Quotes about meadow

A collection of quotes on the topic of meadow, likeness, love, world.

Quotes about meadow

“Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

Part I, section 3.
Source: Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847)

“You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon... Ah, a first ray of sunshine!”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Corot's description of the beginning of a day in Switzerland, Château de Gruyères, 1857; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963
1850s

Nature, Tree, Light, Waiting

“Then, with an enormous rush of meadow-filled wind, the green candle went out, and my best friend died.”

Kristin Cast book Betrayed

Source: Betrayed

“It is fortunate, perhaps, that no matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all of the salient facts about any one of them.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“April: Sky Dance”, p. 32-33.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "April: Come High Water," "April: Draba," "April: Bur Oak," & "April:Sky Dance"
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

Study, Learning

“I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Night

“I just stepped out of the dark, still forest and found myself on a rising hill. In front of me I saw a valley, surrounded by fertile hills, in which a town stood and the newly covered slate roof of the tower glowed in the evening light. Through the richly-flowered, carpeted meadow the river meandered... And behind the hills lay the mountains.... cliff after cliff rose far out into the horizon... Filled with soaring joy I stood there a long time and looked at the beautiful area..”

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Swedish painter

Quote from Friedrich's Diary-note, 1803; as cited by C. D. Eberlein in C. D. Friedrich - Bekenntnisse, pp. 72-73; translated and quoted by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 45
1794 - 1840

Beauty, Mountain, Flowers, Light

“Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995)

Tree, Dance

“In the evening you hear the scream of bats,
Two black horses jump in the meadow,
The red maple rustles.
To the traveller the small inn appears by the wayside.
Wonderful the taste of young wine and nuts,
Wonderful: stumbling drunk into darkening wood.
Through black branches painful bells sound,
On the face dew drips.”

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) austrian poet

"Towards Evening My Heart," Poems (1913)
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/29/wild-heart-turning-white-georg-trakl-and-cocaine/

Pain, Travel, Appearance, Wine

“I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous—that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn't. It makes no difference how well they mean or how cordial they are—they simply get on my nerves unless they chance to represent a peculiarly similar combination of tastes, experiences, and heritages; as, for instance, Belknap chances to do... Therefore it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape and scenery. Let me have normal American faces in the streets to give the aspect of home and a white man's country, and I ask no more of featherless bipeds. My life lies not among people but among scenes—my local affections are not personal, but topographical and architectural. No one in Providence—family aside—has any especial bond of interest with me, but for that matter no one in Cambridge or anywhere else has, either. The question is that of which roofs and chimneys and doorways and trees and street vistas I love the best; which hills and woods, which roads and meadows, which farmhouses and views of distant white steeples in green valleys. I am always an outsider—to all scenes and all people—but outsiders have their sentimental preferences in visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England I must have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence—but as I review the new impressions which have impinged upon me since birth, I think the greatest single emotion—and the most permanent one as concerns consequences to my inner life and imagination—I have ever experienced was my first sight of Marblehead in the golden glamour of late afternoon under the snow on December 17, 1922. That thrill has lasted as nothing else has—a visible climax and symbol of the lifelong mysterious tie which binds my soul to ancient things and ancient places.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Lillian D. Clark (29 March 1926), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 186
Non-Fiction, Letters

Love, Life, People, Family

“Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but Nature's sources never fail. … The petty discomforts that beset the awkward guest, the unskilled camper, are quickly forgotten, while all that is precious remains. Fears vanish as soon as one is fairly free in the wilderness.”

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

" The Yellowstone National Park http://books.google.com/books?id=smQCAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA509", The Atlantic Monthly, volume LXXXI, number 486 (April 1898) pages 509-522 (at pages 515-516); modified slightly and reprinted in Our National Parks http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/our_national_parks/ (1901), chapter 2: The Yellowstone National Park 1900s, Our National Parks (1901)

Age, Fear, Peace, Mountain

“Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Beauty, Peaceful, Flowers

“Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.”

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) American poet, essayist and feminist

Source: The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984

Sleep, Universe

“I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I’m a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time. -- Stargirl”

Jerry Spinelli book Love, Stargirl

Source: Love, Stargirl

Love, World, Time

“Tis a strange thing, that the only friends I have I found in the same way, lying flat in the meadows, crying as if their hearts would break.”

