Bogs Quotes

It was a warm night for the end of March. Walt had left the front door to the ice-cream parlor open when he went out after supper to gossip with the old men down at Darly Stidger's Store. And yet it was not spring, although winter was dead and the moon was sickly with the neitherness of the time between those seasons: those last few weeks before the cries of the green frogs would rise in stitching clamor from the river shores and meadow bogs. ~ Davis Grubb

In reference to the search for Lincoln's killers as it took to the Maryland swamps:
The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous. First, the troops assemble on the edge of bogs with names like Allen's Creek, Scrub Swamp, and Atchall's Swamp, standing at loose attention in the shade of a thick forest of beech, dogwood, and gum trees. Then they form two lines and march straight forward, from one side to the other. As absurd as it seems to the soldiers, marching headlong into cold mucky water, there is no other way of locating Booth and Herold. Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in their painstaking weeklong search for the killers. ~ Bill O'Reilly

Quiet descended, a silence so consuming that even the drafty corridors ceased whistling. Bog wasn't certain where to look, so he solved the problem by plucking out his eyes and sticking them in a drawer. ~ A. Lee Martinez

She gazed toward the marsh that grew thicker, deeper, greener with approaching summer. Mosquitoes whined in there, breeding in the dark water. Alligators slid through it, silent death. It was a place where snakes could slither and bogs could suck the shoe right off your foot.
And it was a place, she thought, that went bright and beautiful with the twinkling of fireflies, where wildflowers thrived in the shade and the stingy light. Where an eagle could soar like a king.
There was no beauty without risk. No life without it. ~ Nora Roberts

Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Agatha Chubb, expert in ancient wizarding artefacts, has identified no fewer than twelve lead Bludgers dating from this period, discovered both in Irish peat bogs and English marshes. "They are undoubtedly Bludgers rather than cannonballs," she writes. The faint indentations of magically reinforced Beaters' bats are visible and one can see the distinctive hallmarks of manufacture by a wizard (as opposed to a Muggle) - the smoothness of line, the perfect symmetry. A final clue was the fact that each and every one of them whizzed around my study and attempted to knock me to the floor when released from its case, ~ J.K. Rowling

There are a few things as heartbreaking to me as seeing a person swimming in a T-shirt. And I can speak with the authority of someone who did it for years. It is conspicuous. It bogs you down. When you get out of the water, you take half the lake with you. It takes the fun out of swimming and puts a visual metaphor to the burdens of a negative body image. ~ Liz Prince

I grew up having to piss in a bucket 'cos there was no indoor shitter, and now I have these computerised Japanese super-loo things that have heated seats and wash and blow-dry your arse at the touch of a button. Give it a couple of years and I'll have a bog with a robot arm that pulls out my turds, so I don't have to strain. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted translucent crystal like alien fungi.

Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise.

Over everything hung the heavy, oppressive stench of rotting metal. After an hour, Cromis' mouth was coated with a bitter deposit, and he tasted acids. He found it difficult to speak. While his horse stumbled and slithered beneath him, he gazed about in wonder, and poetry moved in his skull, swift as the jewelled mosquito-hawks over a dark slow current of ancient decay. ~ M. John Harrison

I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amidst the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail. ~ Charles A. Beard

Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths are straight, the trees regular, the sun shaded; escorted by gentlemen, protected by policemen, wedded and buried by clergymen, she has only to walk demurely from cradle to grave and no one will touch a hair of her head. But on the other side all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course. The paths wind between bogs and precipices; the trees roar and rock and fall in ruin. ~ Virginia Woolf

O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death. ~ John Milton

There seems to be a psychological law of inertia that bogs down every hopeful activist and subverts every revolution. When compassion and empathy fail, backsliding begins. Or totalitarianism. ~ Patrick Califia-Rice

Hell is not hot, or cold. Nor is it deep below ground, or somewhere in the sky. Instead it is a place on Earth filled with sucking bogs, disfiguring diseases and millions of tiny flesh-eating creatures.
Hell is a jungle, and it is monstrously green. ~ Greig Beck

Age, with his eyes in the back of his head, thinks it wisdom to see the bogs through which he has floundered. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Though I imagine we're killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that'll seem insane to people in the future. And as doors to the next world go, a bog ain't a bad choice. It's not quite water and it's not quite land - it's an in-between place. ~ Ransom Riggs

And feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce. ~ John Milton

When the crops were thriving, Squanto took the men to the open forests where the turkey dwelled. He pointed out the nuts, seeds, and insects that the iridescent birds fed upon.
He showed them the leaf nests of the squirrels and the hideouts of the skunks and raccoons. Walking silently along bear trails, he took them to the blueberry patches.
He told them that deer moved about at sundown and sunrise. He took them inland to valleys where the deer congregated in winter and were easy to harvest. He walked the Pilgrims freely over the land.
To Squanto, as to all Native Americans, the land did not belong to the people, people belonged to the land.
He took the children into the meadows to pick wild strawberries. He showed them how to dig up the sweet roots of the wild Jerusalem artichoke. In mid-summer he led them to cranberry bogs and gooseberry patches. Together they gathered chestnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts in September.
He paddled the boys into the harbor in his dugout canoe to set lobster pots made of reeds and sinew. While they waited to lift their pots, he taught them the creatures of the tidal pools. ~ Jean Craighead George

House Rule Number One: Don't stop, talk or questions ask, beware of men wearing masks.

House Rule Number Two: He may run and he may hide, but Shady must never go outside.

House Rule Number Three: Lock your door with the Black Moon's rise, don't come out until morning shines.

House Rule Number Four: Worn under sun and under moon, never remove the O'Chanters' rune.

House Rule Number Five: If four fails and the bogs again crawl, don't break one, break them all. ~ Paul Durham

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I. ~ Peter Watts

Planet Bog - Pools of toxic chemicals bubble under a choking atmosphere of poisonous gases ... but aside from that, it's not much like Earth. ~ Bill Watterson

Crossing the Swamp"

Here is the endless
wet thick
cosmos, the center
of everything - the nugget
of dense sap, branching
vines, the dark burred
faintly belching
bogs. Here
is swamp, here
is struggle,
closure -
pathless, seamless,
peerless mud. My bones
knock together at the pale
joints, trying
for foothold, fingerhold,
mindhold over
such slick crossings, deep
hipholes, hummocks
that sink silently
into the black, slack
earthsoup. I feel
not wet so much as
painted and glittered
with the fat grassy
mires, the rich
and succulent marrows
of earth - a poor
dry stick given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water - a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud -
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves. ~ Mary Oliver

I viddied that thinking is for the gloopy ones and that the oomny ones use like inspiration and what Bog sends. For now it was lovely music that came to my aid. ~ Anthony Burgess

It is a hard service they take that help me. Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born, and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that had red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake; and for all that, they will think they are well paid. ~ W.B.Yeats

And also, one is a mother in order to understand the inexplicable. One is a mother to lighten the darkness. One is a mother to shield when lightning streaks the night, when thunder shakes the earth, when mud bogs one down. One is a mother in order to love without beginning or end. ~ Mariama Ba

I step through origins
like a dog turning
its memories of wilderness
on the kitchen mat:
the bog floor shakes,
water cheeps and lisps
as I walk down
rushes and heather.
I love this turf-face,
it's black incisions,
the cooped secrets
of process and ritual:
-Kinship ~ Seamus Heaney

Landscape is more than flat land covered by floodwater, the seeping of peat bogs, a river of liquid pewter viewed from a sentry tower. It's an influence on what a person values, what she is willing to sacrifice or argue for. ~ Susan Vreeland

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt. ~ Joy Kogawa

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time. ~ Bill McKibben

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen sea, so, in this work of mine, in which I have compared the lives of the greatest men with one another, after passing through those periods which probable reasoning can reach to and real history find a footing in, I might very well say of those that are farther off, beyond this there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther. ~ Plutarch

So what's plan B, exactly?"
"You heard Saga." I glanced at Connor. "The bogs. Saga said there are some runaway Hel-Blar with collars living there. So I'll be bait. They'll chase me, thinking I'm weak. And then you'll grab one."
Quinn looked at Connor then groaned. "On my God, it's like talking to Lucy. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

Sweet to me your voice, said Caolcrodha Mac Morna, brother to sweet-worded sweet-toothed Goll from Sliabh Riabhach and Brosnacha Bladhma, relate then the attributes that are to Finn's people.

[...]

