Withered Leaves Quotes

Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, can persist even after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared. ~ Mortimer Adler

Say, doth she weep for very wantonness?
Or is it that she dimly doth foresee
Across her youth the joys grow less and less
The burden of the days that are to be:
Autumn and withered leaves and vanity,
And winter bringing end in barrenness."
-from "My Lady April ~ Ernest Dowson

Fading, with the Night, the memory of a dead love, and the withered leaves of a blighted hope, and the sickly repinings and moody regrets that numb the best energies of the soul: and rising, broadening, rolling upward like a living flood, the manly resolve, and the dauntless will, and the heavenward gaze of faith-the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen! ~ Lewis Carroll

The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs; and the flowers were all merry by the roadside; and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.

We sang no glad songs nor played; we went not to the village for barter; we spoke not a word nor smiled; we lingered not on the way. We quickened our pace more and more as the time sped by.

The sun rose to the mid sky and doves cooed in the shade. Withered leaves danced and whirled in the hot air of noon. The shepherd boy drowsed and dreamed in the shadow of the banyan tree, and I laid myself down by the water and stretched my tired limbs on the grass.

My companions laughed at me in scorn; they held their heads high and hurried on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation---in the shadow of a dim delight.

The repose of the sun-embroidered green gloom slowly spread over my heart. I forgot for what I had travelled, and I surrendered my mind without struggle to the maze of shadows and songs.

At last, when I woke from my slumber and opened my eyes, I saw thee standing by me, flooding my sleep with ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The wind I hear it sighing, with autumn's saddest sound; withered leaves all thick are lying, as spring-flowers on the ground. This dark night has won me to wander far away; old feelings gather fast upon me. ~ Emily Bronte

Onto a Vast Plain"

You are not surprised at the force of the storm -
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn. ~ Oscar Wilde

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.

The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.

They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep. Children have their play on the seashore of worlds.

They know not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl-fishers dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden treasures, they know not how to cast nets.

The sea surges up with laughter, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby's cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

In a deserted stretch of the Karadj highway Munis had come face-to-face with unbridled lust, although she knew what lust was before being touched by it. The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things, an awareness that instilled undue caution in her, making her fearful that action would lead to ignominy, humiliation. This created in her a desire to be ordinary, average. Yet she did not truly know what it meant to be ordinary. She did not know that it meant not loving an earthworm, not genuflecting at the altar of withered leaves, not standing in prayer at the call of a lark, not climbing a mountain to see the sunrise, not staying awake all night to gaze at the Ursa Major. She did not differentiate between earth and gravel, but she distinguished the earth from the sky. She had not seen the skies of the earth, but she knew there were earths of the sky. She saw herself in an inevitable process of stagnation. She was already partially rotten within.
"What can I do with this mass of trivial knowledge?" she wondered aloud. "How can I cut through it? ~ Shahrnush Parsipur

The Land of Fairy Story is wide and deep and high … its seas are shoreless and its stars uncounted, its beauty an enchantment and its peril ever-present; both joy and sorrow are poignant as a sword. In that land a man may (perhaps) count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very mystery and wealth make dumb the traveller who would report. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates be shut and the keys be lost. The fairy gold (too often) turns to withered leaves when it is brought away. All that I can ask its that you, knowing all these things, will receive my withered leaves, as a token at least that my hand once held a little of the gold. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The frame of the mirror was a deep mahogany and carved with an intricate design of what appeared in the dim light to be leaves and vines. The mirror's surface was clouded with dust and age, so much that Quinn could not even see his own reflection. On impulse, he rubbed a small circle with the back of his wrist but beneath the dust the glass was still milky and unclear. ~ "The Mirror ~ Cassie McCown

I wish I could help you" I whisper.
You are," he murmurs against my knee. "just dont leave me, okay? Everyone leaves me. ~ Simone Elkeles

Who Am I?
I'm a creator, a visionary, a poet. I approach the world with the eyes of an artist, the ears of a musician, and the soul of a writer. I see rainbows where others see only rain, and possibilities when others see only problems. I love spring flowers, summer's heat on my body, and the beauty of the dying leaves in the fall. Classical music, art museums, and ballet are sources of inspiration, as well as blues music and dim cafes. I love to write; words flow easily from my fingertips, and my heart beats rapidly with excitement as an idea becomes a reality on the paper in front of me. I smile often, laugh easily, and I weep at pain and cruelty. I'm a learner and a seeker of knowledge, and I try to take my readers along on my journey. I am passionate about what I do. I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me. ~ Sharon M. Draper

