Timber Quotes

From such crooked timber as humanity is made of, no straight thing was ever constructed. ~ Immanuel Kant

Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working? ~ Stewart Brand

Yet man is born to love. He is compassionate, just and good. He sheds tears for others and such tears give him pleasure. He invents stories to make him weep. Whence then this furious desire for wars and slaughter? Why does man plunge into the abyss, embracing with passion that which inspires him with such loathing? Why do men who revolt over such trivial issues as attempts to change the calendar allow themselves to be sent like obedient animals to kill and be killed? ~ Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber Of Humanity

from 'Incident Light Poem'

And all surprisingly without outrage
without gunshot
without a call of timber with/out bleak rows
to fall:
Light follows the path of least time

A law becomes gospel and sharp eye-water
is a diminished story
The thrill of being an airplane
Of being possibly broken
An amnesiac love between white mud
and the disintegration of shells
winnowed away ~ Andrea Strudensky

If the detective should suffer overmuch from the artistic temperament, and his fellow lodger should dwell overlong upon the fairness of a wrist or the timber of a feminine voice, so much the better for us. Literature never produced a relationship more symbiotic nor a warmer and more timeless friendship. ~ Loren D. Estleman

"Nature" is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind 'in the sails'. As the 'environment' is discovered, the 'Nature' thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this 'Nature' itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which 'stirs and strives', which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'. ~ Martin Heidegger

As became a young sinner, Sam [Mark Twain] had a special interest in Satan. He asked his Sunday school teacher questions about Eve in the garden, wondering "if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber." Twain recalled, "He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension. ~ Fred Kaplan

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Justin Timber-guy ~ Eoin Colfer

Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren't as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear. ~ Tony D'Souza

There was something about those cold, cold eyes that set off sparks in her. Not just sparks. A timber fire. He found something deep inside her that had never been touched before and it ignited just for him. ~ Christine Feehan

About five years ago, the courses we run in the Field Trials were 52 percent timber. The hawks live in trees, and the quail nest on the ground. Since then we've trimmed back about 1,200 acres of trees to get it closer to the ideal course ratio of 25 percent trees/75 percent open ground. ~ Rick Carlisle

Judi Bari did something that I believe is unparalleled in the history of the environmental movement. She is an Earth First! activist who took it upon herself to organize Georgia Pacific sawmill workers into the IWW ... Well guess what friends, environmentalists and rank and file timber workers becoming allies is the most dangerous thing in the world to the timber industry! ~ Darryl Cherney

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms. ~ John Millington Synge

And so they opened the door to the idea that in the name of future peace, any and all means might be justified - including even exterminatory war."108 Kant himself despised this turn, noting that such a war "would allow perpetual peace only upon the graveyard of the whole human race." And the American framers, equally aware of the crooked timber of humanity, were positively phobic about the prospect of imperial or messianic leaders. ~ Steven Pinker

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we us ~ Robert Macfarlane

He would show them that ... that he ... that he was of managerial timber! (pg. 613) ~ Stephen King

Aus so krummen Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing can ever be made. ~ Immanuel Kant

When coal came into the picture, it took about 50 or 60 years to displace timber. Then, crude oil was found, and it took 60, 70 years, and then natural gas. So it takes 100 years or more for some new breakthrough in energy to become the dominant source. Most people have difficulty coming to grips with the sheer enormity of energy consumption. ~ Rex Tillerson

Look at timber prices in the late '90s, at around $50. If you count the true damage of cutting down forests, the resultant flooding, insurance claims, and so on, then the timber price should have been $100. ~ Jochen Zeitz

There are times the lies get to me, times I weary of battering myself against the obstacles of denial, hatred, fear-induced stupidity, and greed, times I want to curl up and fall into the problem, let it sweep me away as it so obviously sweeps away so many others. I remember a spring day a few years ago, a spring day much like this one, only a little more sun, and warmer. I sat on this same couch and looked out this same window at the same ponderosa pine.
I was frightened, and lonely. Frightened of a future that looks dark, and darker with each passing species, and lonely because for every person actively trying to shut down the timber industry, stop abuse, or otherwise bring about a sustainable and sane way of living, there are thousands who are helping along this not-so-slow train to oblivion. I began to cry.
The tears stopped soon enough. I realized we are not so outnumbered. We are not outnumbered at all. I looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass, and another. I saw the sun reflecting bright off the needles of pine trees, and I heard the hum of flies. I saw ants walking single file through the dust, and a spider crawling toward the corner of the ceiling. I knew in that moment, as I've known ever since, that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life--every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale--and it is only our own fear that sets us apart. ~ Derrick Jensen

