Maple Leaves Quotes

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place. ~ Susan Vreeland

There were so many miracles at work: that a blossom might become a peach, that a bee could make honey in its thorax, that rain might someday fall. I thought then about the seasons changing, and in the gray of night I could almost will myself to see the azure sky, the gold of the maple leaves, the crimson of the ripe apples, the hoarfrost on the grass. ~ Jane Hamilton

Tell me again about the girl whose hands
have no color. Whose hands are completely
white. This time make them damned, or
untouched, or have her open a red umbrella
or point at some maple leaves and damned
near cry. Those hands. As freakish goes,
I wish I had a tail. Maybe then you'd know
how much I like you. It shakes me through,
damn through. It shakes me. When she carries
a peacock feather. When she touches her neck
or thighs. You're a person. It's not so bad.
You have hands. You are a person with hands
to hold things. Things you like. Tremendous
things. Tell me what you will hold today. I
know there is room for everything. There is no
need to be ceremonious. Tell what gets let go. ~ Rebecca Wadlinger

I feel you're far away," the man might say. He is observing you, calculating, forming equations he may take to a representative of the patriarchy, such as a doctor, a lawyer, or military official. He is considering physical incarceration and/or biochemical imprisonments such as occur with antidepressants. He is dangerous.
This is a juncture where you may smile. This is optional. You might allow your lips to form the ambiguous seductive shape of slow regret. Or let your mouth fill with too much night, incinerated maple leaves and fox teeth. What you mean is, not yet. ~ Kate Braverman

The leaves on our little maple, all taken together, weigh thirty-five pounds. Every ounce therein must be pulled from the air or mined from the soil - and quickly - over the course of a few short months. From the atmosphere, a plant gains carbon dioxide, which it will make into sugar and pith. Thirty-five pounds of maple leaves may not taste sweet to you and me, but they actually contain enough sucrose to make three pecan pies, which is the sweetest thing that I can think of right now. The pithy skeleton within the leaves contains enough cellulose to make almost three hundred sheets of paper, which is about the number that I used to print out the manuscript for this book. Our ~ Hope Jahren

Autumn in the country advances in a predictable path, taking its place among the unyielding rhythms of the passing seasons. It follows the summer harvest, ushering in cooler nights, and shorter days, enveloping all of Lanark County in a spectacular riot of colour. Brilliant hues of yellow, orange and red exclaim, in no uncertain terms, that these are the trees where maple syrup legends are born. ~ Arlene Stafford-Wilson

Maple leaves in autumn do not suddenly transform into stained glass pendants ... in order to satisfy a human longing for beauty. Their scarlet, ochre, and golden colors emerge as chlorophyll production shuts down, in preparation for sacrificing the leaves that are vulnerable to winter cold, and ensuring the survival of the tree. But the tree survives, WHILE our vision is ravished. The peacock's display attracts a hen, AND it nourishes the human eye. The flower's fragrance entices a pollinator, BUT IT ALSO intoxicates the gardener. In that "while," in that "and," in that "but it also," we find the giftedness of life. ~ Terryl L. Givens

Fall arrived with its honey light and cool evenings, and the maple leaves brightened to match the reds and yellow of ripe apples. It was time to put away the bounty of the warm months for fortitude during the cold ones, as humans had done for centuries. ~ Melissa Coleman

Why do you weep, child? We of the Floating World live only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of cherry blossoms and snow and maple leaves, the calling of a cricket, the beauty of the moon, waning and growing and being reborn, singing our songs and drinking cha and saké, knowing perfumes and the touch of silks, caressing for pleasure, and drifting, always drifting. Listen, child: never sad, always drifting as a lily on the current in the stream of life. How lucky you are, Kiku-chan, you're a Princess of Ukiyo, the Floating World, drift, live for the moment. . . . ~ James Clavell

We drove ten miles in silence, the country road canopied in electric green. I pressed my head against the glass to watch the new maple leaves curling in the breeze. Every few turns offered a tempting glimpse of Lake Champlain's choppy waters. ~ Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. ~ Edith Wharton

It is a poor observance of our first century as a nation if we run up a flag of surrender with three dying maple leaves on it. ~ Charlotte Whitton

Hate is an infection, a disease, that eats away at the good and leaves only evil. ~ R. Francis D'Oliveira

There is so much to learn from leaves who graciously dance in thunder, rain and storm, in heat and merciless cold, dance to a song of their own indifferent that in time they will curl and die for it is not for them to know but only to dance and be happy. ~ Meenakshi Iyer

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

But you can't plead with autumn. No. The midnight wind stalked through the woods, hooted to frighten you, swept everything away for the approaching winter, whirled the leaves. ("The North") ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Self-consciousness, however, does hinder the experience of the present. It is the one instrument that unplugs all the rest. So long as I lose myself in a tree, say, I can scent its leafy breath or estimate its board feet of lumber, I can draw its fruits or boil tea on its branches, and the tree stays tree. But the second I become aware of myself at any of these activities
looking over my own shoulder, as it were
the tree vanishes, uprooted from the spot and flung out of sight as if it had never grown. And time, which had flowed down into the tree bearing new revelations like floating leaves at ever moment, ceases. It dams, stills, stagnates. (Harper Perennial Edition 82) ~ Annie Dillard