Tris: "What if I don't want to cut up aloe leaves?"
Rosethorn: "Ask me if I care what you want. ~ Tamora Pierce

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

He has a really consistent routine. He comes in in the morning at around 8:30. He reads five newspapers. He reads The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Omaha World Herald. Then he has a stack of reports on his desk from the companies Berkshire owns, and some trade press like American Banker or oil and gas journals, and through the rest of the day, he alternates between flipping through this stuff and then talking on the phone to people either who call him or who he calls. He never calls his managers; they can call him. He is really accessible, but he leaves them alone.
Then he has CNBC on all day long with the crawl, with the sound muted and if he sees his name cross along the bottom and they are talking about him, he will turn the sound on to find out what they are saying. That is his day. He doesn't do meetings
there are no meetings.
~ Alice Schroeder

Engineers had not framework for understanding Mandelbrot's description, but mathematicians did. In effect, Mandelbrot was duplicating an abstract construction known as the Cantor set, after the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor. To make a Cantor set, you start with the interval of numbers from zero to one, represented by a line segment. Then you remove the middle third. That leaves two segments, and you remove the middle third of each (from one-ninth to two-ninths and from seven-ninths to eight-ninths). That leaves four segments, and you remove the middle third of each- and so on to infinity. What remains? A strange "dust" of points, arranged in clusters, infinitely many yet infinitely sparse. Mandelbrot was thinking of transmission errors as a Cantor set arranged in time. ~ James Gleick

What has changed in modern times, however, is that the media, the so-called fourth estate made up of America's best and brightest journalists, are no longer trusted.
Sadly that leaves the American people with no one to rely on: not the politicians; not the media.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but political systems abhor a vacuum of trust even more. If we don't find someone to fill it, someone who can unify the country behind the truth, then that vacuum will be filled for us. ~ Glenn Beck

Who are we when we leave our families? Who do we become? What are we capable of? That's something that never leaves us. It begins at that point in your life when you leave the nest, and I don't think we stop wanting to explore that question. ~ Naomi Watts

Sure, equal pay, maternity leaves, and pro sports are important. But a girl can't make a free throw from the foul line if her head's not in the game. ~ Emma McLaughlin

He knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candies fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself as the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees' jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, half-revealed. ~ Italo Calvino

It is often said of people with second sight that their soul leaves the body. That doesn't happen to the glacier. But the next time one looks at it, the body has left the glacier, and nothing remains except the soul clad in air ... the glacier is illuminated at certain times of the day by a special radiance and stands in a golden glow with a powerful aureole of rays, and everything becomes insignificant except it. Then it's as if the mountain is no longer taking part in the history of geology but has become iconic ... A remarkable mountain. At night when the sun is off the mountains the glacier becomes a tranquil silhouette that rests in itself and breathes upon man and beast the word never, which perhaps means always. Come, waft of death. ~ Halldor Laxness

The sky is grey, the air hot.
I walk back across the mown lawn
loving the smell and the houses so completely it leaves my heart empty. ~ Linda Gregg

It seems love is the root of all pain and most of its fruit only leaves a bitter taste behind. ~ L.F. Falconer

Who can say what they'd have done in her situation. She's stronger than she knows. I tried to tell her that every day, too."
"Was that the truth?" Grant asks.
Joseph smiles. "You ever see a tree that's dying, it's nothing but a bunch of dried out branches? You can talk to this tree, tell it all about how its leaves are growing green and healthy. Then you sit back and watch how it changes. ~ Ilie Ruby

Moments come and go; quick flickers in time. Yet those moments can have the profoundest impact on our lives. Either we seize them, and wield them to our needs, or we let them go. It's the moments we let go that, I believe, remain with us strongest - because regret is something that never leaves us. ~ B.N. Toler

Somewhere there was a book of love, with all the symptoms written down in red ink: Dizziness and Desire. A tendency to stare at the night sky, searching for a message that might be found up above. A lurching in the pit of the stomach, as if something much too sweet had been eaten. The ability to hear the quietest sounds--snails munching the lettuce leaves, moths drinking nectar from the overripe pears on the tree by the fence, a rabbit trembling in ivy-just in case he might be there, which was what mattered all along. Real hunger, just to see him, as if this would ever be enough. ~ Alice Hoffman