My vantage point must have been somewhere between our little house and the steamer jetty. The sea was exceptionally calm. Lit up by a sun that you could have taken down and put in your knapsack. Everything: Mooring rings on the harbor wall, piles of timber, the arches of the houses, caiques, windows – all of them were faithful, in the way we describe a dog being faithful. ~ Yorgos Seferis

Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated? ~ Richard Powers

To carry timber into the wood.
[Lat., In silvam ligna ferre.] ~ Horace

Praise everybody, I say to such: never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man's face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again. Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army 168 and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber. ~ Edmund Burke

The wooing of those days was prompt and practical. There was no time for the gradual approaches of an idler and more conventional age. It is related of one Stout, one of the legendary Nimrods of Illinois, who was well and frequently married, that he had one unfailing formula of courtship. He always promised the ladies whose hearts he was besieging that "they should live in the timber where they could pick up their own firewood. ~ John Hay

Indeed, since ancient times, when the life of which I do know something began, people who knew the arguments concerning the vanity of life, the arguments that revealed to me its meaninglessness, lived nonetheless, bringing to life a meaning of their own. Since the time when people somehow began to live, this meaning of life has been with them, and they have led this life up to my own time. Everything that is in me and around me is the fruit of their knowledge of life. The very tools of thought by which I judge life and condemn it were created not by me but by them. I myself was born, educated and have grown up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught us how to cut the timber, tamed the cattle and the horses, showed us how to sow crops and live together; they brought order to our lives. They taught me how to think and to speak. I am their offspring, nursed by them, reared by them, taught by them; I think according to their thoughts, their words, and now I have proved to them that it is all meaningless! "Something is wrong here," I said to myself. "I must have made a mistake somewhere. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Overall, the cost to the Forest Service to prepare and administer the timer sales, to oversee the construction of the roads, to mitigate (in usually small ineffective ways) the damage to the landscape far outweighs any fiscal return. ~ Christopher Ketcham

Since our philosophy has given us no better way to express that intemporal, that indestructible element in us which, says Freud, is the unconscious itself, perhaps we
should continue calling it the unconscious - so long as we do not forget that the word is the index of an enigma - because the term retains, like the algae or the stone that one drags up, something of the sea from which it was taken.

The accord of phenomenology and of psychoanalysis should not be understood to consist in phenomenology's saying clearly what psychoanalysis had said obscurely. On the contrary, it is by what phenomenology
implies or unveils as its limits - by its latent content or its unconscious - that it is in consonance with psychoanalysis. Thus the cross validation between the two doctrines is not exactly on the subject man; their agreements, rather, precisely in describing man as a timber yard, in order to discover, beyond the truth of immanence, that of the Ego and its acts, that of consciousness and its objects, of relations which a consciousness cannot sustain: man's relations to his origins and his relations to his models. Freud points his finger at the Id and the Superego. Husserl, in his last writings, speaks of historical life as of a Tiefenleben. Phenomenology and psychoanalysis are not parallel; much better, they are both aiming toward the same latency. ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The timber harvest on federal land in Oregon, including in the Willamette forest, is about one-tenth today what it was back then, ~ Anonymous

Peter was a gentle, red-haired bear of a man. Standing at six-four in his socks, he moved everywhere with a slight and nautical sway, but even though he was broad across the chest there was something centered and reassuring about him, like an old ship's mast cut from a single timber. ~ Graham Joyce

In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl's or the logger's? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America. ~ Timothy Egan

In the front was a man he knew only as "Samson," a big man that from all appearances was a former juice head gym rat with exquisitely defined muscles, stripped to the waist and carrying a huge nine foot cross hewn from raw timber and held together with nails and twine. Behind him in a rough line were the flagellates: five men also stripped to the waist, holding various chains, heavy corded ropes, and one with what looked like a leather whip from the S&M sex shop. They beat their backs as they slowly walked down the center of the street. ~ Joseph M. Chiron

