Branches Quotes (page 10)
Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old.
Louise Erdrich
Evening prayer. I spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair, Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs, My neck and gut both bent, while in the air. A weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs. Like steaming dung within an old dovecote. A thousand Dreams within me softly burn: From time to time my heart is like some oak. Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn. And then, when I have swallowed down my Dreams. In thirty, forty mugs of beer, I turn. To satisfy a need I can't...
Arthur Rimbaud
I’ll tell you something,' he said, as if he had said nothing that day. 'You’re walking on gallows ground, and there’s a rope around your neck and a raven-bird on each shoulder waiting for your eyes, and the gallows tree has deep roots, for it stretches from heaven to hell, and our world is only the branch from which the rope is swinging.
Neil Gaiman
If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven, Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light, Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content: --The stars pre-eminent in magnitude, And they that from the zenith dart their beams,(Visible though they be to half the earth, Though half a sphere be conscious of their brightness)Are yet of no diviner origin, No purer essence, than the one that burns, Like an untended watch-fire on the ridge. Of some dark mountain; or than those which seem. Humbly to hang,...
William Wordsworth
Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in the falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued. Elations when the forest blooms; gusty. Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering. The boughs of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
Wallace Stevens
The willow is full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendevous, it says. Terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire... Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold,...
Margaret Atwood
Love this description of minor character, Lou Zicutto: "Lou was branch claims manager of the mammoth insurance company where Decker worked part-time as an investigator. Lou was a spindly little twit, maybe a hundred twenty pounds, but he had a huge florid head, which he shaved every day. As a result he looked very much like a Tootsie Pop with lips.
Carl Hiaasen
Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest? I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value? we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.
Aristotle