Bough Quotes & Sayings

Oh, take the liberty! That's what I would have done if Ethan and Mattie had run off together and left me on this forsaken farm. I would have packed my satchel and my portmanteau and climbed aboard a train bound West, and gazed out the window at what there was to see across this vast country. City spires in the midst of wheatfields, and miles of chards with fruit on the bough, and high bridges over broad rivers, and mountains of clouds the likes of which I'd never seen, and birds of a kind I'd never seen before. And there'd be a city where I'd stay, and there'd be an old couple in a fine house of many rooms, and I'd tend them and see
they kept neat, and on my days off I'd wind my black hair in a fashionable way with tortoiseshell combs, and hold my head high, and go out to see what that city had to offer. — Gina Berriault

What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Taut, merry, nervous, expertly mounted, exquisitely clothed, haughty in their bright youth, the chevaliers of France poured from the disheveled clearing. Sunlit, all that morning, they spanned the glittering woods: diamond on diamond, grey on grey, riches on riches; bough and limb indistinguishable; skirts and meadows sewn in the same silks; skulls in antique fantasy knotted with rhizome and leafy with fern frond. Webs, manes, beards, spun the same smokelike filament; rime flashed; jewels sparked, red and fat, on rosebush and ring. Earth and animals wore the same livery. Jazerained in its berries, the oak tree matched their pearls, and paired their brilliant-sewn housings with low mosses underfoot, freshets winking half-ice in the pile. — Dorothy Dunnett

Wood, if you stop to think of it, has been man's best friend in the world. It held him in his cradle, went to war as the gunstock in his hand, was the frame of the bed he came to rejoicing, the log upon his hearth when he was cold, and will make him his last long home. It was the murmuring bough above his childhood play, and the roof over the first house he called his own. It is the page he is reading at this moment; it is the forest where he seeks sanctuary from a stony world. — Donald Culross Peattie

She's a blackbird sitting in a tree staring out at the world, daring the wind to come and knock her off the swaying bough. — J.A. Huss

In the beginning - not now, thank God - Patty was always sharing the important books of her life with him, like Black Elk Speaks, The Golden Bough, and Hero with a Thousand Faces. — Richard Price

Now the New Year reviving old Desires.
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand Of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires. — Omar Khayyam

I never see that prettiest thing- A cherry bough gone white with Spring- But what I think, How gay 'twould be To hang me from a flowering tree. — Dorothy Parker

Of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine - if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success - would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one grey — Nathaniel Hawthorne

He had entered an endless subterranean cavern, where jeweled rocks loomed out of the spectral gloom like marine plants, the sprays of glass forming white fountains. Several times he crossed and recrossed the road. The spurs were almost waist-high, and he was forced to climb over the brittle stems. Once, as he rested against the trunk of a bifurcated oak, an immense multi-colored bird erupted from a bough over his head, and flew off with a wild screech, aureoles of light cascading from its red and yellow wings. At last the storm subsided, and a pale light filtered through the stained-glass canopy. Again, the forest was a place of rainbows, a deep, iridescent light glowing from within. — J.G. Ballard

When I am dead, and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain drenched hair,
Tho you should lean above me broken hearted,
I shall not care.
For I shall have peace.
As leafey trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough.
And I shall be more silent and cold hearted
Than you are now — Sara Teasdale

The Oak

Live thy Life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;

Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed
Soberer-hued
Gold again.