Evidently, selling off America's public lands is not only good for democracy, but good for the economy. It will pay the bills for building more roads and make up for the losses in the decline of timber sales. It will also help pay for the war in Iraq, a war predicted on lies. The outcry is faint. The streets are empty. We are comfortable here in the United States of America. We the people seem to be asleep, numb, and dead to the liberties being lost. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The flower was delicate and untouched. It possessed the potential to inspire, to serve a purpose. Yet there it lay, helpless on a disheveled plank of timber; somber, drifting, and alone. Nature meant it to live with color, swaying in the breeze and surrounded by life. But it did not uplift. It did not bring cheer as it should, drained of all light it once held. Where was the inspired affection? The friendship? The love? There was none. Darkness condemned the innocent to despair. ~ Christie Anderson

James said, "Who are these lawless men who cut your - our - timber?" "Every man!" Edward said angrily, spit flying. "They are mostly small, mean men seeking to make some money. But there are so many of them. They are often savage hungry fellows who stop at nothing. They fight the owners until blood flows and heads are cracked. Even when we catch and prosecute them, they and their friends slip back at night and continue cutting. Settlers, failed businessmen, shingle makers and clapboard sawyers, those are the thieves. And moonlight nights see many good pines fall. ~ Annie Proulx

Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream. ~ Evelyn Waugh

In most mills, only the best portions of the best trees are used, while the ruins are left on the ground to feed great fires which kill much of what is left of the less desirable timber, together with the seedlings on which the permanence of the forest depends. ~ John Muir

On a small square, wood is being cut for the city school. Cords of healthy, crisp timber are piled high and melt slowly, one log after another, under the saws and axes of workmen. Ah, timber, trustworthy, honest, true matter of reality, bright and completely decent, the embodiment of the decency and prose of life! However deep you look into its core, you cannot find anything that is not apparent on its evenly smiling surface, shining with that warm, assured glow of its fibrous pulp woven in a likeness of the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face og the human body. In each fresh section of a cut log a new face appears, always smiling and golden. Oh, the strange complexion of timber, warm eithout exaltation, completely sound, fragrant, and pleasant! ~ Bruno Schulz

All living is storm chasing. Every good heart has lost its roof. Let the walls collapse at your feet. Scream, 'Timber,' when they ask how you are. 'Fine' is the suckiest word. It is the opposite of 'here. ~ Andrea Gibson

I came to feel very, very sentimental about those sets, which is ludicrous, because they represent everything which is transitory and insubstantial. It's absurd that one should feel sentimental about timber and canvas. ~ Patrick Stewart

A lovely deep timber sound that zips from his powerfully strong chest and enters my bones to reverberate through me. Turning in his arms without breaking the connection, I lay my forehead on his chest and inhale him, whatever cologne he selected today, he smells so good.

You know those men who get second glances in the street when he walks by because he smells like heaven dipped in chocolate and the scent of him makes women a little stupid for a few seconds and gives them crazy thoughts about following a strange man home? That's my Grayson.

It's a wonder my sugar D has any skin left because most every second of the day I want to claw into him like a diabolical savage. ~ V. Theia

Perchance the time will come when we shall not be content to go back and forth upon a raft to some huge Homeric or Shakespearean Indiaman that lies upon the reef, but build a bark out of that wreck and others that are buried in the sands of this desolate island, and such new timber as may be required, in which to sail away to whole new worlds of light and life, where our friends are. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up. ~ Bruce Chatwin

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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

Wouldn't it be great to stop, if only for a minute on a regular basis, and reflect on how wonderful everything is? ~ Timber Hawkeye

In 1912, although he, more even than other members of the Senate and the House, thought himself presidential timber (a delusion from which vanishingly few senators and representatives are wholly free when they gaze enraptured into their mirrors of a morning), Senator [William Alden] Smith wasn't noted for much of anything. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

We cannot control what anyone else is up to; we can only be mindful of what we can each do individually, and do it well. ~ Timber Hawkeye

My mother had very humble beginnings - to put it mildly. Her dad built their home out of timber that he cut down on their land. No heat, no air-conditioning - 'no foolishness,' as he would call it. ~ Blake Lively

Technologies of easy travel give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere, - in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home? ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

