Quotes about green (942 quotes, page 5)

“And I go down the stairs again
with the screeching of my worn out
soul

P. G. tunes instruments
for his golden arm
alchemy in a metropolitan shell

The squeak of time was
thrown back into the cracks
where the plaster has the form of a twisting branch

and my veins are sturdy trunks,
scaly, for drops of green sap
nourishment rising
from the bowels of the earth,
…”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

The Book of Opium (1975 - 1990), (Heroin) P. G.'s Basement
Source: Caterina Davinio, Il libro dell'oppio 1975 – 1990 (The Book of Opium 1975 – 1990), Puntoacapo Editrice, Novi Ligure 2012. English translation by Caterina Davinio and David W. Seaman.

Soul , Time

“Swing and a fly ball to right, Green under it….. in foul ground.. makes the catch!…Put it in the books!.. The Mets are gonna play for the pennant!”

Howie Rose (1954) American sports announcer

Calling the 2006 NLDS clincher.
2006

Books , Flying

“I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope – an impotence, in short and to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all…”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Failure , Effort

“The green shoots of economic spring are appearing once again.”

Norman Lamont (1942) British politician

Speech at the Conservative Party Conference, 9 October 1991.

Spring , Appearance

“I became quite green - I have a very strong connection to nature. I read that if we fish the way we fish, in 2048 there will be no more fish left, which is pretty soon. So it's a statement.”

Petra Němcová (1979) Czech fashion model

Explaining why she became vegan, spotted helping out at an OCRF Benefit, as quoted in "Petra Nemcova Goes Vegan For The Fish", in Celebrity-Gossip.net (31 July 2007) http://www.celebrity-gossip.net/celebrities/hollywood/petra-nemcova-goes-vegan-for-the-fish-201498#blog.

Way , Nature , Fish , Strong

“A virgin is like a rose: while she remains on the thorn whence she sprang, alone and safe in a lovely garden, no flock, no shepherd approaches. The gentle breeze and the dewy dawn, water, and earth pay her homage; amorous youths and loving maidens like to deck their brows with her, and their breasts. / But no sooner is she plucked from her mother-stalk, severed from her green stem, than she loses all, all the favour, grace, and beauty wherewith heaven and men endowed her.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

La verginella e simile alla rosa
Ch'in bel giardin' su la nativa spina
Mentre sola e sicura si riposa
Ne gregge ne pastor se le avvicina;
L'aura soave e l'alba rugiadosa,
L'acqua, la terra al suo favor s'inchina:
Gioveni vaghi e donne inamorate
Amano averne e seni e tempie ornate.<p>Ma no si tosto dal materno stelo
Rimossa viene, e dal suo ceppo verde
Che quato havea dagli huoi e dal cielo
Favor gratia e bellezza tutto perde.
Canto I, stanzas 42–43 (tr. G. Waldman)
Compare:
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:
idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui,
nulli illum pueri, nullae optavere puellae:
sic virgo, dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est;
cum castum amisit polluto corpore florem,
nec pueris iucunda manet, nec cara puellis.
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: so a maiden, whilst she remains untouched, so long she is dear to her own; when she has lost her chaste flower with sullied body, she remains neither lovely to boys nor dear to girls.
Catullus, Carmina, LXII (tr. Francis Warre-Cornish)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Love , Men , Youth , Beauty

“In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment, is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug… that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Food , Imagination , Game

“Sir George Ross (Federal Cabinet, Premier of Ontario)– “Mackenzie was sui generis a debater. His humorous sallies blistered like a blast from a flaming smelter. His sterling honesty is a great heritage, and will keep his memory green to all future generations.””

Alexander Mackenzie (1822–1892) 2nd Prime Minister of Canada

Ross 1913, p. 31
His Character

Memory , Future

“Teamwork is what the Green Bay Packers were all about. They didn't do it for individual glory. They did it because they loved one another.”

Vince Lombardi (1913–1970) American football player, coach, and executive

reported in Donald T. Phillips, Run To Win: Vince Lombardi on Coaching and Leadership (2001), p. 23.

Love

“And we saw the seed,
The minuscule Sequoia seed
In the museum by the tremendous slab
Of the tree. And imagined the seed
In soil and the growth quickened
So that we saw the seed reach out, forcing
Earth thru itself into bark, wood, the green
Needles of a redwood until the tree
Stood in the room without soil—
How much of the earth's
Crust has lived
The seed’s violence!
The shock is metaphysical.”

George Oppen (1908–1984) American poet

"Return" st. 2, 1962; New Collected Poems, New Directions, 2002, ISBN 0-811-21488-5

Imagination , Tree

“Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green?”