All his leaves
Fall'n at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough
Naked strength. — Alfred Tennyson

September twenty-second, Sir, the bough cracks with unpicked apples, and at dawn the small-mouth bass breaks water, gorged with spawn. — Robert Lowell

What if the leaves were to fall a-weeping, and say, "It will be so painful for us to be pulled from our stalks, when autumn comes?" Foolish fear! Summer goes, and autumn succeeds. The glory of death is upon the leaves; and the gentlest breeze that blows takes them softly and silently from the bough, and they float slowly down, like fiery sparks, upon the moss. — Henry Ward Beecher

Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not — Richard Dawkins

As fall the light autumnal leaves, one still the other following, till the bough strews all its honors on the earth below. — Dante Alighieri

I was thirty-five and I'd thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I'd been playing in some other game I didn't even know about. Like I'd been holding a hand of kings and then the people around the table started putting down more kings, a king with a squid's face, a naked king with goat's horns holding up a bough of holly. A Russian king with an insect's voice. — Austin Grossman

Even love comes with its own season.. and relationships with their own kismets.They start through us, and then love loves through us. And when the give-and-take between two individuals is over, the relationship fades. Like a fruit that must fall from the bough if it is to carry its life into its next avatar. There is nothing more critical than to exercise the generosity to let something end with the grace it started with. — Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

You know, love isn't the twin-soul business. With you, for instance, women are like apples on a tree. You can have one that you can reach. Those that look best are overhead, but it's no good bothering with them. So you stretch up, perhaps you pull down a bough and just get your fingers round a good one. Then it swings back and you feel wild and you say your heart's broken. But there are plenty of apples as good for you no higher than your chest. — D.H. Lawrence

But that was long ago. She has long since lost interest in motives, in the details of other women's crimes. Even the hatchet makes its usual sense. A mother who loves her child with all her self is only so far from the hatchet anyway; one casual swing and it's done. Hatred, love, all muddled up in that space inside a whisper, when the words don't matter anymore, when the baby's half asleep and you can carry it all the way there if you want, on nothing but the tone of your voice. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. Sing it as softly as you like - the words clench their own teeth. The child still falls. — Emily Ruskovich

Rock-a-bye Baby
In the tree top
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
And Mama will catch you
Cradle and all! — Kristen McKee

The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come. — Dante Alighieri

Mantova
The first thing I saw in the morning
Was a huge golden bee ploughing
His burly right shoulder into the belly
Of a sleek yellow pear
Low on a bough.
Before he could find that sudden black honey
That squirms around in there
Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.
The pear fell to the ground,
With the bee still half alive
Inside its body.
He would have died had I not knelt down
And sliced the pear gently
A little more open.
The bee shuddered, and returned.
Maybe I should have left him a lone there
Drowning in his own delight.
The best days are the first
To flee. — Richard Wilbur

My love of consistency with my own doctrinal views is not great enough to allow me knowingly to alter a single text of Scripture. I have great respect for orthodoxy, but my reverence for inspiration is far greater. I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God. I never thought it to be any very great crime to seem to be inconsistent with myself; for who am I that I should everlastingly be consistent? But I do think it a great crime to be so inconsistent with the word of God that I should want to lop away a bough or even a twig from so much as a single tree of the forest of Scripture. God forbid that I should cut or shape, even in the least degree, any divine expression. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Bad luck alone does not embitter us that badly . . . nor does the feeling that our affairs might have been better managed move us out of range of ordinary disappointment; it is when we recognize that the loss has been caused in great part by others; that it needn't have happened; that there is an enemy out there who has stolen our loaf, soured our wine, infected our book of splendid verse with filthy rhymes; then we are filled with resentment and would hang the villains from that bough we would have lounged in liquorous love beneath had the tree not been cut down by greedy and dim-witted loggers in the pay of the lumber interests. Watch out, then, watch out for us, be on your guard, look sharp, both ways, when we learn--we, in any numbers--when we find who is forcing us--wife, children, Commies, fat cats, Jews--to give up life in order to survive. It is this condition in men that makes them ideal candidates for the Party of the disappointed People. — William H Gass