Elizabeth George Speare book The Witch of Blackbird Pond

Source: The Witch of Blackbird Pond

Way, Lying, Heart, Cry

“Deep in the meadow, hidden far away
A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray
Forget your woes and let your troubles lay
And when again it's morning, they'll wash away.

Here it's safe, here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm

The final lines are barely audible.

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Katniss Everdeen, Rue's song, p. 235
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

Love, Dreams, Forgetting

“The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?”

Philip K. Dick book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Source: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Bird, Singing

“A power of Butterfly must be -
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of Sky”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Flying

“The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“Last Sunday we made a bicycle tour of 80 km. Through the North along the edge of the province [Groningen].... On such a day I get again a lot of impressions which will reappear in altered forms in due time. Beautiful landscapes, nice small roads, beautiful farms, meadows with horses and cattle, birds, water and a lot of sunshine. Mills and towers and trees are breaking the lines of the flat land..”

Hendrik Werkman (1882–1945) Dutch artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Hendrik Werkman, in het Nederlands): Zondag maakten we een fietstocht van 80 km. Door het Noorden langs de rand van de provincie [Groningen].. .Op zoo’n dag doe ik weer heel wat indrukken op die te gelegener tijd omgewerkt weer tevoorschijn komen. Mooie landschappen, aardige weggetjes, prachtige boerderijen, weiden met paarden en vee, vogels, water en zonneschijn volop. Molens en torens en boomen breken de lijnen van het vlakke land..
In a letter to Henkels, 12 July 1944; as cited in H. N. Werkman - Leven & Werk - 1882-1945, ed. A. de Vries, J. van der Spek, D. Sijens, M. Jansen; WBooks, Groninger Museum / Stichting Werkman, 2015 (transl: Fons Heijnsbroek), p. 18
1940's

Beauty, Bird, Tree, Water

“The professors of zoology gather in the meadows
With the palms of their hands they turn back the rainbows
the great magician sets the tomatoes on his forehead
Again thou hauntest castle and grounds
The roebuck whistles the stallion bounds
(And this is how the world is this is all that's ahead of us)”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

World

“The source of all imagination is here in our fields, and Creation is beautiful enough for the furthest flights of the poets. What is called realism only falls far from these flights because it is too meticulously concerned with the detail of material; mere inventories of rocks are not poetry; but all the memories of crags and hills and meadows and woods and sky that lie in a sensitive spirit are materials for poetry, only waiting to be taken out, and to be laid before the eyes of such as care to perceive them.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

Patches of Sunlight

Lie, Beauty, Imagination, Memory

“How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

A Poet!—He Hath Put His Heart to School, l. 9 (1842).

Love, Flowers, Freedom

“He who abhors and shuns the light of the Sun,
He who refuses to behold with respect the living creation of God,
He who leads the good to wickedness,
He who makes the meadows waterless and the pastures desolate,
He who lets fly his weapon against the innocent,
An enemy of my faith, a destroyer of Thy principles is he, O Lord!”

Zoroaster Persian prophet and founder of Zoroastrianism

Ahunuvaiti Gatha; Yasna 32, 10.
The Gathas

God, Faith, Light, Sun

“Americans are everywhere very decent, magnificent and ignorant. They are generous and lovable; they hog the earth and blight the land. In every hill and holler, highland, forest, meadow and plain they will continue to mingle and to learn, by intelligent transition or headlong catastrophe, to bind their lives to the resources of the land.”

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

http://www.paulglover.org/7812.html (“America the Hard Way”), The Grapevine, cover story, Walk Across the USA), 1979-01-10

Intelligence, Learning

“Jean, Jean, roses are red
All the leaves have gone green
And the clouds are so low
You can touch them, and so
Come out to the meadow, Jean.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

Music to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968)

“My love! My lover! Beloved Friend!
Grab this wondrous, fleeting moment,
Drink it inside me,
Let’s drink it together to the end!
[…]
And upon returning, love…
Taking mysterious paths along the meadows
On grassy carpets on the forest floor,
We will make a star of our two shadows.”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

Meu amor! Meu amante! Meu amigo!
Colhe a hora que passa, hora divina,
Bebe-a dentro de mim, bebe-a comigo!
Sinto-me alegre e forte! Sou menina!
[...]
E à volta, Amor... tornemos, nas alfombras
Dos caminhos selvagens e escuros,
Num astro só as nossas duas sombras!...
Quoted in Florbela Espanca (1995), p. 81
Translated by John D. Godinho
The Flowering Heath (1931), "Passeio ao Campo"