Fredric Jameson (1934) American academic

Source: Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Chapter 1: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

People , World , Color , Tree

“Sing louder around
To the bells' cheerful sound,
While our sports shall be seen
On the ecchoing green.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

The Ecchoing Green, st. 1
1780s, Songs of Innocence (1789–1790)

Sport , Singing

“So hard to find my way,
Now that I'm all on my own.
I saw you just the other day,
My how you have grown,
Cast my memory back there, Lord
Sometimes I'm overcome thinking 'bout
Making love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you
My brown eyed girl
You my brown eyed girl.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Brown Eyed Girl
Song lyrics, Blowin' Your Mind! (1967)

Love , Making love , Way , Girl

“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door,
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 10.

Love , Flowers , Joy

“In the early eighties, savvy Japanese had been scouring Melrose for old leather jackets and jukeboxes, and nervous tourists would drive by to look at the punks with green mohawks; now the funny hairstyles looked as if they’d been done at the Beverly Center. Like a government-subsidized avant-garde, Sullivan had thought as he’d tooled his old van down the crowded avenue, affluent disenfranchisement is just galvanic twitching in a dead frog’s leg.”

Tim Powers book Expiration Date

Source: Expiration Date (1995), Chapter 15 (p. 100)

Dead

“Heckler: At least Mrs Thatcher has got guts.
Neil Kinnock: It's a pity that other people had to leave theirs on the ground at Goose Green to prove it.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Daily Telegraph 7 June, 1983.
On TVS television's programme "The South decides" during the 1983 general election campaign. Kinnock was forced to write letters to the families of the war dead to apologise.

People

“For Queen Diana did my body change
Into a fork-tongued dragon flesh and fell,
And through the island nightly do I range,
Or in the green sea mate with monsters strange,
When in the middle of the moonlit night
The sleepy mariner I do affright.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), The Lady of the Land

Change , Sea , Night

“Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)

Love , Women , Men , World

“She was an appetising woman with a full-cheeked smile, about thirty, a Nordic blonde but not icy, though ice was suggested in its tamed winter-sport aspects : the flush after skating, log-fires and hot rum and butter, fine heavy thighs, that would warm your hand like a muff, under a skirt that had swirled in a rink waltz. Her beaver lamb coat was thrust back from a green suit : solid charms, thoroughly wholesome, were indicated.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Smile , Sport , Winter

“O lay me, ye that see the light, near some rock of my hills! let the thick hazels be around, let the rustling oak be near. Green be the place of my rest; let the sound of the distant torrent be heard. Daughter of Toscar, take the harp, and raise the lovely song of Selma, that sleep may overtake my soul in the midst of joy; that the dreams of my youth may return, and the days of the mighty Fingal.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"The War of Inis-thona"
The Poems of Ossian

Love , Youth , Dreams , Soul

“And as the moon rises he sits by his fire
Thinking about women and glasses of beer.
And closing his eyes as the dogies retire,
He sings out a song which is soft but it's clear,
As if maybe someone could hear.Goodnight you moonlight ladies.
Rockabye sweet baby James.
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose.
Won't you let me go down in my dreams?
And rockabye sweet baby James.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Sweet Baby James"
Song lyrics, Sweet Baby James (1970)

Women , Dreams , Color , Beer

“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim, cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuschia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake's head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent's progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny iron balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuschia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Star , Flowers , Lying , Parent

“I walk where once the grass was green
And mourn the lark that sings no more
What bird could sing whose eyes have seen
Broken blossoms on the field of war?”

Tom Springfield (1934) English musician, songwriter and record producer

Song Broken Blossoms.

War , Bird , Grass , Singing

“First she studied her husband's flower arrangement. He had chosen the blossom of a single white wild rose and put a single pearl of water on the green leaf, and set it on red stones. Autumn is coming, he was suggesting with the flower, talking through the flower, do not weep for the time of fall, the time of dying when the earth begins to sleep; enjoy the time of beginning again and experience the glorious cool of the autumn air on this summer evening…soon the tear will vanish and the rose, only the stones will remain — soon you and I will vanish and only the stones will remain.”

James Clavell book Shōgun

Source: Shōgun (1975), Ch. 43

Flowers , Autumn , Tear , Sleep

“The predominant colour of the kitchen -- its walls, cupboards, floor, shelves -- with all the ancillary rooms -- pantries, larders, cold stores, and sculleries, is green -- Hooker's dark green, leaf-green, emerald, faded turquoise, and eau-de-nile -- like the colours of a dark wet jungle.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover

“Butter, bread, and green cheese: whoever cannot say that is not a true Frisian.”

Pier Gerlofs Donia (1480–1520) Frisian warrior, pirate, and rebel

Quoted in: The Linguist: Journal of the Institute of Linguists. Volumes 42-43, The Institute, 2003. p. 192
According to legend, Pier forced his captives to repeat this shibboleth to distinguish Frisians from Dutch and Low Germans.

“Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.”

Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) English poet, author and literary critic

Festubert, 1916 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57255/festubert-1916 (1921)

War , Sadness , Tree , Strong

“Christ is a rock in a weary land, a covert from the tempest of Divine justice, receiving through the ages the snows of Divine mercy, and melting them for the green pastures and still waters of God's peaceful flock — a rock against which wicked men and devils have breathed their empty curses in vain, for eighteen hundred years.”

Edward Thomson (1810–1870) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 100.

Men , God , Age , Peace

“It is a magnificent country, lonely, grand in scale, stretching for mile upon mile, the clear blue air stabbed with peaks of snow, where the sun glints on the ice surfaces, green as sea ice, breath taking in its scope.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 8, Centennial summer, p. 196 (On Canada...)

Sun , Sea , Country

“Someone should put together a ballet under the title Guantanamo, Guantanamo! A corps of prisoners, their ankles shackled together, thick felt mittens on their hands, muffs over their ears, black hoods over their heads, do the dances of the persecuted and the desperate. Around them, guards in olive green uniforms prance with demonic energy and glee, cattle prods and billy-clubs at the ready. They touch the prisoners with the prods and the prisoners leap; they wrestle prisoners to the ground and shove the clubs up their anuses and the prisoners go into spasms. In a corner, a man on stilts in a Donald Rumsfeld mask alternately writes at his lectern and dances ecstatic little jigs.
One day it will be done, though not by me. It may even be a hit in London and Berlin and New York. It will have absolutely no effect on the people it targets, who could not care less what ballet audiences think of them.”

J.M. Coetzee book Diary of a Bad Year

Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

People , Thinking , Dance

“Those unknown heroes whose whitened bones have been piously gathered here, and whose green graves we now strew with sweet and beautiful flowers, choice emblems alike of pure hearts and brave spirits, reached, in their glorious career that last highest point of nobleness beyond which human power cannot go. They died for their country.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, The Unknown Loyal Dead (1871)

Beauty , Flowers , Heart , Country

“Its berries are red as a maiden's lip,
Its leaves are of changeless green;
And any thing changeless now, I wis,
Is somewhat rare to be seen.
The holly, which fall and frost has borne,
The holly's the wreath for a Christmas morn.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1st January 1831) Christmas Carol
The London Literary Gazette, 1831

Christmas

“Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

December “HOUSE TO HOUSE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Food , Waiting

“Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty. But let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans…If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.”

Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924) American statesman

The Day We Celebrate (Forefathers' Day), Address, New England Society of Brooklyn (December 21, 1888).

Love , Spring , Birth , Memory

“As always, when the opportunity arose, Joe took a long, astute look at the girl whom, if he could have managed it, he would have had as his mistress, or, even better, his wife. It did not seem possible that Wendy Wright had been born out of blood and internal organs like other people. In proximity to her he felt himself to be a squat, oily, sweating, uneducated nurt whose stomach rattled and whose breath wheezed. Near her he became aware of the physical mechanisms which kept him alive; within him machinery, pipes and valves and gas-compressors and fan belts had to chug away at a losing task, a labor ultimately doomed. Seeing her face, he discovered that his own consisted of a garish mask; noticing her body made him feel like a low-class windup toy. All her colors possessed a subtle quality, indirectly lit. Her eyes, those green and tumbled stones, looked impassively at everything; he had never seen fear in them, or aversion, or contempt. What she saw she accepted. Generally she seemed calm. But more than that she struck him as being durable, untroubled and cool, not subject to wear, or to fatigue, or to physical illness and decline. Probably she was twenty-five or -six, but he could not imagine her looking younger, and certainly she would never look older. She had too much control over herself and outside reality for that.”

Philip K. Dick book Ubik

Source: Ubik (1969), Chapter 5 (pp. 58-59)

People , Fear , Color , Feeling

“One time I was in the men's room of the bar and there was a guy at the urinal. He was kind of drunk, and said to me in a mean-sounding voice, "I don't like your face. I think I'll push it in."I was scared green. I replied in an equally mean voice, "Get out of my way, or I'll pee right through ya!"”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Part 4: "From Cornell to Caltech, With a Touch of Brazil", "Any Questions?", p. 177
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Men , Way , Guy , Thinking

“And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold,
Bring me my Arrows of desire,
Bring me my Spear — O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green & pleasant land.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Prefatory Poem
1800s, Milton (c. 1809)

God , Mountain , Sleep , Time

“A small clear fountain, with green willow trees;
Girdling it round, there is one single spot
Where you may sit and rest, its only bank;”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Tree

“And sorrowing I to see the sommer flowers,
The lively greene, the lusty lease, forlorne,
The sturdy trees so shattred with the showers,
The fieldes so fade, that florisht so beforne:
It taught mee well, all earthly things be borne
To dye the death: for nought long time may last:
The sommer's beauty yeeldes to winter's blast.”

Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536–1608) English politician and poet

Source: The Induction (1563), Line 50, p. 311

Death , Beauty , Flowers , Tree

“The Zionists have no right to the land of Palestine. There is no place for them on the land of Palestine. What they took before 1947-8 constitutes plunder, and what they are doing now is a continuation of this plundering. By no means do we recognize their Green Line. The land of Palestine belongs to the Palestinians, not to the Zionists.”

Mohamed Morsi (1951–2019) 5th President of Egypt

Morsi in 2010, as quoted by Rod Freidman in Egypt’s Morsi, in 2010 interviews posted online, called Zionists ‘bloodsuckers’ and descendants of pigs, urged to sever all ties with Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/egypts-morsi-in-2010-statements-posted-online-called-zionists-bloodsuckers-and-descendants-of-pigs-urged-to-sever-all-ties-with-israel/, Times of Israel (4 January, 2013)

“Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking, and unguided.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

Feeling , Summer

“Green fields and rolling hills,
Room enough to do what we will.
Sweet dreams of yestertime
Are running though my mind
Of a place I left behind.
Been so long, I can't remember when,
I've been to Canaan and I wanna go back again.”

Carole King (1942) Nasa

Been to Canaan
Song lyrics, Rhymes & Reasons (1972)

Dreams

“I wish to know your Excellency's pleasure about my returning to camp. I expect Mrs. Greene will be put to bed every day. She is very desirous of my stay until that event; and, as she has set her heart so much upon it, I could wish to gratify her, for fear of some disagreeable consequences, as women sometimes, under such circumstances, receive great injury by being disappointed.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (September 1778)

Women , Pleasure , Fear , Disappointment

“Friends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, dead
Of plague, famine, and arrows: and the houses
Battered unsafe by cannonades of stone
Hurled in by the Assyrians: the town-walls
Crumbling out of their masonry into mounds
Of foolish earth, so smitten by the rams:
The hunger-pangs, the thirst like swallowed lime
Forcing them gulp green water maggot-quick
That lurks in corners of dried cisterns: yea,
Murders done for a drink of blood, and flesh
Sodden of infants: and no hope alive
Of rescue from this heat of prisoning anguish
Until Assyrian swords drown it in death.”

Lascelles Abercrombie (1881–1938) Poet, academic, literary critic

Emblems of Love (1912)

Death , Hunger , Hope , Drink

“Well what a turn-up. From professional footballer to television presenter to green politician. Whatever next?”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: It Doesn't Have to Be Like This: Green Politics Explained 1990

Football

“She slides in and you rode down Main Street, you turn right when that red light turns green.
Sun sets now, you're half way to heaven.
She picks a song, you turn it up to 11, you say "Do you wanna?" and she says "Hell yeah." So you hit the party, all your buddies are jealous.
Someday, you'll be looking back on your life at the memories, this is gonna be one of those nights.”

Tim McGraw (1967) American country singer

One of Those Nights
Song lyrics, Two Lanes of Freedom (2013)

Life , Way , Hell , Light

“I thought that prattling boys and girls
Would fill this empty room;
That my rich heart would gather flowers
From childhood's opening bloom.

One child and two green graves are mine,
This is God's gift to me;
A bleeding, fainting, broken heart—
This is my gift to Thee.”

Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878) American musician, hymnwriter

On the death of her child (1852), reported in The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss (1882), p. 138.

God , Girl , Boy , Flowers

“Another hallway led to a green steel door. "This is the execution chamber," the officer said. "The day of the execution, we take the man through this door." He opened the green door, and we blinked at the bright lights inside. A big chair filled the room. I could smell leather. "All right, boys," he said. "Line up." The kids made a straight line that led out the green door, then moved ahead, one at a time, to sit in the big wooden chair. "This is the electric chair, Tommy Ray," my dad explained. "It's where murderers are executed." The boys inched forward. Some sat longer in the chair than others. Executed meant killed, that much I knew. "This is the ultimate consequence for the ultimate act of evil," my father told the troop. When all the boys had sat in the chair, it was my turn. I reached up and felt the smooth wood, the leather straps with cold metal buckles. There was a black steel cap dangling up there like a lamp without a bulb. "Up you go, Tommy Ray," Dad said, hoisting me into the chair. The boys were staring at me. But I wasn't even a little bit afraid. My father stood right beside me. I could feel his warm hand next to the cool metal buckle. As the school bus rumbled out of the prison parking lot that afternoon, I stared back at the high walls. I had learned another important lesson. A consequence was what followed what you did. If you did good things, you'd be rewarded with further good things. If you broke the law, you'd have to pay the price. I have never forgotten that lesson.”

