Balsam Fir Quotes

It's easy tae be philosophical when some other cunt's got shite fir blood. ~ Irvine Welsh

Here are the Top Ten things that your parents say to you:
-Is that all you're going to do all day, sit in front of the computer?
-When I was your age I had two jobs.
-Why don't you wear some clothes that fir for a change?
-Turn it down. I can hear it all the way over here.
-You're not eating that for dinner.
-Did you do your homework?
-Stop mumbling and speak up.
-Now what did you do?
-Because I said so.
-No. ~ Charles Benoit

Fancy can save or kill; it hath clos'd up
Wounds when the balsam could not, and without
The aid of salves:
to think hath been a cure.
For witchcraft then, that's all done by the force
Of mere imagination. ~ William Cartwright

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. ~ John Milton

Not long after, and while it was still twilight, the grandfather also went to bed, for he was up every morning at sunrise, and the sun came climbing up over the mountains at a very early hour during these summer months. The wind grew so tempestuous during the night, and blew in such gusts against the walls, that the hut trembled and the old beams groaned and creaked. It came howling and wailing down the chimney like voices of those in pain, and it raged with such fury among the old fir trees that here and there a branch was snapped and fell. In the middle of the night the old man got up. "The child will be frightened," he murmured half aloud. He mounted the ladder and went and stood by the child's bed.

Outside the moon was struggling with the dark, fast-driving clouds, which at one moment left it clear and shining, and the next swept over it, and all again was dark. Just now the moonlight was falling through the round window straight on to Heidi's bed. She lay under the heavy coverlid, her cheeks rosy with sleep, her head peacefully resting on her little round arm, and with a happy expression on her baby face as if dreaming of something pleasant. The old man stood looking down on the sleeping child until the moon again disappeared behind the clouds and he could see no more, then he went back to bed. ~ Johanna Spyri

The peasantry had only recently been freed from slavelike servitude, and they were crushed with debt. The economy was stagnant. The country was hardly industrialized; there were not many factories. Though in St. Petersburg itself, nobles and sophisticates attended balls in Parisian gowns and discussed the poetry of the French, this ramshackle empire also included huge, frigid wastes of fir tree and tundra, deserts where the only inhabitants were nomadic families with their herds, and mountain towns that had never even heard the name of their distant ruler. ~ M T Anderson

And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long.

On Starvation Ridge
little sticks
Are trying to grow. ~ Jack Kerouac

They can't complain to the police, they say, because their cows roam the streets. The police will only take down an FIR (First Information Report) and register a case if cows are stolen from within someone's property. So these farmers buy Alsatian dogs to guard the cows. They buy roosters to wake them up at dawn for the milking; and then buy hens to give the rooster something to do. Within the compound of an urban dairy farmer lies an entire ecosystem. ~ Shoba Narayan

Store of bees, in a dry and warme bee-house, comely made of fir boards, to sing, and sit, and feede upon your flowers and sprouts, make a pleasant noyse and sight. For cleanly and innocent bees, of all other things, love and become, and thrive in your orchard. If they thrive (as they must needs if your gardiner be skilfull, and love them: for they love their friends and hate none
but their enemies) they will besides the pleasure, yeeld great profit, to pay him his wages; yea the increase of twenty stock of stools with other bees, will keep your orchard. ~ William Lawson

Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane? ~ Sebastian Faulks

Colonel Matterson reading from wrinkled scripture of that long yellow hand:
The flag is America. America is the plum. The peach. The watermelon. America is the gumdrop. The pumpkin seed. America is television.
Now, the cross is Mexico. Mexico is the walnut. The hazelnut. The acorn. Mexico is the rainbow. The rainbow is wooden. Mexico is wooden.
Now, the green sheep is Canada Canada is the fir tree. The wheat field. The calendar.
The night is the Pacific Ocean. ~ Ken Kesey

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir tree. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fawcett also shared with me a passion for words and we would trawl the dictionary together and simply howl and wriggle with delight at the existence of such splendours as 'strobile' and 'magniloquent', daring and double-daring each other to use them to masters in lessons without giggling. 'Strobile' was a tricky one to insert naturally into conversation, since it means a kind of fir-cone, but magniloquent I did manage.

I, being I, went always that little bit too far of course. There was one master who had berated me in a lesson for some tautology or other. He, as what human being wouldn't when confronted with a lippy verbal show-off like me, delighted in seizing on opportunities to put me down. He was not, however, an English teacher, nor was he necessarily the brightest man in the world.

'So, Fry. "A lemon yellow colour" is precipitated in your test tube is it? I think you will find, Fry, that we all know that lemons are yellow and that yellow is a colour. Try not to use thee words where one will do. Hm?'

I smarted under this, but got my revenge a week or so later.

'Well, Fry? It's a simple enough question. What is titration?'

'Well, sir…, it's a process whereby…'

'Come on, come on. Either you know or you don't.'

'Sorry sir, I am anxious to avoid pleonasm, but I think…'

'Anxious to avoid what?'

'Pleonasm, sir.'

'And what do you mean by that?'

'I'm sorry, s ~ Stephen Fry

A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time. ~ Robert Doisneau

Oread"

Whirl up, sea -
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir. ~ H.D.

