Cedar Quotes

2009 saw the eighth 'ten-year flood' of Fargo, North Dakota, since 1989. In Iowa, Cedar Rapids was hit last year by a flood that exceeded the 500-year flood plain. All-time flood records are being broken in areas throughout the world. ~ Al Gore

Driving home to Iowa from Marion, Indiana, I went through Chicago, sure, but it was far easier to find a field than a town. Far easier to find empty spaces than people. Even in my town, Cedar Rapids, the second-largest city in Iowa, you are never more than minutes from a cornfield. It's a bigness that can feel limiting if you are the only one of you that you see. But the internet is an equalizer - bringing together voices that once felt alone, realigning boundaries, creating spaces where there were none before.

There is a danger too of creating ideological bubbles. Of filtering out dissent. It's a criticism that was leveled heavily against blue states after the 2016 election. But when you are in the minority - the voice that is silenced - you are never in a bubble, even if you try. And finding a place where you don't have to fight for acceptance, where you can just be accepted, even if that is online is the difference between pain and hope. ~ Lyz Lenz

During his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe. ~ Wade Davis

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

I am from Lebanon, from Beirut and Saida

I am from the ground underneath my home

I am from the trees, the cedar tree

I come from Tabouleh and brown eyes, from Karim...

Kassar and Kassem

I come from happiness and culture

From "Habibi" and "Hayete"

I am from all religions

I am from the room beneath the stars. ~ Zeina Kassem, Talal Kassem

You cannot fold a flood and put it in a drawer, because the winds would find it out and tell your cedar floor. ~ Emily Dickinson

Most of life is doing little things," said Cedar gently, "and doing them really well."
"They might be little BRAVE things," said Crispin. ~ M.I. McAllister

Away and away the aeroplane shot, till it was nothing but a bright spark; an aspiration; a concentration; a symbol (so it seemed to Mr. Bentley, vigorously rolling his strip of turf at Greenwich) of man's soul; of his determination, thought Mr. Bentley, sweeping round the cedar tree, to get outside his body, beyond his house, by means of thought, Einstein, speculation, mathematics, the Mendelian theory––away the aeroplane shot. ~ Virginia Woolf

When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has set a while in a cedar bucket. Warmish-cool, with a faint taste like the hot July wind in Cedar trees smells. ~ William Faulkner

Zorba is beautiful, but something is missing. The earth is his, but the heaven is missing. He is earthly, rooted, like a giant cedar, but he has no wings. He cannot fly into the sky. He has roots but no wings. ~ Rajneesh

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

Greta's cedar hope chest
Is full of pamphlets
Glass shelves of romantic vignettes
A journal laced with sedimentary prose
Norma gathers and collects vintage photoplays
Hair combs valentines
Lillian allows the animals to scratch
And the leather crack
And the mail collect in the box as coatings peel
Agnes veiled cathedral dweller
Smiles with benevolent pain

But it's Katrina's fair
Tuesday morning
As she with caution unlatches the flat door
She alone cascades to the basement
Careful not to spoil her
Calico printed pinafore
Composite traits and mannerists
All others dissipate

Marguerite vigilant
She dwells upon frigid casements
Sarah's thoughts in high velocity
Accusations always pierce and pass
Clara abandons her passions for distastes
A Miss Lenora P. Sinclair
Early for coffee in the pool
"I'm resituating all your words"
Capital Space Colon Paragraph

Sylvia keeps beasts in jars labeled by
Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family
Genus
Species

But it's Katrina's fair
Tuesday morning
As she with caution unlatches the flat door
She alone cascades to the basement
Careful not to spoil her
Calico printed pinafore
Composite traits and mannerists
All others dissipate

