Quotes about wind
page 7

“The microbial brain—gifted with long-range transport, data trading, genetic variants… and the ability to reinvent genomes—began its operations some 91 trillion bacterial generations before the birth of the Internet. Ancient bacteria, if they functioned like those today, had mastered the art of worldwide information exchange. …The earliest microorganisms would have used planet-sweeping currents of wind and water to carry the scraps of genetic code…”

Howard Bloom (1943) American publicist and author

Source: Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), Ch.1 Creative Nets in the Precambrian Era

Art, Birth, Water

“It's a tango." Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. "I love tangos." "I can't dance." "You don't have to dance. I'll do that dancing." Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, "Pretend you are drowning." I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco's leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, "It doesn't take two to dance, it only takes one," and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. "What did I tell you?”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Marco's breath scorched my ear. "You're a perfectly respectable dancer."
Source: The Bell Jar (1963), Ch. 9

Love, Music, Jerk, Knowledge

“The moonlight rolls down like a river,
The silence streams out like a sea;
And far where the eastern winds quiver,
My farewell goes floating to thee.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

And Thou Too (1888)

Silence, Sea

“Will I ever get to where I'm going?
If I do, will I know when I'm there?
If the wind blew me in the right direction,
Would I even care?
I would.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Make Yourself (1999)

“A Prophetess inspir'd thou shalt behold
Down in a Cave, who long hath Fate foretold;
Which writ in Leaves, the Maid in order puts,
And to secure, in hollow Marble shuts.
They keep their Stations just as she design'd:
But the Door op'ning, with the smallest Wind,
The slender leaves do every way disperse.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

Fate, Way

“Bloodlessness and pain dried within; and blowing of wind and cold coming from without met together in the sweet body of Christ. And these four, — twain without, and twain within — dried the flesh of Christ by process of time. And though this pain was bitter and sharp, it was full long lasting, as to my sight, and painfully dried up all the lively spirits of Christ’s flesh. Thus I saw the sweet flesh dry in seeming by part after part, with marvellous pains. And as long as any spirit had life in Christ’s flesh, so long suffered He pain.”

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

The Eighth Revelation, Chapter 16

Life, Pain, Suffering, Time

“If a pitcher who wishes to retire a batter (motivation) throws a burning fastball (action) directly into the wind (environmental influence), then the observer should conclude that the pitcher has a particularly strong arm (ability). If a batter tries to hit that ball (motivation) but fails (action), then the observer should conclude that the batter lacked coordination (ability) or was blinded by the sun”

Daniel T. Gilbert (1957) American psychologist

environmental influence
Source: "Ordinary personology." 1998, p. 96; as cited in Malle (2011, 75)

Motivation, Strong, Sun

“Once fishing was a rabbit's foot--
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout--
The fisher's fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.”

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) Poet

Poem: The Drunken Fisherman http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lowell/onlinepoems.htm

Life, Fish, Sun, Dance

“Framework 2 is connected with the creativity and vitality of your world. In your terms, the dead waken in Framework 2 and move through it to Framework 3, where they can be aware of their reincarnational identities and connections with time, while being apart from a concentration on earth realities. In those terms, the so-called dead dip in and out of earth probabilities by travelling through Framework 2, and into those probabilities connected with earth realities. Some others may wind up in Framework 4, which is like Framework 2, except that it is a creative source for other kinds of realities not physically oriented at all and outside of, say, time concepts as you are used to thinking about them. In a way impossible to describe verbally, some portion of each identity also resides in Framework 4, and in all other Frameworks.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 139

World, Way, Travel, Thinking

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Edward Bulwer-Lytton book Paul Clifford

Probably the most parodied and ridiculed opening line in literature. It is the inspiration for a satirical prize, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Used by Charles M. Schultz in the Peanuts cartoons.
Paul Clifford (1830)

Night

“When the captain throws out his sheet-anchor, and the ship "rides at anchor," as it is called, there is a great strain on every link of that chain; and if one bad link breaks, off goes the anchor, and the ship is driven before the winds, and may be destroyed. Now, our character is very much like the chain; one bad piece vitiates and spoils it. So we must have a pure character.”

John Hall (1829–1898) Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died 1898

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 44.