This sunlight shames November where he grieves
In dead red leaves, and will not let him shun
The day, though bough with bough be overrun.
But with a blessing every glade receives
High salutation. — Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Shy Gifts
Shy gifts that come to us from a world that may not
even know we're here. Windfalls, scantlings.
Breaking a bough like breathy flute-notes, a row
of puffed white almond-blossom, the word in hiding
among newsprint that has other news to tell.
In a packed aisle at the supermarket, I catch
the eye of a wordless one-year-old, whale-blue,
unblinking. It looks right through me, recognising
what? Wisely mistrustful but unwisely
impulsive as we are, we take these givings
as ours and meant for us - why else so leap
to receive them? - and go home lighter
of step to the table set, the bed turned down, the book
laid open under the desk-lamp, pages astream
with light like angels' wings, arched for take-off. — David Malouf

The world does not end tonight
And the fruit that we will pick tomorrow
Await us, weighing the unstripped bough. — Charles Tomlinson

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. — Henry Ward Beecher

The tree is stripped,
All color, fragrance gone,
Yet already on the bough,
Uncaring spring! — Ikkyu

The funny thing was that the sisters were hardly nubile, creamy-skinned Lolitas blushing on the bough. In fact, one of them looked like she'd beaten herself with a tire iron during a smallpox-induced hallucination, and the other looked like a close-up photo of a wolf spider. — Diablo Cody

But days even earlier than these in April have a charm, - even days that seem raw and rainy ... There is a fascination in walking through these bare early woods, - there is such a pause of preparation, winter's work is so cleanly and thoroughly done. Everything is taken down and put away ... All else is bare, but prophetic: buds everywhere, the whole splendor of the coming summer concentrated in those hard little knobs on every bough ... — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Merrily, merrily shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough. — William Shakespeare

Alice didn't like being criticised, so she began asking questions. "Aren't you sometimes frightened at being planted out here, with nobody to take care of you?" "There's the tree in the middle," said the Rose: "what else is it good for?" "But what could it do, if any danger came?" Alice asked. "It could bark," said the Rose. "It says 'Bough-wough!' " cried a Daisy, "that's why its branches are called boughs! — Lewis Carroll

Men give up one thing to take up another, but in spite of numerous changes they do not find peace. They are no better than monkeys who let go one bough to take hold of another, only to let it go again. — Gautama Buddha

Quick as a flash, Sawney Rath's eyes hardened. "Then I'm ordering you to skin Felch alive!" He took the otter's paw, closing it over the knife handle. "Obey me!"
The crowded clearing became as silent as a tomb. All eyes were upon the Taggerung, awaiting his reaction to the order.
Tagg turned his back on Sawney and strode to the side of the fox strung up to the beech bough. He raised the blade. Felch shut his eyes tight, his head shaking back and forth as his nerves quivered uncontrollably. With a sudden slash Tagg severed the thongs that bound him. Felch slumped to the ground in a shaking heap. Tagg's voice was flat and hard as he turned to face Sawney.
"I'm sorry to disobey your order. The fox is a sorry thief, but I will not take the life of a helpless beast. — Brian Jacques

Hiding in every flower, in every leaf, in every twig and bough, are reflections of the God who once walked with us in Eden. - The Color of Grace — Tonia Triebwasser

The Bird of Time

O Bird of Time on your fruitful bough
What are the songs you sing? ...
Songs of the glory and gladness of life,
Of poignant sorrow and passionate strife,
And the lilting joy of the spring;
Of hope that sows for the years unborn,
And faith that dreams of a tarrying morn,
The fragrant peace of the twilight's breath,
And the mystic silence that men call death.

O Bird of Time, say where did you learn
The changing measures you sing? ...
In blowing forests and breaking tides,
In the happy laughter of new-made brides,
And the nests of the new-born spring;
In the dawn that thrills to a mother's prayer,
And the night that shelters a heart's despair,
In the sigh of pity, the sob of hate,
And the pride of a soul that has conquered fate. — Sarojini Naidu

As the twig is bent the bough is shaped, that was another old saying, and once a pretentious asshole, always a pretentious asshole. — Stephen King

When you choose to earn your living by helping people who are in emotional pain, you're also making a choice to carry them on your back for a while. To hell with all that talk of taking responsibility, assertiveness. That's crap. You're going to be coming up against helplessness every day of your lives. Your patients will imprint you, like goslings who latch on to the first creature they see when they stick their heads out of the egg shell. If you can't handle it, become and accountant. (82) When the Bough Breaks — Franz W. Kellermanns

