Quotes about greens (942 quotes, page 9)

“In Aman's pomp poor Mardocheus wept,
Yet God did turn his fate upon his foe;
The Lazar pined while Dives' feast was kept,
Yet he to heaven, to hell did Dives go.
We trample grass and prize the flowers of May,
Yet grass is green when flowers do fade away.”

Robert Southwell (1561–1595) English Jesuit

"Scorn not the Least", line 19; p. 54.

God , Fate , Flowers , Hell

“Look up - to where the corn is green!”

Emlyn Williams (1905–1987) British dramatist and actor

Play The Corn is Green, last line.

“When the light turns green, you go. When the light turns red, you stop. But what do you do when the light turns blue with orange and lavender spots?”

Shel Silverstein book A Light in the Attic

A Light in the Attic

Light

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love , Women , God , Secret

“Orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green light.”

Andrew Marvell Bermudas

Bermudas (1657)

Light

“Opposites are:
for tone, a more luminous/lighter one for a darker one.
for tint, the complementaries, that is, a certain red opposed to its complementary, etc.
Red — Green
Orange — Blue
Yellow — Violet
for line, those making a right angle.”

Georges Seurat (1859–1891) French painter

Quotes, 1881 - 1890, Letter to Maurice Beaubourg', August 1890

“When the cabin port-holes are dark and green
Because of the seas outside;
When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between)
And the steward falls into the soup-tureen,
And the trunks begin to slide;
When Nursey lies on the floor in a heap,
And Mummy tells you to let her sleep,
And you aren't waked or washed or dressed,
Why, then you will know (if you haven't guessed)
You're ‘Fifty North and Forty West!”

Rudyard Kipling book Just So Stories

How the Whale Got His Throat.
Just So Stories (1902)

Sleep , Sea

“The green movement, in other words, is the red movement stripped of the veneer of reason and science and bent on the destruction of reason and science rather than take the trouble to learn what reason and science actually are. The green movement is the red movement no longer in its boisterous, arrogant youth, but in its demented old age.”

George Reisman (1937) American economist

Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996)

Youth , Age , Learning , Science

“Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
" Romance Sonámbulo http://www.poesia-inter.net/index203.htm" from Primer Romancero Gitano (1928)

Mountain , Horse , Sea

“Convince yourself. Kovno is a treasure-trove for artists. It is gloomy, the lamps don't make it lighter and the streets are getting darker. Their violet windows hover threateningly in the darkness. The elusive lines of low houses, on them - the glimmer of green and red flames - illuminating rows of shops. Bright green bright red stripes [all] fall on the violet sidewalk. And all those shadows are full of people who only speak about one thing, about love, in the dialect, Polish or broken Russian. Whispers and loud words touch the silence, like the green and red bands of light - the darkness of the night. Something terrible, terrible lies over everything, I feel a shudder, it seems I am in another world, far away from real life.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Quote from Werefkin's letter to Alexej von Jawlensky, between December 1909 and Spring 1910; as cited in 'Ambiguity of Home: Identity and Reminiscence in Marianne Werefkin's Return Home, c. 1909', Adrienne Kochman http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring06/52-spring06/spring06article/171-ambiguity-of-home-identity-and-reminiscence-in-marianne-werefkins-return-home-c-1909
1906 - 1911

Love , Life , People , World

“Turning away from the computer I saw through my own narrow window (at least it opened) the green, the blue, the flashes. I looked to the clock, the screen, the window. An hour passed, then two. I looked again at the clock and saw it had been only twenty minutes. I willed the second-hand, the minute-hand, the hour-hand to move faster, to deliver me to five o'clock when I would be released as from my prison term. Then suddenly I stopped, struck by the absurdity of wishing away the only thing I've got. Eight hours, eighty years, it was all too similar. Would I wish away the years until the day of my retirement, until my time was once again my own? At work I tried to keep busy to make the hours pass quickly. It was no different when watching television, socializing, moving frenetically--there are so many ways to kill time.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words (2000)

Way , Business , Time

“But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.”

John Keats Ode on Melancholy

"Ode on Melancholy", st. 2
Poems (1820)

Flowers

“And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Oh Breathe Not His Name, st. 1.
Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

Secret , Soul , Tear , Memory

“We have seven colours — violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red (Roy G. Biv). Our atmosphere has a number of particles and when light falls on them, it gets scattered. With blue colour having less wavelength and more scattering qualities, it scatters and makes the sky blue. While red colour has opposite qualities than blue so traffic lights are of this colour.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

His observations on the "strange events in our solar system" and as to why the sky looked blue and red colour was used in traffic lights to signal to vehicles to stop.
When Prof Jayant Narlikar saw the sun rise in the west

Light

“As the days of spring arouse all nature to a green and growing vitality, so when hope enters the soul it makes all things new. It insures the progress which it predicts. Rooted in faith, growing up into love; these make the three immortal graces of the gospel, whose intertwined arms and concurrent voices shed joy and peace over our human life.”

James Freeman Clarke (1810–1888) American theologian and writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 328.

Love , Life , Peace , Faith

“True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked "Unknown," and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in "honoring the memory" of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.”