Computers are one of the products in the USA that appear to be unregulated by the government which leaves consumers unprotected from flawed devices. ~ Steven Magee

Heaven preserve us! what a hotch-potch!" cried Hubert. "Is that what they are doing nowadays? I very seldom read a novel, but when I glance into one, I'm sure to find some such stuff as that! Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people's imagination. Common life - I don't say it's a vision of bliss, but it's better than that! Their stories are like the underside of a carpet, - nothing but the stringy grain of the tissue - a muddle of figures without shape and flowers without color. When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement. Your clergyman here with his Romish sweetheart must be a very pretty fellow. Why didn't he marry her first and convert her afterwards? Isn't a clergyman after all, before all, a man? I ~ Henry James

Death is for a long time. Those of shallow thought say that it is forever. There is, at least, a long night of it. There is the forgetfulness and the loss of identity. The spirit, even as the body, is unstrung and burst and scattered. One goes down to death, and it leaves a mark on one forever. ~ R.A. Lafferty

Murali observed that the lazy breath of air that half-tried to wake up the leaves of the giant banyan tree was no less significant than a comet blazing across the skies. It was the same great cosmic intent that drove both. Apart ~ Manu Bhattathiri

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child's drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn't know. ~ Tana French

To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;
Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;
The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.
It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.
- A poem called DIGGING. ~ Edward Thomas

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find. ~ Otto Penzler

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel. ~ Hilary Mantel

I never want to be apart from you," he said. "I'm going to buy an island and take you there. A ship will come once a month with supplies. The rest of the time it will be just the two of us, wearing leaves and eating exotic fruit and making love on the beach ... "
You'd start a produce export business and organize a local economy within a month," she said flatly.
Harry groaned as he recognized the truth of it. "God. Why do you tolerate me?"
Poppy grinned and slid her arms around his neck. "I like the side benefits," she told him. "And really, it's only fair since you tolerate me. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Flowers bloomed without glimpsing your smile in spring, leaves have fallen in autumn chiming in with the gloom, the chill of winter has gone and now is the first light of summer without you near but in our hearts will forever hold you dear ... Elizabeth's Shorter Poems ~ Elizabeth E. Castillo

One by one, like leaves from a tree, / All my faiths have forsaken me. ~ Sara Teasdale

When God walks, he leaves a trail of stardust in his wake.
When I walk, I have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so that I can find my way home. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

. . . most of the ones who come when the call goes out won't have ever fought a war before. They'll come because they think it's honorable, or because they want to be heroes. They'll show up in their pretty armor, and they'll litter the battlefield like leaves. ~ Seanan McGuire

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europehas endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form ... ~ Marcel Proust

Risotto with Seafood 2 bay leaves 1 carrot, chopped 2 small onions: 1 chopped, 1 minced 3 (1-pound) lobsters 1/3 cup olive oil 3 tablespoons tomato paste 2 cups Arborio rice 1½ cups white wine (dry) 2 tablespoons butter 2 pounds medium shrimp, peeled 1 pound scallops Fill pot with water sufficient to cover 3 lobsters. Add bay leaves, carrot, chopped onion. Bring to a boil, add lobsters, and cook 10 minutes. Reserve water the lobsters were cooked in. Cool lobsters and remove meat. Cook minced onion in olive oil until translucent; add tomato paste until blended. Then add rice. Slowly add white wine and an equal amount of lobster water. Continue stirring and adding liquid as rice cooks, 20 minutes or so. Melt butter in a separate pan. Add shrimp; cook until pink. Remove shrimp and add scallops; sear until golden. Add shrimp and lobster to the risotto pan. Fold in. Season to taste. ~ Christina Baker Kline

If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations. ~ Zadie Smith

When the hounds of Spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

As winter strips the leaves from around us, so that we may see the distant regions they formerly concealed, so old age takes away our enjoyments only to enlarge the prospect of the coming eternity. ~ Jean Paul

I love listening to music with my mate. We don't do it often, but when we do we'll just sit there and lose our heads in it. Sooner or later he'll start saying something to the effect of "Hey, Thom, can you put in something else now?" but I'll just nod coldly and respond "not just yet". But after awhile, I'll finally budge. And that's when I crack a big smile and take out The Bends and put in Kid A. My friend just sighs and leaves the room, and I can't blame him. He's not ready for that leap yet. ~ Thom Yorke

Destiny leaves no soul bereft of it's compliment. - Roald le Beau ~ Emma Holly

When mourning the loss of our departed friends, I cannot help but think that in every death there is a birth; the spirit leaves the body dead to us, and passes to the other side of the veil alive to that great and noble company that are also working for the accomplishment of the purpose of God, in the redemption and salvation of a fallen world. ~ Wilford Woodruff