Who robbed the woods,
The trusting woods?
The unsuspecting trees
Brought out their burrs and mosses
His fantasy to please.
He scanned their trinkets, curious,
He grasped, he bore away.
What will the solemn hemlock,
What will the fir-tree say? ~ Emily Dickinson

Annabeth glared at me like she was going to punch me. And then she did something that surprised me even more. Shd kissed me. "Br careful Seaweed Brain." she put her cap back on and vanished. I probably would have sst there fir the rest of the day, staring at the lava and trying to remember what my name was. ~ Rick Riordan

It is a balsam," answered Don Quixote, "the receipt of which I have in my memory, with which one need have no fear of death, or dread dying of any wound; and so when I make it and give it to thee thou hast nothing to do when in some battle thou seest they have cut me in half through the middle of the body - as is wont to happen frequently, - but neatly and with great nicety, ere the blood congeal, to place that portion of the body which shall have fallen to the ground upon the other half which remains in the saddle, taking care to fit it on evenly and exactly. Then thou shalt give me to drink but two drops of the balsam I have mentioned, and thou shalt see me become sounder than an apple. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

On 20 November, front-line troops got 500 grams of bread per day, factory workers received 250, and everyone else 125 (that is, two slices). 'Twigs were collected and stewed,' records an historian of the siege. 'Peat shavings, cottonseed cake, bonemeal was pressed into use. Pine sawdust was processed and added to the bread. Mouldy grain was dredged from sunken barges and scraped out of the holds of ships. Soon Leningrad bread was containing 10% cottonseed cake that had been processed to remove poisons. Household pets, shoe leather, fir bark and insects were consumed, as was wallpaper paste which was reputed to be made with potato flour. Guinea pigs, white mice and rabbits were saved from vivisection in the city's laboratories for a more immediately practical fate. 'Today it is so simple to die,' wrote one resident, Yelena Skryabina, in her diary. 'You just begin to lose interest, then you lie on your bed and you never get up again. Yet some people were willing to go to any lengths in order to survive: 226 people were arrested for cannibalism during the siege. 'Human meat is being sold in the markets,' concluded one secret NKVD report, 'while in the cemeteries bodies pile up like carcasses, without coffins. ~ Andrew Roberts

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;

then, as you scan
it, you see in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,
eventually
you will be able to see me.) ~ Margaret Atwood

I walk into the night forest. I reach out my hands on either side. I can feel the smooth bark of the Red Alder trees and the rough chasms of mature Douglas Fir, and then I can feel the stringy fibrous bark of the Western Red Cedar. I can push my fingers into the Cedar bark; it is like cloth to my fingertips. But here and there I can also feel the lacelike fingers of Hemlock and the prickly needles of Spruce touching my face and my neck. ~ Ned Hayes

The impression of wood-grain ... must be considered, not only as regards texture and visibility, but for the occasional possibility of the expression of form. A soft wood, with hard annulations, such as fir, prints very dearly. ~ Walter J. Phillips

All life is rife with possibilities. Seeds have possibilities, but all their tomorrows are caught by the patterning of their life cycle. Animals have possibilities that are greater than that of a fir tree or a blade of grass. Still, though, for most animals, the pattern of instinct, the patterns of their lives, are very strong. Humanity has a far greater range of possibilities, especially the very young. Who will children grow up to be? Who will they marry, what will they believe, what will they create? Creation is a very powerful seed of possibility. ~ Patricia Briggs

It's like a fairytale suspended in time-the princess forgotten, the hero eaten whole by a noble Fir goblin. The story ended, but no one remembered to burn the haunted forest to the ground. ~ Shea Ernshaw

All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will,and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is their nature to live fir others;to make complete abnegation of themselves,and to have no life but in their affections. ~ John Stuart Mill

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue. ~ David Abram

I have been reading three books Dean lent me this week. One was like a rose garden
very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain
full of balsam and tang
I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully
I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one
it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers' breath, of ropes of pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. ~ Virginia Woolf

The enhanced call us misfits - people who don't fir their intended purpose. So maybe you're a misfit too. Doesn't mean you're not deserving. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be here. ~ Becky Chambers

The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon. Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips. The crops filled with snowberries are breathtaking, looking like a clump of pearls, and nearly as rare; it's always a thrill to open a crop and see nothing but beautiful white berries. Usually in these woods, though, in the autumn, the crops are bulging with bright red kinnickkinnick berries, and the bright green leaves from the same bush. Tom and Nancy save the crop from each bird they kill and set it on the windowsill to dry translucent in the sunlight - a globe, a ball, filled with Christmas colors, perfect red and green; and then in December they hang these as ornaments on their tree. For ~ Rick Bass

Sombre as fir trees, liquid cats
Moved in the grass without a sound.
They did not know the grass went round.
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray
And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray. ~ Wallace Stevens

Twenty minutes into our walk away from the wall put us deep in a forest of fir, pine, cottonwood, and aspen trees. The lush forest floor was alive and danced with shadows cast from an endless parade of swaying trees. As we approached early evening it was cool and peaceful. The sound of the trees moving in the wind high above seemed like a friendly traveling companion, calling us farther and farther into the depths of the forest. ~ Patrick Carman

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high, The sailing pine,the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral, The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepest still, The yew obedient to the bender's will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platane round, The carver holm, the maple seldom inward sound. ~ Edmund Spenser

Wounds sustained for the sake of conscience carry their own balsam with the blow. ~ Walter Scott

Goodness is generous and diffusive; it is largeness of mind, and sweetness of temper,
balsam in the blood, and justice sublimated to a richer spirit. ~ Jeremy Collier