Ambrose Bierce book A Bivouac of the Dead

A Bivouac of the Dead, The New York American, November 22, 1903

Thinking , Memory

“The shade fell darker from the clustering vine,
Whose green boughs twined the lattice like a wreath;
The lark had ceased the musical glad laugh
With which he hails the morning; note by note
The matin song had died upon the wind;
The dew which hung upon the cypresses
Had turned to sunshine on the waving leaves;”

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

(14th February 1829) Lines on Newton’s Picture of the Disconsolate
The London Literary Gazette, 1829

Music

“I am forced to transpose until finally my picture may seem completely changed when, after successive modifications, the red has succeeded the green as the dominant color. I cannot copy nature in a servile way, I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture – when I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike that of a musical composition”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1900s, Notes d'un Peintre (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 411

Music , Color , Way , Nature

“But thou, lorn stream, whose sullen tide
No sedge-crown'd sister now attend,
Now waft me from the green hill's side
Whose cold turf hides the buried friend!”

William Collins (1721–1759) English poet, born 1721

Source: Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson, (1748) http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/collins/thomson.php, line 29.

Sister

“The plains are very wonderful now – like green gold and yellow gold and red gold – in patches – and the distance blue and pink and lavender strips and spots – May sounds like a Dow Canyon but really its wonderful – specially in the evening – I usually go alone – Yesterday rode home on a hay wagon – no it was clover with a funny old man – His mules and wagon blocked my path so we started talking... We had a great time riding toward the sunset. He was little and dried up and weather beaten – but he likes living..”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Canyon, Texas, (October 30), 1916, pp. 209, 210
1915 - 1920, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Home , Time , Weather

“Beyond are greens where pink chestnuts, may trees and copper beeches flaunt themselves gaily.”

Arthur Mee (1875–1943) British journalist and writer

Page 69, Harpenden.
The King's England: Hertfordshire

Tree

“I went home and stayed at Green Meadows. A couple of days later we all went up to Boston and the aircraft landed. I'll never forget it. My dad got out of the aircraft and he really looked super; he was fifty-nine years old at the time. WIth him in the aircaft were a couple of division commanders, including John W. O'Daniel, who had lost his son in the Normandy invasion and who later became my commanding general at the Infantry School at Fort Benning when I went through the basic officers course in 1946. Also aboard was Leon Johnson [USAF], who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for the Ploesti Raid, followed by eight or nine noncoms, not one of whom was wearing less than a Silver Star. All of this was followed by a ticker-tape parade through Boston. That evening my father spoke at the Shell on the Esplanade in Boston. We came home that night quite late and the next morning he came upstairs and woke me up and said we were going for breakfast. I ate breakfast with him and then I got on a train and went back to West Point. It was the last time I ever saw him.”

George S. Patton IV (1923–2004) U.S. Army general

Source: The Fighting Pattons (1997) by Brian M. Sobel, p. 33

School , Home , Star , Time

“Ascended Kynthos alone, the cave of Apollo – half-way magnificent and majestic. A pool with fine fig trees nearby full of giant (sacred?) toads – leaping and barking. Also green frogs.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

1961 - 1975

Way , Tree

“I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do. It appeals to the imagination from the start: those colours, green and yellow, create an atmosphere.”

J. Milton Hayes (1884–1940) British actor and writer

Quoted in Waugh, Alex (1967) My Brother and Other Profiles

God , Imagination

“Go you and, with such glorious hues,
Live with proud peacocks in green parks.”

William Henry Davies (1871–1940) British poet

The Kingfisher

“Here is an amazement –– once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

"Am I Not Among the Early Risers"
West Wind (1997)

“"You are a weak reed, Recruit Green!" Helve shouted. "Weak reeds make for badly woven baskets! This platoon will not be a badly woven basket!"”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Sir Thursday (2006), p. 156.

“The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa - was furnished with voluptuous grandeur in approximations of various styles, predominantly those of several Louis, with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century additions. Heavy coloured glass ashtrays of monstrous size and weight rested in inlaid marquetry tables of vaguely Pompadour associations. At dinner we drank champagne from ruby Bohemian glasses: the meat was carved at a Boulle-type sideboard. ‘Regency’ wallpaper of dark green and lighter green stripes was partially covered by gilt-framed landscapes of no style whatsoever.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

A Friend From England (1987)

Housing

“Love that so many of you are saying your 2 fav bands are Green Day & Paramore. Do you even realize how cool that is for us to hear!?”

Hayley Williams (1988) American singer-songwriter and musician

Hayley's Twitter post. http://twitter.com/#!/yelyahwilliams/status/54811243004952576 (10 September 2010)

Love

“The golden sun rose from the silver wave,
And with his beams enamelled every green.”

Edward Fairfax (1580–1635) English translator

Book I, stanza 35
Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1600)

Sun

“It began to worry me that I could never possibly settle in England now, not after Tokyo nude-shows and sliced green chillies, brown children sluicing at the road-pump, the air-conditioned hum in bedrooms big as ballrooms, negligible income-tax, curry tiffins, being the big man in the big car, the bars of all the airports of Africa and the East.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Children , Cars

“Time' has a large part to play in looking at a picture. A picture (a stupid empty surface to begin with) gets covered in the course of its creation by a rhythmically measured network of colors, lines and dots, which evokes in its final form a total of living movement. The eye jumps from a blue to red, to green (even if there is only a change of form), to a black line, suddenly comes upon a sharp white eruption, follows it, floats on to... It is impossible to take it all-in at once. Time is inseparable from surface.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

Quote in Macke's letter to philosopher de:Eberhard Grisebach, March 1913; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145

Stupidity , Color , Change , Time

“Overwhelmed with disgust, Donnell said, “I could sell you sorry fuckers anything, couldn’t I?”
They weren’t sure they had heard correctly; they looked at each other, puzzled, asking what had been said.
“I could sell you sorry fuckers anything,” he repeated, “as long as it had a bright package and was wrapped around a chewy nugget of fear. I could be your green-eyed king. But it would bore me to be the salvation of cattle like you. Take my advice, though. Don’t buy the crap that’s slung into your faces by two-bit wart-healers!” He jabbed his cane at Papa Salvatino, who stood open-mouthed in the aisle, a litter of paper cups and fans and Bibles spreading out from his feet. “Find your own answers, your own salvation. If you can’t do that,” said Donnell, “then to Hell with you.””