Love, Star, Lovers, Drink

“I use the example of the rainbow and of the phenomena connected with it, of which sort are the circle around the sun and the stars, likewise the rod lying at the side of the sun or of a star which appears to the eye in a straight line… called the rod by Seneca, and the circle is called the corona, which often has the colors of the rainbow. But neither Aristotle nor Avicenna, in their Natural Histories, has given us knowledge of things of this sort, nor has Seneca, who composed a special book on them. But Experimental Science makes certain of them. [The experimenter] considers rowers and he finds the same colors in the falling drops dripping from the raised oars when the solar rays penetrate drops of this sort. It is the same with waters falling from the wheels of a mill; and when a man sees the drops of dew in summer of a morning lying on the grass in the meadow or the field, he will see the colors. And in the same way when it rains, if he stands in a shady place and if the rays beyond it pass through dripping moisture, then the colors will appear in the shadow nearby; and very frequently of a night colors appear around the wax candle. Moreover, if a man in summer, when he rises from sleep and while his eyes are yet only partly opened, looks suddenly toward an aperture through which a ray of the sun enters, he will see colors. And if, while seated beyond the sun, he extend his hat before his eyes, he will see colors; and in the same way if he closes his eye, the same thing happens under the shade of the eyebrow; and again, the same phenomenon occurs through a glass vessel filled with water, placed in the rays of the sun. Or similarly if any one holding water in his mouth sprinkles it vigorously into the rays and stands to the side of the rays; and if rays in the proper position pass through an oil lamp hanging in the air, so that the light falls on the surface of the oil, colors will be produced. And so in an infinite number of ways, as well natural as artificial, colors of this sort appear, as the careful experimenter is able to discover.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

Books, Color, Way, History

“And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

"Weathers", lines 15-18

Family

“The gatherd storme is rype; the bigge drops falle;
The forswat meadowes smethe, and drenche the raine;
The comyng ghastness do the cattle pall,
And the full flockes are drivynge ore the plaine;
Dashde from the cloudes the waters flott againe;
The welkin opes; the yellow levynne flies;
And the hot fierie smothe in the wide lowings dies.”

Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770) English poet, forger

Stanza 5.
An Excelente Balade of Charitie

Water

“There is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 11 (pp. 346-347)

People, Fear, Beauty, Way

“The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at play
Through the meadow land toward a closing door
A door marked "nevermore" that wasn't there before”

Johnny Mercer (1909–1976) American lyricist, songwriter, singer and music professional

Song The Days of Wine and Roses

Wine

“b>One of the loveliest and most magnificent events that can happen in the country is when ponies take fright, particularly in a herd. A meadow-pippit has flown past. The ponies' fear is at first blended with play, even with mockery, amusement touched with a shudder, not unlike the behavior of the mentally ill. They trot as if they were retreating from a slow-moving stream of fire, but with lightning in every action, storm in every nerve; swinging their heads everywhere as if the front of their necks were made of elastic, gracefully flirting their tails. They can even pause for a moment, and start biting and boxing, with those romantic mating cries of theirs. Then all at once it is as if the fire has started flowing right under these strange creatures, they charge away like a storm incarnate over scree and bogs and landslides, dipping the tips of their toes for a fractional moment into the furnace that blazes beneath their hooves, cutting across waterfalls, gullys, and boulders, galloping steeply for a while until they stand trapped at last on some ledge high in the mountaintops, there to die and be eaten by birds.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Fear, Behavior, Bird, Past

“It runs through the reeds,
And away it proceeds,
Through meadow and glade,
In sun and in shade,
And through the wood-shelter,
Among crags in its flurry,
Helter-skelter,
Hurry-skurry.”

Robert Southey (1774–1843) British poet

St. 2. The Cataract of Lodore http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/652.html (1820)

Sun

“Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower
Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet?
'God!' let the torrents, like a shout of nations,
Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, 'God!'
'God! ' sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, 'God!'.”

