Quotes About Willows

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy.... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"--big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.

I forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can possibly explain.

It's the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it!

Lovers inside and horses ignoring the lovers. And the creek nearby. The willows. That was the scene. I forget the sky. The sky, let's say, was green and dotted with silly clouds that looked like dimes. Then

Home, I whispered. is where the river flows humming through the willows. Home is milkweed in your hair, with hemlock moss your pillows. Home, if you could only know, is anyplace I see you --- it's in your heart and from the start I've known my home would be you. FROM BOOK _ZAZOO_ , p.21, Chapter 3

the willows, whose drooping fronds reached out to touch their own reflections.

A similarity between fishing and this other enterprise was that no matter where along the stream you stood, there seemed to be, just down there, where the stream spilled through a narrow race around stones, or just beyond the tresses of the willows, the perfect spot, the spot you had all along intended to go to.

At Ghent the wind rose. There was a smell of rain and a heavy drag Of wind in the hedges but not as the wind blows Over fresh water when the waves lag Foaming and the willows huddle and it will rain . . .

A new home by a gap in the Meng wall; Of the old trees, a few gnarled willows are left. Those who come in the future, who will they be, Grieving in vain for what others had before?

Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town--his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain--where he used to dance at the Saturday hops.

The weeping willows, on the other hand, are evocative of death. They are a little contrived, a little exaggerated, still green in the middle of all the colors of autumn, and there is a human pathos to them.

I love the long grass coming up to meet the willows.

Over its waters the willows drooped their long hair, bucking in the gusts as if with sobs. Against the dark surface she could make out the white waterlily buds, like small hands reaching up from beneath the surface.

I'm alone with the ghost of the swamp, somewhere near the weeping willows.

In the bottoms, reeds grew thick and green in rain-swollen waterways; low, shrubby willows populated a patchwork of sandy islands; and other water-hardy stuff grew in such profusion that only the most wretched fugitives were to be found there. Merely to dwell in such a place was to confess oneself an outlaw or a witch. The valleys and ravines that drained into it were choked with trees, generally too small and mean to be of interest to any, save charcoal burners. The

They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows. (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers.) They say truth is to be found there entire, and virtue, that shuffles along here, down blind alleys, is to be had there perfect.

This is what was bequeathed us: This earth the beloved left And, leaving, Left to us. No other world But this one: Willows and the river And the factory With its black smokestacks. No other shore, only this bank On which the living gather. No meaning but what we find here. No purpose but what we make. That, and the beloved's clear instructions: Turn me into song; sing me awake.

Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

She went to the window and looked out. The ground fell away to a branch where willows burned lime green in the sunset. Dark little birds kept crossing the fields to the west like heralds of some coming dread. Below the branch stood the frame of an outhouse from which the planks had been stripped for firewood and there hung from the ceiling a hornetnest like a gross paper egg. The tinker returned from the cart with a lantern

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we've offered and those we have yet to make.

A tender speech is combing through the willows. In a bare whisper, the elms lean. Something about the place conjures up the ancient past: the hound, the spear, the spinning wheel. There's pleasure to be had in history.

I'll always be happy if they'd leave me alone in that delightful and unknown furthest corner, apart from struggles, putrefactions and nonsense; the ultimate corner of sugar and toast, where the mermaids catch the branches of the willows and the heart opens to a flute's sharpness.

Rumi advised me to keep my spirit up in the branches of a tree and not peek out too far, so I keep mine in the very tall willows along the irrigation ditch out back