mud quotes

As for the grass, it grewas scant as hair in leprosythin dried blades pricked the mud which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, stood stupefied.

- Robert Browning
  Men and Women,'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'.

There anchoring, Peter chose from man to hide, There hang his head, and view the lazy tide In its hot slimy channel slowly glide; Where the small eels that left the deeper way For the warm shore, within the shallows play; Where gaping mussels, left upon the mud, Slope their slow passage to the fallen flood.

- George Crabbe
  The Borough, letter 22,'Peter Grimes', l.185^91.

Mud! Mud! Glorious mud! Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So follow me, follow, Down to the hollow, And there let us wallow In glorious mud.

- Bud stage name of Robert Winthrop Flanagan
  'The Hippopotamus'.

Ulysses†is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

- E(dward) M(organ) Forster
  Of  James  Joyce's1922 novel.  Aspects of the Novel, ch.6.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

- Nathaniel Hawthorne
The House of the Seven Gables, ch.2.

What isscience? Science is angling in the mudangling for immortalityand for anything elsethat may happen to turn up.

- Aldous Leonard Huxley
  After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

Two men look out through the same bars: One sees the mud, and one the stars.

- Frederick Langbridge
  A Cluster of Quiet  Thoughts.

The widening river's slow presence, The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud, Gathers to the surprise of a large town: Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water, And residents from raw estates.

- Philip Arthur Larkin
  Of Hull.'Here'.

Do not despise my opinion, when I remind you that it should not be hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which, if you consider them well, you may find really marvellous ideas.

-Leonardo daVinci
Quoted in Irma  A Richter (ed) Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1977).

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy! A mountain-stream that ends in mud Methinks is melancholy.

-James Russell Lowell
  'An Interview with Miles Standish', stanza11.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.

- Bernard Malamud
  Dubin's Lives.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

- Gertrude Stein
  'Q.E.D.', bk.1. Collected in Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings (1971).

He who slings mud generally loses ground.

- Adlai E(wing) Stevenson
Recalled on his death,14 Jul1965.

A body would 'a thought he was Adamhe was just all mud.

- Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
  TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn, ch.6.