always greener on the other side of reality. Which is rather setting ourselves up for eternal disappointment, eh? If we cannot take joy in the merely real, our lives shall be empty indeed.
“As a flower springs up secretly in a fenced garden, unknown to the cattle, torn up by no plough, which the winds caress, the sun strengthens, the shower draws forth, many boys, many girls, desire it.”
Ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis,
Ignotus pecori, nullo contusus aratro,
Quem mulcent aurae, firmat sol, educat imber;
Multi illum pueri, multae optavere puellae.
LXII
Carmina
" Heaven-Haven http://www.bartleby.com/122/2.html", lines 1-8
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)
Source: Memoirs of a Geisha