Down the way a silk design
This face is mine
Tis I, Ka ~ Natalie Merchant

Her mother had smelled of cold and scales, her father of stone dust and dog. She imagined her husband's mother, whom she had never met, had a whiff of rotting apples, though her stationary had stunk of baby powder and rose perfume. Sally was starch, cedar, her dead grandmother sandalwood, her uncle, swiss cheese. People told her she smelled like garlic, like chalk, like nothing at all. Lotto, clean as camphor at his neck and belly, like electrified pennies at the armpit, like chlorine at the groin. She swallowed. Such things, details noticed only on the edges of thought would not return.
'Land,' Mathilde said, 'odd name for a guy like you.'
'Short for Roland,' the boy said.
Where the August sun had been steaming over the river, a green cloud was forming. It was still terrifically hot, but the birds had stopped singing. A feral cat scooted up the road on swift paws. It would rain soon.
'Alright Roland,' Mathilde said, suppressing as sigh, 'sing your song. ~ Lauren Groff

The spruce and cedar on its shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees. Ducks were sailing here and there on its surface, and a solitary loon, like a more living wave, - a vital spot on the lake's surface, - laughed and frolicked, and showed its straight leg, for our amusement. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Many of their lodges remained as perfect as when occupied. They were made of poles two or three inches in diameter, set up in circular form, and covered with cedar bark. ~ William Henry Ashley

I haven't been locked into just the sci-fi although I love it - mostly for the fans ... It's tremendous to go out and do all these conventions and thank them for supporting the show. But it's been a mix ... I mean I (also) love the warm and fuzzies (like Cedar Cove and My Best Friends' Dogs). ~ Teryl Rothery

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help. ~ Paul Engle

The woods were full of sound: the stream between the rocks, the wind among the needles of the pine branches, the chitter of insects and the cries of small arboreal mammals, as well as the birdsong; and from time to time a stronger gust of wind would make one of the branches of a cedar or a fir move against another and groan like a cello. It ~ Philip Pullman

When I describe for my far-away friends the Northwest's subtle shades of weather - from gloaming skies of 'high-gray' to 'low-gray' with violet streaks like the water's delicate aura - they wonder if my brain and body have, indeed, become water-logged. Yet still, I find myself praising the solace and privacy of fine, silver drizzle, the comforting cloaks of salt, mold, moss, and fog, the secretive shelter of cedar and clouds.

Whether it's in the Florida Keys, along the rocky Maine coast, within the Gulf of Mexico's warm curves, on the brave Outer Banks; or, for those who nestle near inland seas, such as the brine-steeped Great Salk Lake or the Midwest's Great Lakes - water is alive and in relationship with those of us who are blessed with such a world-shaping, yet abiding, intimate ally.

Every day I am moved by the double life of water - her power and her humility. But most of all, I am grateful for the partnership of this great body of inland sea. Living by water, I am never alone. Just as water has sculpted soil and canyon, it also molds my own living space, and every story I tell.

…Living by water restores my sense of balance and natural rhythm - the ebb and flow of high tides and low tides, so like the rise and fall of everyday life. Wind, water, waves are not simply a backdrop to my life, they are steady companions. And that is the grace, the gift of inviting nature to live inside my home. Like a Chambered Nautilus I spin out my ~ Brenda Peterson

By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book. ~ John Vaillant

The heart's affections are divided like the branches of the cedar tree; if the tree loses one strong branch; it will suffer but it does not die; it will pour all its vitality into the next branch so that it will grow and fill the empty place. ~ Khalil Gibran

The sense of it may come with watching a flock of cedar waxwings eating wild grapes in the top of the woods on a November afternoon. Everything they do is leisurely. They pick the grapes with a curious deliberation, comb their feathers, converse in high windy whistles. Now and then one will fly out and back in a sort of dancing flight full of whimsical flutters and turns. They are like farmers loafing in their own fields on Sunday. Though they have no Sundays, their days are full of sabbaths. ~ Wendell Berry

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy. ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899 ~ Hamlin Garland

The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted- Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre- stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary- her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart.
"Good grief," he'd said, shuddering. "I'm in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price. ~ Tracy Guzeman

But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others ... Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this, this is forever. ~ Irene Nemirovsky

It is easy enough to call men
from the edges of the earth.
It is easy enough to summon them to my feet
with a thought–
it is beautiful to see the tall panther
and the sleek deer-hounds
circle in the dark.
It is easy enough
to make cedar and white ash fumes
into palaces
and to cover the sea-caves
with ivory and onyx.