What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer's plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian's; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl's ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay. ~ Gary Inbinder

Hope is my enemy. She is a sucuubus who descends upon sleeping humankind, whispering that there is a future. A broth future, as a matter of fact; as long as we persevere in extending our essences through the lives of our children, and through their children. She is a lost, a snakeoil salesman bartering chimira for generative fluid, which she sucks out of us before casting out withered husks onto the fire. And so we fall, row upon row like seasons of corn, but not until we relinquish our seed into her exploitive hands. For in the end, we all die, and only Hope lives on. And we for, sometimes mourned for a season, but presently forgotton. Ultimately, like it or not, we are the futures dirt. This is the state of affairs we choose to subject our children to ~ Jim Crawford

There was always a slight upswing in February, the town's coldest month, when out-of-towners liked to hike into the national park to see the famous waterfalls when they rose, like bridal veils, against the mountains. But mostly, from December to April, those who made their living off tourists just suffered through, dreaming of warmer months, of kingfisher-blue skies and leaves so green they looked like they'd just been painted, as if the color would smear if you touched it. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

The night smelled like blackberry leaves and the ocean's nearness, something sweet and deep and full. ~ Deb Caletti

Henley - " She reached for him, but he eluded her grasp. "I don't want you to go."
"No, you want to be the one who leaves. That's how it works, right? You go whenever you're ready. And to hell with what I'm ready for. ~ Sarah Cross

She never quite leaves her children at home, even when she doesn't take them along. ~ Margaret Culkin Banning

There are days I drop words of comfort on myself like falling leaves and remember that it is enough to be taken care of by my self. ~ Brian Andreas

The axe of intemperance has lopped off his green boughs and left him a withered trunk. ~ Jonathan Swift

It seems to me that fire leaves nothing behind at all - the ash really isn't part of the flame, it's part of the fuel. Fire changes it from one thing to another, drawing off its energy and turning it into . . . well, into more fire. Fire doesn't create anything new, it simply is. If other things must be destroyed in order for fire to exist, that's all right with fire. As far as fire is concerned, that's what those things are there for in the first place. When they're gone, the fire goes, too, and though you may find evidence of its passing you'll find nothing of the fire itself - no light, no heat, no tiny red fragments of cast-off flame. It disappears back to wherever it came from, and if it feels or remembers, we have no way of knowing if it feels or remembers us. ~ Dan Wells

I'm sorry, I guess my company leaves a lot to be desired. ~ Nicholas Sparks

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
Trees that start again. ~ Robert Bly

We don't know predestined ways,
or what future might behold,
someone leaves,someone remains,
and new things replace the old.
We don't know a thing for sure,
what's today,is there tomorrow?
Yet,somehow we still endure,
through those moments filled with sorrow.
Can we really be mistaken,
trying just the best we can?
something's given and some taken,
never knowing how nor when.
We don't know that much,it's true,
life's a mystery divine,
a day came,when i lost you,
treasured guiding star of mine. ~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

There is only one directive: that the lost are found; that the thick leaves encasing the dead are parted and they are lifted into the arms of light. ~ Patti Smith

Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors deliriums and death. ~ Herman Melville

Somewhere," he told her, "somewhere else lived a boy and a girl beside the sea and as they grew older they grew more transparent. At first blue blood vessels and then bones bloomed beneath the skin but soon they could see the shapes of the world behind their bodies, the shudder of leaves like shadows in the brain, a butterfly's flutter in the mutter of the heart, beetles in the coils of the bowels. They watched wine whirl down each other's throats and the sun rise up each other's spines, stepping vertically vertebra to vertebra. Soon the only substance they obtained was when their bodies overlapped and so they clasped each other, peering for the vestiges of eyes, teeth, ears, smears against the landscape. And one day they kissed and disappeared. ~ Keith Miller

Plain and simple, men need community with other men. Loving, you-before-me, dedicated relationship. If you have never had it, you don't really get it yet, and if you had that community and lost it, you know the cavity it leaves in your soul until you discover it again. ~ James MacDonald

Everything that could happen, but it never happened, eventually was taken away by the wind and leaves no trace.The life - this is our actions. ~ Paulo Coelho