Quotes about hazel

A collection of quotes on the topic of hazel, herring, love, doing.

Quotes about hazel

Rick Riordan photo
John Green photo

“I’m a good person but a shitty writer. You’re a shitty person but a good writer. We’d make a good team. I don’t want to ask you any favors, but if you have time – and from what I saw, you have plenty – I was wondering if you could write a eulogy for Hazel. I’ve got notes and everything, but if you could just make it into a coherent whole or whatever? Or even just tell me what I should say differently. Here’s the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease. I want to leave a mark. But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, “They’ll remember me now,” but (a) they don’t remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion. (Okay, maybe I’m not such a shitty writer. But I can’t pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can’t fathom into constellations.) We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can’t stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it’s silly and useless – epically useless in my current state – but I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either. People will say it’s sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it’s not sad, Van Houten. It’s triumphant. It’s heroic. Isn’t that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm. The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox. After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I got caught. I really thought she was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark almost blue color, and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar. A nurse guy came in and told me I had to leave, that visitors weren’t allowed, and I asked if she was doing okay, and the guy said, “She’s still taking on water.””

A desert blessing, an ocean curse. What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Augustus "Gus" Waters, p. 310-313
The Fault in Our Stars (2012)

Nâzım Hikmet photo
Holly Black photo
Pablo Neruda photo
Rick Riordan photo
Holly Black photo

“Hazel never cried. She was forged from iron; she never broke.”

Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest

George William Russell photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Fannie Flagg photo

“Hazel always used to say There's not enough darkness in the entire universe to snuff out the light of just one little candle.”

Fannie Flagg (1944) American actress, comedian and author

Source: I Still Dream About You

Richard Adams photo

“A thing can be true and still be desperate folly, Hazel.”

Source: Watership Down

Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Joanne Harris photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo

“Oh, no!" Hazel wailed. "Popcorn! Our fatal weakness!”

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
Rick Riordan photo
John Greenleaf Whittier photo
James Macpherson photo
Walter Scott photo

“The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade.”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Canto I, stanza 1.
The Lady of the Lake http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3011 (1810)

Charlie Brooker photo

“I won't get over that in a hurry: my least favourite atrophied Hazel McWitch lookalike in the world, singing "I just want to make love to you", right there on primetime telly. She has to be the only person on Earth who can take a lyric like that and make it seem like a blood-curdling threat without changing any of the words.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

On Gillian McKeith singing
[Screen Burn, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/columnists/story/0,,1788457,00.html, The Guardian, 3 June 2006, 2007-08-19]
Guardian columns, Screen Burn

Marie de France photo

“The two of them resembled the honeysuckle which clings to the hazel branch: when it has wound itself round and attached itself to the hazel, the two can survive together: but if anyone should then attempt to separate them, the hazel quickly dies, as does the honeysuckle. "Sweet love, so it is with us: without me you cannot survive, nor I without you."”

D'euls deus fu il tut autresi
Cume del chevrefoil esteit
Ki a la codre se perneit:
Quant il s'i est laciez e pris
Ensemble poënt bien durer;
Mes ki puis les volt deservrer,
Li codres muert hastivement
E li chevrefoil ensement.
"Bele amie, si est de nus:
Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!"
"Chevrefoil", line 74; p. 110.
Lais

Dafydd ap Gwilym photo

“A fine handsome youth rewarded me;
May is a generous, open-handed prince.
He sent me true coins:
Clean green leaves of May's gentle hazels.
Twigs' florins don’t disappoint me,
May's fleur-de-lys wealth.”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Harddwas teg a'm anrhegai,
Hylaw ŵr mawr hael yw'r Mai.
Anfones ym iawn fwnai,
Glas defyll glân mwyngyll Mai.
Ffloringod brig ni'm digiai,
Fflŵr-dy-lis gyfoeth mis Mai.
"Mis Mai" (May), line 9; translation by Patrick Sims-Williams, from Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983) p. 541.

Arthur Symons photo

“Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders.”

Arthur Symons (1865–1945) British poet

An Introduction to the Study of Browning, preface (1906).

Robert A. Heinlein photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The First Revelation, Chapter 5
Context: He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.