Withered Quotes - Page 5

• Hopes have precarious life.
  They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off
  In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

  George Eliot

  Hope, Growth, Vigorous

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.4195, Delphi Classics

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• This might explain why Obama gave billions to Wall Street crooks, and dragged the Iraq and Afghan wars on and on.
  Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing... We have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights, like a dead trumpet vine, clings to our pseudo-Roman columns.

  Gore Vidal

  Wall, War, Rights

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• The leaves are falling, falling as from way off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures. And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness. We all are falling. This hand falls. And look at others: it is in them all. And yet there is one who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Stars, Loneliness, Fall

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• 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

  Fall, Exercise, Autumn

  Jane Austen (2013). “Persuasion In Modern English”, p.221, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Poor Fred - he's actually working on a typo, and somebody ought to tell him. Twice in the New Testament Jesus withered fig trees, Isaiah withered a fig tree, and there's another place in the Old Testament - I think it-s in Psalms - where a fig tree was withered. God hates figs, not fags!

  Thom Hartmann

  Jesus, Hate, Thinking

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• Man, when living, is soft and tender; when dead, he is hard and tough. All animals and plants when living are tender and delicate; when dead they become withered and dry. Therefore it is said: the hard and tough are parts of death; the soft and tender are parts of life.

  Laozi

  Nature, Men, Animal

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• A man is born gentle and weak. At death, he is hard and stiff. Green plants are tender and filled with sap. At death, they are withered and dry. Therefore, the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death, and the gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

  Laozi

  Motivational, Fitness, Health

  Laozi (1997). “道德经”, Vintage

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• I get worried for young girls sometimes; I want them to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled.

  Amy Poehler

  Girl, Smart, Independent

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• From a withered tree, a flower blooms

  Gautama Buddha

  Flower, Tree, Blooming Flower

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• I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

  Charles Dickens

  Flower, Eye, Scary

  Charles Dickens (1881). “Great Expectations”, p.78

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• There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.

  Vasily Grossman

  People, Evil, Soul

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• All our lives we are engaged in preserving our experiences and keeping them fresh by artificially sprinkling the water of memory over them. They have ceased to retain their original smell and fragrance. Do you call it life- this effort at the preservation of a phantom freshness in something that is withered and gone?

  Vimala Thakar

  Memories, Smell, Water

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• Materialism is decadent and degenerate only if the spirit of the nation has withered and if individual people are so unimaginative that they wallow in it.

  Brooks Atkinson

  People, Degenerates, Spirit

  Brooks Atkinson (1951). “Once Around the Sun”

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• We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air; We dug a spring in infancy Of water pure and fair; We sowed in youth a mustard seed, We cut an almond rod; We are now grown up to riper age— Are they withered in the sod?

  Charlotte Bronte

  Spring, Cutting, Air

  '19 December 1835'

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• The death of a man's wife is like cutting down an ancient oak that has long shaded the family mansion. Henceforth the glare of the world, with its cares and vicissitudes falls upon the old widower's heart, and there is nothing to break their force, or shield him from the full weight of misfortune. It is as if his right hand were withered; as if one wing of his angel was broken, and every movement that he made brought him to the ground.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Fall, Angel, Heart

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• The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk.

  Jonathan Swift

  Green, Trunks, Intemperance

  Jonathan Swift (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Jonathan Swift (Illustrated)”, p.874, Delphi Classics

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• Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.

  Rose Macaulay

  Morning, Lakes, Bird

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Personal Pleasures”, p.102, A&C Black

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• Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith-the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen!

  Lewis Carroll

  Memories, Regret, Night

  Lewis Carroll (2015). “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Other Tales”, p.367, Race Point Pub

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• The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth.

  Washington Irving

  Beautiful, Mother, Children

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• [On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets.

  Maria Edgeworth

  Suffering, Literature, May

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• Shut up the door: who loves me must not look / Upon the withered world, but haste to bring / His lighted candle, and his story-book, / And live with me the poetry of spring.

  Alice Cary

  Spring, Book, Autumn

  Alice Cary (1876). “The Last Poems: Of Alice and Phoebe Cary”, p.136

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• People do not care to give alms without some security for their money; and a wooden leg or a withered arm is a sort of draft upon heaven for those who choose to have their money placed to account there.

  Henry Mackenzie

  People, Giving, Heaven

  Henry Mackenzie (1820). “The man of feeling: and Julia de Roubigné, a tale”, p.18

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• ... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.

  Dorothy Gilman

  Memories, Past, People

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• Violent excitement exhausts the mind and leaves it withered and sterile.

  Francois Fenelon

  Mind, Violence, Excitement

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• A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it--when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Spring, Wine, Mean

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