But I would give up
rock-fringes of coral
and the inmost chamber
of my island palace
and my own gifts
and the whole region
of my power and magic
for your glance. ~ H.D.

It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years; it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind. ~ Claes Oldenburg

I don't want you to be lonely," Cedar couldn't help saying. "Or hungry! You two always forget to go shopping till the cupboards are bare. I'll be right back." She grabbed some baskets and ran out of the house.
Old Mother Hubbard's Corner Market was always open early, so Cedar filled her baskets with Pinocchio's and Gepetto's favorite foods: bread, fruitcake, sardines, and humble pie. ~ Shannon Hale

Can't release her? The air caught in my chest, hardened, and refused to move. There was a good chance I wasn't making it out of this basement. The craziest thing I had ever done was ride some insane roller coaster at Cedar Point
and now that seemed like no big deal. I'd never been out of the country. Never played with my unborn niece.
Never made amends with my parents and sister since our continued fighting began almost eight months earlier. ~ Skye Callahan

Beautiful prairies, bordered by lofty hills sparsely scattered with timber, stretch around. The massive fronds of the Pinus Ponderosa replace the elegant leaflets of the Cedar, no longer found save rarely, perchance, in some deep dell moistened by a purling streamlet. Groves of aspen appear here and there. The Balsam Poplar shows itself at intervals only, along the streams. The white racemes of the Service-berry flower, and the chaste flowers of the Mock Orange, load the air with their fragrance. Every copse re-echoes with the low drumming of the ruffed Grouse; the trees resound with the muffled booming of the Cock of the Woods. The Pheasant shirrs past; the scrannel-pipe of the larger Crane -- ever a watchful sentinel -- grates harshly on the ear; and the shrill whistle of the Curlew as it soars aloft aides the general concert of the re-opined year. I speak still of Spring; for the impressions of that jocum season are ever the most vivid, and naturally recur with the greatest force in after years. -- Alexander Caulfield Anderson describing the new brigade trail between Lac la Hache and Kamloops. ~ Nancy Marguerite Anderson

The name Kyirong means "the village of happiness," and it really deserves the name. I shall never cease thinking of this place with yearning, and if I can choose where to pass the evening of my life, it will be in Kyirong. There I would build myself a house of red cedar wood and have one of the rushing mountain streams running through my garden, in which every kind of fruit would grow, for though its altitude is over 9,000 feet, Kyirong lies on the twenty-eighth parallel. When we arrived in January the temperature was just below freezing it seldom falls below -10 degrees Centigrade. The seasons correspond to the Alps, but the vegetation is subtropical. Once can go skiing the whole year round, and in the summer there is a row of 20,000-footers to climb. ~ Heinrich Harrer

In my stories, I wrote Malcolm as fire and gold and power, but here in my arms, Colin is cedar, silver, and summer air. ~ Jacqueline E. Smith

I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone. ~ Ned Hayes

But man, can she snore," Cedar smiled wistfully, "Do you think when I become a real girl I'll be able to snore, too? ~ Shannon Hale

The last time I saw you, you were wearing a white cotton shirt. You were standing upright with your wife on the lawn, in the sunlight, in front of the chateau, at my brother's wedding. You shared in the enthusiasm of the ceremony. For my part, I felt distanced from it. I didn't recognize my family in this mundane get-together. You didn't seem put off by the bourgeois ceremony, or by my brother's choice to have his love approved by third parties, even when these were distant third parties. You didn't have the sad and absent look you normally took on at public gatherings. You smiled, watching the people, a little tipsy from the wine and the sun, chatting on the large lawn between the white stone façade and the two-hundred-year-old cedar tree. I often wondered, after your death, if that smile, the last one I saw from you, was mocking, or if instead it was the kindly smile of someone who knew that soon he would no longer partake in earthly pleasures. You didn't regret leaving these behind, but neither were you averse to enjoying them a little longer. ~ Edouard Leve

