Bend In The Wind Quotes & Sayings

The river is constantly turning and bending and you never know where it's going to go and where you'll wind up. Following the bend in the river and staying on your own path means that you are on the right track. Don't let anyone deter you from that. — Eartha Kitt

We bow to the inevitable. We're not wheat, we're buckwheat! When a storm comes along it flattens ripe wheat because it's dry and can't bend with the wind. But ripe buckwheat's got sap in it and it bends. And when the wind has passed, it springs up almost as straight and strong as before. We aren't a stiff-necked tribe. We're mighty limber when a hard wind's blowing, because we know it pays to be limber. When trouble comes we bow to the inevitable without any mouthing, and we work and we smile and we bide our time. And we play along with lesser folks and we take what we can get from them. And when we're strong enough, we kick the folks whose necks we've climbed over. That, my child, is the secret of the survival. — Margaret Mitchell

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer. — Virginia Woolf

Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend, when the wind blows across it. — Confucius

See now, for a good blade, one that will not betray the man in battle, rods of hard and soft iron must be heated and braided together. Then is the blade folded over and hammered flat again, and maybe yet again, many times for the finest blades ... So the hard and soft iron are mingled without blending, before the blade is hammered up to its finished form and tempered, and ground to an edge that shall draw blood from the wind. So comes the pattern, like oil and water that mingle but do not mix. Yet it is the strength of the blade, for without the hard iron the blade would bend in battle, and without the soft iron it would break. — Rosemary Sutcliff

The Holy Spirit is like the wind. It can be gentle enough to stroke a leaf but hard enough to bend a tree. God provides us rest, but He'll also bring us an inch away from our breaking point. Both are done in love. — Alisa Hope Wagner

When life begins we are tender and weak When life ends we are stiff and rigid All things, including the grass and trees, are soft and pliable in life and dry in brittle in death So the soft and supple are the companion of life While the stiff and unyielding are the companions of death An army that cannot yield will be defeated A tree that cannot bend will crack in the wind Thus by Nature's own decree the hard and strong are defeated while the soft and gentle are triumphant — Laozi

It is early morning; outside, the sky is dark and the trees move dramatically in the wind. Soon a storm will come. I want to live to see it. This is the way of nature: to persuade us around one more bend, to beckon us to behold one more vista. — Elizabeth Berg

Churchill warned them now: "When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But" - his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear - "your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby. — William Manchester

The willow is my favorite tree. I grew up near one. It's the most flexible tree in nature and nothing can break it - no wind, no elements, it can bend and withstand anything. — Pink

People", Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, "by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It make us feel as if we're in control. Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man's influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person's influence. — Brandon Sanderson

The fields are snowbound no longer;
There are little blue lakes and flags of tenderest green.
The snow has been caught up into the sky-
So many white clouds-and the blue of the sky is cold.
Now the sun walks in the forest,
He touches the bows and stems with his golden fingers;
They shiver, and wake from slumber.
Over the barren branches he shakes his yellow curls.
Yet is the forest full of the sound of tears ...
A wind dances over the fields.
Shrill and clear the sound of her waking laughter,
Yet the little blue lakes tremble
And the flags of tenderest green bend and quiver. — Katherine Mansfield

He grew restless with Connemara and its bleak possibilities, its blasted bogscape and lunar rockiness, the grey desolation of everything around him, the rainy, acidulous smell of the air. The wind lashed in like a whip from the Atlantic and the trees grew at every angle to the ground except the perpendicular. He sat for hours at his cracked, filthy window watching them bend and warp in a gale; wondering when the fury might get too much and they would break in two or be torn from the earth. But they never broke. They just groaned and bowed low, and remained bowed after the storm had raged away. Stooped. Hunched. Twisted. Deformed: the serveants of a master who detested their devotion. — Joseph O'Connor

A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away. — Amy Tan

What it had indexed to was only an idea of a place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of a river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn't much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow. — Kevin Powers

Human relationships are primary in all of living. When the gusty winds blow and shake our lives, if we know that people care about us, we may bend with the wind ... but we won't break. — Fred Rogers

The cherry trees are disconsolate lovers;
they can't hold their pink smiles
after the unkindness of that night.
The wind here is straight from Chicago -
it will snap you unless you bend.
The news from far-off money towns
is the clamor of falling towers.