“Herbert Marcuse made a lengthy, impassioned response. What good was the Voting Rights Act accomplishing, he said, since the blacks were pursuing the tawdry values as their white fellow citizens? They were accepting the same capitalist values and aping the life-restricting respectability of the middle class. At a prolonged pause in his reply, just as he was getting his second wind, I rose and asked him a simple question: 'Which do you prefer, a situation in which the blacks had no freedom to vote or one in which they had the freedom to vote but chose wrongly?' Marcuse's response surprised the audience--and subsequently perhaps Marcuse himself: 'Since I have gone so far out on a limb, I may as well go all the way. I would prefer that they did not have the freedom to vote if they are going to make the wrong use of their freedom.”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

For this and other reasons, I suspect, Marcuse never became the darling of the black American students.
Out of Step (1985)

Life, Way, Question, Freedom

“Every Muslim must rise to defend his religion. The wind of faith is blowing.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

Video statement broadcast on the Arabic-language Al-Jazeera TV station. (7 October 2001) http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/world/0302/timeline.bin.laden.audio/content.1.html. 2000s, 2001

Faith, Religion

“Green wind from the green-gold branches, what is the song you bring?
What are all songs for me, now, who no more care to sing?
Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still,
But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”

William Sharp (writer) (1855–1905) Scottish writer

Poem The Lonely Hunter.

Life, Singing, Heart, Summer

“I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Je voudrais, un jour, avoir un nom si connu, si populaire, si célèbre, si glorieux enfin, qu'il m'authorisât, à p[éter] dans le monde, et que le monde trouvât ça tout naturel. Quoted in the Journals of Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, also known as Mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol. I http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14799/14799-8.txt (1887), translated by Lewis Galantière, entry for 1855-10-13.

Nature, Thinking

“I've experienced all kinds of discrimination," Oshima says. "Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met." He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. "Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002), Chapter 19, Oshima

Love, Women, Men, Pain

“That man’s best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature’s infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/67/12267.html,vol. 1, letter 38

Truth, Nature, Bird, Singing

“She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Peter Quince at the Clavier (1915)

Grass

“On Bill Clinton: "If left to my own devices, I'd spend all my time pointing out that he's weaker than bus-station chili. But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied. Besides, no one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal."”

Molly Ivins (1944–2007) American journalist

Introduction to You Got to Dance With Them What Brung You. Salon.com, The quotable Ivins http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2000/12/12/ivins_quotes/index.html, Dec. 12, 2000. Retrieved February 1, 2007.

Fools, Time

“If one of these elements, heat, becomes predominant in any body whatsoever, it destroys and dissolves all the others with its violence. …Again if too much moisture enters the channels of a body, and thus introduces disproportion, the other elements, adulterated by the liquid, are impaired, and the virtues of the mixture dissolved. This defect, in turn, may arise from the cooling properties of moist winds and breezes blowing upon the body. In the same way, increase or diminution of the proportion of air or of the earthy which is natural to the body may enfeeble the other elements.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter IV, Sec. 6

Way, Nature

“And in the lonely cool before dawn,
You hear their engines roaring on.
But when you get to the porch they're gone on the wind.
So Mary climb in.
It's a town full of losers,
And I'm pulling out of here to win.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Thunder Road"
Song lyrics, Born to Run (1975)

“There was a rock that since the creation of the world had been worked upon by the pure essences of Heaven and the fine savours of Earth, the vigour of sunshine and the grace of moonlight, till at last it became magically pregnant and one day split open, giving birth to a stone egg, about as big as a playing ball. Fructified by the wind it developed into a stone monkey, complete with every organ and limb.”

Arthur Waley (1889–1966) British academic

Source: Translations, Monkey: Folk Novel of China (1942), Ch. 1 (p. 11)

World, Birth

“And then music. Wind chimes. And the sound of someone playing a violin. A fiddle. Or maybe just the music of a little dragon's wings. Maybe.”

Christopher Golden (1967) American writer

Page 63
Strangewood (1999)

Music

“A little water makes a sea, a small puff of wind a Tempest.”

Thomas Browne (1605–1682) English polymath

On Dreams

Water, Sea

“Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
Named of the four winds, North, South, East and West;
Portals that lead to an enchanted land…
Here, it is written, Toil shall have its wage
And Honor honor, and the humblest man
Stand level with the highest in the law.
Of such a land have men in dungeons dreamed
And with the vision brightening in their eyes
Gone smiling to the fagot and the sword.

O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
Fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of Fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of Freedom.”

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) American poet, novelist, editor

Unguarded Gates; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Men, Fate, Children, Law

“At the time the Danes decided to back wind power, the cost of electricity produced this way was many times greater than that produced by fossil fuels. The Danish government, however, could see its potential and supported the industry until costs came down. Today Denmark leads the world in both wind power production and the building of turbines; and wind now supplies 21 percent of the country’s electricity. One striking aspect of the way that wind power has developed there is that some 85 percent of the capacity is owned by individuals or wind cooperatives, and so power lies in the hands of the people.”

