Twigs Quotes - Page 3

• You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That's what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

  Steven Wright

  Branches, Spit, Knows

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• Nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness; now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. Some green she thinks so good for our eyes that, like blue, she never banishes it entirely from our eyes, but has created evergreens.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Eye, Winter, Thinking

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.2799, Delphi Classics

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• October turned my maple's leaves to gold; The most are gone now; here and there one lingers: Soon these will slip from the twigs' weak hold, Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Dying, Gold, Here And There

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1897). “The Writings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich”

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• November’s days are thirty: November’s earth is dirty, Those thirty days, from first to last; And the prettiest things on ground are the paths.... Few care for the mixture of earth and water, Twig, leaf, flint, thorn, Straw, feather, all that men scorn, Pounded up and sodden by flood, Condemned as mud.

  Edward Thomas

  Nature, Dirty, Men

  Edward Thomas (2012). “Poems of Edward Thomas”, p.28, Other Press, LLC

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• Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders.

  Arthur Symons

  Discovery, Criticism, Treasure

  Arthur Symons (1906). “An Introduction to the Study of Browning”

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• Modern art must strike out from the old. The new is not revealed to those whose eyes are fastened in worship upon the old…Have you ever seen an inch worm crawl up a leaf or twig, and then clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.

  Albert Pinkham Ryder

  Art, Eye, Air

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• The origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Tree, Branches, Tiny

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History".

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• Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance - nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

  Walter Benjamin

  Ignorance, Feet, Cities

  Walter Benjamin (1996). “Selected Writings: 1927-1934”, p.598, Harvard University Press

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• Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appears, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds - the invisible shared out in endless abundance.

  Denise Levertov

  Morning, Rain, Winter

  Denise Levertov, “Bearing The Light”

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• Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.

  Chinua Achebe

  Men, Missing, Mark

  Chinua Achebe (1992). “Things Fall Apart”, Everyman's Library

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• I used to be so twig skinny that I couldn't eat enough, because I was just naturally skinny. Until I went to China.

  Lisa Ling

  Skinny, Enough, Used

  "I'm A Runner: Lisa Ling". Interview with Sarah Lorge Butler, www.runnersworld.com. June 1, 2005.

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• He was sure that he was not the cause of the abrupt silence. His passage through the canyon had not previously disturbed either birds or cicadas. Something was out there. An intruder of which the ordinary forest creatures clearly did not approve. He took a deep breath and held it again, straining to hear the slightest movement in the woods. This time he detected the rustle of brush, a snapping twig, the soft crunch of dry leaves-and the unnervingly peculiar, heavy, ragged breathing of something big.

  Dean Koontz

  Breathing, Silence, Bird

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• Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Growing Up, Elephants, Different

  Willard Van Orman Quine, Patricia Smith Churchland, Dagfinn Follesdal (2013). “Word and Object”, p.8, MIT Press

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• Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Voice, Bird, Sound

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.233, Delphi Classics

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• Seeing then that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly; or else he will find himself entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twigs; the more he struggles, the more belimed.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Truth, Struggle, Men

  Thomas Hobbes (2008). “Leviathan”, p.36, Simon and Schuster

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• It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Art, Nature, Mirrors

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.34, Xist Publishing

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• He is very fond of me, almost too fond. I could do with less caressing and more rationality. I should like to be less of a pet and more of a friend, if I might choose; but I won't complain of that: I am only afraid his affection loses in depth where it gains in ardour. I sometimes liken it to a fire of dry twigs and branches compared with one of solid coal, very bright and hot; but if it should burn itself out and leave nothing but ashes behind.

  Anne Bronte

  Fire, Pet, Depth

  Anne Bronte (2009). “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.301, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?

  Alice Sebold

  Girl, Kissing, Two

  Alice Sebold (2014). “The Lovely Bones: Picador Classic”, p.106, Pan Macmillan

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