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 10, p. 118

Fear , Hell

“Like most experts, I've always defined a planet in common-sense terms: Can you beam down to it? Is it populated by green-skinned women? Would Galactus eat it for food?”

John Hodgman book The Areas of My Expertise

August 24, 2006
The Areas of My Expertise (2005), Appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Women , Food , Sense

“Behold, the atheists' nightmare. Now if you study a well-made banana, you'll find, on the far side, there are three ridges. On the close side, two ridges. If you get your hand ready to grip a banana, you'll find on the far side there are three grooves, on the close side, two grooves. The banana and the hand are perfectly made, one for the other. You'll find the maker of the banana, Almighty God, has made it with a non-slip surface. It has outward indicators of inward contents — green: too early; yellow: just right; black: too late. Now if you go to the top of the banana, you'll find, as with the soda can makers have placed a tab at the top, so God has placed a tab at the top. When you pull the tab, the contents don't squirt in your face. You'll find a wrapper which is biodegradable, has perforations. Notice how gracefully it sits over the human hand. Notice it has a point at the top for ease of entry. It's just the right shape for the human mouth. It's chewy, easy to digest and its even curved toward the face to make the whole process so much easier. Seriously, Kirk, the whole of creation testifies to the genius of God's creation.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God , Study

“I recently researched my family tree, and quite quickly labels of class are smudged into nonsense. For a couple of generations back, it’s all very proletariat in every direction—Bethnal Green bottle-makers and jobs that belong in Dickens. But with the generational doubling that occurs, before too long it’s a muddle of all manner of colliding types: scullery maids and sculptors, officers and gentlemen.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Family , Tree

“One time, when I was really little, I climbed a tree and ate these green, sour apples. My stomach swelled and became hard like a drum, it hurt a lot. Mother said that if I'd just waited for the apples to ripen, I wouldn't have become sick. So now, whenever I really want something, I try to remember what she said about the apples.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner (2003)

Tree , Time , Waiting , Hurt

“When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, "Thou shalt cease to be!" the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depth of my spirit with the blood of divinity.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality

Life , Death , Angels , Feeling

“In Antwerp I did not even know what the Impressionists were, now I have seen them and though not being one of the club, yet I have much admired certain Impressionist pictures – Degas, nude figure – Claude Monet, landscape. And now for what regards what I myself have been doing, I have lacked money for paying models, else I had entirely given myself to figure painting but I have made a series of colour studies in painting simply flowers, red poppies, blue corn flowers and myosotys. White and rose roses, yellow chrysantemums – seeking oppositions of blue with orange, red and green, yellow and violet, seeking THE BROKEN AND NEUTRAL TONES to harmonise brutal extremes. Trying to render intense COLOUR and not a grey harmony.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote of Vincent van Gogh in his letter to Horace Mann Livens, from Paris, September or October 1886; from letter 569 - vangoghletters online http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let569/letter.html
1880s, 1886

Money , Flowers , Study , Painting

“The wood is decked in light green leaf.
The swallow twitters in delight.
The lonely vine sheds joyous tears
Of interwoven dew and light. Spring weaves a gown of green to clad
The mountain height and wide-spread field.
O when wilt thou, my native land,
In all thy glory stand revealed?”

Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) Georgian poet and politician; a saint of Georgian Orthodox Church

Spring, p. 61
Anthology of Georgian Poetry (1948)

Mountain , Spring , Tear , Light

“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Kubla Khan (1797 or 1798)

Lovers

“I have a whole series of pictures that are, I mean in a sense, landscapes. Well, I wouldn't hold the landscape in front of me and translate it more abstractly into the painting, no. But I would - again in that American expedient thing you [Barbara Rose, earlier in the interview] were talking about - thinking ideas in my language. Sort of like today. 'Hm, bunch of roses', hm. 'Flags out the window', hm.... But once it got down on the surface I would say in 99 times out of a 100, out of 101, nobody would come along and say how come you put 'shoes' in a picture. I mean it would be too brown or too green.”

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) American artist

quote about her way of 'abstraction'
1960s, Interview with Barbara Rose', Archives - American Art, 1968

Shoe , Idea , Thinking , Sense

“Hey little leaf, lying on the ground—
now you're turning slightly brown!
Why don't you come back on the tree,
turn the color green the way you ought to be?”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Same Old Man
Divers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divers_(Joanna_Newsom_album) (2015)

Color , Way , Lying , Tree

“[Graham Greene’s] ability to encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter (1948); his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, "Novel, The"

Books , Heart

“It is not inappropriate to describe the function of the teacher as that of acting to compel awareness. This is not to say that such compulsion contrives to bring a subject to act in the way in which the teacher believes the free man ought to act. It aspires only to assure that the subject is acting for himself and not as the mere instrument of unmediated impulses. There is even a compulsory quality about the Socratic method for, by asking questions, by enquiring in the reasons and grounds for doing this or that, it forces a man to conceive of himself in terms of intentions; it thereby forces him to be free.
It does not force him, however, to act in a manner substantively different from this original impulses. … The man who swings at his enemy in blind rage may, after lengthy consideration of creative alternatives, swing at him with cool deliberation. The intentionalist cannot accept the tradition of Kant, Green, and Bosanquet which polarizes conscious duty and preconscious desire and presupposes that reflective awareness will always produce substantive changes in the character of our goals, for to him it is the qualitative change that turns mere impulses into goals that is significant for freedom.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 78-79

Way , Question , Freedom , Teachers

“I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.”