Do you have a cat and is she sitting on your lap? Does her forehead smell like cedar trees and fresh sweet air? ~ Ruth Ozeki

As with many marriages, hers was based on essential misconceptions. In her case she had been misled into thinking Peter was reliable, perhaps because he was very careful always to put cedar shoe trees into his shoes and because he always wore the same cologne, a bay rum that could be had only from a shop in a London arcade. It turned out that he was not reliable, just finicky about small personal things like that. He still used a shaving brush and a straight razor. ~ Anna Quindlen

I have the cedar box safely tucked away in my bedroom closet, but its ghosts follow me about the house, distracting me from my work, interrupting my train of thought, pulling at my limbs and hair, whispering gossip in my ear. ~ Debra K. Rodgers

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

Songs of the Soul

On a dark night,
Inflamed by love-longing -
O exquisite risk! -
Undetected I slipped away.
My house, at last, grown still.
Secure in the darkness,
I climbed the secret ladder in disguise -
O exquisite risk! -
Concealed by the darkness.
My house, at last, grown still.

That sweet night: a secret.
Nobody saw me;
I did not see a thing.
No other light, no other guide
Than the one burning in my heart.

This light led the way
More clearly than the risen sun
To where he was waiting for me

- The one I knew so intimately -
In a place where no one could find us.

O night, that guided me!
O night, sweeter than sunrise!
O night, that joined lover with Beloved!
Lover transformed in Beloved!
Upon my blossoming breast,
Which I cultivated just for him,
He drifted into sleep,
And while I caressed him,
A cedar breeze touched the air.

Wind blew down from the tower,
Parting the locks of his hair.
With his gentle hand
He wounded my neck
And all my senses were suspended.

I lost myself. Forgot myself.
I lay my face against the Beloved's face.
Everything fell away and I left myself behind,
Abandoning my cares
Among the lilies, forgotten. ~ Juan De La Cruz

All the bees knew Sugar; they carried their feelings for her with them in their genes, they could sense her from more than half a mile away and would no sooner find her a threat than fly to the moon. But Elizabeth the First sensed Grady Parkes from half a mile away too, and her resulting hum was not one of blissful content. It was his smell, partly: an aftershave, with base notes of tobacco and cedar and a hint of bitter herbs, and his natural scent, which was too sour for Elizabeth the First's liking. She registered him as something to watch out for and passed this on through the realm. ~ Sarah-Kate Lynch

This is based on Sauce Américaine. A classic French sauce, its recipe calls for crushed lobster shells and meat crushed together.
And then there's its rich, woody fragrance. I know what it's from now! COGNAC!" *Cognac is a variety of brandy made in Cognac, France. There are many strict requirements the brandy must meet in order to be considered an official cognac.*
"I see! When brandy is aged, it absorbs the scents of the wooden casks in which it's stored! That's why this curry has such a strong bouquet of woody aromas... like sandalwood and cedar!"
"Yup! That's right, sir. By the way, for this dish I experimented a little...
... and used Napoleon-Grade Cognac, which has even richer scents.
There are several grades of cognac, depending on how long it is aged. Napoleon Grade is considered the highest. ~ Yuto Tsukuda

Love has made him surprise himself. He would never have believed it possible, but it's turned out that he is a man who can walk up to a closed door on a murky November day, wearing his one good suit, and knock without hesitation, waiting while the rain comes down around him, even though he's not wanted. He can do this and not think twice, just the way he can spend hours watching a wounded cedar beetle and weep over its rare beauty, as well as its agony.