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

"Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni" (1802)

God, Soul, Flowers, Singing

““There are moments when I feel Howards End peculiarly our own." "All the same, London's creeping." She pointed over the meadow--over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust. "You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now," she continued. "I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world." Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly. Howards End, Oniton, the Purbeck Downs, the Oderberge, were all survivals, and the melting-pot was being prepared for them. Logically, they had no right to be alive. One's hope was in the weakness of logic. Were they possibly the earth beating time?”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 44

Life, World, Hope, Feeling

“Living and dead matter were so obviously at variance here, and the living matter so obviously triumphant in its adaptability over the dead elements and their rigid laws that the barren wilderness seemed to us more essentially alive than green trees rustling in the wind. How was it possible that for over a century scientists should have regarded nature as a harmonious whole, in itself so divinely complete that it needed no god? As long as the word nature conjured up the green woods and the flower-strewn meadows of our childhood that was understandable and in line with our own feelings. And even long scientific expeditions into the desert had done very little to correct this impression. It was only now, when the desert had become our home, that the old impression slowly began to fade.”

Henno Martin (1910–1998) German geologist

Source: Sheltering Desert; Union Deutsche Verlangsgesellschaft Ulm (1958), p. 87

God, Law, Feeling, Home

“Overhead the swallows dipped down to catch bugs rising from the ground. Then they soared back up beyond the barracks. Hannah watched them for a moment, scarcely breathing. It was as if all nature ignored what went on in the camp. There were brilliant sunsets and soft breezes. Around the commandant’s house, bright flowers were teased by the wind. Once she’d seen a fox cross the meadow to disappear into the forest.”

Jane Yolen book The Devil's Arithmetic

Source: The Devil's Arithmetic (1988), p. 154

Flowers, Nature, Housing

“He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.162

Love, Death, World, Sadness

“How sweet and beautifull is every place & I visit my old Haunts with renewed delight… nothing can exceed the beautiful green of the meadows which are beginning to fill with butter Cups — & various flowers — the birds are singing from morning till night but most of all the Sky larks — How delightfull is the Country.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Letter to his wife, Maria Bicknell (20 April 1821); as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 28
1820s

Beauty, Flowers, Bird, Singing

“Thou art gone from my gaze like a beautiful dream,
And I seek thee in vain by the meadow and stream.”

George Linley (1798–1865) British writer

Thou art gone, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Beauty, Dreams, Art

“When I reached the [Yosemite] valley, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close companionship. … I … bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the meadows, conversed with the domes, and played with the pines.”

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

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 355); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2 1870s

Love

“Meadows trim, with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide;
Towers and balements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighboring eyes.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 75

Beauty, Tree

“How oft in schoolboy-days, from the school's sway
Have I run forth to Nature as to a friend, —
With some pretext of o'erwrought sight, to spend
My school-time in green meadows far away!
Careless of summoning bell, or clocks that strike,
I marked with flowers the minutes of my day.”

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873) American poet

"How oft in schoolboy-days" lines 1–6, Poems, 1860

School, Flowers, Nature, Time

“Mark in the meadows the ruin of Time;
Take the hint, and let life be improv'd in its prime.”

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) British statesman and man of letters

"Advice to a Lady in Autumn", published in A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. I. (1763), printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley

Life, Time

“He was learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Section 2 (p. 37)
Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

World, Color, Sense, Learning

“And you, fair nymphs of Tagus, parent stream,
If ever your meadows were my pastoral theme,
O come auspicious, and the song inspire
With all the boldness of your hero's fire:
Deep and majestic let the numbers flow,
And, rapt to heaven, with ardent fury glow.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

E vós, Tágides minhas, pois criado
Tendes em mi um novo engenho ardente,
Se sempre em verso humilde celebrado
Foi de mi vosso rio alegremente,
Dai-me agora um som alto e sublimado,
Um estilo grandíloco e corrente,
Por que de vossas águas Febo ordene
Que não tenham enveja às de Hipocrene.
Stanza 5 (tr. William Julius Mickle)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto I

Parent

“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" Binsey Poplars http://www.bartleby.com/122/19.html", lines 1-8 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Sun

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

George Mackley (1900–1983) Wood engraver

Preface to George Mackley's Picture Book (1981)

Love, Life, Parting

“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

“The tender Evenlode that makes
Her meadows hush to hear the sound
Of waters mingling in the brakes,
And binds my heart to English ground.A lovely river, all alone,
She lingers in the hills and holds
A hundred little towns of stone,
Forgotten in the western wolds.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"Dedicatory Ode", stanzas 31–32
Verses (1910)

Love, Water, Heart

“There is at least a punky spark in my heart and it may blaze in this autumn gold, fanned by the King. Some of my grandfathers must have been born on a muirland for there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to Cassiope, and oozing through all my veins impel me unhaltingly through endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better.”