I ran a constant low fever waiting for my ride to come and take me away to something finer. I lay in bed at night, watching the red beacon on top of the water tower, a clear signal to me of the beauty and mystery of a life that waited for me far away, and thought of Housman's poem,
"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom upon the bough.
It stands among the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my three-score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again ... "
and would have run away to where people would appreciate me, had I known of such a place, had I thought my parents would understand. But if I had said, "Along the woodland I must go to see the cherry hung with snow," they would have said, "Oh,no, you don't. You're going to stay right here and finish up what I told you to do three hours ago. Besides, those aren't cherry trees, those are crab apples. — Garrison Keillor

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. — Rumi

Time that had not come yet - an anomaly in itself - had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change. — Marilynne Robinson

T'was Spring, t'was Summer, all was gay Now Autumn bears a cloud brow The flowers of Spring are swept way And Summer fruits desert the bough — Thomas Gray

He was talking about hire purchase. precredit cards. A different way of getting the poor into debt, but I think he was right. It was nice when ordinary people could take a holiday in Spain, of course, but easy credit is what started the cultural rot. Tourism depends on lots of people everywhere with loads of disposable wealth, which means all kinds of changes through a place a cultivates it. The real, messy, informative past disappears to be overlaid with bad fiction, with simplified folklore, easy answers. Memory needs to remain complex, debatable. Without those qualities it is mere nostalgic sentimentality. Commodified identity. Souls bough and sold. — Michael Moorcock

There was always an uncertain promise dangling in the future like a golden fruit hanging from some fantastic bough. — Gustave Flaubert

You must always confront your fears," Goon said as though she hadn't spoken. "Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch. — Charles De Lint

WILLMORE: Nay, if we part so, let me die like a Bird upon a Bough, at the Sheriff's Charge. By Heaven, both the Indies shall not buy thee from me. I adore thy Humour and will marry thee, and we are so of one Humour, it must be a Bargain - give me thy Hand - [Kisses her hand.] And now let the blind ones (Love and Fortune) do their worst. — Aphra Behn

Later, in a different home, I befriended a eucalypt, using a resilient bough as a trampoline. Learning nothing from having plummeted from the peppercorn, I'd bounce happily in my haven in the heavens. I loved that tree - and fully understand why Heysen, Roberts, McCubbin and the rest devoted so much time and effort to painting arboreal portraits. — Phillip Adams

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow. — Omar Khayyam

Burning the small dead branches broke from beneath thick spreading whitebark pine. A hundred summers snowmelt rock and air hiss in a twisted bough. — Gary Snyder

She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love — Thomas Pynchon

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough. — Hugh Martin

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. — Robert Frost

A bird no one wants. he's mine. my bird of pain. he doesn't sing. that bird swaying on the bough. — Charles Bukowski

And I have soldier dolls! My uncle Garrett bough them for me. — Maya Banks

I'm not Mother Teresa. But I'm not Frank Bough, either. I am getting older and a bit more sensible. I'm not going to be popping up in dungeons every six months. If you catch me preaching fidelity while I am shagging chickens then throw the book at me. Otherwise, leave me alone. — Steve Coogan

A fallen blossom
returning to the bough, I thought
But no, a butterfly. — Arakida Moritake

The sweet calm sunshine of October, now
Warms the low spot; upon its grassy mold
The pur0ple oak-leaf falls; the birchen bough
drops its bright spoil like arrow-heads of gold. — William C. Bryant

Love, like a mountain-wind upon an oak, falling upon me, shakes me leaf and bough. — Sappho

She wondered how people would remember her. She had not made enough to spread her wealth around like Carnegie, to erase any sins that had attached to her name, she had failed, she had not reached the golden bough. The liberals would cheer her death. They would light marijuana cigarettes and drive to their sushi restaurants and eat fresh food that had traveled eight thousand miles. They would spend all of supper complaining about people like her, and when they got home their houses would be cold and they'd press a button on a wall to get warm. The whole time complaining about big oil. — Philipp Meyer

