Herons Quotes

O, Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you. Amen.
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When we meet someone and fall in love, we have a sense that the whole universe is on our side. I saw this happen today as the sun went down. And yet if something goes wrong, there is nothing left! No herons, no distant music, not even the taste of his lips. How is it possible for the beauty that was there only minutes before to vanish so quickly?
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Life moves very fast. It rushes us from heaven to hell in a matter of seconds.
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I smile and say nothing,
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If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself.
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Everything is an illusion - and that applies to material as well as spiritual things.
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She had spent a lot of her life saying 'no' to things to which she would have liked to say 'yes',
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My dear, it's better to be unhappy with a rich man than happy with a poor man, and over there you'll have far more chance of becoming an unhappy rich woman.
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Love isn't that important. I didn't love your father at first, but money buys everything, even true love.
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Hail Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who turn to you. Amen.
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She would never find what she was looking for if she couldn't express herself.
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At the moment, I'm far too lonely to think about love, but I have to believe that it will happen, that I will find a job and that I am here because I chos ~ Paulo Coelho

Mount Fuji was mostly invisible n the summer, but on clear days she could see its grand and graceful silhouette dominating the northern sky. White herons gathered in the river upstream from laundry suds pouring out of a city grate, and hydrangeas bloomed on the banks, dropping blue and lavender petals over soda cans and bento cartons littered beside the asphalt. ~ Sara Backer

Like the air-invested heron, great persons should conduct themselves; and the higher they be, the less they should show. ~ Philip Sidney

It is never too late to go quietly to our lakes, rivers, oceans, even our small streams, and say to the sea gulls, the great blue herons, the bald eagles, the salmon, that we are sorry. ~ Brenda Peterson

[I have] a heavenly vase full of autumn leaves today. They look so beautiful. How much closer to God can one get? And a beautiful blue heron flew over the brook. Nature can make me cry faster than anything. ~ Lotte Lenya

I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp, - tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

What birds can have their bills more peculiarly formed than the ibis, the spoonbill, and the heron? ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

The Heron

Every morning at dawn the heron comes winging across the woods to rob my lake of its trout. It is not a very large lake, and there are not very many trout; soon there will be none at all if the heron continues to breakfast in this fashion. I would not grudge him a reasonable meal occasionally, but he is an indiscriminate and extravagant fisherman who pulls out trout too large for him to swallow and strews them mangled on the bank. The good fisherman, the honest angler, returns his smaller catch to the water; the heron acts contrariwise, failing to return those which are too big to be of any use to him. The other day he was seen struggling with one half way down his throat; and in spite of my liking for herons, especially when they frequent other people's lakes and streams, I confess I wish it had choked him. ~ Vita Sackville-West

It was a relief to see his father, who'd always been an unfailing source of reassurance and comfort. They clasped hands in a firm shake, and used their free arms to pull close for a moment. Such demonstrations of affection weren't common among fathers and sons of their rank, but then, they'd never been a conventional family.
After a few hearty thumps on the back, Sebastian drew back and glanced over him with the attentive concern that hearkened to Gabriel's earliest memories. Not missing the traces of weariness on his face, his father lightly tousled his hair the way he had when he was a boy. "You haven't been sleeping."
"I went carousing with friends for most of last night," Gabriel admitted. "It ended when we were all too drunk to see a hole through a ladder."
Sebastian grinned and removed his coat, tossing the exquisitely tailored garment to a nearby chair. "Reveling in the waning days of bachelorhood, are we?"
"It would be more accurate to say I'm thrashing like a drowning rat."
"Same thing." Sebastian unfastened his cuffs and began to roll up his shirtsleeves. An active life at Heron's Point, the family estate in Sussex, had kept him as fit and limber as a man half his age. Frequent exposure to the sunlight had gilded his hair and darkened his complexion, making his pale blue eyes startling in their brightness.
While other men of his generation had become staid and settled, the duke was more vigorous than ever, in part because his youngest s ~ Lisa Kleypas

If development proceeds at its present pace, there will come a day in the lifetime of my students when people will not understand why this ever was called the Pajaro Valley. May it go in the public record that some of the damage was done when the good liberals, Todd, Oscar, Parr, and Lowell, held majority control of the city council.
-Frank Bardacke (April, 1991).
Good Liberals and Great Blue Herons ~ Frank Bardacke

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world. ~ Timothy Egan

I can put my whole fist in my mouth! Wanna see? ~ Karen Smith

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break.

Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely. ~ Rebecca Solnit

A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river. ~ John Steinbeck

If I had not immersed myself in books, in stories and legends, in newspapers, in reports, if everything communicable had not grown up in me, I should have been a nonentity, a collection of uncomprehended events. (And that might have been a good thing, then I should have thought of something new.) That I can see, that I can hear, are things I do not deserve; but my feelings, those I truly deserve, these herons over white beaches, these wanderers by night, the hungry vagabonds that take my heart as their highroad. I wish I could call out to all those who believe in their unique brains and the hard currency of their thoughts: be of good faith! But these coins which you clink together have been withdrawn from circulation, only you don't know it yet....Admit that when you really pay, with your lives, you do so only beyond the barrier, when you have said farewell to everything that is so dear to you--to landing-places, flying-bases, and only from there do you embark on your own path and your journey from imagined stop to imagined stop, travellers who must not be concerned with arriving. ~ Ingeborg Bachmann

Nine herons stand like flowers in the canal beside the coking plant. ~ Anthony Doerr