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

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr http://digitalcollections.pacific.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/muirletters/id/12500/rec/1 (perhaps Autumn 1870); published in William Federic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/life/life_and_letters/default.aspx (1924), chapter 8: Yosemite, Emerson, and the Sequoias 1870s

Autumn, Heart

“Earth, what have I to do with thee?
With your meadows where dumb beasts
Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads?
What have I to do with your implacable births?
So why this gracious melancholia?
Is it because anger is no use?”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"A Portal" (1976), trans. Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass
Hymn of the Pearl (1981)

Birth, Anger

“A fresh river in a beautiful meadow
Imagined in his mind
The good Painter, who would some day paint it”

Jeff VanderMeer book City of Saints and Madmen

"The Transformation of Martin Lake", epigram, p. 130
City of Saints and Madmen (2001–2004)

Beauty, Imagination, Painting

“Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

" In the Valley of the Elwy http://www.bartleby.com/122/16.html", lines 9-10 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Love, World, Water

“When humus remains constantly damp, without, however, being covered with water, it forms a very unpleasant smelling acid, which is more particularly, characterized by the property which it possesses of colouring blue litmus paper into red. This circumstance has long been known, and it is the reason that land and meadows which are not properly drained, and which exhibit these phenomena, are called sour. We have carefully examined these facts, and have endeavoured to discover the peculiar constitution of this acid. At first, we were inclined to regard it as being of a distinct nature, and having carbon for its base; but we have since become convinced that it is generally composed of acetic acid, and occasionally contains a portion of the phosphoric. This latter always adheres so firmly to the humus that it cannot be separated from it either by boiling or washing. The liquid in which the humus is boiled certainly acquires a slight acid flavour, but the greater part of the acid remains attached to the humus.
This acid or sour humus it not at all of a fertilizing nature; on the contrary, it is prejudicial to vegetation* Where it is very strong and pervades the whole of the humus, the soil only produces reeds, rushes, sedge, and other useless, unpalatable plants; and whenever these abound, it may be inferred that the soil contains a great deal of sour or acid humus… There are various means of getting rid of this baneful property, and rendering the humus fertile. It is well known that with the aid of alkalies, ashes, lime, and marl, humus may be deprived of its acidity, and rendered easily soluble… Heaths do not thrive where this humus does not exist, and when they have established themselves in one particular spot, they suffer few other plants to appear. This humus may be changed by a dressing composed of marl, lime, or ammonia; and where this has been mixed with the soil, the heaths, &c., speedily perish.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section III: Agronomy, p. 343-4, as cited in Ruffin (1852, p. 85).

Nature, Strong, Suffering, Water

“My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read,
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

The Summer Rain http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6711&poem=31808, st. 1 (1842)

Books, Reading

“Paint studies of parts, for instance a piece of land, a group of trees or things like that, but always in a way that people can understand these things in relation with the whole landscape, by adding behind that group of trees the air in a right tone color and thereby in connection with the trees... Furthermore studies of a whole, preferably very simple subjects - A meadow with horizon and a piece of air to examine further the general tone color, the harmony of the whole.... and study nature even more by thinking about it than working after it.”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
(original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) Schilder studies van gedeelten, bv. een stuk grond, een boomgroep of dergelijke maar toch altijd zóó dat men die in verband met het geheele landschap begrijpen kan, door achter die boomgroep de lucht juist van toon en daardoor in verband met de boomen er bij te schilderen.. .Verder studies van een geheel, liefst zeer eenvoudige sujetten - Eene weide met horizon en stuk lucht. Om nog meer de algemeene toon, de harmonie van het geheel na te gaan.. ..en bestudeer de natuur nog meer met er over te denken dan met er na [naar!?] te werken.
Quote from a letter of Roelofs to his pupil Hendrik W. Mesdag, 27 May 1866; as cited by De Bodt, in Halverwege Parijs, Willem Roelofs en de Nederlandse Schilderskolonie in Brussel, Gent, 1995a, p. 238
1860's

People, Color, Way, Understanding

“The sun in his golden chariot had driven almost to the last meadow of the sky.”

