3 Willows Quotes & Sayings

It'll be all right, my fine fellow," said the Otter. "I'm coming along with you, and I know every path blindfold; and if there's a head that needs to be punched, you can confidently rely upon me to punch it. — Kenneth Grahame

Question four: What book would you give to every child?
Answer: I wouldn't give them a book. Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words. I would take children outside and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads.
That said, if you're going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind In The Willows, which I hope would remind them to go outside. — Derrick Jensen

When other girls had tea parties on the playground, I brought out my secondhand Ouija board and attempted to raise the dead. While my classmates gave book reports on The Wind In The Willows or Charlotte's Web, I did mine on tattered, paperback copies of Stephen King novels that I'd borrowed from my grandmother. Instead of Sweet Valley High, I read books about zombies and vampires. Eventually, my third grade teacher called my mother in to discuss her growing concerns over my behavior, and my mom nodded blithely, but failed to see what the problem was. When Mrs. Johnson handed her my recent book report on Pet Sematary,, my mom wrinkled her forehead with concern and disapproval. "Oh, I see,"she said disappointingly, as she turned to me. "You spelled 'cemetery' wrong." Then I explained that Stephen King had spelled it that way on purpose, and she nodded, saying, "Ah. Well, good enough for me. — Jenny Lawson

Dora appeared, placing Alex's coffee in front of him."Your girlfriend is a wonder, honey,"she siad to him, squeezing willows shoulder. Willow's smile turned strained at the word "girlfriend. He could see her wanting to correct the woman and then deciding to let it pass. — L.A. Weatherly

The heavy rain dripped off his thick leather hat and sloshed on the dry hard ground. To someone with a soul, it might have been peaceful, pretty, even to watch the drops bounce and form graceful puddles before they disappeared into the cracks in the Earth.

Daniel Marlin merely cursed. He only saw the weather as another delay before they could rescue their brother from jail. He turned the horse back into the copse of trees, hating to admit defeat. — Grace Willows

Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town
his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain
where he used to dance at the Saturday hops. — Graham Greene

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind. — Frank Herbert

And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!" "By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. . . . "It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing." - KENNETH GRAHAME, The Wind in the Willows — Kevin Fedarko

I'll always be happy if they'd leave me alone in that delightful and unknown furthest corner, apart from struggles, putrefactions and nonsense; the ultimate corner of sugar and toast, where the mermaids catch the branches of the willows and the heart opens to a flute's sharpness. — Federico Garcia Lorca

The spineless pussy willows in Ottawa are actually helping to condition the Canadian public to accept the surrender of our country, which American forces were unable to accomplish in 1776 and 1812. — Paul Hellyer

I do not blench at nature red in tooth and claw... And much as I love The Wind in the Willows and the works of Beatrix Potter, I never dress my animals in clothes... They behave as animals should behave, with the exception that they open their mouths and speak the Queen's English. — Dick King-Smith

Adlestrop
Yes, I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop
only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
— Edward Thomas

Hayden McGregor glanced with contempt at the pitch-black road. "I do not fear the darkness. It fears me." He dismissed the approaching gloom with a narrowed stare. His steel gray eyes holding it back with a contemptuous regard. — Grace Willows

In the bottoms, reeds grew thick and green in rain-swollen waterways; low, shrubby willows populated a patchwork of sandy islands; and other water-hardy stuff grew in such profusion that only the most wretched fugitives were to be found there. Merely to dwell in such a place was to confess oneself an outlaw or a witch. The valleys and ravines that drained into it were choked with trees, generally too small and mean to be of interest to any, save charcoal burners. The — Neal Stephenson

This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy ... his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and "The Wind in the Willows"
big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children's book. The story told by "The Lord of the Rings" is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied. — Adam Gopnik

Have you ever been through a painful season in life and wished for something new, something fresh, or even something healing to come along? Take this journey with Robin Price, a widow and single mother with a big heart and passion for those closest to her as she wades through trying to live, let go, and love again. Wishing on Willows is a story of hope that will find you stepping up to the willow tree and daring to make wishes — Jane Kirkpatrick

He gazed into eyes the color of a summer morning sky and sighed. It felt as if his soul had just come home. — Grace Willows

The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves. — John Fowles

To those who have faced death with courage, and lived life to its fullest,
eternity is but a moment in time, of complete and utter fulfillment. — Kali Willows

Though you are three times more beautiful than angels,
Though you are the sister of the river willows,
I will kill you with my singing,
Without spilling your blood on the ground.
Not touching you with my hand,
Not giving you one glance, I will stop loving you,
But with your unimaginable groans
I will finally slake my thirst.
From her, who wandered the earth before me,
Crueler than ice, more fiery than flame,
From her, who still exists in the ether
From her you will set me free. — Anna Akhmatova

And beyond the Wild Wood again?' he asked. 'Where it's all blue and dim and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn't and something like the smoke of towns or is it only cloud drift.'
'Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wild World,' said the Rat. 'And that's something the doesn't matter either to you or me. — Kenneth Grahame

When, on a moonlit night, you see a wide village street with its peasant houses, haystacks, sleeping willows, tranquility enters the soul; in this calm, wrapped in the shade of night, free from struggle, anxiety and passion, everything is gentle, wistful, beautiful, and it seems that the stars are watching over it tenderly and with love, and that this is taking place somewhere unearthly, and that all is well. — Anton Chekhov

Men are mere mortals but their quest for knowledge leads them to the brink of immortality."

Excerpt from novel You Can't Escape Love by Grace Willows — Grace Willows

You play those dimples like an exquisite orchestra, Mr. Boomer. — Grace Willows

But the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. — Truman Capote

Perhpas if I call out to Rat he might hear," said the Mole to himself, but without much hope.
Rat! Ratty! O Rat, please hear me!" he called out as loudly as he could, holding up his lantern as he did so, waving it about/ But the wind rushed and roared around him even more, and snatched his weak words away the moment they were they were uttered, and scattered them wildly and uselessly as if they were flakes of snow,
Even worse, the light of the lantern began to gutter, and then, quiet suddenly, an extra strong gust of wind blew it out.
Well then," said the daunted but resolute Mole, putting the spent lantern on the ground, "there's nothing else for it! Frozen rivers are dangerous thinngs, no doubt, but I must try to cross, despite the dangers."
The Willows in the Winter — William Horwood

Sonnet: To the River Otter

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child! — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Your life, your breath, do they diligently seek,
Beyond the ridge to Willows Peak.
Go tortured soul! Go the weak!
Fall into their arms which eagerly reach,
Your spirit will they shackle and keep,
buried in the darkness of Willows Peak."
"Not the happiest poem in the world," Breccan remarked. — Madison Thorne Grey

The First Flowers
Beside the brook
Toward the willows,
During these days
So many yellow flowers have opened
Their eyes into gold.
I have long since lost my innocence, yet a memory
Touches my depth, the golden hours of morning, and gazes
Brilliantly upon me out of the eyes of flowers.
I was going to pick flowers;
Now I leave them all standing
And walk home, an old man. — Hermann Hesse

I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin. — Jo Walton