Yet my woolly dog is happy chasing
a well-chewed stick and a wet spaniel,
a green-headed duck is talking quarks
with a brown-headed duck on the lake shore,
and my friend is reading poems of spring
in a language she knows only in dreams.
The wild cherries will bloom again. — Robert Moss

We saw men haying far off in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass which they cut. In the distance the wind seemed to bend all alike. — Henry David Thoreau

Be silent like a rock, deeply rooted and straight like a tree, bend like a reed in the wind, listen to the sounds that your ears ignore, and feel the world through your intuition. The latter will never betray you, your senses will! — Irina Serban

Dicey looked out over the tall marsh grasses, blowing in the wind. If the wind blew, the grasses had to bend with it. — Cynthia Voigt

We live in age of compromise, but if we stand on the bedrock of God's truth, we will not bend with the winds of relativism and faithlessness. — R.C. Sproul

Why are doors more difficult to open
as if some sadness were leaning against them?
Why do windows darken and trees bend
when there is no wind? You call that occasional
roar the roar of a plane and I imagine
a time when I might have believed that. But now the darkness has been going on
for too long, and I have accustomed myself
to the pleasure of thinking that soon
there will be no reason to hold on in this place
where rocks are like water and it's so difficult
to find something solid to hold on to. — Stephen Dobyns

Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward. Bend to the winds of heaven. And learn tranquility. — Richard St. Barbe Baker

Late last year, I spoke to a group of young married people, all its members very perturbed about the world in which we live, about problems which, of course, might affect their private worlds. I could give them no easy answers. Having lived for a few months past sixty-eight years, and having been a professional writer for over forty of them, has not endowed me with special wisdom. I don't know any how-to-do or solve-it-yourself formulas. I know as little as these young folks about the future, and I could tell them only to bend with the wind and lean upon the spirit. — Faith Baldwin

Of every aspect of the moor, the earth and stone and rain and fire, the wind is the strongest one in Near. Here on the outskirts of the village, the wind is always pressing close, making windows groan. It whispers and it howls and it sings. It can bend its voice and cast it into any shape, long and thin enough to slide beneath the door, stout enough to seem a thing of weight and breath and bone. The wind was here when you were born, when I was born, when our house was built, when the Council was formed, and even when the Near Witch lived, — Victoria Schwab

There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too - unexpected - when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don't know how others are. So much of life seems speculation. — Elizabeth Strout

The sound of the wind stretches its limbs.
The jazz music witholds some of its ruckus.
Hands move something in the dark.
I say: just an old romanticism...
No matter, the place will fit everything.

Vision descends upon flaccid pathways
and rides them on cheap metal.
Dried out trees and others take their water
from the drowned sand by force.
I say: a passing depression.
No matter, the place will fit everything.
During the day the sun approaches the mountain,
places its hand upon it,
its cold hand of lovers,
strikes stone with stone.
Mountain scrub dances behind the stone.
The sun does not see it.
Only the moon shines upon it all the way beyond the bend
and the guardian stones watch from afar.
I say: a passing coincidence.
No matter, the place will fit everything. — Ashur Etwebi

To count a few gulls makes the journey happy.
In the reedy bend, under the willow bank,
My wife and children smile with me.
The moment I fall asleep, wind and waves are quiet;
No glory, no disgrace, and not a single worry. — Wu Cheng'en

Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house. I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes - a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker - varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it alone the Say. Sticklebacks in jars,. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get? — David Mitchell

The whites, you see, are tempted by their egos and have no means to resist. We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves, alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the hakujin believes his aloneness is everything, his separateness is the foundation of his existence. He seeks and grasps, seeks and grasps for his separateness, while we seek union with the Greater Life - you must see that these are distinct paths we are traveling, Hatsue, the hakujin and we Japanese. — David Guterson

You have proven to be a true 'Steel Magnolia, strong as steel with your roots planted deep in the southern soil. Remember to always bend with the wind. Although time may weather you, you will always be my beautiful Magnolia. — Nancy B. Brewer

Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control, let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy's fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper a surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy's flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust. — Ann Voskamp

We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. We bend our egos, all of the time, and that is where we differ. That is the fundamental difference, Hatsue. We bend our heads, we bow and are silent, because we understand that by ourselves alone, we are nothing at all, dust in a strong wind, while the 'hakujin' believes his aloneness is everything, his separateness is the foundation of his existence. He seeks and grasps, seeks and grasps for his separateness, while we seek union with the Greater Life
you must see that these are distinct paths we are travelling, Hatsue, the 'hakujin' and we Japanese (p. 176). — David Guterson

I am strong as steel and my roots are planted deep in this southern soil. Time may have weathered me, but I will always bend with the wind — Nancy B. Brewer

A square egg in a dish of lentils won't make a marrow bend with the wind, nor will it make rhubarb grow up the milkmaid's leg. — Les Dawson

On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees - where there are any trees - all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks ... I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair, - bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed; - for the sea is devouring the land. — Lafcadio Hearn