China is responsible for a lot of the major conservation issues we're facing. It's the main market for rhino horn. Tigers are being killed for tiger bone wine. They're driving the tropical timber trade and illegal logging in Indonesia, and the trade in tropical reef fish. ~ Mark Carwardine

The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service's 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third - 49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio - is available for logging. It allows huge swathes of land to be clear-cut, ~ Bill Bryson

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity
then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective. ~ David Suzuki

Life and death lived inside each other. That's what occured to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. ~ Peter Heller

Overhead, the wild huntsman of the storm passed continuously in one blare of mingled noises; screaming wind, straining timber, lashing rope's end, pounding block and bursting sea contributed; and I could have thought there was at times another, a more piercing, a more human note, that dominated all, like the wailing of an angel; I could have thought I knew the angel's name, and that his wings were black. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The moment I took hold of the line, I felt the mighty tug of the wind coursing into my palm and wrist, and there I stayed, transfixed. The pwer in that topgallant sail suddenly awed me, and yet it was among the smaller sails on the mast. It was a mere speck on the ocean, catching an infinitesimal fraction of all the howling winds that crossed the wide seas. I literally could not move a muscle, trying in vain to absorb the magnitude of it.
And there was something else, as well. This wind was blowing me westward. I was hurtling into my own predestined future. With neither star nor compass, I knew the heading of this wind. It bore down on a lonely river crossing in one of the last wild places on Earth, where timber moaned in a gale, and frosty grass sparkled in the dawn, and beasts lumbered and thundered the valley. A sacred place protected by Comanches. ~ Mike Blakely

At first I followed her deliberately soft voice, which had the timber of a zurna,* and listened to her speech, which resembled embroidery or a string of pearls, words and phrases completely different from those of the townspeople, somewhat withered yet ornate, with the aura of those old chambers and something enduring. ~ Mesa Selimovic

Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars. ~ Victor Hugo

Mainstream economists habitually treat asset depletion as income, while ignoring the value of the assets themselves. If the owner of an old-growth forest cuts it and sells the timber, the market may record a drop in the land's monetary value, but otherwise the ecological damage done is regarded as an externality. Irreplaceable biological assets, in this case, have been liquidated; thus the benefit of these assets to future generations is denied. From an ecosystem point of view, an economy that does not heavily tax the extraction of non-renewable resources is like a jobless person rapidly spending an inheritance. ~ Anonymous

You take up for your buddies, no matter what they do. When you're a gang, you stick up for the members. If you don't stick up for them, stick together, make like brothers, it isn't a gang anymore. It's a pack. A snarling, distrustful, bickering park like the Socs in their social clubs or the street gangs in New York or the wolves in the timber. ~ S.E. Hinton

I glanced at Alex and stifled a shriek. While I wasn't looking, he'd transformed into a large timber wolf.
"Do you have to turn into animals behind my back?" I asked.
Alex barred his fangs in a canine grin. ~ Rick Riordan

Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days. ~ Terry Pratchett

The present Mr. Parslow was teaching his son the craft; the two of them and their three workmen would scramble like industrious termites over the scaffolding they'd erected at the corner of the library, or over the roof of the chapel, and haul up bright new blocks of stone or rolls of shiny lead or balks of timber. The ~ Philip Pullman

It is possible to regulate watercourses over any given distance without embankment works; to transport timber and other materials, even when heavier than water, for example ore, stones, etc., down the centre of such water-courses; to raise the height of the watertable in the surrounding countryside and to endow the water with all those elements necessary for the prevailing vegetation."
"Furthermore it is possible in this way to render timber and other such materials non-inflammable and rot resistant; to produce drinking and spa-water for man, beast and soil of any desired composition and performance artificially, but in the way that it occurs in Nature; to raise water in a vertical pipe without pumping devices; to produce any amount of electricity and radiant energy almost without cost; to raise soil quality and to heal tuberculosis, cancer and a variety of physical disorders. ~ Viktor Schauberger

We are consuming our forests three times faster than they are being reproduced. Some of the richest timber lands of this continent have already been destroyed, and not replaced, and other vast areas are on the verge of destruction. Yet forests, unlike mines, can be so handled as to yield the best results of use, without exhaustion, just like grain fields. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

We often say that we fear no invasion from the south, but the armies of the south have already crossed the border - American enterprise, American capital is taking rapid possession of our mines and our water power, our oil areas and our timber limits. ~ Sara Jeannette Duncan