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green. ~ Geoff Dyer

A water snake glided smoothly up the pool, twisting its periscope head from side to side; and it swam the length of the pool and came to the legs of a motionless heron that stood in the shadows. A silent head and beak lanced down and plucked it out by the head, and the beak swallowed the little snake while its tail waved frantically. ~ John Steinbeck

We look up, if only to see if we're likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up by the twigwork of oaks or maples, painted in rainbows, or just primed in the pale gray of my '52 Ford. If we are truthful, the sky is never neutral. ~ Robert Michael Pyle

As Emma watched, Jace offered Kit a slim silver dagger with a design of herons in flight etched on the handle. Kit took it carefully, nodding his head. ~ Cassandra Clare

Kathleen, Lady Trenear, was a petite woman with red hair, tip-tilted eyes and high cheekbones. Phoebe had come to like her very much during the week the Ravenels had stayed at Heron's Point. Kathleen was cheerful and engaging, albeit a bit horse mad, since both her parents had been in the business of breeding and training Arabians. Phoebe liked horses, but she didn't know nearly enough about them to carry on a detailed conversation. Fortunately, Kathleen was the mother of an infant son who was close to Stephen's age, and that had provided ample ground for conversation. ~ Lisa Kleypas

She turns her head, throws the damn thing with a strong flick, and it lands in the side of a wooden heron's head. Holy shit. I can't believe it. Lust bashes me like a sledgehammer, and I suddenly imagine her naked.
"Dude!" Blake yells, snapping me back to reality.
Anna stares down at me like she's conquered me. "You showed your colors!"
"Did not," I reply quickly. But even as I say it, I think I bleedin' well might've. ~ Wendy Higgins

Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen's Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. Philip's, lawyers moving out of their offices to lunch on Broad Street, the darkness of reveille on cold winter mornings, regattas, the flash of bagpipers' tartans passing in review, blue herons on the marshes, the pressure of the chinstrap on my shako, brotherhood, shad roe at Henry's, camellias floating above water in a porcelain bowl, the scowl of Mark Santoro, and brotherhood again. ~ Pat Conroy

Each course was more delectable than the last. Phoebe would have thought nothing could have surpassed the efforts of the French cook at Heron's Point, but this was some of the most delicious fare she'd ever had. Her bread plate was frequently replenished with piping-hot milk rolls and doughy slivers of stottie cake, served with thick curls of salted butter. The footmen brought out perfectly broiled game hens, the skin crisp and delicately heat-blistered... fried veal cutlets puddled in cognac sauce... slices of vegetable terrine studded with tiny boiled quail eggs. Brilliantly colorful salads were topped with dried flakes of smoked ham or paper-thin slices of pungent black truffle. Roasted joints of beef and lamb were presented and carved beside the table, the tender meat sliced thinly and served with drippings thickened into gravy. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The queen was settling on the edge of the bed, ungainly with hesitation and at the same time exquisite in her grace, like a heron landing in a treetop. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

The Herons! The Herons!
The mighty, fighting Herons!
No other Brotherband you'll see
Is even half as darin'

We sailed away from Hallasholm, we had to be real quick,
For Kloof had eaten Erak's ax and chewed his walking stick.

We sailed across the Stormwite and we struck a mighty storm.
We had to wear our woolly caps to keep us nice and warm.

We sailed around Cape Shelter and then south to Araluen.
We called upon the people there to find out what was doin'.

We chased an evil slaver to the market of Socorro.
"We can't rescue them tonight," said Hal. "We'll get them out tomorrow."
Lydia and the Ranger burned the market to the ground.
The rest of us, we freed the slaves then headed out of town.

The Herons! The Herons!
The mighty, fighting Herons!
No other Brotherband you'll see
Is even half as darin'

The slave master named Mahmel was a nasty kind of thug,
So Stiggy dropped a rock and crushed him like a bug.

We sailed back to Cresthaven and we set the captives free.
King Duncan said, "Well done, my lads, you're just the boys for me.
My Ranger Gilan has to go hunt down some assassins
So go along with him and give these wicked types a thrashin'."

A pirate galley barred our way. We quickly overtook 'em.
And Ingvar led the charge aboard to stab and chop and hook 'em.

We beat the Tualaghi and the Scorpions ~ John Flanagan

If there is a place in heaven for Labrador Retrievers (and I trust there is or I won't go) it'll have to have a brook right smack in the middle - a brook with little thin shoals for wading and splashing; a brook with deep, still pools where they can throw themselves headlong from the bank; a brook with lots of small sticks floating that can be retrieved back to shore where they belong; a brook with muskrats and muskrat holes; a brook with green herons and wood ducks; a brook that is never twice the same with surprises that run and swim and fly; a brook that is cold enough to make the man with the dog run like the devil away from his shaking; a brook with a fine spot to get muddy and a sunny spot or two to get dry. ~ Gene Hill

The Challons' cook and kitchen staff had outdone themselves with a variety of dishes featuring spring vegetables and local fish and game. Although the cook back home at Eversby Priory was excellent, the food at Heron's Point was a cut above. There were colorful vegetables cut into tiny julienne strips, tender artichoke hearts roasted with butter, steaming crayfish in a sauce of white burgundy and truffles, and delicate filets of sole coated with crisp breadcrumbs. Pheasant covered with strips of boiled potatoes that had been whipped with cream and butter into savory melting fluff. Beef roasts with peppery crackled hides were brought out on massive platters, along with golden-crusted miniature game pies, and macaroni baked with Gruyère cheese in clever little tart dishes. ~ Lisa Kleypas