Tanith Lee book Volkhavaar

Source: Volkhavaar (1977), Chapter 1 (p. 9; opening line)

Sun

“The carny had a horse, all skin and bone,
A bow-backed nag, that he named "Sorrow",
Now it is buried in a shallow grave,
In the then parched meadow.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, Your Funeral… My Trial (1986), The Carny

Horse

“Let beeves and home-bred kine partake
The sweets of Burn-mill meadow;
The swan on still St. Mary's Lake
Float double, swan and shadow!”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Yarrow Unvisited.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Home

“But just as the world grew right again,
We heard a wanderer out on the plain
Singing what none of us understood;
Yet we thought that the world grew thrice more sweet
And the meadows were blossoming under his feet.
And we felt a grand and beautiful fear,
For we knew that a marvellous thought drew near;
So we kept the glass for a little while:
And the skies grew deeper and twice as bright,
And the seas grew soft as a flower of light,
And the meadows rippled from stile to stile;
And memories danced in a musical throng
Thro' the blossom that scented the wonderful song.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part III : The Mystic Ruby
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

World, Fear, Beauty, Music

“But now he sleeps endlessly.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing;
singing along marshes and meadows,
slides on frozen horns,
faltering souls in the mist
stumbling over a thousand hoofs
like a long, dark, sad tongue,
to form a pool of agony
close to the starry Guadalquivir.
Oh, white wall of Spain!
Oh, black bull of sorrow!
Oh, hard blood of Ignacio!
Oh, nightingale of his veins!”

Federico García Lorca Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías

Pero ya duerme sin fin.
Ya los musgos y la hierba
abren con dedos seguros
la flor de su calavera.
Y su sangre ya viene cantando:
cantando por marismas y praderas,
resbalando por cuernos ateridos,
vacilando sin alma por la niebla,
tropezando con miles de pezuñas
como una larga, oscura, triste lengua,
para formar un charco de agonía
junto al Guadalquivir de las estrellas.
¡Oh blanco muro de España!
¡Oh negro toro de pena!
¡Oh sangre dura de Ignacio!
¡Oh ruiseñor de sus venas!
Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935)

Sadness, Soul, Flowers, Sleep

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. … Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.”

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

Source: A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf, 1916, chapter 4: Camping Among the Tombs, page 140

Life, Death, Children, Beauty

“Gossip grows like weeds
In a summer meadow.
My girl and I
Sleep arm in arm.”

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (662–710) Japanese poet

XIX, p. 21
Kenneth Rexroth's translations, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese (1955)

Girl, Sleep, Summer

“Maud Muller, on a summer's day,
Raked the meadows sweet with hay.
Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health.”

John Greenleaf Whittier Maud Muller

Maud Muller (1856)

Health, Beauty, Summer, Wealth

“You asked me whether you could learn to sing. I don't know. It could well be that you have the makings of a singer. It could well be that the world will give you the best that it has: glory, power, honor, what else is there? Palaces and parks, perhaps? Or merry meadows? And then what?”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Garðar Hólm
Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Learning, World, Singing

“It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.”

George Gissing (1857–1903) English novelist

As quoted in 'The Book Of Us : A Guide To Scrapbooking About Relationships (2005) Angie Pedersen, p. 46

World, Heart

“It is clever the way death reaps and gathers its harvests, but what somber harvests. Whole generations do not fall at once; that would be too sad, too visible. But bit by bit. The meadow is attacked on several sides at the same time. One day, one will go; the other, some time after; one must reflect, glance about oneself to notice the empty spaces, the vast contemporary killing.”

Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) French novelist

Habile façon dont la mort fauche, fait ses coupes, mais seulement des coupes sombres. Les générations ne tombent pas d'un coup; ce serait trop triste, trop visible. Par bribes. Le pré attaqué de plusieurs côtés à la fois. Un jour, l'un; l'autre, quelque temps après; il faut de la réflexion, un regard autour de soi pour se rendre compte du vide fait, de la vaste tuerie contemporaine.
La doulou: (la douleur), 1887-1895 (Paris: Librairie de France, 1930) p. 29; Milton Garver (trans.) Suffering, 1887-1895 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934) pp. 29-30.