Sylvia Plath book Crossing the Water

"Metaphors" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/metaphor.html
Crossing the Water (1971)

Money , Housing , Training

“On the third floor of Manning's Coffee Shop in the Farmer's Market in Seattle confronting the Sound, the windows are opaque with fog. Sitting here in the long deserted room, I feel suspended enveloped by a white silence. Two floors below, the farmers are bending over their long rows of fruit and vegetables; washing and arranging their produce under intense lights shaded by circular green shades. Above, where I sit, the world seems obliterated from all save memory; abstracted without the feeling of being divorced from one’s roots. My eye keeps focusing upon the opaque windows [an equivalent of the picture plane]. Suddenly the vision is disturbed by the shape of a gull floating silently across the width of the window, a line of movement drawn across the picture surface. Then space again. In opposing lines to the gull's flight, the Sound moves northward through the Inland Passage... It is true that trains run daily out of Seattle to points East and South, but my mind takes but little cognizance of this fact. To me Seattle seems pocketed. There is only one way out: Alaska, toward the North! Swerving to the South, there is the Orient, although in San Francisco I feel the Orient rolling in with its tides. My imagination, it would seem, has its own geography.”

Mark Tobey (1890–1976) American abstract expressionist painter

Source: 1950's, In: Reminiscence and Reverie, 1951, pp. 45, 46

World , Way , Feeling , Imagination

“Poor verdant fool, and now green ice! thy joys,
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass,
Bid us lay in ‘gainst winter rain, and poise
Their floods with an o’erflowing glass.”

Richard Lovelace (1617–1658) English writer and poet

The Grasshopper (l. 17-20).

Fools , Grass , Winter , Joy

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 1
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale

Pain , Sense , Tree , Light

“Of the Earth, of the Mother, my heart with her heart in accord:
As I lie mid the cool green tresses that mantle her breast
I begin with the grass once again to be bound to the Lord.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

The Nuts of Knowledge (1903)

Lie , Grass , Heart

“How is it possible still to see the human face pink, now that our life, redoubled by noctambulism, has multiplied our perceptions as colourists? The human face is yellow, red, green, blue, violet.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 174
1910, Manifesto of Futurist Painters,' April 1910

Life

“You see our new towns, our smiling countryside. I am proud of our achievements. There is an enormous amount more to do. Remember that we are a great crusading body, armed with a fervent spirit for the reign of righteousness on earth. Let us go forward into this fight in the spirit of William Blake: "I will not cease from mental strife/Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand/Till we have built Jerusalem/In England's green and pleasant land."”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the Labour Party Conference in Scarborough (1 October 1951), quoted in The Times (2 October 1951), p. 4
Prime Minister

Smile , Sleep , Fight

“In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me. I know this is God.”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 81, p. 505

God

“Cole out……. Purse…. trying to find Greening……Ohhh, what a touch…in-towards Geoff Horsfield…. IT'S IN! THEY HAVE THE EQUALISER! I think it's Earnshaw's first touch!”

Jonathan Pearce (1959) British football commentator

The Baggies made amends and striker Robert Earnshaw equalised with ten minutes to go. The Gunners as a result had failed to close the gap at the top of the league, which helped open a five-point gap with Chelsea by the end of November 2004.

Thinking

“That instructed damsel
Donned a gown of green;”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

"The Vestal"
The Janitor's Boy And Other Poems (1924)
Context: p>Finally she faltered;
Saw at last, forsooth,
Every gaudy color
Is a bit of truth.
Then the gates were opened;
Miracles were seen;
That instructed damsel
Donned a gown of green;Wore it in a churchyard,
All arrayed with care;
And a painted rainbow
Shone above her there.</p

“The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)
Context: The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present — they are real.

Death , Men , Fear , Beauty

“Last I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry they didn't be nice to me.
If they try to beat me again I'll hurt them. I will.”

Richard Matheson (1926–2013) American fiction writer

Born of Man and Woman (1950)
Context: I am not so glad. All day it is cold in here. The chain comes slow out of the wall. And I have a bad anger with mother and father. I will show them. I will do what I did that once.
I will screech and laugh loud. I will run on the walls. Last I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry they didn't be nice to me.
If they try to beat me again I'll hurt them. I will.

Hurt

“I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.”

Charlotte Brontë book Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 17)
Jane Eyre (1847)
Context: Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer." My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Love , Soul , Strong

“Every field, every tree is now budding; now the woods are green, now the year is at its loveliest.”
Nunc omnis ager, nunc omnis parturit arbor; Nunc frondent sylvae, nunc formosissimus annus.

Virgil book Eclogues

Nunc omnis ager, nunc omnis parturit arbor;
Nunc frondent sylvae, nunc formosissimus annus.
Book III, lines 56–57 (tr. Fairclough)
Eclogues (37 BC)

Tree

“This is he.
This is the man they ate at the green table
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light falls and the terrible blood streams down.”