I will relate, said Finn. Till a man has accomplished twelve books of poetry, the same is not taken for want of poetry but is forced away. No man is taken till a black hole is hollowed in the world to the depth of his two oxters and he put into it to gaze from it with his lonely head and nothing to him but his shield and a stick of hazel. Then must nine warriors fly their spears at him, one with the other and together. If he be spear-holed past his shield, or spear-killed, he is not taken for want of shield-skill. No man is taken till he is run by warriors through the woods of Erin with his hair bunched-loose about him for bough-tangle and briar-twitch. Should branches disturb his hair or pull it forth like sheep-wool on a hawthorn, he is not taken but is caught and gashed. Weapon-quivering hand or twig-crackling foot at full run, neither is taken. Neck-high sticks he must pass by vaulting, knee-high sticks by stooping. With the eyelids to him stitched to the fringe of his eye-bags, he must be run by Finn's people through the bogs and the marsh-swamps of Erin with two odorous prickle-backed hogs ham-tied and asleep in the seat of his hempen drawers. If he sink beneath a peat-swamp or lose a hog, he is not accepted of Finn's people. For five days he must sit on ~ Flann O'Brien

A 10.7-mile bike ride past bogs, beaches ~ Anonymous

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning. ~ Robert Smithson

He screamed. Mmm?' inquired the gentleman. I ... I would never presume to interrupt you, sir. But the ground appears to be swallowing me up.' It is a bog,' said the gentleman, helpfully. It is certainly a most terrifying substance. ~ Susanna Clarke

Come come! Come Out!
From bogs old frogs command the dark
and look...the stars ~ Kikaku

A creative force that either creates itself or arises from nothing, and which is a causa sui (its own cause), exactly resembles Baron Munchhausen, who drew himself out of the bog by taking hold of his own hair. ~ Ludwig Buchner

It's a funny thing about bogs. You can fill them with rocks and sand and old logs and make a little fenced-in yard on top with a woodpile and chopping block - but bogs go right on behaving like bogs. Early in the spring they breathe ice and make their own mist, in remembrance of the time when they had black water and their own sedge blossoming untouched. ~ Tove Jansson

Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moonnor firefly has shown me the causeway to it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Life got in the way
two years in the army, work, marriage, family responsibilities, the need to earn more and more money, all the muck that bogs us down when we don't have the balls to stand up for ourselves
but I had never lost my interest in books. ~ Paul Auster

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water. ~ Barbara Hurd

Chemical properties in the peat stop anything from rotting, so bogs are the "bank vaults" of Irish history, protecting whatever is put in them. A bog-cutter recently described finding a slab of butter, still edible after more than a hundred years. ~ Carmel McCaffrey

Monch was on no simple retreat. The journey he had plotted for himself was much longer, and took him many buckets away from Appollon to Angarr's Sorrow, the land of fetid bogs in southeastern Sarthiss. This was a world far away from everything he knew... from everyone he knew. Granted, the list of people he knew was exceptionally short, especially since Monch was horrible with names and only slightly less horrible with faces. Regardless, he did not wish to accidentally advertise his inexperience to anyone he might possibly know, which is why he travelled so far afield.

There were ruins in the swamps, ruins hidden under years of neglect and heavy with decay. Things lurked in those ruins, inhuman beasts with forbidden hungers. He intended to use the dangers of the swamps as the whetstone that would hone his abilities to a razor-keen edge. Monch would test his blade against and come back all the stronger...

...or dead.

No... that wasn't right. Given the fact that he was immortal, death really wasn't an option. So then, he would come back stronger...

...or something something horrible. Monch decided to fill in those particular details later on, when he had time to ponder his autobiography at length. He would tidy up that particular idiom later. ~ D.F. Monk

Frankenswine:

Like an old crazy quilt, I'm pieces and parts from nine different bodies and five different hearts. My brain is a poet's, my snout's from a thief, my hooves all belonged to the old fire chief, I'm slogging thru swamps and mist covered bogs, hunted by farmers with torches and dogs. Thru mountains and towns, over oceans and snow, I've landed here on this arctic ice floe. So I sit here alone at the world frozen end, just looking for someone whom I can call friend. ~ Doug Cushman

We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself. ~ Samuel Johnson

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east;
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon - the Three Wise Kings.
An old man passing said:
"Can't he make it talk" -
The melodion, I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade -
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse ~ Patrick Kavanagh

Mum and I were delighted to find out we were descended from 'bog-trotters.' ~ Jasmine Guinness