Death, Sadness, Way, Time

“On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 7

Grass

“I dreamt last night Christ came to earth again
To bless His own. My soul from place to place
On her dream-quest sped, seeking for His face
Through temple and town and lovely land, in vain.
Then came I to a place where death and pain
Had made of God's sweet world a waste forlorn,
With shattered trees and meadows gashed and torn,
Where the grim trenches scarred the shell-sheared plain.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, Advent 1916

Love, Death, God, Pain

“Cincinnatus was ploughing his four jugera of land upon the Vaticanian Hill,—the same that are still known as the Quintian Meadows,—when the messenger brought him the dictatorship, finding him, the tradition says, stripped to the work.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book XVIII, sec. 20.
Naturalis Historia

“The human heart is a meadow full of fireflies, a summer western sky of shimmering distant lightnings, a shore set round with flashing lighthouses, far-away voices calling that we cannot understand.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Understanding, Distant, Heart, Summer

“I suppose I must be out of sorts to feel everything so deeply. Sometimes, however, it seems to me that i am not really a human being at all, but like a bird or a beast in human form. I feel so much more at home even in a scrap of garden like the one here, an dstill more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees than - at one of the our party congresses.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Prison Letter, (May 12, 1917), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks

Feeling, Home, Bird, Grass

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Men, God, War

“Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole – a creature of ecclesiastical law – is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases…. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes – fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”

William O. Douglas (1898–1980) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972)
Judicial opinions

Life, Law, Feeling, Fish

“I love the fair lilies and roses so gay,
They are rich in their pride and their splendor;
But still more do I love to wander away
To the meadow so sweet,
Where down at my feet,
The harebell blooms modest and tender.”

Dora Read Goodale (1866–1953) U.S. poet

Queen Harebell; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 353.

Love

“Regarding my childhood, my grandmother could play by ear and she loved to hear me practice and would say after every piece, "That was pretty. Play that one again." She was a booster. I had two women piano teachers who encouraged me to compose--Margie Murphy and Helen Lipscomb. Helen was also a composer and we used part of my lessons for composition.
When I was in high school, I read John Cage's books and fell in love with the ideas and the excitement of the avant garde. My music, as a result, moved over to what has been called post-Cagian, non-academic. That lasted until about 1979 at which point I changed. My music is now quite lyrical, sometimes called neo-Romantic, and full of cut-ups/collage of newly composed materials. Since 1985 I have been composing mostly swales for various instrumental combinations.
A swale is a meadow or a marsh where there is nourishment and moisture and therefore, a rich diversity of plant life. My work, since 1984, has been made from swatches (of newly composed music, rather than found music) which are reminiscent of this diversity…”

Beth Anderson (1950) American neo-romantic composer

Anderson (1996-2011) "Beth Anderson, Composer, Miscellany From The Dark Past" at beand.com http://www.beand.com/, Last Updated January 3, 2011

Love, Life, Women, Books

“And as the company passed from the valley, into a higher ground,
The rain beat on the ridge and on the meadow, and on the mound,
Until nothing was left, nothing at all except the body of Sorrow,
That rose in time, to float upon the surface of the eaten soil.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, Your Funeral… My Trial (1986), The Carny

Time

“The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man - all belong to the same family. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

Family, Flowers, Sister, Water

“No, the Dutchman is not cold, not insensitive, our people are still full of enthusiasm for what is noble and good. Holland above all! We artists, from Rembrandt to Maris, rave over our country. We find our Holland a delicious beautiful country with its meadows, its beaches, its sea, its domestic interiors, its figures, peasants, farmers, Jews, merchants, everything is similar picturesque as it is all just up for grabs. The most beautifully in the Netherlands is however Amsterdam, that delicious spacious Amsterdam, which is expressing so much and uniting so much in itself.”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls, in Nederlands): Neen, de Nederlander is niet koud, niet ongevoelig, ons volk is nog steeds vol geestdrift voor wat edel en goed is. Holland bovenal! Wij kunstenaars, van Rembrandt tot Maris, dwepen met ons land. Wij vinden ons Holland een heerlijk mooi land met zijn weiden, zijn stranden, zijn zee, zijn binnenhuizen, zijn figuren, boeren, landlieden, joden, kooplieden, alles is even schilderachtig, als maar voor het grijpen. Het mooiste van Nederland is echter Amsterdam, het heerlijk ruim Amsterdam, waarvan zoveel uitgaat en dat zooveel in zich vereenigt.
Quote from Israëls' speech of thanks at the honoring-party for his 70th birthday in Arti et Amacitiae in Amsterdam, Feb 1885; as cited in 'Jozef Israëls in Arti', in Algemeen Hadelsblad, 6 Feb. 1895
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1871 - 1900