Tommy Franks (1945) United States Army general

Source: American Soldier (2004), p. 8

School , Law , Feeling , Boy

“And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,
Vaguely and incoherently, some dream
Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills...
A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;
Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

World , Sadness , Dreams , Sun

“If upon a white canvas I jot down some sensations of blue, of green, of red – every new brush stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I set out to paint an interior... If I paint a green near the red, if I paint in a yellow floor, there must still be between this green, this yellow, and the white of the canvas a relation that will be satisfactory to me. But these several tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary, therefore, that the various elements that I use be so balanced that they do not destroy one another..”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1905 - 1910, Notes d'un Peintre' (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 411

Painting

“If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

"'Disgrace,' Ctd.," http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/06/sweeping-and-wr.html The Daily Dish (19 June 2008)

People , Fools , Intelligence , Fraud

“I want to thank Sian [Berry, Green Party] and Lindsey [German, Left List] and Alan [Craig, Christian Peoples Party] and Gerard [Batten, UKIP], who have sometimes joined us for hustings, but mainly I want to thank my two colleagues in the strange triumvirate who have been trundling around London's church halls and TV studios violently disputing the meaning of multiculturalism and the exact cost of conductors. On which point I think I'm going to declare victory.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

2000s, 2008, First Speech As London Mayor (May 3, 2008)

People , Thinking , Victory

“I remember those days hanging out
At the village green
Engineer boots, leather jackets
And tight blue jeans
Drop a dime in the box play the
Song about New Orleans
Cold beer, hot lights
My sweet romantic teenage nights.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

Beer , Light , Night , Box

“[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

Question , Change , Time

“In paper, many a poet now survives
Or else their lines had perish'd with their lives.
Old Chaucer, Gower, and Sir Thomas More,
Sir Philip Sidney, who the laurel wore,
Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excell,
Sir Edward Dyer, Greene, Nash, Daniel.
Sylvester, Beaumont, Sir John Harrington,
Forgetfulness their works would over run
But that in paper they immortally
Do live in spite of death, and cannot die.”

John Taylor (1578–1653) English poet of the 16th and 17th centuries

From "The Praise of Hemp-seed" http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/Renascence_Editions/taylor1.html, published 1620. This is the earliest surviving printed reference to the death of William Shakespeare and Francis Beaumont, who had both died in 1616.

Death , Art , Forgetting

“And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" Poem in October http://www.bigeye.com/october.htm", st. 5 (1946)

“I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere bluer than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. …I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. … in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.”

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 14 (16 September 1902)

Pleasure , Beauty , Feeling , Mountain

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view. Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. … I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain”, p. 130-132.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Arizona and New Mexico: On Top," & "Arizona and New Mexico: Thinking Like a Mountain"

Death , God , Fear , Exercises

“"Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture…They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)…also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."…in American poetry…Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel…. There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16).”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Science , Parting

“The joy of love when it comes late is like the burning of a green log, which gives out all the more heat and keeps its ability to do so all the longer, the slower it is to kindle.”

Chrétien de Troyes French poet and trouvère

Joie d'amors qui vient a tart
Sanble la vert busche qui art,
Qui dedanz rant plus grant chalor
Et plus se tient en sa valor,
Quant plus demore a alumer.
Source: Yvain or Le Chevalier au Lion, Line 2521

Love , Joy

“In Switzerland, there’s now this semi-urbanism; architecture that’s neither good nor bad, neither urban nor rural, and yet well-connected to the public transport network; where there’s always something green, but never lush or a lot; where there’s always a bit of water in the form of a river, stream or a lake. As long as most people can live like that and it doesn’t suddenly become too dense and packed in the districts, and in the trams and suburban trains, it’s impossible to change it.”

Jacques Herzog (1950) Swiss architect

places.designobserver.com http://places.designobserver.com/feature/an-interview-with-jacques-herzog/32118/.

People , Water , Change , Training

“Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

The Portable Door (2003)

Love , Life , Death , Pleasure

“Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days!
None knew thee but to love thee,
Nor named thee but to praise.”

Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867) American writer

On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake. Compare: "She was good as she was fair, None—none on earth above her! As pure in thought as angels are: To know her was to love her, Samuel Rogers, Jacqueline, Stanza 1.

