Hemlock Quotes

• My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.

  John Keats

  Pain, Heart, Sadness

  'Ode to a Nightingale' (1820) st. 1

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• This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Ocean, Twilight, Sadness

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867). “The Poetical Works of H. W. Longfellow. Complete Edition”, p.98

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• What will the solemn Hemlock- What will the Oak tree say?

  Emily Dickinson

  Nature, Tree, Solemn

  Emily Dickinson, Cristanne Miller (2016). “Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them”, p.47, Harvard University Press

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• The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

  Robert Frost

  Change, Heart, Dust

  Betsy Melvin, Tom Melvin, Robert Frost (2000). “Robert Frost's New England”, p.25, UPNE

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• Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

  Ray Bradbury

  Plato, Men, Blood

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• Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, "What will you have, sir?" And I said, "A glass of hemlock."

  Ernest Hemingway

  Funny, Marriage, Regret

  Ernest Hemingway (2008). “The Good Life According to Hemingway”, Ecco

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• Far away beyond the pine-woods,' he answered, in a low dreamy voice, 'there is a little garden. There the grass grows long and deep, there are the great white stars of the hemlock flower, there the nightingale sings all night long. All night long he sings, and the cold, crystal moon looks down, and the yew-tree spreads out its giant arms over the sleepers.

  Oscar Wilde

  Stars, Flower, Moon

  Oscar Wilde (1997). “Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: The Plays, the Poems, the Stories and the Essays Including De Profundis”, p.205, Wordsworth Editions

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• I have to seek God beauty. Because isn't my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? . True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on the hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things . Nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature.

  Ann Voskamp

  Fall, Moon, Glasses

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• It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.

  Denis Diderot

  God, Religious, Mistake

  "Against the Faith". Book by Jim Herrick, 1985.

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• What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statutes the next.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Passion, Government, People

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, Henry Barton Dawson (1864). “The Fœderalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favor of the New Constitution, as Agreed Upon by the Fœderal Convention, September 17, 1787. Reprinted from the Original Text. With an Historical Introduction and Notes”, p.439, New York : C. Scribner ; London : Sampson Low

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• The world of life, of spontaneity, the world of dawn and sunset and starlight, the world of soil and sunshine, of meadow and woodland, of hickory and oak and maple and hemlock and pineland forests, of wildlife dwelling around us, of the river and its wellbeing--all of this [is] the integral community in which we live.

  Thomas Berry

  Nature, Sunset, Sunshine

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• For him who fain would teach the world The world holds hate in fee- For Socrates, the hemlock cup; For Christ, Gethsemane.

  Don Marquis

  Hate, Fate, World

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• Go back to classical times, say classical Greece. Who drank the hemlock? Was it someone who was conforming, obeying the gods? Or was it someone who was disrupting the youth and questioning the faith and belief? Socrates, in other words. It was Socrates.

  Noam Chomsky

  Belief, Youth, Questioning

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock.

  Gil Amelio

  Errors, Done, Way

  Gil Amelio, William L. Simon (1998). “On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• There is nothing so inconvenient in this world as an absolutely truthful person, who can both speak and write, and has the courage of his convictions. One can always arrange matters with liars ... But with the man or woman who holds truth dearer than life, and honor more valuable than advancement, there is nothing to be done, now that governments cannot insist on the hemlock-cure, as in the case of Socrates.

  Marie Corelli

  Truth, Liars, Writing

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• He was met even now As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud; Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds, With bur-docks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.

  William Shakespeare

  Weed, Flower, Sea

  William Shakespeare (1866). “The Works of William Shakespeare”, p.376

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• Anti-intellectualism ... has been present in some form and degree in most societies; in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congressional investigations.

  Richard Hofstadter

  Degrees, Gowns, Towns

  Richard Hofstadter (2012). “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”, p.20, Vintage

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• It looked like something the Hemlock needed, or a piece of equipment a plumber had left behind. It looked like none of your business.

  Daniel Handler

  Pieces, Equipment, Left Behind

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• Along with rising and falling water, winter is the province of wind. When the sea-breath and mountain-roar bend the hemlocks of these hills, the birds hang on as best they can.

  Robert Pyle

  Fall, Winter, Wind

  Robert Michael Pyle (2007). “Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place”, p.204, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• This hill crossed with broken pines and maples lumpy with the burial mounds of uprooted hemlocks (hurricane of '38) out of their rotting hearts generations rise trying once more to become the forest just beyond them tall enough to be called trees in their youth like aspen a bouquet of young beech is gathered they still wear last summer's leaves the lightest brown almost translucent how their stubbornness has decorated the winter woods.

  Grace Paley

  Summer, Spring, Heart

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• Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens, the hemlock on one day, and statues on the next.

  James Madison

  Freedom, One Day, Liberty

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2015). “The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution”, p.309, Coventry House Publishing

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• The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.

  Virginia Woolf

  Twilight, Moving, Knitting

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.56, Broadview Press

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