Tim Flannery book The Weather Makers

Source: The Weather Makers (2005), Chapter 29 (p. 268)

People, World, Way, Support

“During my cadet years, West Point was still a military cloister, linked tenuously to the outside world by the West Shore Railway, the excursion boats on the Hudson, and a winding road leading westward into New Jersey. A cadet normally entered the Academy in July and never left it on vacation until his second Christmas. In the meantime, he led a completely regimented life, arising at six, going to bed at ten and rarely having a moment without a duty to occupy it.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 25

Life, World, Christmas

“Awake, ye West Winds, through the lonely dale,
And Fancy, to thy fairy bower betake;
Even now, with balmy freshness breathes the gale,
Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake;
Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake,
And Evening comes with locks bodropp'd with dew;
On Desmond's mouldering turrets slowly shake
The trembling rye-grass and the harehell blue,
And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew.”

William Julius Mickle Sir Martyn

Sir Martyn (1777), Canto I, stanza 1

Grass

“Autumn, cloud blades on the horizon.
The west wind blows from ten thousand miles.
Dawn, in the clear morning air,
Farmers busy after long rain.
The desert trees shed their few green leaves.
The mountain pears are tiny but ripe.
A Tartar flute plays by the city gate.
A single wild goose climbs into the void.”

Du Fu (712–770) Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty

"Clear After Rain" (雨晴), as translated by Kenneth Rexroth in One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (1971), p. 16

Mountain, Business, Autumn, Tree

“To hell with the wind!
Confound the rain!
I recognize no Buddha.
A blow like the stroke of lightning -
A world turns on its hinge.”

Nampo Jomyo (1235–1309)

Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6
Other translation:
I rebuke the wind and revile the rain,
I do not know the Buddha and patriarchs;
My single activity turns in the twinkling of an eye,
Swifter even than a lightning flash.
Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Zen Dust, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World p. 206; cited in Richard Bryan McDaniel (2013)

World, Hell

“There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"The Cool Web," lines 9–12, from Poems 1914-1926 (1927).
Poems

Fear, Joy, Sea

“The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 1 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

World, Way, Parting

“There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own." Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Life, Way, Understanding, Strong

“Stamping around, waiting, I cursed England aloud, hands dug deep into pockets, dancing to the wind that knocked in vain at the Sunday shops. Cigarette-packets, football fixtures, bus-tickets sailed by in dust-ghosts of Saturday. A woman with a puce face and a blancmange-coloured prayer-book was waiting also for The Priest and Pig, and she looked puce disapproval at me. Twenty minutes late, the bus yawned in from town, near-empty, and it swallowed us in a gape of Sunday ennui. So we sundayed along, rattling and creaking in Sunday hollowness, I upstairs, tearing my elevenpenny ticket while I read the prospectus of Winter Commercial Classes stuck on the window.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Books, Tear, Winter, Waiting

“Antonio dreams of owning the land he works on, he dreams that his sweat is paid for with justice and truth, he dreams that there is a school to cure ignorance and medicine to scare away death, he dreams of having electricity in his home and that his table is full, he dreams that his country is free and that this is the result of its people governing themselves, and he dreams that he is at peace with himself and with the world. He dreams that he must fight to obtain this dream, he dreams that there must be death in order to gain life. Antonio dreams and then he awakens…. Now he knows what to do and he sees his wife crouching by the fire, hears his son crying. He looks at the sun rising in the East, and, smiling, grabs his machete. The wind picks up, he rises and walks to meet others. Something has told him that his dream is that of many and he goes to find them.”

Subcomandante Marcos (1957) Mexican activist

" Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds http://struggle.ws/mexico/ezln/marcos_se_2_wind.html" (August 1992)

Life, Death, People, Truth

“I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat.”

Djuna Barnes book Nightwood

Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 5 : Watchman, What of the Night?

“This is a terrible hour, but it is often that darkest point which precedes the rise of day; that turn of the year when the icy January wind carries over the waste at once the dirge of departing winter, and the prophecy of coming spring.”