Richard is certain that other species fall in love - primates, of course, and canines - but he has wondered about his beetles. There are people who would surely get a chuckle out of the mere suggestion, but in Richard's opinion it's pure vanity to presume that love exists only on our terms. A red leaf may be the universe for the tortoise beetle or the ladybird. A single touch the ecstasy of a lifetime. And so, here he is, in love despite everything. It is he, stupider than any beetle, and far more obstinate, who has traveled three thousand miles, even though he fully expects to be turned away. ~ Alice Hoffman

Let the mind help us to get there, after we have decided with our heart. Let the mind follow us, rather than lead us. ~ Jamie Cedar Rogers

This summer just got a whole hell of a lot more interesting.
"Welcome to Cedar Cove. ~ Melody Grace

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to. ~ Robert Rauschenberg

I told everyone you didn't go poof, but they just looked at me funny," said Maddie. Cedar shook her head. "You said, 'Tiny crow crowned unconfused with a cloud.' ~ Shannon Hale

These days people call entertainment capturing someone at their lowest moment and then posting it for the world to see. ~ Cedar Cove

This garden was peaceful and calm. Pink cherry blossoms and violet plum blossoms graced the sweeping trees. The petals fell like snowflakes, dancing and swirling until they touched the soft, verdant grass.
There was something familiar about this place.
Her eyes traveled down the flat stone steps. She knew this path, knew those stones. The third one from the bottom had a crack in the middle- from when she was five and the neighbor's boy convinced her there were worms on the other side of the stones. She'd hammered the stone in half, eager to catch a few worms to play with.
There weren't any, of course, but her mother had helped her find some dragonflies by the pond instead, and they'd spent an afternoon counting them in the garden.
Mulan smiled wistfully at the memory. This can't be the same garden. I'm in Diyu.
Yet no painter could have re-created what she saw more convincingly. Every detail was as she remembered. At the bottom of the stone-cobbled path was a pond with rose-flushed lilies, and a marble bench under the cherry tree. She used to play by the pond when she was a little girl, catching frogs and fireflies in wine jugs and feeding the fish leftover rice husks and sesame seeds until her mother scolded her.
And beyond the moon gate was-
Mulan's hand jumped to her mouth.
Home.
That smell of home- of Baba's incense from the family temple, sharp with amber and cedar; of noodles in Grandmother Fa's special pork broth; of jasmine ~ Elizabeth Lim

A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

I stood on the cedar deck for quite a spell, eye fuckin' the night sky, trying to stare down the stars. Blood had crusted on my neck, back, in my hair, down the legs of my jeans, to where i was as spattered as a thumbless beef packer. I kept on with my close study of the higher reaches, fantasizing that a comet was due to streak by trailing a message only for me, spelled out clearly and printed huge. Some epigram from far away out there that'd clue me in on how to feel after killing a man ~ Daniel Woodrell

The will is in the cedar box in our bedroom closet,' she said into his hair. Declan closed his eyes. He whispered, 'I hate him.'
'My dauntless Declan,' Aurora said, and then she slid softly to the floor. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean. Country is compact of all its past disasters and strokes of luck–of flood and drouth, of the caprices of glaciers and sea winds, of misuse and disuse and greed and ignorance and wisdom–and though you may doze away the cedar and coax back the bluestem and mesquite grass and side-oats grama, you're not going to manhandle it into anything entirely new. It's limited by what it has been, by what's happened to it. And a people, until that time when it's uprooted and scattered and so mixed with other peoples that it has in fact perished, is much the same in this as land. It inherits. ~ John Graves

The boy and the girl had once dreamed of ships, long ago, before they'd ever seen the True Sea. They were the vessels of stories, magic ships with masts hewn from sweet cedar and sails spun by maidens from thread of pure gold. Their crews were white mice who sang songs and scrubbed the decks with their pink tails. ~ Leigh Bardugo

MY PAJAMAS ARE soaked with sweat when I jolt awake and there is a third person in my bedroom. A man I've never seen before. I begin screaming like an injured monkey.