It is very frustrating not to be understood in this world. If you say one thing and keep being told that you mean something else, it can make you want to scream. But somewhere in the world there is a place for all of us, whether you are an electric form of decoration, peppermint-scented sweet, a source of timber, or a potato pancake. ~ Lemony Snicket

My very first job was selling pop off the back of a wagon. Then I went to work in a timber yard to save up for my bass amp and joined The Smiths. ~ Andy Rourke

The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperation among nations, can be fortified not by weapons of war but by wheat and cotton, by milk and wool, by meat and timber, and by rice. These are words that translate into every language. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Hair"

There is great mystery, Simone,
In the forest of your hair.
It smells of hay, and of the stone
Cattle have been lying on;
Of timber, and of new-baked bread
Brought to be one's breakfast fare;
And of the flowers that have grown
Along a wall abandonèd;

Of leather and of winnowed grain;
Of briers and ivy washed by rain;
You smell of rushes and of ferns
Reaped when day to evening turns;
You smell of withering grasses red
Whose seed is under hedges shed;

You smell of nettles and of broom;
Of milk, and fields in clover-bloom;
You smell of nuts, and fruits that one
Gathers in the ripe season;
And of the willow and the lime
Covered in their flowering time;

You smell of honey, of desire,
You smell of air the noon makes shiver:
You smell of earth and of the river;
You smell of love, you smell of fire.
There is great mystery, Simone,
In the forest of your hair.

Contemporary French Poetry, edited by Jethro Bithell (Wentworth Press March 4th 2019)

reply | edit | delete | flag * ~ Remy De Gourmont

Humans like to consider everything as linear, when in reality everything is cyclic.

They are obsessed with straight lines. Straight roads, straight houses, straight pieces of steel, glass, and timber. Straight cut diamonds. Let's get straight to the point. Be straight with me. I am straight, not gay.

And this is how they see their lives. A linear journey, along the road of life. That is where expressions such as Highway to Hell come from.

But what about other expressions, such as the life cycle, the cycle of nature, and the weather cycle?

Because of this obsession with straight lines, they view history and historical events, as existing way back along an imaginary path, one they are sure they are far away from. Like watching a fading wake from a ship.

So when they look at the religious wars, for example, the Christians versus the Muslims, the rise and fall of Empires, democracies and dictatorships, they seem blind when comparing present day situations with those of the past.

The majority of humans see evolution as a race along a straight race track, a race they are winning by a long margin, yet they are afraid to ever slow down, in case other life catches them.

If they did slow down long enough, they may observe that the track is actually cyclic. ~ Robert Black

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn't contain himself. He held his head back and roared, "Timber." After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics. ~ Alex Kotlowitz

Wit is brushwood; judgment, timber; the one gives the greatest flame, the other yields the most durable heat; and both meeting make the best fire. ~ Thomas Overbury

It's not Africa that is destroying the African rainforest, it's selling concessions to timber companies that are not African, they are from the developed world - Japan, America, Germany, Britain. ~ Jane Goodall

I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward. ~ Carl Andre

We have a tremendous personal responsibility for the way our life has turned out, and an equally important role of steering it into the future. Although we constantly make decisions, we're not always mindful of their far-reaching consequences. ~ Timber Hawkeye

1

I don't believe in omens or fear
Forebodings. I flee from neither slander
Nor from poison. Death does not exist.
Everyone's immortal. Everything is too.
No point in fearing death at seventeen,
Or seventy. There's only here and now, and light;
Neither death, nor darkness, exists.
We're all already on the seashore;
I'm one of those who'll be hauling in the nets
When a shoal of immortality swims by.


2

If you live in a house - the house will not fall.
I'll summon any of the centuries,
Then enter one and build a house in it.
That's why your children and your wives
Sit with me at one table, -
The same for ancestor and grandson:
The future is being accomplished now,
If I raise my hand a little,
All five beams of light will stay with you.
Each day I used my collar bones
For shoring up the past, as though with timber,
I measured time with geodetic chains
And marched across it, as though it were the Urals.


