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wood quotes

  • Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweth sed, and bleweth med, And springth the wude nu. See also Pound 664:27.

    -Anonymous
    c.1250  'Sumer is icumen in', l.1^4.

  • Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out: so where there is no talebearer, the strife ceaseth.

    -Bible (Old Testament)
    Proverbs 26:20.

  • But two miles more and then we rest! Well, there is still an hour of day, And long the brightness of the west Sit then, awhile, here in this wood So total is the solitude, We safely may delay.

    - Charlotte Bronte« 
      'Regret', in Poems by Currer, Ellis and  Acton Bell.

  • And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead and with its head He went galumphing back. 'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to myarms, my beamish boy! Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy.

    -Dodgson
    Through the Looking-Glass, ch.1,'Looking-Glass House'.

  • Like piles of dry wood with red-hot coals underneath.

    - Henry Cisneros
      Of US cities, rife with racial tension. In US News and World Report,19  Apr.

  • Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war!

    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
      'Kubla Khan'.

  •    Suddenlya puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still nightthe first sigh of the east on my face.

    - Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra Connor
      'Youth'.

  • As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone, And hides the ruin that it feeds upon, So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.

    -William Cowper
      Poems,'The Progress of Error', l.285^8.

  • Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che   la diritta via era smarrita. In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood where the straight path was lost.

    -Dante Alighieri originally Durante
    c.1320  Divina Commedia,'Inferno', canto1, l.1^3.

  • The bow was made in England, Of true wood, of yew wood, The wood of English bows.

    - SirArthur Conan Doyle
    The White Company,'Song of the Bow'.

  • In that sharp light the fields did lie Naked and stone-like; each tree stood Like a tranced woman, bound and stark, Far off the wood With darkness ridged the riven dark. 336

    -John Freeman
      'Stone Trees'.

  • I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

    - Robert Lee Frost
      'The Road Not Taken'.

  • On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves; The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

    - A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
      A Shropshire Lad, no.31.

  • I read the first 2 pages of the usual sloppy English and [Stuart Gilbert] read me a lyrical bit about nudism in the wood and the end which is a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D. H. L.'s country at any rates, makes all the propaganda for itself.

    -James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
    On D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. Letter to Harriet Weaver,17 Dec.

  • The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone; 'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own.

    - (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
      'The'Eathen'.

  • Pussy said to the Owl,'You elegant Fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?' They sailed away for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-tree grows, And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose.

    - Edward Lear
    Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat'.

  • Tha t|'m, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig. Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig.

    - Sorley Gaelic name Somhairle MacGill-Eain MacLean
      'Hallaig', epitaph.

  • That bat that you were kind enough to send, Seems (for as yet I have not tried it) good: And if there's anything on earth can mend My wretched play, it is that piece of wood.

    - Henry Edward Manning
       Verse sent to Charles Wordsworth, nephew of the poet William Wordsworth, after the latter sent him the present of a cricket bat.

  •    Who would think that a little bit of leather, and two pieces of wood, had such a delightful and delighting power!

    - Mary Russell Mitford
    ^32  Our Village.

  • He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms.

    - Dorothy ne  e Rothschild Parker
      Not So Deep as AWell,'Tombstones in the Starlight'.

  • To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art.

    -J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley
      The Good Companions, bk.1, ch.1.

  • Two evils, monstrous either one apart, Possessed me, and were long and loath at going: A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart, And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

    -John Crowe Ransom
      Chills and Fever,'Winter Remembered'.

  • Everyone knowsthat thelabel Modern Art no longer has any relation to the words that compose it. To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern nor art; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand-year-old mask from the South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach becomes Art.

    - Harold Rosenberg
      'TheAmerican Action Painters', in Art News, no.51, Dec.

  •    The stubborn spearmen still made good Their dark impenetrable wood, Each stepping where his comrade stood The instant that he fell.

    - Sir Walter Scott
      Marmion, canto 6, stanza 34.

  • O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood. Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand!

    - Sir Walter Scott
      The Lay of the Last Minstrel, canto 6, stanza 2.

  • Heap on more wood!the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it will, We'll keep our Christmas merry still.

    - Sir Walter Scott
      Marmion, canto 6, introduction.

  • Proud Maisie is in the wood, Walking so early; Sweet Robin sits on the bush, Singing so rarely.

    - Sir Walter Scott
      The Heart of Midlothian, ch.40 (MadgeWildfire's song).

  • It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore.

    - Dylan Marlais Thomas
      'Poem in October'.

  • To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.

    - Dylan Marlais Thomas
      Under MilkWood, opening words.

  • Many-maned scud-thumper, tub of male whales, maker of worn wood, shrub- ruster, sky-mocker, rave! portly pusher of waves, wind-slave.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      Telephone Poles and Other Poems,'Winter Ocean'.

  •    That vessel in which the powers of steam are to be employed to work the engine, which is called the Cylinder in common fire engines, and which I call the SteamVessel, must, during the whole time the engine is at work, be kept ashot asthesteamthat entersit; first, by enclosing it ina case of wood, oranyother materialsthat transmit heat slowly; secondly, by surrounding it with steam or other heated bodies; and thirdly, by suffering neither water noranyother substance colder thansteam to enter and touch it during that time.

    -James Watt
      Specification of patent, 5 Jan, for a new method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire engines.

  • One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect. Enough of science and of art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.

    -William Wordsworth
      'TheTablesTurned', stanzas 6^8.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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