"Calm down," Josh says into my ear. I scramble into his lap and press my face into his collar bone, huffing his cedar scent so hard I probably suck out his ghost. I'm about to be taken to a scary medical facility, away from the safety of my bed and these arms.

"Don't let them, Josh! I'll get better!"

"I'm a doctor, Lucy. How long and what symptoms?" The man puts on some gloves. ~ Sally Thorne

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. ~ Annie Dillard

I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens ... air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely. ~ Richard Nelson

Seattle, the mild green queen: wet and willing, cedar-scented, and crowned with slough grass, her toadstool scepter tilted toward Asia, her face turned ever upward in the rain; the sovereign who washes her hands more persistently than the most fastidious proctologist. ~ Tom Robbins

Elmcrest CC, in Cedar Rapids, is where it all started when I was growing up. The tree-lined course has a very demanding layout that requires you to be accurate off the tee and avoid a number of well-placed water hazards on some of the holes. ~ Zach Johnson

The rituals surrounding vacations among Manhattan's wealthiest and best-connected citizens are strange and specific. By vacations I don't mean country houses, which are part of the regular ebb and flow of life and which are frequently subjects for complaint - The kids never want to go! The caretaker missed the roof leak! The pipes froze! - as though having a six-thousand-square-foot, cedar-shingled cottage on five acres overlooking the ocean is nothing more or less than a constant test of character. ~ Anna Quindlen

A voice in my head told me I acted like a spoiled brat, but I duct taped that sucker shut. I didn't make it far, though. The seductive cedar smell enveloped me as Lux hoisted me off the ground, threw me over his shoulder and carried me back to the group. ~ Isabelle Crusoe

I can pass days
Stretch'd in the shade of those old cedar trees,
Watching the sunshine like a blessing fall,
The breeze like music wandering o'er the boughs,
Each tree a natural harp,
each different leaf
A different note, blent in one vast thanksgiving. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Jack took me to the Christmas Dance.
It snowed the day of the dance, making the Meier Farmhouse and Dance Hall look like something out of a painting, the lights on the roof glowing under sheets of white. And when Jack led me onto the dance floor and grasped one of my hands and tugged it up behind his neck, then placed his arm around my back, soft and low, I thought life couldn't get better.
He pulled me close against him, our hands clasped next to his chest.The cedar from the farmhouse mingled with Jack's aftershave,making a sweet, rustic scent.
"Becks,remember the first time we met?" he asked,his lips grazing my ear.
Of course I remembered. The events of that day were permanently etched into my brain. "You mean,the time you nearly beheaded me with a baseball?"
"I had to do something to get the new girl's attention."
"A simple 'hello' would have worked."
He pulled me in tighter, as if that were possible. "Why did we wait so long to do this?"
"Um, because you were making your way through the entire cheerleading squad?"
He looked at me for a few moments, then shook his head and leaned in to brush his lips along my shoulder.
I closed my eyes. If this was what I could expect for the rest of my high school years,I never wanted to graduate.
Ever. ~ Brodi Ashton

She warned him that, if he got killed, she should cut down the great cedar at the south-west corner of Groby. It kept all the light out of the principal drawing-room and the bedrooms above it ... He winced: he certainly winced at that. She regretted that she had said it. It was along other lines that she desired to make him wince. ~ Ford Madox Ford

He smells the same - peppermint and cedar and a hint of old books. ~ Cath Crowley

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth. ~ Leonard E. Read

And in that moment with the warmth of the sun and coolness of the rock and the mountains and cedar all around her, she knew she would be okay with whatever happened to her. And with that thought, never before had she felt so free. ~ Diane Les Becquets

