Rocking Quotes (page 19)
The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.
Ray Bradbury
Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing...
Walter Pater
To harden the earththe rocks took charge: instantlythey grew wings: the rocksthat soared: the survivorsflew upthe lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulentskyhad not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stoneflashing here and therechanged into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercingwind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.
Pablo Neruda
The waves smash against rocks, boulder thunders upon bolder. Granite men grind one another, leaving their clean sand to floor the ocean.The alternative would be for the republic to breed up a race of men who could work together without growing violent: men more interested in getting somewhere than having their own way." Haniel Long: Homestead 1892: Pittsburgh Memoranda.
Haniel Long
I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
Andrew Wyeth
Late in August the lure of the mountains becomes irresistible. Seared by the everlasting sunfire, I want to see running water again, embrace a pine tree, cut my initials in the bark of an aspen, get bit by a mosquito, see a mountain bluebird, find a big blue columbine, get lost in the firs, hike above timberline, sunbathe on snow and eat some ice, climb the rocks and stand in the wind at the top of the world on the peak of Tukuhnikivats.
Edward Abbey