3

I tailored the age to fit me.
We walked to the south, raising dust above the steppe;
The tall weeds fumed; the grasshopper danced,
Touching its antenna to the horse-shoes - and it prophesied,
Threatening me with destruction, like a monk.
I strapped my fate to the saddle;
And even now, in these coming times,
I stand up in the stirrups like a chil ~ Arseny Tarkovsky

The leaves of these [larch] trees are like those of the pine; timber from them comes in long lengths, is as easily wrought in joiner's work as is the clearwood of fir, and contains a liquid resin, of the color of Attic honey, which is good for consumptives . ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

In the construction of houses, choice of woods is made. Straight un-knotted timber of good appearance is used for the revealed pillars, straight timber with small defects is used for the inner pillars. Timbers of the finest appearance, even if a little weak, is used for the thresholds, lintels, doors, and sliding doors, and so on. Good strong timber, though it be gnarled and knotted, can always be used discreetly in construction. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity. ~ George Will

There are many arts and sciences of which a miner should not be ignorant. First there is Philosophy, that he may discern the origin, cause, and nature of subterranean things; for then he will be able to dig out the veins easily and advantageously, and to obtain more abundant results from his mining. Secondly there is Medicine, that he may be able to look after his diggers and other workman ... Thirdly follows astronomy, that he may know the divisions of the heavens and from them judge the directions of the veins. Fourthly, there is the science of Surveying that he may be able to estimate how deep a shaft should be sunk ... Fifthly, his knowledge of Arithmetical Science should be such that he may calculate the cost to be incurred in the machinery and the working of the mine. Sixthly, his learning must comprise Architecture, that he himself may construct the various machines and timber work required underground ... Next, he must have knowledge of Drawing, that he can draw plans of his machinery. Lastly, there is the Law, especially that dealing with metals, that he may claim his own rights, that he may undertake the duty of giving others his opinion on legal matters, that he may not take another man's property and so make trouble for himself, and that he may fulfil his obligations to others according to the law. ~ Georgius Agricola

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth ... The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black rock below. And instead of feeling sad like I did most mornings, I felt something else now. I found myself saying, 'Explode. Explode you mountains. Rip them down you fuckers. Take this stinking dirt and leave this land with hatred and death. ~ Scott McClanahan

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land Tax Act which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely no! It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. ~ Edmund Burke

Are we ever getting out of these mountains?" she asked without turning to look at him.
He moved up behind her and put his arms around her.
She leaned back against him. Her hair glistened with melting snow. She felt small in his arms.
"We're going to get out of here," he whispered as he slowly turned her to face him. "Do you trust me?"
She raised her head to meet his eyes and held his gaze for a long moment. "With my life. ~ B. J. Daniels

The Log in My Eye You hypocrite, first get the beam of timber out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the tiny particle out of your brother's eye. MATTHEW 7:5 ~ Joyce Meyer

[ ... ] outlining how certain fans of 'NSYNC like to imagine Justin Timber lake getting fisted by Lance Bass. Glenn Dixon surmised that much of the Contemporary Christian genre is driven by artists who literally want to fuck Jesus Christ. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The cache of Christianity is Christ. Not money in the bank or a car in the garage or a healthy body or a better self-image. Secondary and tertiary fruits perhaps. But the Fort Knox of faith is Christ. Fellowship with him. Walking with him. Pondering him. Exploring him. The heart-stopping realization that in him you are part of something ancient, endless, unstoppable, and unfathomable. And that he, who can dig the Grand Canyon with his pinkie, thinks you're worth his death on Roman timber. Christ is the reward of Christianity. Why else would Paul make him his supreme desire? "I want to know Christ" (Phil. 3:10 NCV). ~ Max Lucado

The weather was fine, the valleys literally covered with buffaloe, and everything seemed to promise a safe and speedy movement to the first grove of timber on my route, supposed to be about ten days' march. ~ William Henry Ashley