Vic just laughed at that, didn't bother to tell him she had pulled his cell phone apart and shoved it in the garbage the day before. He took her in his arms, held her in his bearish embrace. He was a big man, glum about being overweight, but he smelled better than any guy she had ever met. His chest smelled of cedar and motor oil and the outdoors. He smelled like responsibility. For a moment, being held by him, she remembered what it had been like to be happy. ~ Joe Hill

Cedar groaned and picked up her spoon with her bright blue fingers. While the rest of her was the fiery brown of the cedar wood she'd been carved from, her fingers were covered in blue paint up to her knuckles. You could tell a lot about Cedar's current art projects by the color of her fingers. She didn't mind getting messy. She just sanded the paint off. ~ Shannon Hale

Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in his beauty deigns to walk. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks....

The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world.

I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly.

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag? ~ Annie Dillard

Ancient tradition has a saying: 'The infinitely distant is the return.' Among the maxims of Zen that point in the same direction is the statement that the 'great revelation,' acquired through a series of mental and spiritual crises, consists in the recognition that 'no one and nothing 'extraordinary' exists in the beyond'; only the real exists. Reality is, however, lived in a state in which 'there is no subject of the experience nor any object that is experienced,' and under the sign of a type of absolute presence, 'the immanent making itself transcendent and the transcendent immanent.' The teaching is that at the point at which one seeks the Way, one finds oneself further from it, the same being valid for the perfection and 'realization' of the self. The cedar in the courtyard, a cloud casting its shadow on the hills, falling rain, a flower in bloom, the monotonous sound of waves: all these 'natural' and banal facts can suggest absolute illumination, the satori. As mere facts they are without meaning, finality, or intention, but as such they have an absolute meaning. Reality appears this way, in the pure state of 'things being as they are.' The moral counterpart is indicated in sayings such as: 'The pure and immaculate ascetic does not enter nirvana, and the monk who breaks the rules does not go to hell,' or: 'You have no liberation to seek from bonds, because you have never been bound. ~ Julius Evola

Secondly, it is the very nature of spiritual life to grow. Wherever they principle of this life is to be found, it can be no different for it must grow. "But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day" (Prov. 4:18); "The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger" (Job 17:9). This refers to the children of GOd, who are compared to palm and cedar trees (Psa. 92:12). As natural as it is for children and trees to grow, so natural is growth for the regenerated children of God.

Thirdly, the growth of His children is the goal and objective God has in view by administering the means of grace to them. "And He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints...that we henceforth be no more children...but speaking the truth in love, may grow up into Him in all things, which is the Head" (Eph. 4:11-15). This is also to be observed in 1 Peter 2:2: "as newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby, " God will reach His goal and His word will not return to Him void; thus God's children will grow in grace.

Fourthly, is is the duty to which God's children are continually exhorted, and their activity is to consist in a striving for growth. That it is their duty is to be observed in the following passages: "But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord ~ Wilhemus à Brakel

Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made.
Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I'm not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men…but 'you mustn't be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall. ~ Paul Bogard

Aah, woodpecker! Help!" Cedar shouted. "Woodpecker! Girl made of wood! Not a good combo!" "I'll help you!" Hunter cried. "Here we go," Cupid said, rubbing her hands together. "It's shirt-ripping time." Sure enough, Hunter ripped off his shirt and posed. Invisible horns played a heroic fanfare. Hunter lifted his ax and chased the woodpecker. Which was chasing Cedar. "Aah, ax!" Cedar said, still running. "A woodpecker! And an ax! Aah! ~ Shannon Hale

The world was incomprehensibly intricate, and yet this forest made a simple sense in her heart that she felt nowhere else.
[S]he wanted only her own strawberry farm, the fragrance of the fields and the cedar trees, and to live simply in this place forever.
[S]he had fallen into loving him long before she knew herself, though it occurred to her now that she might never know herself, that perhaps no one ever does, that such a thing might not be possible.
[Y]ou should learn to say nothing that will cause you regret. You should not say what is not in your heart
or what is only in your heart for a moment. But you know this
silence is better. ~ David Guterson

As the sun shines both on the cedar and the smallest flower, so the Divine sun illumines each soul. ~ Therese Of Lisieux

We hope we have it contained. So far, it looks as though Afton, Wyoming, and Cedar City and Kanab in Utah are the only hot spots. ~ Marc Cameron

Miss Rook!" His chocolate brown eyes brightened as he saw me, and he crossed the room at once to sweep me into a warm embrace. I felt his chest rise and fall. I could hear his heartbeat. He smelled like cedar.