Charlotte Brontë book Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 20: To-Morrow

Spring, Winter

“How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! … Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“June: The Alder Fork”, p. 39.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "May: Back from the Argentine," "June: The Alder Fork," "July: Great Possessions," and "July: Prairie Birthday"

Thinking, Fish, Time, Falseness

“Some of my ideas certainly came from my mother's father. She and he had a family argument and didn't see each other for twenty years, though we all lived in the same town. Mother wouldn't let my grandfather in the house. She let me visit him though. He was part Indian and part French, a tiny dark-haired man with an Indian hoked-nose; tight-lipped and stubborn. But he talked to me about the spirits of the fire and the wind, and took me for long walks in a nearby woods, while he told me Indian legends.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 42

Family, Idea, Parting, Housing

“We lunched in Fregene: grilled sardines sprinkled with parsley and lemon. Federico ate daintily, like someone with no appetite. The beach was deserted, the wind brisk. In the distance stood the abandoned lighthouse he filmed for 8 1/2. Like someone about to propose a toast, he stood up and "recited" from King Lear :
Hark! Have you heard the news? The king fell off a cliff.
O horrible! Were you very close to him?
Indeed, sir. Close enough to push.
We laughed until he brusquely sat down again, scraping the fish scales off his fingers, staring at the age spots that covered his hands. The beautiful adolescent waitress asked for his autograph. He drew himself as a man-lion in a hat and scarf with huge paws chasing her, and signed it "Féfé." We spent the afternoon visiting Ostia and returned to Rome in a sweltering twilight. He asked to be driven home for a change of clothes. We invited Giulietta, who wore a green velvet turban, to join us for dinner. (Had she already lost her hair from chemotherapy?) Graciously, she declined while smoking cigarette after cigarette. At Cesarina's, Federico drew hilarious, pornographic sketches on the table napkin saying, "If you have not made love today then you have lost a day!"”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

The entire restaurant was at his feet. He was twenty years old now and as thin as Kafka. He was Rome. He had adopted us the way Rome adopts everyone, and we loved him.
On Fellini's final years
Federico Fellini: Sou um Grande Mentiroso (2008)

Love, Age, Beauty, Way

Wú Chéng'ēn book Monkey

Monkey, chapter 1 (trans. Arthur Waley)
Journey to the West [Xiyouji] (1592)

World, Birth

“In the big house,
Where the sun lives,
With the walls so white and blue.
In the red soil,
All the green grows.
And the winds blow across your face.
They blow across your heart.
It's the time of the turning and there's something stirring outside.
It's the time of turning and we'd better learn to say our goodbyes.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

The Time of the Turning
Song lyrics, OVO (2000)

Learning, Time, Sun, Heart

“Heroic figures are now obsolete,
So Demigod and Devil find retreat
In minds of children — as rare beasts and men,
Elsewhere extinct, persist in hill or fen
From man protected — where each form assumes
Gigantic stature and intention, looms
From wind-moved, twilight-woven histories:
For them each flower teems with mysteries.”

Osbert Sitwell (1892–1969) British baronet

"When First the Poets Sung", line 34 (1927).

Men, Children, History, Flowers

“Supernatural agents are critical components of all religions but not of all ideologies. They are, in part, by-products of a naturally selected cognitive mechanism for detecting agents-such as predators, protectors, and prey-and for dealing rapidly and economically with stimulus situations involving people and animals. This innate releasing mechanism is trip-wired to attribute agency to virtually any action that mimics the stimulus conditions of natural agents: faces on clouds, voices in the wind, shadow figures, the intentions of cars or computers, and so on. Among natural agents, predators such as snakes are as likely to be candidates for deification as are protectors, such as parent-figures.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 15
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

People, Religion, Cars, Nature

“Your way leads you to lands of rain and wind—
mine takes me back to our old room, our bed.”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 53–54

Way

“For love is like the breathing wind,
That everywhere may entrance find.”

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

The Golden Violet - The Child of the Sea
The Golden Violet (1827)

Love

“In June–July 1998, progressives kicked up quite a racket. The government has packed the Indian Council of Historical Research with pro–Ram Mandir historians, they shouted. It has surreptitiously altered the aims and objectives of the Council, they shouted. As is their wont, they had sparked the commotion by giving wind to a concoction. As is their wont too, they were charging others with planning to do in some undefined future what they had themselves been actually doing for decades – that is, write history to a purpose.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

History, Future

“Blush'd the first blush of coming day,
Faded the fairy band away.
They pass'd and only left behind
A lingering fragrance on the wind,
And on the lake, their haunted home,
One long white wreath of silver foam.”