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) poet, short story writer, novelist

Litany for Dictatorships (1935)
Context: For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns
Without name, without resurrection, without stars,
His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
With the smell of his many prisons — John Smith, John Doe,
John Nobody — oh, crack your mind for his name!
Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
And barbarous with portent.
This is he.
This is the man they ate at the green table
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light falls and the terrible blood streams down.

Wisdom , War , Peace , Light

“But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices?”

Herman Melville book Billy Budd, Sailor

Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 2
Context: But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.

“His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds.”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

The Philosophy of Paine (1925)
Context: He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity.
His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds — or on persons devoted to them — have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.
When Theodore Roosevelt termed Tom Paine a "dirty little atheist" he surely spoke from lack of understanding. It was a stricture, an inaccurate charge of the sort that has dimmed the greatness of this eminent American. But the true measure of his stature will yet be appreciated. The torch which he handed on will not be extinguished.

Nature

“There is, in fact, neither red, green nor yellow magic. There is "doing." Only "doing" is magic." Properly to realise the scale of what Gurdjieff meant by magic, one has to remember his continually repeated aphorism, "Only he who can be can do," and its corollary that, lacking this fundamental verb, nothing is "done," things simply "happen."”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

"Gurdjieff" in Man, Myth and Magic : Encyclopedia of the Supernatural (1970) http://www.gurdjieff.org/travers1.htm
Context: It is clear from Gurdjieff's writings that hypnotism, mesmerism and various arcane methods of expanding consciousness must have played a large part in the studies of the Seekers of Truth. None of these processes, however, is to be thought of as having any bearing on what is called Black Magic, which, according to Gurdjieff, "has always one definite characteristic. It is the tendency to use people for some, even the best of aims, without their knowledge and understanding, either by producing in them faith and infatuation or by acting upon them through fear. There is, in fact, neither red, green nor yellow magic. There is "doing." Only "doing" is magic." Properly to realise the scale of what Gurdjieff meant by magic, one has to remember his continually repeated aphorism, "Only he who can be can do," and its corollary that, lacking this fundamental verb, nothing is "done," things simply "happen."

“If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

A statement regarding the Emmett Till murder.
Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green. Maybe the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

World

“When conservatives don't conserve and liberals don't liberate, Greens become centrists, because we directly address the central concerns of average Americans for healthy food, clean water and air;”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

[http:/www.paulglover.org/greenprez.html] (“Green Giant,” Syracuse New Times, cover story regarding Green Party Presidential candidacy) 2003-08-23
Context: When conservatives don't conserve and liberals don't liberate, Greens become centrists, because we directly address the central concerns of average Americans for healthy food, clean water and air; for secure housing; for reliable health care and satisfying work. By contrast, Democratic and Republican party leaders are dangerous extremists, indulging extremes of violence and greed, converting global wealth and human decency into chaos.

Food , Water

“There are two modes of criticism. One which … crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drouth.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant.
There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.
"Poets of the People" in Art, Literature and the Drama (1858).

Suffering

“The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities.”

Van Jones book The Green Collar Economy

The Green Collar Economy (2008)
Context: The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not just be about recycling things to give them a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance.

Communication

“While Greens are horrified at corporate and consumer trashing of planet and society, our message is primarily confident and affirmative.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.paulglover.org/greenpresident.html (Green Party Presidential candidacy page), 2004
Context: While Greens are horrified at corporate and consumer trashing of planet and society, our message is primarily confident and affirmative. Greens foster grassroots nonprofit and worker-managed enterprises that repair nature. Greens can govern to literally rebuild America's cities and suburbs, such that neighborhoods become energy-efficient; productive of food and fuel; respectful of water; safe and fun to live in. We can restore regional agriculture, rural economies, and habitat.

Confidence

“Awake,
Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.”

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

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)
Context: Awake, my soul! not only passive praise
Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears,
Mute thanks and secret ecstasy. Awake,
Voice of sweet song! awake, my heart, awake!
Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my hymn.

Heart

“You think you hold the core and kernel
Of all the world beneath your crust,
Old dial? But when you lie in dust,
This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved.
Love is eternal.”

Eleanor Farjeon (1881–1965) English children's writer

Time And Love
Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908)
Context: Dropt tears have hastened your decay
And brought you one step nigher death;
And you have heard, unthrilled, unmoved,
The music of Love's golden breath
And seen the light in eyes that loved.
You think you hold the core and kernel
Of all the world beneath your crust,
Old dial? But when you lie in dust,
This vine will bloom, strong, green, and proved.
Love is eternal.

Love , Lie , World , Thinking

“At the gate of the garden, beside the lingham post which stood there in eternal erection, sat a boy who was diverting himself by whittling, with a small green-handled knife, a bit of cedar-wood into the quaint shaping which the post had.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Source: The Way of Ecben (1929), Ch. 13 : What a Boy Thought
Context: At the gate of the garden, beside the lingham post which stood there in eternal erection, sat a boy who was diverting himself by whittling, with a small green-handled knife, a bit of cedar-wood into the quaint shaping which the post had. His hair was darkly red: and now, as he regarded Alfgar with brown and wide-set eyes, the face of this boy was humorously grave, and he nodded now, as the complacent artist nods who looks upon his advancing work and finds all to be near his wishes.