Watching our entire country implode under the self-serving ideologies of those so eager to claim everything but the Constitution as their guide leaves at least half of us without a home. We may live on the same land, but our nation and the citizens of that nation have been exiled into a national wilderness. ~ Larisa Alexandrovna

For a split second I wonder what I am doing here on this battlefield, on the front line. I am a princess. I am soft and regal. I am quiet, forgotten Sorrowlynn, who never leaves her rooms. And yet I am so much more. I have the capacity to be anything. To be everything! This girl running to fight for the greater good is me. For the first time ever, I feel like I am living the life I was meant to be living all along. ~ Bethany Wiggins

Sleeping Wrestler

You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it's just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it's thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I'm one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you're going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler ~ Mutsuo Takahashi

Where yet my boys are, and that fatal She,
Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought
Destruction for a dowry - this to see
And feel, and know without repair, hath taught
A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free:
I have not vilely found, nor basely sought,
They made an Exile - not a Slave of me. ~ George Gordon Byron

There is a real problem with the lack of diversity, specifically in genre films and the superheroes our kids grow up watching and emulating, they can't really identify with. When you see the same thing, over and over again, and it seems not to speak of you and your heritage and your culture, it leaves you out of this world, a little bit. It gives a certain social distance with your world. ~ Djimon Hounsou

The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one,
In the slow process of the doubtful years. ~ Bayard Taylor

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks. ~ Todd Gitlin

I think of childhood as an explosion of creativity. For most people, growing up and earning a living means leaving all that behind. But an artist never leaves that behind. Edwin Mullhouse was my way of exploring the child as artist and, under the guise of childhood, something larger. ~ Steven Millhauser

Fortunately, humans can only hold a certain degree of unhappiness. What goes beyond that destroys him or leaves him indifferent. ~ Goeth?

There is something to be said for rain, the sharing of an intimate caress with the leaves, blades of grass and all the living and the dead creatures to remind us we are connected.~Lyn Crain ~ Lyn Crain

I told her how many things on earth have a fixed colour. Let us say, the green leaves. In our eyes, a red or a yellow leaf is beautiful. Even better if the leaf is shaded in several hues. So we paint the yellows and reds in our paintings oftener. And we forget the ordinary green, the best in nature. ~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Dauntless traitors crowded the hallway; the Erudite crowd the execution room, but there, they have made a path for me already. Silently they study me as I walk to the metal table in the center of the room. Jeanine stands a few steps away. The scratches on her face show through hastily applied makeup. She doesn't look at me.

Four cameras dangle from the ceiling, one at each corner of the table. I sit down first, wipe my hands off on my pants, and then lie down.

The table is cold. Frigid, seeping into my skin, into my bones. Appropriate, perhaps, because that is what will happen to my body when all the life leaves it; it will become cold and heavy, heavier than I have ever been. As for the rest of me, I am not sure. Some people believe that I will go nowhere, and maybe they're right, but maybe they're not. Such speculations are no longer useful to me anyway.

Peter slips an electrode beneath the collar of my shirt and presses it to my chest, right over my heart. He then attaches a wire to the electrode and switches on the heart monitor. I hear my heartbeat, fast and strong. Soon, where that steady rhythm was, there will be nothing.

And then rising from within me is a single thought:

I don't want to die.

All those times Tobias scolded me for risking my life, I never took him seriously. I believed that I wanted to be with my parents and for all of this to be over. I was sure I wanted to emulate their self-sacrifice. ~ Veronica Roth

The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship. ~ George F. Kennan

I drive him to school, then I break back into Barron's house. I'm the best kind of thief, the kind that leaves behind items equal in value to those he's stolen.
Then I go home and shave until my skin is as slick as any slickster's. ~ Holly Black

Watch an Ant, Watch the bees, feel wind move the leaves. Touch your smile above your chin from the glorious world we all live in. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. ~ James W. Loewen

One courageous man who leaves the coward crowds behind himself and walks forward has the potential of changing the whole world! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The Great Commandment to love God and love others is a call to intimacy; the Great Commission to go and make disciples is a call to fruitfulness. Intimacy is to precede fruitfulness. The Great Commandment must precede the Great Commission and is an inseparable part of it. When intimacy does not precede fruitfulness, we easily become subject to our own mission and become focused upon religious duty, hyper-religious activity, and aggressive striving that leaves an angry edge in our life and relationships. ~ Jack Frost

I'm the only one who leaves the house in my pajamas because I can't get my shit together, nor do I give a shit that I can't get my shit together. ~ Jen Mann

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the blue blazer's a bit of a loose cannon. A suit decided long ago what it wanted to be, and it doesn't want to hear your ideas, but a blue blazer only got around to half the job. So it leaves it up to you to find its bottoms. Gray slacks, blue jeans, patterns, white pants and different blue shades all work. ~ Willie Geist

His fielding leaves you wondering. Then he steps up to hit and all doubts start to fade. ~ Mickey Mantle