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

The Golden Violet - The Haunted Lake
The Golden Violet (1827)

Home

“There's a slow train rumbling east of a place called Eden
Feeling wind-blown and proud as the trees upon the plain
And a stranger's voice talked to me of liberty and freedom
Yeah, it seems like he done gone wrong again
And he wears that hat like shame
Well he tasted the fruit of another
And when his Margie, when she discovered
Said she's gonna love him ten times more
Ain't nobody's business if she do”

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

"East of Eden"
Lyrics and poetry

Love, Feeling, Business, Tree

“From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, wherever the four winds blow
I been in some big towns an' heard me some big talk, but there is one thing I know
A woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave ya to sing the blues in the night.”

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

Song Blues in the Night

Singing, Night

“Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever.”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

Cherrylog Road (l. 106–108).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)

Speed

“The more freely abstract the form becomes, the purer, and also the more primitive it sounds. Therefore, in a composition in which corporeal elements are more or less superfluous, they can be more or less omitted and replaced by purely abstract forms, or by corporeal forms that have been completely abstracted... Here we are confronted by the question: Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract? This is a question that naturally arises, the answer to which is at once indicated by an analysis of the concordance of the two elements of form (the objective and the abstract). Just as every word spoken (tree, sky, man) awakens an inner vibration, so too does every pictorially represented object. To deprive oneself of the possibility of this calling up vibrations would be to narrow one's arsenal of expressive means. At least, that is how it is today. But apart from today's answer, the above question receives the eternal answer to every question in art that begins with 'must.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

There is no 'must' in art, which is forever free.
Quote from: Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, 2 Vols. (transl. Peter Vergo); Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., (1982), p. 195; as cited in: Samet, Jennifer Sachs. Painterly Representation in New York, 1945-1975. Dissertation, The City University of New York, 2010. p. 25
1910 - 1915

Art, Question, Nature, Tree

“I think there's a time to work, and everyone has to kind of adjust. And then there's a time to relax, and be the mom or take the kids on vacation when you need to wind down. So it's a matter of planning, and being able to map out your year or your week or let's start with the day. It is just being multi-tasking and being available.”

Vanessa L. Williams (1963) American actress, singer and former Miss America

Vanessa Williams: 'Vacation' http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vanessa-williams-vacation/ (April 6, 2004)

Moms, Thinking, Time

“The storm is over, the land hushes to rest:
The tyrannous wind, its strength fordone,
Is fallen back in the west.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

The Storm is Over, The Land Hushes to Rest, l. 1-3.
Poetry

“.. you see they hung my painting here [on her show 'Wind', 2009] I did that in the early 1990s. People never really liked them so much back then, they thought they looked more like photographs. Actually, I was doing them when I was still married to Gerhard Richter [till 1993], and it was somehow in relation to what he was doing, you know, these kind of side-to-side gestural abstracts – done like this [gestures as if pulling a squeegee over a surface from one side to the other] like paintings of the 1950s. Mine were called 'Basic Research', they were rubbings of oil paint on canvas – frottages of the floor of my studio. I did quite a few of these. [Gerhard] Richter put one up in his studio for some time... But he found it too hard and then took it out after a while.”

Isa Genzken (1948) German sculptor

2001 - 2010, Out to Lunch with Isa Genzken' (2009)

People, Time, Painting

“Life cannot be reconciled with the idea that back of the universe is a Supreme Being, all merciful and kind, and that he takes any account of the human beings and other forms of life that exist upon the earth. Whichever way man may look upon the earth, he is oppressed with the suffering incident to life. It would almost seem as though the earth had been created with malignity and hatred. If we look at what we are pleased to call the lower animals, we behold a universal carnage. We speak of the seemingly peaceful woods, but we need only look beneath the surface to be horrified by the misery of that underworld. Hidden in the grass and watching for its prey is the crawling snake which swiftly darts upon the toad or mouse and gradually swallows it alive; the hapless animal is crushed by the jaws and covered with slime, to be slowly digested in furnishing a meal. The snake knows nothing about sin or pain inflicted upon another; he automatically grabs insects and mice and frogs to preserve his life. The spider carefully weaves his web to catch the unwary fly, winds him into the fatal net until paralyzed and helpless, then drinks his blood and leaves him an empty shell. The hawk swoops down and snatches a chicken and carries it to its nest to feed its young. The wolf pounces on the lamb and tears it to shreds. The cat watches at the hole of the mouse until the mouse cautiously comes out, then with seeming fiendish glee he plays with it until tired of the game, then crushes it to death in his jaws. The beasts of the jungle roam by day and night to find their prey; the lion is endowed with strength of limb and fang to destroy and devour almost any animal that it can surprise or overtake. There is no place in the woods or air or sea where all life is not a carnage of death in terror and agony. Each animal is a hunter, and in turn is hunted, by day and night. No landscape is beautiful or day so balmy but the cry of suffering and sacrifice rends the air. When night settles down over the earth the slaughter is not abated. Some creatures are best at night, and the outcry of the dying and terrified is always on the wind. Almost all animals meet death by violence and through the most agonizing pain. With the whole animal creation there is nothing like a peaceful death. Nowhere in nature is there the slightest evidence of kindness, of consideration, or a feeling for the suffering and the weak, except in the narrow circle of brief family life.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Source: The Story of My Life (1932), p. 383

