Neil Perry character
Context: Modified passage from the book Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Full citation:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Quotes about wood
A collection of quotes on the topic of wood, likeness, use, making.
Quotes about wood
“To bear children into this world is like carrying wood into a burning house.”
As quoted in Reflekser i trylleglass: stemmer fra vårt århundre [Magical Reflections : Voices of Our Century] (1998) edited by Haagen Ringnes
The Milwaukee Sentinel Princess Grace finds relaxation in her gardens Jan. 1, 1981
St. 1
Source: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)
I had barely got to the end of the sentence when she closed her eyes and gently slipped away. She was unique, and the world is a better place for having known her. I love you, Linda. note: Last words to his wife, Linda, as recounted by McCartney in a statement released to the press three days after her death
Source: as quoted in "Linda's Death 'Heartbreak' for McCartney" https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=99480655 by Emma Ross, Tucson Citizen (April 21, 1998), p. B1
Source: Walden
Interview with Earth First! in Administrative Maximum Facility Prison, Florence, Colorado, USA, (June 1999)
Interviews
p. 57: Ch. 3 http://books.google.com/books?lr=&id=edhCAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+three+great+elemental+sounds+in+nature+are+the+sound+of+rain+the+sound+of+wind+in+a+primeval+wood+and+the+sound+of+outer+ocean+on+a+beach%22&pg=PA57#v=onepage
The Outermost House, 1928
“What is a throne? — a bit of wood gilded and covered in velvet. I am the state”
I alone am here the representative of the people. Even if I had done wrong you should not have reproached me in public — people wash their dirty linen at home. France has more need of me than I of France.
Statement to the Senate (1814) He echoes here the remark attributed to Louis XIV L'état c'est moi ( "The State is I" or more commonly: "I am the State.")
Variant translation: A throne is only a bench covered with velvet...
Source: Poem "The Road Not Taken"
Context: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Variant: Follow your passion. Stay true to yourself. Never follow someone else's path unless you're in the woods and you're lost and you see a path. By all means, you should follow that.
Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…”
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front
Source: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
Source: " Under Milk Wood http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_umw1.html" (1954)
“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
Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest
Sahih Bukhari Volume 001, Book 011, Hadith Number 617.
Sunni Hadith
“The wood that crowns the peak of Nesis set fast in ocean.”
Silvaque quae fixam pelago Nesida coronat.
i, line 148 (tr. J. H. Mozley)
Silvae, Book III
Lemony Snicket
The Vile Village (2001)
Statement to Parliament (4 February 1658) quoted in The Diary of Thomas Burton, esq., volume 2: April 1657 - February 1658 (1828), p. 466
"Ex Oblivione" - First published in The United Amateur, 20, No. 4 (March 1921)
Fiction
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), VII On the Proportions and on the Movements of the Human Figure
Schwitters (1921) in: Abstract Art, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London 1990, p. 68-69.
1920s
Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 1
To Major Winrich Behr in the early morning hours of April 21, 1945. Quoted in "Battle for the Ruhr" - Page 378 - by Derek S. Zumbro - 2006
in a speech to students at Phillips Exeter Academy, 2007
Source: True at First Light (1999), Ch. 10
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings
Source: Winter Rose (1996), Chapter 5, pp. 42-43.
Diogenes Laërtius, vi. 21,
Quoted by Diogenes Laërtius
“My idea of Comic Relief is switching Victoria Wood off.”
The Pall-Bearer's Revue (1992)
Quote from Boudin's letter in 1894; as cited in 'Figures on the Beach in Trouville, 1869', by Anne-Marie Bergeret-Gourbin https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/boudin-eugene/figures-beach-trouville, Museo Thyssen
Eighty percent of Boudin's beach scenes are painted on wood panels; in small formats, c. 30 x 45 cm
1880s - 1890s
Near to the Wild Heart (1943), p. 43
“Ah, were men's voices like the wood-birds' melody— Each happy note distinct, but all in harmony!”
The Cherubinic Wanderer
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XXIX Precepts of the Painter
'Then I can be going home right away,' retorts Tjaden, and we all laugh.
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ch. 9
"Towards Evening My Heart," Poems (1913)
Source: http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/29/wild-heart-turning-white-georg-trakl-and-cocaine/
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
“Wherever wood can swim, there I am sure to find this flag of England.”
