Lowlands Quotes

Stirling, like a huge brooch, clasps Highlands and Lowlands together. ~ Alexander Smith

Here, if nowhere else in the land, the sense of satiety is unknown; and it is to this mental tonic, even more than to the bracing air of the heights, that we owe the unwearied spirit which nerves us to walk more leagues upon the mountains than we could walk miles upon the plain. For in the lowlands we walk with the body only; in the highlands we walk with the mind ~ Henry Stephens Salt

The lowlands aren't so different from here," said Britta. "Just bigger and ... " "A lot bigger," said Frid. "It's ~ Shannon Hale

With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims,
And your match-book songs and your gypsy hymns,
Who among them would try to impress you?
-Bob Dylan, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" (1966) ~ Bob Dylan

Take my advice - if you expect no kindness, then you won't be disappointed when none is given; but, Lord, are you all the more grateful for it when it is!" -From "In the Lowlands ~ Gary A. Braunbeck

Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire. ~ Alain De Botton

The earliest dated monument yet discovered in Tikal and all of the Maya lowlands, Stela 29, has a Long Count date of 8.12.14.13.15, which translates to A.D. 292. ~ David Roberts

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society ... ~ John Muir

Bilbo had escaped the goblins, but he did not know where he was. He had lost hood, cloak, food, pony, his buttons and his friends. He wandered on and on, till the sun began to sink westwards - behind the mountains. Their shadows fell across Bilbo's path, and he looked back. Then he looked forward and could see before him only ridges and slopes falling towards lowlands and plains glimpsed occasionally between the trees. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59] ~ Siri Hustvedt

After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone- the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom. In the night, the stars convened, and the vast ghost of Machhapuchare radiated light, although there was no moon. ~ Peter Matthiessen

He taught me to read and write. I learned my lessons with my elder children. He has always kept school in our house, every night of his life. Our children supposed it was for them; I knew it was quite as much for me. While I sat at knitting or sewing, I spelled over the words he gave out. I know nothing of my ancestors, save that they came from the lowlands of Holland, down where there were cities, schools, and business. They were well educated, but they would not take the trouble to teach their children. As I have spoken to you, my husband taught me. All I know I learn from ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

The attempt to separate Lowland from Highland Scotland ignores the extent to which Lowland Scots are the descendants of Highlanders, and how many Lowland Scots, like Nan Shepherd, made the country's mountains the focus of their spiritual aspirations. 'Highlandism' is not simply the ersatz adoption of a stereotypical version of Scottish culture which is entirely unconnected with the reality of modern Scottish life: the Highlands are both the geographical and the historical backdrop with which 'Lowland' Scottish culture interacts. ~ Cairns Craig

Greenery

Juniper, Oracle Oak and Hop Tree,
California Buckeye, and Elderberry.
Pacific Dogwood and the pale green Eucalyptus,
Quaking Aspen and Flannelbush.

raw, sprouting, lush
green love
green with envy
green with youth
green with early spring

olive, emerald, avocado,
greenlight
ready, set, GO!
greenhouse, greenbelts, ocean kelp,
cucumber, lizard, lime and forest green,
spruce, teal, and putting green.

green-eyed, verdant, grassy, immature
green and leafy
green half-formed
tender, pleasant, alluring
temperate
freshly sawed
vigorous
not ripe
yet
promising

greenbriar, greenbug, green dragon
greenshanks running along the ocean's edge
greenlings swimming
greenlets singing
greengage plums
green thumbs
greenhorns
and greenflies-
how on earth
amid sage swells
kelly hillsides
and swirls of firs
did I ever find
that green of
hers?

holly, drake, and brewster green,
pistachio, shamrock, serpentine
terre verde, Brunswick, tourmaline,
lotus, jade, and spinach green:
start to finish
lowlands to highs
no field, no forest, no leaf, no blade
can catch the light or trap the shade;
no earthly tones will ever rise
to match the green
enchantment
of her eyes. ~ Nancy Boutilier

People living on the plains do not wonder what is happening on the top of the high mountain, but a person who climbs to the top of the high mountain wonders what is going on in the lowlands! Why? Because there is crowd and rush, ignorance and shouting, war and all kinds of stupidity down there! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love. So universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best. ~ John Muir

Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization. Few ~ Chris Highland

Life is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops. ~ Phillips Brooks

An army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness. ~ Sun Tzu

Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum ~ Robert M. Pirsig

[Bloodraven] fingered the cloth, marveling at the tightness of the weave. The things that the men of the lowlands were capable of never ceased to amaze him. Those few stolen items that trickled up to the northern tribes were bartered at high prices, for even the mountain humans who worked in fear of their lives for the tribes, did not create such clever things. But then again, perhaps they were capable, but chose not to share with the race that had hunted and oppressed them for generations. Understandable. If he were in the same position he'd have offered nothing more than the simplest tasks demanded of him. Not for the first time he considered the tribal chieftains of old fools for choosing to make war with the humans instead of ally with them. ~ P.L. Nunn

As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island's coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copan's inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster-reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels. ~ Jared Diamond

Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend –
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways –
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things –
Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding l ~ Thomas Hardy

[ ... ] little Belgium once again busy at what she does best, tamely offering her battlefield-ready lowlands to boots, hooves, iron wheels, waiting to be first to go under before a future no one in Europe has the clairvoyance to imagine as anything more than an exercise for clerks. ~ Thomas Pynchon

It is a comfort to me to know that above the steam and filth of human lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity, very small in number (for everything outstanding is by its nature rare): one belongs to it, not because one is more talented or more virtuous or more heroic or more loving than the men below, but - because one is colder, brighter, more far-seeing, more solitary; because one endures, prefers, demands solitude as happiness. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Slave ships landed more than 1.5 million African captives on British Caribbean islands (primarily Jamaica and Barbados) by the late 1700s and had brought more than 2 million to Brazil. In North America, however, the numbers of the enslaved grew, except in the most malarial lowlands of the Carolina rice country. By 1775, 500,000 of the thirteen colonies' 2.5 million inhabitants were slaves, about the same as the number of slaves then alive in the British Caribbean colonies. Slave labor was crucial to the North American colonies. Tobacco shipments from the ~ Edward E. Baptist