Life, Death, Pain, Family

“Climbing up on Solsbury Hill,
I could see the city light.
Wind was blowing, time stood still.
Eagle flew out of the night.
He was something to observe.
Came in close, I heard a voice.
Standing stretching every nerve,
Had to listen had no choice.
I did not believe the information.
I just had to trust imagination.
My heart going boom boom boom.
"Son," he said, "Grab your things, I've come to take you home."”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Solsbury Hill
Song lyrics, Peter Gabriel (I) (1977)

Home, Imagination, Light, Time

“Why does pouring oil on the sea make it clear and calm? Is it for that the winds, slipping the smooth oil, have no force, nor cause any waves?”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Symposiacs, book viii. Question IX
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Sea

“[Alvine] ’Tis one of those bright fictions that have made
The name of Greece only another word
For love and poetry; with a green earth—
Groves of the graceful myrtle — summer skies,
Whose stars are mirror'd in ten thousand streams—
Winds that move but in perfume and in music,
And, more than all, the gift of woman's beauty.
What marvel that the earth, the sky, the sea,
Were filled with all those fine imaginings
That love creates, and that the lyre preserves!”

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

Bacchus and Ariadne from The London Literary Gazette (2nd November 1822) Dramatic Scene - II.
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Love, Beauty, Music, Imagination

“Watching storms
Start to form
Over America.
Can't do anything.
Just watch them swing
With the wind
Out to sea.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Hounds of Love (1985), The Ninth Wave

Sea

“Like a Long Magnolia Blossom Bending to the Wind. Under heavy silence. Of a house in mourning. Only the cry of cicadas. Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. Seem to long for you who is now gone. Under the August sun. The Indian Lilacs turn crimson. As if trying to heal the wounds of the mind. My wife has departed alone. Only I am left. Like a lone magnolia blossom bending to the wind. Where can I appeal. The sadness of a broken heart.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Poem (August 1974), as quoted in Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781846680670 (2013), by Sheila Miyoshi Jager, London: Profile Books, p. 414. 1970s

Sadness, Silence, Sun, Heart

“There's a road, long and winding.
The lights are blindin', but it gets there.
Don't give up, don't look back.
There's a silver linin', it's out there somewhere.
Everybody wants an answer, everybody needs a friend.
We all need a shinin' star on which we can depend.”

Bryan Adams (1959) Canadian singer-songwriter

Star, written by Bryan Adams, Mutt Lange, and Michael Kamen
Song lyrics, 18 til I Die (1996)

Star, Light, Dependency

“In New Mexico he always awoke a young man…Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests… That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!”

Willa Cather book Death Comes for the Archbishop

Book IX, Ch. 3
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

Women, Men, Beauty, Art

“As a metaphor - and I stress that it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or cyclically balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics this metaphor is implemented in the ‘closed loop’, the circular arrangement of feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an invariant, but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over time. Whenever we happen to look in a feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things but between them.
If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the heart, as Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Source: Cybernetics, Experience and the Concept of Self, 1970, pp.186-7 cited in: Vincent Kenny (2010) Remembering Ernst von Glasersfeld http://www.oikos.org/vonen.htm at oikos.org, retrieved Oct 11, 2012.

World, Way, Nature, Thinking

“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

“Under our constitutional system, courts stand against any winds that blow as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are non-conforming victims of prejudice and public excitement…No higher duty, or more solemn responsibility rests upon this Court than that of translating into living law and maintaining this constitutional shield deliberately planned and inscribed for the benefit of every human being subject to our Constitution — of whatever race, creed, or persuasion.”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

Writing for the court, Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940).

Law, Suffering

“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

“There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever.”

George Borrow book Lavengro

Source: Lavengro (1851), Ch. 25

Feeling

“The stars are silent.
Voyager among dark harbors, I listen, but the midnight wind carries only the sound of trees and water lapping against the gunwale and the solitary cry of the night swallow.
There is no dawn. No searing sun rises in east or west. The rocks over Calumal do not silver, and the great round world slides through the void.”