"That will suffice," Jackaby grumbled loudly from behind me. "Yes, yes. You are young and your love is a hot biscuit and other abysmally romantic metaphors, I'm sure. You do recall that you saw each other yesterday?"

Charlie pulled away but paused to brush a hand gently across my neck. His smile was tired but gratified. I straightened and tried to will the flush out of my cheeks. "Normal people do occasionally express fondness for one another."

"Yes, fine. I'm familiar with the concept," he groused. "It's the bubbly auras and fluttering eyelashes that really test one's limits."

"My eyelashes do not flutter," I said.

"Who said I was talking about your eyelashes? Charlie has eyelashes."

"I apologize, Mr. Jackaby, for any undue fluttering on my part," Charlie said diplomatically. ~ William Ritter

To sit in solitude, to think in solitude with only the music of the stream and the cedar to break the flow of silence, there lies the value of wilderness. ~ John Muir

My records don't go platinum or gold. I think they go cedar. ~ Dave Sitek

My doors enter from the sidestreet,
my windows painted basement black,
my mouth kisses the blues harp,
my heart hides like notes
locked in a cedar chest. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Seaside gusts of wind,
And a house in which we don't live,
And the shadow of a cherished cedar
In front of a forbidden window ...
Perhaps there is someone in this world
To whom I could send all these lines. Well then!
Let the lips smile bitterly
And a tremor touch the heart again. ~ Anna Akhmatova

12. The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. 13. Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. 14. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing; 15. To shew that the Lord is upright: he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him. ~ Anonymous

Kahlo is Mezcal with chilli
Dried citrus peels
Red pepper
Cedar
And cigar leaf.
Woody notes
And heat sneaking up fast. ~ Karl Wiggins

The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof'd garret and harks to the musical rain, ~ Walt Whitman

The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tenderer kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet. Streaming files of wild ducks began to make their appearance high in the air; the back of the squirrel might be heard from the groves of beech and hickory-nuts, and the pensive whistle of the quail at intervals from the neighboring stubble field. The small birds were taking their farewell banquets. In the fullness of their revelry, they fluttered, chirping and frolicking from bush to bush, and tree to tree, capricious from the very profusion and variety around them. There was the honest cock robin, the favorite game of stripling sportsmen, with its loud querulous note; and the twittering blackbirds flying in sable clouds; and the golden-winged woodpecker with his crimson crest, his broad black gorget, and splendid plumage; and the cedar bird, with its red-tipt wings and yellow-tipt tail and its little monteiro cap of feathers; and the blue jay, that nosy coxcomb, in his gay light blue coat and white underclothes, screaming and chattering, nodding and bobbing and bowing, and pretending to be on good terms with every songster of the grove. ~ Washington Irving

His scent is intensified in here perfectly, baked by summer, preserved by snow, sealed and pressurized inside glass and metal. I inhale like a professional perfumer. Top notes of mint, bitter coffee, and cotton. Mid notes of black pepper and pine. Base notes of leather and cedar. Luxurious as cashmere. If this is what his car smells like, imagine his bed. Good idea. Imagine his bed. He ~ Sally Thorne

Now, any other man in Cedar Dell would catch hell for wearing a pink shirt. Not Nicholas Sutherland. He'd still ooze masculinity if he wore pink sneakers and socks with purple pom-poms. ~ Emily March

There was not a person alive who knew about Cedar ~ K.K. Hendin