Like as the culver on the bared bough
Sits mourning for the absence of her mate — Edmund Spenser

On two chairs beneath the bole of the tree and canopied by a living bough there sat, side by side, Celeborn and Galadriel. Very tall they were, and the Lady no less tall than the Lord; and they were grave and beautiful. They were clad wholly in white; and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold, and the hair of the Lord Celeborn was of silver long and bright; but no sign of age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the wells of deep memory. — J.R.R. Tolkien

You know we've all sinned a lot against science
so we really ought to be as available as an apple
on a bough
pleasant thought fresh air free love cross-pollenization
oh oh god how I'd love to dream let alone sleep — Frank O'Hara

Whatever you keep hidden in your heart, God
manifests in you outwardly. Whatever the root of
the tree feeds on in secret, affects the bough and
the leaf. — Rumi

When I grew a little older, and had suitors, I demanded from them rings from the bottom of the sea, or a sword from the depths of the desert, or a golden bough and a thick golden fleece, too, before I allowed even one kiss. — Catherynne M Valente

Senseless is the breast and cold
Which relenting love would fold;
Bloodless are the veins and chill
Which the pulse of pain did fill;
Every little living nerve
That from bitter words did swerve
Round the tortur'd lips and brow,
Are like sapless leaflets now
Frozen upon December's bough. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mr Bough has 'surprise picnic' written all over him. — John Allison

Winter crescent resting in the high pine bough - you fly through the woods like a lone snow bird ... — John Geddes

And strange were the tales of the pond in the meadow,
And eager we listened with eyes opened wide
To Those tales often told by poor Mary the widow,
Who lived in a cottage the meadow beside.
Play not, my dear boys, near the pond in the meadow,
The mermaid is waiting to pull you beneath;
Climb not for a bird's nest, the bough it may sliver,
And the mermaid will drag you to darkness and death. — J.R. Withers

Once through this ruined city did I pass
I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked
'What knowest thou of this wilderness?'
It replied: 'I can sum it up in two words:
'Alas, Alas! — Khushwant Singh

But I had no mind for these smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster; a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged stake, an elm bough falling suddenly on a still morning, a car at a blind corner; all the catalogue of threats to civilized life rose and haunted me; I even pictured a homicidal maniac mouthing in the shadows, swinging a length of lead pipe. — Evelyn Waugh

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. — W.B.Yeats

Love is the law of God. You live that you may learn to love. You love
that you may learn to live. No other lesson is required of Man.You are
the tree of Life. Beware of fractionating yourselves. Set not a fruit against a fruit, a leaf against a leaf, a bough against a bough; nor
set the stem against the roots; nor set the tree against the mother-
soil. That is precisely what you do when you love one part more than
the rest, or to the exclusion of the rest. No love is possible except
by the love of self. No self is real save the All-embracing Self.
Therefore is God all Love, because he loves himself. So long as you
are pained by Love, you have not found your real self, nor have you
found the golden key of Love. Because you love an ephemeral self, your
love is ephemeral. — Mikhail Naimy

The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart. — Evelyn Waugh

Sweet is the rose, but grows upon a brere;
Sweet is the juniper, but sharp his bough;
Sweet is the eglantine, but stiketh nere;
Sweet is the firbloome, but its braunches rough;
Sweet is the cypress, but its rynd is tough;
Sweet is the nut, but bitter is his pill;
Sweet is the broome-flowre, but yet sowre enough;
And sweet is moly, but his root is ill. — Edmund Spenser

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - Frazer's depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung's description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious - as — George Pendle

Birds sing on a bare bough; O, believer, canst not thou? — Charles Spurgeon

He felt that he had always been there, among the apple trees, watching for the woman in the tower to come to her window. Seasons may have passed, years may have grown green on the bough, then withered and fallen, but he would stand there and wait for a chance to keep a promise he had made. — Ava Zavora