Jack McDevitt book The Hercules Text

Source: The Hercules Text (1986), Chapter 10 Monitor (p. 162)

World, Star, Tree, Water

“Night with all her negro train,
Took possession of the plain;
In an hearse she rode reclin'd.
Drawn by screech-owls slow and blind:
Close to her, with printless feet,
Crept Stillness in a winding sheet.”

Christopher Smart (1722–1771) English poet

Ode XIV. A Night-Piece; or, Modern Philosophy (1748).

Training, Night

“Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines?”

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

August 1875, page 220
John of the Mountains, 1938

Music, Water

“Sleep is when all unsorted stuff comes as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.”

William Golding book Pincher Martin

Source: Pincher Martin (1956), Chapter six, as cited in [Robert Andrews, The New Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations, https://books.google.com/books?id=VK0vR4fsaigC&pg=PT657, 30 October 2003, Penguin Books Limited, 978-0-14-196531-4, 657]

Sleep

“No visitors shall yonder valley find.
Except the spirits of the rain and wind:
Here you must bide, my friends, with me entombed
In this dim crypt, where shelved around us lie
The mummied authors.”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

"Third Evening".
The Poet's Journal (1863)

Lie

“It is in the world of words, amid the dull but perhaps necessary detail of every-day events—that quotations come with a warmth and a welcome upon memory, and like Milton's fish, "Show to the sun their wav'd coats dropt with gold." …In the dry and laboring essay, amid the windings of many words and the accumulation of antecedents, we hail their sudden and familiar appearances as patches of Nature's green to repose on by the way; their "dulcet and harmonious breath" animates a train of associations that dwell in the most sylvan haunts of emotion and sentiment; to their fountains of "loosened silver" we turn for a refreshing and a pleasant abstraction.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

World, Way, Nature, Fish

“I, who am dead, have ways of knowing
Of the crop of death that the quick are sowing.
I, who was Pompey, cry it aloud
From the dark of death, from the wind blowing.

I, who was Pompey, once was proud,
Now I lie in the sand without a shroud;
I cry to Caesar out of my pain,
"Caesar beware, your death is vowed."”

John Masefield (1878–1967) English poet and writer

King Cole and Other Poems (1926), " The Rider at the Gate http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1251.html"

Death, Pain, Lie, Way

“Outside the wind of Jehovah still beat on the door, trying to enter. There was no other sound. Not a jackal on the earth, nor a crow in the air. Every living thing cowered in fear, waiting for the Lord's anger to pass.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book The Last Temptation of Christ

Source: The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), Ch. 10

Fear, Waiting, Anger

“Toy balloon
once kidnapped by the wind —
come home, and I will say:
There are no children here.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Still Life with a Balloon"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Calling Out to Yeti (1957)

Children, Home

“The winds were blowing from west to east, pushing Abby’s boat toward the rocks as Abby struggled with the autopilots below. If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 111

“Something inhuman has come to Tarker's Mills, as unseen as the full moon riding the night sky high above. It is the Werewolf, and there is no more reason for its coming now than there would be for the arrival of cancer, or a psychotic with murder on his mind, or a killer tornado. Its time is now, its place is here, in this little Maine town where baked bean church suppers are a weekly event, where small boys and girls still bring apples to their teachers, where the Nature Outings of the Senior Citizen's Club are religiously reported in the weekly paper. Next week there will be news of a darker variety.
Outside, its tracks begin to fill up with snow, and the shriek of the wind seems savage with pleasure. There is nothing of God or Light in that heartless sound—it is all black winter and dark ice.
The cycle of the Werewolf has begun.”

Stephen King book Cycle of the Werewolf

January
Cycle of the Werewolf (1983)

God, Pleasure, Girl, Boy

“Wherever waves can roll, and winds can blow.”

Charles Churchill (satirist) (1731–1764) British poet

The Farewell (1764), line 38; comparable with: "Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam", Lord Byron, The Corsair, canto i. stanza 1

“Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Surprised by Joy, l. 1 (1815).

Joy

“I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

"Pastures of Plenty" (1941)

Light

“My wind is turned to bitter north,
That was so soft a south before;
My sky, that shone so sunny bright,
With foggy gloom is clouded o’er
My gay green leaves are yellow-black,
Upon the dank autumnal floor;
For love, departed once, comes back
No more again, no more.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

A Song of Autumn http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/songautumn.html.