Love

“There's a man who came to stay
The boy he replaced, disappeared without a trace.
Stole all my songs and my style away
No-one would say what they wanted to say
So he was king for a day.
If you sail into the sun
Beware the eyes of green
And if the whole world tells you 'you are the one'
I defy you not to believe them, my son…”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

"The Man Who Came to Stay"
Lyrics and poetry

World , Boy , Sun

“I have all my life been an indweller of the town, and I frankly confess, for a constant residence, I like it better than all the pastoral charms that ever made the morality of an essay, or gave grace to poetry; still there is that about the country to which the heart always turns with a feeling of freshness and renovation. The moonlight walk through the green wood, would come back upon the memory with a spell which would not belong to a lamp-lighted ramble. The green-leaf would give its freshness, the wild-flower its sweetness; on the ear would arise the murmur of the wind in the boughs — or the song of the brook singing like a child for very gladness.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Life , Feeling , Flowers , Light

“I remember staring at the computer screen--light green letters on dark--then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words (2000)

Life , Light

“The people here in fact seem to live in the streets, which are alive from morning until night, not as they are in New York with that never-ending determination for the 'long-green', but with a pleasure-loving crowd that doesn’t care what it does or where it goes, so that it has a good time.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

Edward Hopper, in a letter to his mother, Paris, October 30, 1906; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 14
1905 - 1910

Love , People , Pleasure , Time

“Does not even the most sexually democratic of us, among which number I unquestionably count myself, not choke back the tiniest sob at the sight of poor old Denis stumbling along behind, struggling pitifully to hold his trilby on, as the PM strides across Goose Green with the wind managing only to make her hair look more Medusan, and the very mines praying she will not crush them under-heel?”

Alan Coren (1938–2007) humorist and writer from the United Kingdom

"Subordinate Claus", Bumf (1984).

“I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my viols-da-gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips [landscapes] and enjoy the fag - end of life in quietness and ease. But these fine ladies [very probably his wife and daughters] and their tea-drinkings, dancings, husband-huntings, &c, &c. &c., will fob me out of the last ten years, and I fear miss getting husbands too. But we can say nothing to these things you know, Jackson, we must jog on and be content with the jingling of the bells, only, d-[damned]-it I hate a dust, the kicking up a dust, and being confined in harness to follow the track whilst others ride in the waggon, under cover, stretching their legs in the straw at ease, and gazing at green trees and blue skies without half my 'Taste'. That's d-d [damned] hard. My comfort is I have five viols-da-gamba: three 'Jayes' and two 'Barak Normans”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Adieu.
2 Quotes from Gainsborough's letter to his friend William Jackson of Exeter, from Bath, 4 June 1768; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 385 (Appendix A - Letter VIII)
1755 - 1769

Life , Hate , Fear , Drink

“Each green leaf or each needle is in effect a remarkably well-regulated metal factory. Its operation can be demonstrated experimentally. With the falling of the leaves or needles this supply of metals is scattered by the wind, and the more undergrowth there is, the greater is the dispersion of organic metal salts, which during the winter are pressed down hard by the snow.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Living Water

Winter

“Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking;
late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again.”

Wang Wei (699–759) a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, musician, painter, and statesman

"Deer Fence" (鹿柴), trans. Burton Watson
Variant translations:
No one is seen in deserted hills,
Only the echoes of speech is heard.
Sunlight cast back comes deep in the woods,
And shines once again upon the green moss.
Translated by Stephen Owen
On the empty mountain, seeing no one,
Only hearing the echoes of someone's voice;
Returning light enters the deep forest,
Again shining upon the green moss.
Translated by Richard W. Bodman and Victor H. Mair

“The green beret' is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom. I know the United States Army will live up to its reputation for imagination, resourcefulness, and spirit as we meet this challenge.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

"Letter to the United States Army" (11 April 1962) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx; Box 5, President's Outgoing Executive Correspondence, White House Central Chronological Files, Papers of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
1962

Imagination , Courage , Freedom , Fight

“Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all afflictions.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

August 1875, page 220
John of the Mountains, 1938

Nature , Affliction

“To give here an elaborate account of Pappus would be to create a false impression. His work is only the last convulsive effort of Greek geometry which was now nearly dead and was never effectually revived. It is not so with Ptolemy or Diophantus. The trigonometry of the former is the foundation of a new study which was handed on to other nations indeed but which has thenceforth a continuous history of progress. Diophantus also represents the outbreak of a movement which probably was not Greek in its origin, and which the Greek genius long resisted, but which was especially adapted to the tastes of the people who, after the extinction of Greek schools, received their heritage and kept their memory green. But no Indian or Arab ever studied Pappus or cared in the least for his style or his matter. When geometry came once more up to his level, the invention of analytical methods gave it a sudden push which sent it far beyond him and he was out of date at the very moment when he seemed to be taking a new lease of life.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Life , People , School , History

“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes.
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns.”

Dylan Thomas Fern Hill

St. 1
Fern Hill (1946)

Grass , Time , Housing , Night

“Every time my nose gushed blood, I felt like a little boy who'd wet his pants. I jumped out of the chair, pressed a handkerchief against my face, and hustled toward the nearest bathroom […] How red the blood looked against the whiteness of the porcelain sink, I thought. How vividly imagined that color was, how aesthetically shocking. The other fluids that came out of us were dull in comparison, the palest of squirts. Whitish spittle, milky semen, yellow pee, green-brown mucus. We excreted autumn and winter colors, but running invisibly through our veins, the very stuff that kept us alive, was the crimson of a mad artist—a red as brilliant as fresh paint.”