Boy

“The Third World attitude toward the United States is also easy to understand if you think of it in terms of adolescence. The citizens of the Third World are in a teenage muddle about us--full of envy, imitation, anger and blind puppy love. I have been held at gunpoint by a Shi'ite youth in West Beirut who told me in one breath that America was "pig Satan devil" and that he planned to go to dental school in Dearborn as soon as he got his green card. In Ulundi, in Zululand, I talked to a young man who, as usual, blamed apartheid on the United States. However, he had just visited the U. S. with a church group and also told me, "Everything is so wonderful there. The race relations are so good. And everyone is rich."”

P. J. O'Rourke book Give War a Chance

Just what part of America had he visited, I asked. "The South Side of Chicago," he said.
Give War a Chance (1992)

Love , Youth , World , School

“Love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity. Everybody has it. Existence is love. But it's like water flowing through a hose. It depends in which direction you point it. So everybody has the force running. And maybe, the way in which you find the force of love operating in you, is that you have a passionate like of booze, or ice cream, or automobiles, or good-looking members of the opposite sex or the same sex, but there is love operating. And people, of course, tend to distinguish between the various kinds of love, there are good kinds, such as divine charity, and allegedly bad kinds, such as, in quotes, animal lust. But it should be understood I think, that they are all forms of the same thing. But they differ, in rather the same way that the colors of white light divide into the spectrum when passed through a prism. So we might say that the red end of the spectrum of love is Dr. Freud's libido. And the violet end of the spectrum of love is agape, what is called divine love or divine charity. And that in the middle the various yellows, blues, and greens, are friendship, human endearment, consideration, and all that sort of fellow-feeling. But it's all the same thing.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

The Spectrum of Love

Love , Friendship , People , Sex

“She watched him with cool green eyes and smiled innocently. The eyes were alert with wonder, curiosity, and — perhaps something else — but she could apparently not see that he was in pain.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 29
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Context: She watched him with cool green eyes and smiled innocently. The eyes were alert with wonder, curiosity, and — perhaps something else — but she could apparently not see that he was in pain. There was something about her eyes that caused him to notice nothing else for several seconds. But then he noticed that the head of Mrs. Grales slept soundly on the other shoulder while Rachel smiled. It seemed a young shy smile that hoped for friendship. He tried again.
"Listen, is anyone else alive? Get —"
Melodious and solemn came her answer: "listen is anyone else alive — " She savored the words. She enunciated them distinctly. She smiled over them Her lips reframed them when her voice was done with them. It was more than reflexive imitation, he decided. She was trying to communicate something. By the repetition, she was trying to convey the idea: I am somehow like you.
But she had only just now been born.
And you're somehow different, too, Zerchi noticed with a trace of awe.

Pain , Smile

“To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: The Smart Set (October 1919), p. 139
Context: The bitter, of course, goes with the sweet. To be an American is, unquestionably, to be the noblest, grandest, the proudest mammal that ever hoofed the verdure of God's green footstool. Often, in the black abysm of the night, the thought that I am one awakens me with a blast of trumpets, and I am thrown into a cold sweat by contemplation of the fact. I shall cherish it on the scaffold; it will console me in Hell. But there is no perfection under Heaven, so even an American has his small blemishes, his scarcely discernible weaknesses, his minute traces of vice and depravity.

God , Hell , Night

“The Tennessee stud was long and lean
The color of the sun and his eyes were green.”

Jimmy Driftwood (1907–1998) singer

"Tennessee Stud" (1958)
Context: The Tennessee stud was long and lean
The color of the sun and his eyes were green.
He had the nerve and he had the blood
And there never was a hoss like the Tennessee stud.

Color , Sun

“Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Stanza 4.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800), Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)
Context: If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; And that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.

Forgetting

“See these eyes so green…
I can stare for a thousand years
Colder than the moon
It's been so long…
And I've been putting out fire…
With gasoline!”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Song lyrics, Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (1982)

“On the green banks of Shannon, when Sheelah was nigh,
No blithe Irish lad was so happy as I”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

The Harper, st. 1 (1799)
Context: On the green banks of Shannon, when Sheelah was nigh,
No blithe Irish lad was so happy as I;
No harp like my own could so cheerily play,
And wherever I went was my poor dog Tray.

Happiness

“Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Entry of 13 February 1756 in Charles Francis Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes, and Illustrations vol. 2 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850) 4, Google Books, 13 December 2010, web http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BGYFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA5&dq=%2215+sunday+staid+at+home%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YJlsU4u-FsPBOKu3gaAI&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%2215%20sunday%20staid%20at%20home%22&f=false
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)
Context: Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious."
Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity.

Christ

“But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”

Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) English poet and soldier (1893-1918)

Dulce et Decorum Est (1917)
Context: Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

Light , Sea

“Mix a rose madder with white, let us say, and you get a pink, quite different from the original madder, and the result is a surface color instead of a transparent one, a color you look on instead of into. One does not paint long out of doors before it becomes apparent that a green tree has a lot of red in it. You may not see the red because your eye is blinded by the strong green, but it is there never the less. So if you mix a red with the green you get a sort of mud, each color killing the other. But by the other method. when the green is dry and a rose madder glazed over it you are apt to get what is wanted, and have a richness and glow of one color shining through the other, not to be had by mixing.”

