Withered Leaves Quotes
The winter evening settles down. With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps. The grimy scraps. Of withered leaves about your feet. And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat. On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street. A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.
T. S. Eliot
Philippa’s letter, from an afflicted conscience, was not very much longer. … if I don’t look for him, no one else will. You know I’m sorry. But I couldn’t leave that little thing to wither away by itself Don’t be sad. We’re all going to come back. And you can teach him Two Legs and I Wot a Tree, and save him the top of the milk for his blackberry pie. He’ll never know, if we’re quick, that nobody wanted him.… Which had, Kate considered as she scrubbed off her tears, a ring of unlikely...
Dorothy Dunnett
Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
Jane Austen
It was a woman's voice, high and sweet, with a strange music in it like none that he had ever heard and a sadness that he thought might break his heart. Bran squinted, to see her better. It was a girl, but smaller than Arya, her skin dappled like a doe's beneath a cloak of leaves. Her eyes were queer--large and liquid, gold and green, slitted like a cat's eyes. No one has eyes like that. Her hair was a tangle of brown and red and gold, autumn colors, with vines and twigs and withered flowers...
George R. R. Martin
A stone lies in a river; a piece of wood is jammed against it; dead leaves, drifting logs, and branches caked with mud collect; weeds settle there, and soon birds have made a nest and are feeding their young among the blossoming water plants. Then the river rises and the earth is washed away. The birds depart, the flowers wither, the branches are dislodged and drift downward; no trace is left of the floating island but a stone submerged by the water;? such is our personality.
Cyril Connolly
The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.
Haruki Murakami
The wind, one brilliant day, calledto my soul with an odor of jasmine."In return for the odor of my jasmine, I'd like all the odor of your roses."I have no roses; all the flowersin my garden are dead."Well then, I'll take the withered petalsand the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?
Antonio Machado
The dragon is withered, His bones are now crumbled; His armour is shivered, His splendour is humbled! Though sword shall be rusted, And throne and crown perish. With strength that men trusted And wealth that they cherish, Here grass is still growing, And leaves are yet swinging, The white water flowing, And elves are yet singing. Come! Tra-la-la-lally! Come back to the valley!
J. R. R. Tolkien
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a...
Fernando Pessoa