Quotes about fen

A collection of quotes on the topic of fen, men, day, greatness.

Quotes about fen

“People with yuan fen are destined to like one another;
Friendship develops even if a thousand miles apart.
But should yuan fen be absent between two individuals,
They will remain strangers despite sitting face-to-face”

Adeline Yen Mah book Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society

Source: Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society

Friendship, People

“You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Source: Tragedy of Coriolanus

Love, Men, Hate, Cry

“Discretion,” said Fen with great complacency, “is my middle name.”
“I dare say. But very few people use their middle names.”

Edmund Crispin (1921–1978) British composer

Source: Beware of the Trains

People

“Heroic figures are now obsolete,
So Demigod and Devil find retreat
In minds of children — as rare beasts and men,
Elsewhere extinct, persist in hill or fen
From man protected — where each form assumes
Gigantic stature and intention, looms
From wind-moved, twilight-woven histories:
For them each flower teems with mysteries.”

Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) British baronet

"When First the Poets Sung", line 34 (1927).

Men, Children, History, Flowers

“My wife was born in Hemingford Grey in Huntingdon and we knew and loved its river, the Great Ouse. We sat by it, we meditated by it, we walked its banks, we explored it by canoe, skiff and pont. I knew its mills, its sluices, its locks, its churches, its meadows and, further afield, its fens. It became part of my life.”

George Mackley (1900–1983) Wood engraver

Preface to George Mackley's Picture Book (1981)

Love, Life, Parting

“Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

London, 1802, l. 1 (1807).

Water

“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.”

Evelyn Waugh book Scoop

An oft-quoted example of William Boot's style. When first mentioned in the novel it is "splashy" and not "plashy", but this is a remembrance of another journalist; when Boot himself quotes it, he has "plashy".
Scoop (1938)

“Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"To a Friend" http://www.poetry-online.org/arnold_to_a_friend.htm (1849), line 1

Men, Soul

“It is said by parrot-minded critics that Owen was "a man of one idea," whereas he was a man of more ideas than any public man England knew in his day. He shared and befriended every new conception of moment and promise, in science, in education, and government. His mind was hospitable to all projects of progress; and he himself contributed more original ideas for the conduct of public affairs than any other thinker of his generation…. Because some of his projects were so far reaching that they required a century to mature them, onlookers who expected them to be perfected at once, say he "failed in whatever he proposed." While the truth is he succeeded in more things than any public man ever undertook. If he made more promises than he fulfilled, he fulfilled more than any other public man ever made. Thus, he was not a man of "one idea" but of many. Nor did his projects fail. The only social Community for which he was responsible was that of New Harmony, in Indiana; which broke up through his too great trust in uneducated humanity — a fault which only the generous commit. The communities of Motherwell and Orbiston, of Manea, Fen, and Queenwood in Hampshire were all undertaken without his authority, and despite his warning of the adequacy of the means for success. They failed, as he predicted they would. Critics, skilled in coming to conclusions without knowing the facts, impute these failures to him.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

Memorial dedication (1902)

Truth, Education, Communication, Idea

“I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds,
The gray and wintry sides of many glens,
And did but half remember human words,
In converse with the mountains, moors, and fens.”

John Millington Synge (1871–1909) Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore

Prelude (1910).

Mountain, Star, Flowers, Bird

“Dismal and fearsome to view was this strong place of Carcë, most like to the embodied soul of dreadful night brooding on the waters of that sluggish river: by day a shadow in broad sunshine, the likeness of pitiless violence sitting in the place of power, darkening the desolation of the mournful fen; by night, a blackness more black than night herself.”

Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros

Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Chapter 4, "Conjuring in the Iron Tower"

Soul, Strong, Water, Night