Paul Auster book Oracle Night

Paul Auster, Oracle Night, New York: Henry Holt and Company, pp. 41-42.
Oracle Night (2003)

Color , Imagination , Boy , Autumn

“Well - not quite yet - green police [the Germans] still driving around with machine guns, etc. Nevertheless big peace party with warning by Eisenhower. - Walked around in the city [Amsterdam], much drunkenness..”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Beckmann's Diary in early May 1945, Amsterdam; as cited on: 'Arts in exile' http://kuenste-im-exil.de
1940s

Peace

““Could Yarl the Omnipotent create a stone so heavy he couldn’t lift it?” Green Green asked him.
”No,” said Courtcour.
”Why not?”
”He would not.”
”That is no answer.”
”Yes, it is. Think about it. Would you?””

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 7 (p. 157)

Thinking

“Someday I must be able to paint truly remarkable colors. Yesterday I held in my lap a wide, silver-gray satin ribbon which I edged with two narrower black, patterned silk ribbons. And I placed on top of these a plump, bottle-green velvet bow. I'd like to be able to paint something one day in those colors.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

‎note in her Journal, 3 June, 1902; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals, ed. Günter Busch and ‎Liselotte von Reinken (1998), p. 278
1900 - 1905
Variant: Someday I must be able to paint truly remarkable colors. Yesterday I held in my lap a wide, silver-gray satin ribbon which I edged with two narrower black, patterned silk ribbons. And I placed on top of these a plump, bottle-green velvet bow. I'd like to be able to paint something one day in those colors.

Color , Painting

“The misleading character of the accident theory is evident from the fact that even now the “error” involved from the standpoint of U. S. policy-makers and American leaders generally is neither one of purpose nor method – it is strictly a case of unexpectedly large expense. For the U. S. leadership, in other words, Vietnam is simply another, painfully large “cost over-run.” In terms of basic U. S. objectives and methods employed, in the Third World – essentially establishment of reliable client states, increasingly managed by military elites, with generous financial and military support (arms, advisors, Green Berets, and more extensive military intervention when junta control is threatened, as in Santo Domingo) – Vietnam is a facet of a completely rational policy. The policy may be vicious and catastrophic, from the perspective of the Vietnamese; and it may be a sordid and disruptive waste of human and material resources from the standpoint of the real interests of the ordinary American; but to the Rostows, Westmorelands and Nixons, the Vietnam War is a noble endeavor (“one of our finest moments”) that we cannot afford to abandon without achieving our original ends. The evidence is compelling that this leadership is entirely capable of destroying every village in Vietnam (and in the process, every Vietnamese) if this is required to attain the original political objectives.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities, 1970, pp. 87-88.

War , World , Error , Support

“The poets told thy birth
Was welcomed upon earth
By the sweet multitude of shining flowers,
By bursting buds, green leaves, and sunny hours.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1832

Flowers , Birth

“How do the green mountains through the ages remain green?
How do the flowing waters day and night keep flowing?
Let us not cease either but throught the ages remain green.”

Yi Hwang (1501–1570) Korean Confucianism scholar

Twelve Songs of Dosan

Age , Mountain , Water , Night

“The word "vegetarian" derives from the Latin "vegetus"—whole, sound, fresh, lively. The meat humans eat is neither whole, sound, fresh or lively. It is dis-limbed, tainted, decaying, stale and dead. A diet consisting of green leafy vegetables, root crops, grains, berries, nuts and fruits supplies all the body needs for strength and well-being. It is healthful food, aesthetic, economical, harmless to our brother animals, easy to grow, to prepare and to digest. Flesh-eating by humans is unnecessary, irrational, anatomically unsound, unhealthy, unhygienic, uneconomic, unaesthetic, unkind and unethical.”

Helen Nearing (1904–1995) American writer

Source: Simple Food for the Good Life (1980), Ch. 4

Health , Food , Animals , Dead

“Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers,
Lull'd by the faint breezes sighing through her hair;
Sleeps she and hears not the melancholy numbers
Breathed to my sad lute 'mid the lonely air.”

