Twigs Quotes - Page 4

• I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig--or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Believe, Butterfly, Swimming

  75 Copy quote

• It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hatred, Soul, Monsters

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.12, Broadview Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I grabbed Aunt Prue's tiny hand, her fingers as small as bare twigs in winter. I closed my eyes and took her other hand, twisting my strong fingers together with her frail ones. I rested my forehead against our hands and closed my eyes. I imagined lifting my head up and seeing her smiling, the tape and tubes gone. I wondered if wishing was the same thing as praying. If hoping for something badly enough could make it happen.

  Kami Garcia

  Strong, Eye, Winter

  4 Copy quote

• He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

  A. S. Byatt

  Beautiful, Clouds, Flames

  A.S. Byatt (2011). “Ragnarok: the End of the Gods”, p.28, Canongate Books

  23 Copy quote

  Show source

• For what use are books to anyone whose days are like a rook's nest with every twig a duty.

  Mervyn Peake

  Book, Use, Nests

  Mervyn Peake (2007). “Titus Groan”, p.324, The Overlook Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.

  Chinua Achebe

  War, Vines, Hints

  Chinua Achebe (2009). “Collected Poems”, p.29, Anchor

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• To walk into Bill Olsen's poems is to enter a mind so weirdly curious, you can't be released to sadness, not yet: it's just too surprising.  But this book-half microscope, half telescope-shadows grief, our shared and ordinary life where an old neighbor obsessively gathers twigs to wish back the tree, where the moon is regularly ‘sawn in half,’ where sprinklers give off ‘little wet speeches.’  What else?  It's brilliantly instead and odd.

  Marianne Boruch

  Grief, Book, Sadness

  4 Copy quote

• I've not really had a bad Christmas. Apart from serious things, like when my father died. He rather spoiled the party and I've never forgiven him for falling off the twig on Christmas Day.

  John Nettles

  Father, Party, Fall

  Source: www.mirror.co.uk

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Hate, Twilight, Curves

  Robinson Jeffers, Tim Hunt (1988). “The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: 1928-1938”, p.410, Stanford University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism.

  Lewis Thomas

  Animal, Cells, Essentials

  "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher". Book by Lewis Thomas, 1974.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Laws are not made like lime-twigs or nets, to catch everything that toucheth them; but rather like sea-marks, to guide from shipwreck the ignorant passenger.

  Philip Sidney

  Sea, Law, Ignorant

  Sir Philip Sidney, Jane Porter (1807). “Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney: With Remarks”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When Providence favors, you can make a safe voyage on a twig.

  Publilius Syrus

  Favors, Safe, Voyages

  4 Copy quote

• We get forwards in the world not so much by doing services, as receiving them: you take a withering twig, and put it in the ground; and then you water it, because you have planted it.

  Laurence Sterne

  Water, Receiving, World

  Laurence Sterne, Melvyn New, Geoffrey Day (2006). “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: And, Continuation of the Bramine's Journal : with Related Texts”, p.152, Hackett Publishing

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• On my last day of shooting, I'd be happy to say 'Cut, it's a wrap' and fall off the twig.

  Richard Attenborough

  Fall, Cutting, Shooting

  4 Copy quote

• This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vie with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air.

  Jonathan Swift

  Art, Nature, Lying

  Jonathan Swift, Thomas Roscoe (1859). “The works of Jonathan Swift, D.D.: with copious notes and additions and a memoir of the author”, p.551

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's really difficult to have your voice heard and feared when you both speak softly and carry a twig.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Voice, Speak, Difficult

  " Fareed Zakaria GPS", www.cnn.com. July 27, 2014.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't throw my body down on the stage at all anymore because I'm sure I'd snap like a twig.

  Michael Gira

  Body, Stage, Snaps

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Be very vigilant over thy child in the April of his understanding, lest the frost of May nip his blossoms. While he is a tender twig, straighten him; whilst he is a new vessel, season him; such as thou makest him, such commonly shall thou find him. Let his first lesson be obedience and his second shall be what thou wilt.

  Francis Quarles

  Children, Understanding, Frost

  9 Copy quote

• 'Helping industry' is the elephant pit of socialism, a deep hole with sharp spikes at the bottom, covered over with twigs and fresh grass.

  Enoch Powell

  Elephants, Pits, Helping

  9 Copy quote

• Enjoying the least things - a chill glass of water, a moment of play with the cat, the sight of sunlight caught in the frost spangling the locust twigs - is a form of prayer.

  Stephanie Mills

  Prayer, Cat, Glasses

  Stephanie Mills (2003). “Epicurean Simplicity”, p.30, Island Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's the old idea that the process of evolution is some push in the direction of greater complexity--in particular greater intellectual complexity. In one twig of the tree of life, namely ours, having a big brain happened to have advantages. But that's just what worked for a particular species of primate 5 to 7 million years ago.

  Steven Pinker

  Ideas, Years, Tree

  4 Copy quote

• I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Soul, Progress, Pedestal

  "Dinosaur in a Haystack". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, "Can We Complete Darwin's Revolution?", p. 327, 1995.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Sleep doesn't come easy when a broken twig conjures images of a hulking mental patient snapping the arms off children, over by the bin.

  Craig Stone

  Children, Sleep, Broken

  4 Copy quote

• Bare twigs in April enhance our pleasure; We know the good time is yet to come.... Bare twigs in Autumn are signs for sadness; We feel the good time is well-nigh past.

  William Allingham

  Sadness, Autumn, Past

  William Allingham, Helen Paterson Allingham (1912). “Poems”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.

  Logan Pearsall Smith

  Wind, Forever, Soul

  Logan Pearsall Smith (1989). “An anthology”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source