Quotes about whorl

A collection of quotes on the topic of whorl.

Quotes about whorl

“Do you know the story about the farmer who complained all his life about getting too much rain or too little, about the soil and the winds and so on? […] The farmer died and went to Mainframe, and was soon called to the magnificent chamber in which Pas holds court. Pas said to him, "I understand you feel that I botched certain aspects of the job when I built the Whorl; and the farmer admitted it was so, saying, "Well, sir, pretty often I thought I could have made it better."”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

To which Pas replied, "Yes, that's what I wanted you to do."
Volume 3: Return to the Whorl (2001), Ch. 6
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

Life, Feeling, Understanding

“You have need of learning, children, in order that the whorl will someday have need of you.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 1, Ch. 2
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)

Children, Learning

“.. for the dead fish was striped like a cat and the sky was striped like the fish and the conch was whorled like an ear and the beach was ribbed like a dog's mouth and the movables in the surf splintered and crashed like the walls of Jericho.”

John Cheever book The Wapshot Chronicle

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957)

Dogs, Cats, Fish, Dead

“They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, —
All the coils, loops and whorls.
They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze," ll. 19-25
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)
Context: Like witches they flew along rows,
Keeping creation at ease;
With a tendril for needle
They sewed up the air with a stem;
They teased out the seed that the cold kept asleep, —
All the coils, loops and whorls.
They trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves.

Sun

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A. M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Color, Business, Tree, Grass