Maxfield Parrish (1870–1966) American painter and illustrator

Letter to F.W Weber (1950); as quoted in Maxfield Parrish by Coy Ludwig (1997)
Context: It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color. A modern Kodachrome is a delight when held up to the light with color luminous like stained glass. So many ask what is meant by transparent color, as though it were some special make. Most all color an artist uses is transparent: only a few are opaque, such as vermillion, cerulean blue, emerald green, the ochres and most yellows, etc. Colors are applied just as they come from the tube, the original purity and quality is never lost: a purple is pure rose madder glowing through a glaze of pure blue over glaze, or vice versa, the quality of each is never vitiated by mixing them together. Mix a rose madder with white, let us say, and you get a pink, quite different from the original madder, and the result is a surface color instead of a transparent one, a color you look on instead of into. One does not paint long out of doors before it becomes apparent that a green tree has a lot of red in it. You may not see the red because your eye is blinded by the strong green, but it is there never the less. So if you mix a red with the green you get a sort of mud, each color killing the other. But by the other method. when the green is dry and a rose madder glazed over it you are apt to get what is wanted, and have a richness and glow of one color shining through the other, not to be had by mixing. Imagine a Rembrandt if his magic browns were mixed together instead of glazed. The result would be a kind of chocolate. Then too, by this method of keeping colors by themselves some can be used which are taboo in mixtures.

Color , Tree , Strong , Painting

“The image of those cool green eyes lingered with him as long as life.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 29
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Context: The image of those cool green eyes lingered with him as long as life. He did not ask why God would choose to raise up a creature of primal innocence from the shoulder of Mrs. Grales, or why God gave to it the preternatural gifts of Eden — these gifts which Man had been trying to seize by brute force again from Heaven since first he lost them. He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, and a promise of resurrection. One glimpse had been a bounty, and he wept in gratitude. Afterwards he lay with his face in the wet dirt and waited.
Nothing else ever came — nothing that he saw, or felt, or heard.

Life

“Thy universe, O God, is home,
In height or depth, to me;
Yet here upon thy footstool green
Content am I to be;
Glad when is oped unto my need
Some sea-like glimpse of Thee.”

Lucy Larcom (1824–1893) American teacher, poet, author

Poems (1869), A Strip of Blue (1870)
Context: Here sit I, as a little child;
The threshold of God's door
Is that clear band of chrysoprase;
Now the vast temple floor,
The blinding glory of the dome
I bow my head before.
Thy universe, O God, is home,
In height or depth, to me;
Yet here upon thy footstool green
Content am I to be;
Glad when is oped unto my need
Some sea-like glimpse of Thee.

God , Home , Universe , Sea

“In The Greening of America, I did not mean that we would all become richer in material things, I meant that we would all become richer in the totality. I still think it is possible for that vision to become a reality.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: There is a point at which material things offer less than do some nonmaterial things. We ought to be able to live on a reasonable level and at the same time have others live on a reasonable level. Then we would not be afraid to work in our cities, we would not be at war with ourselves, which is characteristic of people in this country. If we were at peace with ourselves, we would be able to see other less material, but still quite rewarding, horizons. In The Greening of America, I did not mean that we would all become richer in material things, I meant that we would all become richer in the totality. I still think it is possible for that vision to become a reality.

Thinking , Reality

“He tried to refocus his eyes to get another look at the face of this being, who by gestures alone had said to him: I do not need your first Sacrament, Man, but I am worthy to convey to you this Sacrament of Life. Now he knew what she was, and he sobbed faintly when he could not again force his eyes to focus on those cool, green, and untroubled eyes of one born free.”

Walter M. Miller, Jr. book A Canticle for Leibowitz

Ch 29
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Fiat Voluntas Tua
Context: He received the Wafer from her hand. She replaced the lid of the ciborium and set the vessel in a more protected spot under a jutting rock. She used no conventional gestures, but the reverence with which she had handled it convinced him of one thing: she sensed the Presence under the veils. She who could not yet use words nor understand them, had done what she had as if by direct instruction, in response to his attempt at conditional baptism. He tried to refocus his eyes to get another look at the face of this being, who by gestures alone had said to him: I do not need your first Sacrament, Man, but I am worthy to convey to you this Sacrament of Life. Now he knew what she was, and he sobbed faintly when he could not again force his eyes to focus on those cool, green, and untroubled eyes of one born free.

Life

“Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries. A great variety of manufactured objects could be grown instead of made. Green technology could supply human needs with far less damage to the natural environment. And green technology could be a great equalizer, bringing wealth to the tropical areas of the world which have most of the sunshine, most of the human population, and most of the poverty. I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. "Could" is not the same as "will". To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics. We need a consensus of public opinion around the world that the existing gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intolerable. In reaching such a consensus, religions must play an essential role. Neither technology alone nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice to human societies, but technology and religion working together might do the job.

“I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. "Could" is not the same as "will". To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Progress In Religion (2000)
Context: Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries. A great variety of manufactured objects could be grown instead of made. Green technology could supply human needs with far less damage to the natural environment. And green technology could be a great equalizer, bringing wealth to the tropical areas of the world which have most of the sunshine, most of the human population, and most of the poverty. I am saying that green technology could do all these good things, bringing wealth to the tropics, bringing economic opportunity to the villages, narrowing the gap between rich and poor. I am not saying that green technology will do all these good things. "Could" is not the same as "will". To make these good things happen, we need not only the new technology but the political and economic conditions that will give people all over the world a chance to use it. To make these things happen, we need a powerful push from ethics. We need a consensus of public opinion around the world that the existing gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth are intolerable. In reaching such a consensus, religions must play an essential role. Neither technology alone nor religion alone is powerful enough to bring social justice to human societies, but technology and religion working together might do the job.