People, Beauty, Sea, Country

“As far as they were concerned, gunfire was nothing but noise. That’s why wars can keep going. Even the people who make them, who fight in them, don’t really get the picture. Even with a bullet in their gut, they’d go on picking up old shoes that “might come in handy.” The way a sheep, lying on its side in a meadow, will keep on grazing with its dying breath. Most people don’t die until the last moment; others start twenty years in advance, sometimes more. Those are the unfortunates.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 4

War, People, Shoe, Way

“I close my eyes halfway just as when I conceive paintings and I see the houses 'Dunkelbunt' -glowing in pure strong and deep colours a little sad like seem on a rainy day instead of ugly cream colour and green meadows on all roofs instead of corrugated iron. p.6”

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) Austrian artist

Island of Lost Desires (1980)

Sadness, Strong, Painting, Housing

“It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.”

Stephen Crane book The Red Badge of Courage

Source: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ch. 24

Pain, War, Youth, World

“Avoiding all control, I spread out sheets of white paper or canvas in the nature. For some time they stay in the grass, in the rushes of river, in the meadows or among the rocks. Nature registers its presence, covering the surface of the paper with colors, forms and tracks. This process is controlled by a number of agents; such as space and time, substance and causality. It is governed by nature's intensity. It does not, depend on man's interference. Nature is the greatest and most admirable creator, and unlike logic it doesn't fail. The artist obligation is not to shape - handicraft, but to understand the riddles of reality. In such conception of Art there lies, as in the Universe itself, an immense richness, and a countless variety of forms.”

Jacek Tylicki (1951) American artist

Catalogue to exhibition in Gallery 38 - Copenhagen, 1976, as cited in: Leszek Brogowski & Dorota Czerner (transl.). Jacek Tylicki: Art and Artworks. 2014

Art, Color, Understanding, Nature

“This mortal life is like a meadow where the serpent lies among the flowers and grass, and if anything we see there pleases our eyes, the result is to enlime our souls more deeply.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Questa vita terrena è quasi un prato,
che 'l serpente tra' fiori et l'erba giace;
et s'alcuna sua vista agli occhi piace,
è per lassar piú l'animo invescato.
Canzone 99, st. 2
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Life, Soul, Flowers, Grass

“The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

Death of the Flowers http://www.bartleby.com/248/85.html (1832), st. 1

“After further consideration, the herd of ponies had left off being frightened at all and had calmed down, and were now grazing in the home pastures, on the grass fields and gravel banks or in the home meadow close up to the farm. I stood at the window in that autumn light that makes the dead and the living more sharply discernible than the light of any other season. Yes, what a well-sculptured creature the pony is, so finely carved that even if there were no more than half a chisel stroke extra the workmanship would be ruined; that curve from neck to rump, and all the way down to the fetlock, is in actual fact a woman's curve; in the oblique-set eyes of these creatures lies buried a wisdom that is hidden from men but blended with the mockery of the idols; around the muzzle and the underlip hovers the smile that no cinema shark has ever been able to reproduce; and where is the female star who smells as wonderful as the nose of a pony?</b”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Wisdom, Men, Smile, Way

“In the year 1837, a short paper was read by me before the Geological Society of London, "On the Formation of Mould," in which it was shown that small fragments of burnt marl, cinders, &c., which had been thickly strewed over the surface of several meadows, were found after a few years lying at the depth of some inches beneath the turf, but still forming a layer.”

Charles Darwin book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms

Introduction, p. 3. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=18&itemID=F1357&viewtype=image The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881) Source: 'Transactions Geolog. Soc.' vol. v. p. 505. Read November 1, 1837.

Lying, Reading

“It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh….”

Thomas Pynchon book Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Children, Spring, Flowers, Birthday

“The brightest blades grow dim with rust,
The fairest meadow white with snow.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Chanson without Music; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Daberlohn's diagnosis [about the etching she made as his portrait] holds encouragement for Charlotte…. Daberlohn (in his letter) 'In my opinion you are destined to create something above average.'
….'Above average.' She is elated by his letter and really feels quite proud… While beginning to paint the buttercup-strewn meadow where she happens to be sitting, she decides to make his prophecy come true and actually create something 'above average'.”

Charlotte Salomon (1917–1943) German painter

written text with brush, in her paintings JHM no. 4599 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004599/part/character/theme/keyword/M004599 + 4600 https://charlotte.jck.nl/detail/M004600/part/character/theme/keyword/M004600: in 'Life? or Theater..', p. 482-483 Charlotte Salomon - Life? or Theater?

Feeling, Painting