George Darley (1795–1846) Irish poet, novelist, and critic

Poem Sweet in her green dell http://www.bartleby.com/101/640.html

Sadness , Beauty , Flowers , Sleep

“How do you see this tree? Is it really green? Use green, then, the most beautiful green on your palette. And that shadow, rather blue? Don't be afraid to paint it as blue as possible.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Comment voyez-vous cet arbre? Il est bien vert? Mettez donc du vert, le plus beau vert de votre palette; — et cette ombre, plutôt bleue? Ne craignez pas la peindre aussi bleue que possible.
Quote from a conversation in 1888, Pont-Aven, with Paul Sérusier as cited by w:Maurice Denis, inL'influence de Paul Gauguin, in Occident (October 1903) and published in Du symbolisme au classicisme. Théories (1912), ed. Olivier Revault d'Allonnes (Paris, 1964), p. 51.
1870s - 1880s

Beauty , Tree , Painting

“The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver--what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe--
Just a little white with the dust.”

Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) English poet

On Receiving News of the War (1914), Break of Day in the Trenches (1916)

Life , Pleasure , Sleep , Strong

“The world is beautiful outside: white, green, and red; but inside it is black and dark as death.”

Walther von der Vogelweide (1170–1230) Middle High German lyric poet

Diu welt ist ûzen schoene wîz grüen unde rôt
und innân swarzer varwe vinster sam der tôt.
"Owe war sint verswunden alliu mîniu jâr", line 37; translation from George Fenwick Jones Walther von der Vogelweide (New York: Twayne, 1968) p. 136.

Death , World , Beauty

“I remember now how our bright spring green deepened.
With the years the seasons changed,
And we were lush as the underside of August.”

Ani DiFranco (1970) musician and activist

How Long Can It Last
Song lyrics

Spring , Change , Season

“Three-thirty in the morning…To Ray Garraty it seemed the longest minute of the longest night of his entire life. It was low tide, dead ebb, the time when the sea washes back, leaving slick mudflats covered with straggled weed, rusty beer cans, rotted prophylactics, broken bottles, smashed buoys, and green-mossed skeletons in tattered bathing trunks. It was dead ebb.”

Stephen King book The Long Walk

The Long Walk (1979)

Life , Beer , Time , Sea

“Is there any death here in our camp? Yes, yes! Three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, the noblest band that ever trod the earth, died to make this camp a camp of glory and of liberty forever. But there are no dead issues here. There are no dead ideas here. Hang out our banner from under the blue sky this night, until it shall sweep the green turf under your feet. It hangs over our camp. Read away up under the stars the inscription we have written on it, lo these twenty-five years.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, An Appeal to Young Men (1879)

Death , Star , Idea , Reading

“Whence, if ever, shall come the actuality
Of a voice speaking the mind's knowing,
The sunlight bright on the green windowshade,
And the self articulate, affectionate, and flowing,
Ease, warmth, light, the utter showing,
When in the white bed all things are made.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"Sonnet: O City, City" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnet-o-city-city/
Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

Light

“But this is as a dream, — the plough has pass'd
Where the stag bounded, and the day has looked
On the green twilight of the forest-trees.
This Oak has no companion!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

- - -
The Oak from The London Literary Gazette (19th April 1823) Fragments
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Dreams , Tree

“[After discovering Soren's former home is abandoned] Then Twilight spoke, "Soren, they're gone. Maybe something happened to them. You shouldn't take it personally. Buck up now, old buddy."
"Personally? What do you know, Twilight, that is personal about any family? You've never had a family. Remember, you're always telling us about how much you learned in your own orphan school of tough learning. You don't know the feel of a mother's down. You don't know what it's like to hear stories from a father, or to hear him sing. Do you know what a psalm is, Twilight? I bet you don't. Well, we Barn Owls know about psalms and books and the feeling of down."
Twilight's feathers had ruffled up, spiky with ice crystals. He looked fearsome. "I'll tell you what I know, you miserable little owl. The whole world is my family. I know the softness of a fox's fur, and the strange green light that comes into their eyes during the spring moons. I know how to fish because I learned from an eagle. And when meat is scarce I know how to find the ripest part of a rotten tree and peck the juiciest bugs from it. I know plenty."”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture (2003), Chapter Twenty-four: "Empty Hollows", p. 181

Books , World , School , Family

“Two women and a child in a glade beside a spring. Beyond them, the varnished wilderness wherein bright birds cry. The child is chalk, Europe's daughter. Her dusky attendants, a green Indian and a maroon slave.
The scene, from Democracy in America, is discovered by that most famous European traveler to the New World, Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocratic son of the Enlightenment, liberal, sickly, gray, violet, lacking the vigor of the experiment he has set himself to observe… His description intends to show the African and the Indian doomed by history in corresponding but opposing ways.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

History is a coat cut only to the European.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Women , World , Way , Travel

“We've had too many divisions or stand-offs regarding the pan-blue and pan-green divide, the mainlander-Taiwanese divide and even the southern Taiwan-northern Taiwan divide. In fact, we're all in the same boat.”

Wang Ju-hsuan (1961) Taiwanese politician

Wang Ju-hsuan (2015) cited in " Chu's running mate: 'We're all in same boat' http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201511180030.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 18 November 2015.