I'll find out who's inside. Wait here and keep alert!' Hallam rasped. He skirted the main path to skulk towards one of the shuttered windows on the building's eastern wall. There was a crack in the wood and he gently inched closer to peer inside.
There was a hearth-fire with a pot bubbling away and a battered table made of a length of wood over two pieces of cut timber. A small ham hung from the rafters, away from the rats and mice. He couldn't see anyone but there was a murmur of voices. Hallam leaned in even closer and a young boy with hair the colour of straw saw the movement to stare. It was Little Jim. Thank God, the child was safe. Snot hung from his nose and he was pale. Hallam put a finger to his lips, but the boy, not even four, did not understand, and just gaped innocently back.
Movement near the window. A man wearing a blue jacket took up a stone bottle and wiped his long flowing moustache afterwards. His hair was shoulder-length, falling unruly over the red collar of his jacket. Tied around his neck was a filthy red neckerchief. A woman moaned and the man grinned with tobacco stained teeth at the sound. Laughter and French voices. The woman whimpered and Little Jim turned to watch unseen figures. His eyes glistened and his bottom lip dropped. The woman began to plead and Hallam instinctively growled.
The Frenchman, hearing the noise, pushed the shutter open and the pistol's cold muzzle pressed against his forehead.
Hallam watched the man's eye ~ David Cook

There were three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except for a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in their season. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The paradigm of the development of natural resource-based industry - meatpacking, lard, timber, iron and coal, grain. Cincinnati's lard processing plants looked a lot like JDR's oil refineries thirty years later. ~ Charles R. Morris

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that can ~ G.K. Chesterton

The Old Fortress at Tirfang, it had a bad name: witches built it, raised it by magic, infecting even the ordinary materials in which they worked - stone, timber, and slate - with their dark sorceries. ~ Madeline Howard

The Otherworld does not supply the meaning of life. Rather, the Otherworld describes being alive. Life, in all its glory - warts and all, so to speak. The Otherworld provides meaning by example, by exhibition, by illustration if you will. ... Through the Otherworld we learn what it is be be alive, to be human: good and evil, heartbreak and ecstasy, victory and defeat, everything. ... where does one first learn loyalty? Or honor? Or any higher value, for that matter? ... Where does one learn to value the beauty of a forest and to revere it?'
In nature?'
Not at all. This can easily be proven by the fact that so many among us do not revere the forests at all - do not even see them, in fact. You know the people I am talking about. You have seen them and their works in the world. They are the ones who rape the land, who cut down forests and despoil oceans, who oppress the poor and tyrannize the helpless, who live their lives as if nothing lay beyond the horizon of their own limited earth-bound visions. But I digress. The question before us is this: where does one first learn to see a forest as a thing of beauty, to honor it, to hold it dear for its own sake, to recognize its true value as a forest, and not just see it as a source of timber to be exploited, or a barrier to be hacked down in order to make room for a motorway? ... the mere presence of the Otherworld kindles in us the spark of higher consciousness, or imagination. It is the stories and tale and visions of th ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

The adumbration of beauty contained in one detail was linked with the subsequent adumbration of beauty, and so it was that the various adumbrations of a beauty which did not exist had become the underlying motif of the Golden Temple. Such adumbrations were signs of nothingness. Nothingness was the very structure of this beauty. Therefore, from the incompletion of the various details of this beauty there arose automatically an adumbration of nothingness, and this delicate building, wrought of the most slender timber, was trembling in anticipation of nothingness, like a jeweled necklace tremoling in the wind. ~ Yukio Mishima

And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams! ~ Thomas Carlyle

I have had so many Dwellings, Nat, that I know these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: I was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion and now, as they say, I have learned to feather it. When first I was with Sir Chris. I found lodgings in Phenix Street off Hogg Lane, close by St Giles and Tottenham Fields, and then in later times I was lodged at the corner of Queen Street and Thames Street, next to the Blew Posts in Cheapside. (It is still there, said Nat stirring up from his Seat, I have passed it!) In the time before the Fire, Nat, most of the buildings in London were made of timber and plaister, and stones were so cheap that a man might have a cart-load of them for six-pence or seven-pence; but now, like the Aegyptians, we are all for Stone. (And Nat broke in, I am for Stone!) The common sort of People gawp at the prodigious Rate of Building and exclaim to each other London is now another City or that House was not there Yesterday or the Situacion of the Streets is quite Changd (I contemn them when they say such things! Nat adds). But this Capital City of the World of Affliction is still the Capitol of Darknesse, or the Dungeon of Man's Desires: still in the Centre are no proper Streets nor Houses but a Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch. (I have heard of that Gentleman, says Nat all a quiver). It is true that in what we call th ~ Peter Ackroyd

[A] pile driver was improvised by mounting a large steam donkey engine, a steam hammer, and a timber tower on a barge. ~ Ray Bottenberg