Love, Autumn

“He feared neither God, nor devil, nor man, nor wind, nor sea, nor his own conscience. And I believe he hated everybody and everything. But I think he was afraid to die. I believe I am the only man who ever stood up to him.”

Joseph Conrad book The Shadow Line

Referring to Mr. Burns. Compare to Heart of Darkness' manager: "He was becoming confidential now, but I fancy my unresponsive attitude must have exasperated him at last, for he judged it necessary to inform me he feared neither God nor devil, let alone any mere man. I said I could see that very well..."
The Shadow Line (1915)

God, Hate, Fear, Thinking

“The diseases which are hard to cure in neighborhoods… are catarrh, hoarseness, coughs, pleurisy, consumption, spitting of blood, and all others that are cured not by lowering the system but by building it up. They are hard to cure, first, because they are originally due to chills; secondly, because the patient's system being already exhausted by disease, the air there, which is in constant agitation owing to winds and therefore deteriorated, takes all the sap of life out of their diseased bodies and leaves them more meager every day. On the other hand, a mild, thick air, without drafts and not constantly blowing back and forth, builds up their frames by its unwavering steadiness, and so strengthens and restores people who are afflicted with these diseases.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book I, Chapter VI, Sec. 3

Life, People, Disease, Affliction

“And the rest, all the rest. All the days and lights and winds and years that would have been, and that would not be, that should be and were not, because he was dead. Shot dead on the road, in the wind, at twenty-one. His mountains unclimbed, never to be climbed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Eye of the Heron

Source: The Eye of the Heron (1978), Chapter 10 (p. 151)

Mountain, Light, Dead

“Now that the wind is tamed and broken,
And day gleams over the lea,
Row, row, for the one you love
Was out on the raging sea:
Row, row, row,
Sturdy and brave o’er the treacherous wave,
Hope like a beacon before,
Row, sailor, row
Out to the sea from the shore!”

Louise Imogen Guiney (1861–1920) American writer

After the Storm

Love, Hope, Rage, Sea

“Seething over inwardly
With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul,
Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
Levity my matter,
Like enough a withered leaf
For the winds to scatter.”
Estuans intrinsecus ira vehementi in amaritudine loquar meę menti: factus de materia levis elementi similes sum folio de quo ludunt venti.

Archpoet (1130–1165) 12th century poet

Estuans intrinsecus
ira vehementi
in amaritudine
loquar meę menti:
factus de materia
levis elementi
similes sum folio
de quo ludunt venti.
Source: "Confession", Line 1

Soul

“KING: I am full of thoughts,
A thousand wheels toss my incertain fears,
There is a storm in my hot boiling brains,
Which rises without wind. A horrid one.”

Thomas Dekker The Noble Spanish Soldier

The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622)

Fear

“weak are defeated by the strong in the world of Nature. A reed by the north wind, for instance. And silence by the forest.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

109
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

World, Nature, Strong, Silence

“These are the stories the Dogs tell, when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north.”

Clifford D. Simak book City

Editor’s Preface (p. 5)
City (1952)

Dogs

“Thy light alone like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,
Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 3
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)

Life, Truth, Dreams, Music

“The wind is not helpless for any man's need,
Nor falleth the rain but for thistle and weed.”

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

Love is Enough (1872), Song II: Have No Thought for Tomorrow

“Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the depths of space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning…”

H. G. Wells book The Shape of Things to Come

Things to Come (1936)

Death, Law, Way, Star

“Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Universe, Water

“Maia lifted her gaze to watch low clouds briefly occult a brightly speckled, placid sea, its green shoals aflicker with silver schools of fish and the flapping shadows of hovering swoop-birds. The variegated colors were lush, voluptuous. Mixing with scents carried by the moist, heavy wind, they made a stew for the senses, spiced with fecund exudates of life.
The beauty was heavy-handed, adamantly consoling. She got the point—that life goes on.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Source: Glory Season (1993), Chapter 4 (p. 80)

Life, School, Beauty, Color

“[to] think, in a certain way, of the power and severity of Romanesque paintings... Go to the beach and make graphic signs in the sand, draw by pissing on the dry ground, design in space by recording the songs of the birds, the sounds of water and wind.... and the chant of insects.”

Joan Miró (1893–1983) Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist

'Working notes of Miro, 1940 – 1941'; as quoted in: Calder Miró, ed. Elizabeth Hutton Turner / Oliver Wick; Philip Wilson Publishers, London 2004, p. 69
1940 - 1960

Way, Bird, Thinking, Water