People , World , Chance , Wealth

“The first and most tangible result of the Green Movement is that the world, today, has a far better understanding of the true nature of the Islamic Republic on the one hand, and the true wishes and aspirations of the Iranian people on the other. The black veil has been torn off the face of the regime. Ultimately, I am confident my country will be liberated from this darkness. The Iranian people will prevail. This regime will fall at the hands of its own people. If you recall nothing of my comments this evening, remember this: the struggle of the Iranian people for democracy, human rights and dignity continues, whether you hear about it on the news in this country or not. It will continue until we prevail, thanks to our heroic youth whose eyes are firmly on the future, not the past.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

“Iran: From Theocracy to Democracy” http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=441&page=1, George Washington University, April 13, 2010.
Speeches, 2010

People , Youth , World , Democracy

“I encourage investment in technologies that increase communication with the Iranian people. America in particular needs to increase the available mediums of dialogue with the Iranian people by strengthening the ability of the Iranian people to access news and information and to overcome the electronic censorship and monitoring efforts of the Iranian regime… This renewed dialogue would allow the world to demonstrate its solidarity with the democracy-seeking Iranian people. It would also improve the accuracy of the information received from Iran. But perhaps most importantly, improving these technologies would allow the Green Movement within Iran to communicate, organize and mobilize much more efficiently.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

Excerpted Comments Made by Reza Pahlavi of Iran to a Group of Prominent American Business Leaders in New York City http://www.rezapahlavi.org/details_article.php?article=414&page=2, Dec. 9, 2009.
Speeches, 2008-2009

People , World , Democracy , Communication

“Those hundred lovers
are asleep forever
beneath the dry earth.
Andalusia has
long, red-colored roads.
Córdoba, green olive trees
for placing a hundred crosses
to remember them.
Those hundred lovers
are asleep forever.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Color , Lovers , Tree

“I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich
but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch,
one who escapes his tutor's monologues,
and kills the day in boredom with his dogs;
nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry,
his people dying by the balcony;
the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite
no longer gets him through a single night;
his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb;
even the ladies of the court, for whom
all kings are beautiful, cannot put on
shameful enough dresses for this skeleton;
the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent
washes to cleanse the poisoned element;
even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy,
our tyrants' solace in senility,
he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food
is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

People , Food , Beauty , Dogs

“I have been in Green Day for most of my life, we have been doing this since I was 16 years old, and I just love how this band has evolved from a bunch of 'slackers' to one of the most socially conscious bands out there. It is pretty groovy to see how things have changed and yet it has all been a very natural process for us.”

Billie Joe Armstrong (1972) American singer and guitarist

Nature , Love , Life , Making love

“There are no emergency meetings, no headlines, no breaking news. No one is acting as if we were in a crisis. Even most climate scientists or green politicians keep on flying around the world, eating meat and dairy. … Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can't save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed. Everything needs to change. And it has to start today.”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

"School strike for climate - save the world by changing the rules" https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/greta-speeches#greta_speech_tedx, TEDxStockholm (24 November 2018)
2018

World , Change , Flying

“Venetian Memories. Jane has agreed to have copied in her brain some of Paul’s memory-traces. After she recovers consciousness in the post-surgery room, she has a new set of vivid apparent memories. She seems to remember walking on the marble paving of a square, hearing the flapping of flying pigeons and the cries of gulls, and seeing light sparkling on green water. One apparent memory is very clear. She seems to remember looking across the water to an island, where a white Palladian church stood out brilliantly against a dark thundercloud.”

Derek Parfit book Reasons and Persons

Source: Reasons and Persons (1984), p. 220

Light , Water , Memory , Flying

“Once again, we can be sure that these Canadian blue-green-purple globes are not meteors, nor are they fragments of a comet or Venus. What, then, are they? Spacecraft from another world?”

Kenneth Arnold (1915–1984) American aviator and businessman

Discussing http://www.nicap.org/articles/ShalettsArticle1.pdf a fisherman's report http://www.waterufo.net/item.php?id=1148 of purplish spheres with portholes maneuvering over the Crow River, Ontario, Are Space Visitors Here?, Fate (summer 1948)

World

“There was a moist, fertile, decaying sort of odor in the air. Florida was the sort of place that always seemed to be threatening to slip out of time and go back to the Paleozoic where it belonged. The light was a tawny gold filtered through a fragmented wall of green.”

Robert Sheckley book Hunter/Victim

Source: Hunter/Victim (1988), Chapter 38 (p. 175)

Light , Time

“To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & and a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers..”

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

1790s, Letter to Revd. Dr. Trusler (1799)

Money , Tree , Imagination , Sun

“The level of climate hysteria keeps increasing. Some want a drastic reduction in consumption. Some call for a green fascist dictatorship. Some say we should stop having babies. Where will this madness stop?!”

Maxime Bernier (1963) Canadian politician

Oct 4 https://twitter.com/MaximeBernier/status/1180220350426238977
2019

Baby , Madness

“I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet.”

Amy Krouse Rosenthal (1965–2017) author, a radio show host and producer, and filmmaker

From her essay [Amy Krouse Rosenthal, You May Want to Marry My Husband, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/style/modern-love-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband.html, 22 November 2019, The New York Times, March 3, 2017], published 10 days before her death, as quoted in [Stevens, Heidi, Chicago author Amy Krouse Rosenthal's 'You May Want to Marry My Husband' essay went viral. Now her husband is honoring her life with a giant yellow umbrella in Lincoln Park., https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/heidi-stevens/ct-life-stevens-monday-amy-krause-rosenthal-lincoln-park-0513-story.html, 22 November 2019, The Chicago Times]

Personality , Children , Night , Time

Quotes about greens page 9

Quotes about greens
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