Statement at Rochefort (July 1815)
"Concerning the Islands Recently Discovered in the Indian Sea" (14 March 1493)
Source: Crossways (1889), The Song Of The Happy Shepherd, l. 1–5.
The Ragged Wood http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1673/
In The Seven Woods (1904)
Context: p>O hurry where by water among the trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images--
Would none had ever loved but you and I!Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood?--
O that none ever loved but you and I!O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry—
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.</p
Fiction, The Colour Out of Space (1927)
Context: West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night.
Life Without Principle (1863)
Context: If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!
“They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods.”
Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), IV
Context: They sang the praises of nature, of the sea, of the woods. They liked making songs about one another, and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they sprang from their hearts and went to one's heart. And not only in their songs but in all their lives they seemed to do nothing but admire one another. It was like being in love with each other, but an all-embracing, universal feeling.
“Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good!”
"The Termite"
Good Intentions (1942)
Context: Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it, and found it good!
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.
Letter to August Derleth (21 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 220
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth
Context: Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. Yet I can assure you that this point of view is joined to one of the plainest, naivest, and most unobtrusively old-fashioned of personalities—a retiring old hermit and ascetic who does not even know what your contemporary round of activities and "parties" is like, and who during the coming winter will probably not address two consecutive sentences to any living person—tradesmen apart—save a pair of elderly aunts! Some people—a very few, perhaps—are naturally cosmic in outlook, just as others are naturally 'of and for the earth'. I am myself less exclusively cosmic than Klarkash-Ton and Wandrei... I begin with the individual and the soil and think outward—appreciating the sensation of spatial and temporal liberation only when I can scale it against the known terrestrial scene. They, on the other hand, are able to think of wholly non-human abysses of ultimate space—without reference-points—as realities neither irrelevant nor less significant than immediate human life. With me, the very quality of being cosmically sensitive breeds an exaggerated attachment to the familiar and the immediate—Old Providence, the woods and hills, the ancient ways and thoughts of New England—whilst with them it seems to have the opposite effect of alienating them from immediate anchorages. They despise the immediate as trivial; I know that it is trivial, but cherish rather than despise it—because everything, including infinity itself, is trivial. In reality I am the profoundest cynic of them all, for I recognize no absolute values whatever.
“Let my delight be the country, and the running streams amid the dells—may I love the waters and the woods, though I be unknown to fame.”
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes,
Flumina amem sylvasque inglorius.
Book II, lines 485–486 (tr. Fairclough)
Georgics (29 BC)
Spiritual Canticle of The Soul and The Bridegroom
“It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.”
1850s, Autobiographical Sketch Written for Jesse W. Fell (1859)
Context: My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age, and he grew up literally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer County, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.<!--p.33
Matilda (1819)
Context: My greatest pleasure was the enjoyment of a serene sky amidst these verdant woods: yet I loved all the changes of Nature; and rain, and storm, and the beautiful clouds of heaven brought their delights with them. When rocked by the waves of the lake my spirits rose in triumph as a horseman feels with pride the motions of his high fed steed.
But my pleasures arose from the contemplation of nature alone, I had no companion: my warm affections finding no return from any other human heart were forced to run waste on inanimate objects.
“If you are afraid of wolves, keep out of the woods.”
On the Draft Constitution of the U.S.S.R. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm, 25 November 1936.
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews
Variants:
No oaths, no seals, no official mummeries were used; the treaty was ratified on both sides with a yea, yea — the only one, says Voltaire, that the world has known, never sworn to and never broken.
As quoted in William Penn : An Historical Biography (1851) by William Hepworth Dixon
William Penn began by making a league with the Americans, his neighbors. It is the only one between those natives and the Christians which was never sworn to, and the only one that was never broken.
As quoted in American Pioneers (1905), by William Augustus Mowry and Blanche Swett Mowry, p. 80
It was the only treaty made by the settlers with the Indians that was never sworn to, and the only one that was never broken.
As quoted in A History of the American Peace Movement (2008) by Charles F. Howlett, and Robbie Lieberman, p. 33
The History of the Quakers (1762)
“There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.”
Source: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), ch. 1
Source: A Walk in the Woods (1997), Chapter 4 (p. 51)
Source: Always and Forever, Lara Jean
Source: The Wind in the Willows
Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior
Source: Songs of Unreason
Source: Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
“If a man says something in the woods and there are no women there, is he still wrong?”
No. 97
Apophthegms (1624)
Context: Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things — old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
1910s
Source: "The Road Not Taken", st. 4 (1916)