My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there? — William, Saroyan

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer. — Jewel Spears Brooker

My own novel, 'The Silver Bough,' about the inhabitants of a remote town at risk of being overwhelmed by Scotland's mythological past, was once criticised by a disgruntled fan as 'fantasy for people who don't read fantasy.' — Lisa Tuttle

Woodman, spare that tree! Touch not a single bough! In youth it sheltered me, And I'll protect it now. — George Pope Morris

Come to thee again! ENTWIFE. When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last; When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past; I'll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain! BOTH. Together we will take the road that leads into the West, And far away will find a land where both our hearts — J.R.R. Tolkien

We need winds and tempests to exercise our faith, to tear off the rotten bough of self-dependence, and to root us more firmly in Christ. The day of evil reveals to us the value of our glorious hope. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

To write is to pour one's innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one's hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower. — Colette

Fig tree, how long it's been full meaning for me, the way you almost entirely omit to flower and into the seasonably-resolute fruit uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret. Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough. — A.E. Housman

But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena's owl of wisdom and Merlin's companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind. — Mary Oliver

If thou hadst thy will what wouldst thou reserve?" said Manwe. "Of all thy realm what dost thou hold dearest?"
All have their worth," said Yavanna, "and each contributes to the worth of the others. But the kelvar can flee or defend themselves, whereas the olvar that grow cannot. And among these I hold trees dear. Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon their bough little mourned in their passing. So I see in my thought, would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them! — J.R.R. Tolkien

How many million Aprils came
before I ever knew
how white a cherry bough could be,
a bed of squills, how blue
And many a dancing April
when life is done with me,
will lift the blue flame of the flower
and the white flame of the tree
Oh burn me with your beauty then,
oh hurt me tree and flower,
lest in the end death try to take
even this glistening hour ... — Sara Teasdale

If in the moonlight from the silent bough
Suddenly with precision speak your name
The nightingale, be not assured that now
His wing is limed and his wild virtue tame.
Beauty beyond all feathers that have flown
Is free; you shall not hood her to your wrist,
Nor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own
In any fashion; beauty billed and kissed
Is not your turtle; tread her like a dove -
She loves you not; she never heard of love. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Reptilian green the wrinkled throat,
Green as a bough of yew the beard;
He bent his head, and so I smote — Yvor Winters

My love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment on the bough, as the same cat crouches. — Charles Bukowski

How fair doth Nature
Appear again!
How bright the sunbeams!
How smiles the plain!
The flow'rs are bursting
From ev'ry bough,
And thousand voices
Each bush yields now.
And joy and gladness
Fill ev'ry breast!
Oh earth!-oh sunlight!
Oh rapture blest!
Oh love! oh loved one! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Hop along, my little friends, up the Withywindle! Tom's going on ahead candles for to kindle. Down west sinks the Sun: soon you will be groping. When the night-shadows fall, then the door will open, Out of the window-panes light will twinkle yellow. Fear no alder black! Heed no hoary willow! Fear neither root nor bough! Tom goes on before you. Hey now! merry dol! We'll be waiting for you! — J.R.R. Tolkien

When trees shall fall and starless night devour the sunless day; When wind is in the deadly East, then in the bitter rain I'll look for thee, and call to thee; I'll come to thee again! ENTWIFE. When Winter comes, and singing ends; when darkness falls at last; When broken is the barren bough, and light and labour past; I'll look for thee, and wait for thee, until we meet again: Together we will take the road beneath the bitter rain! BOTH. Together we will take the road that leads — J.R.R. Tolkien

God pity us indeed, for we are human,And do not always seeThe vision when it comes, the shining change,Or, if we see it, do not follow it,Because it is too hard, too strange, too new,Too unbelievable, too difficult,Warring too much with common, easy ways,And now I know this, standing in this light,Who have been half alive these many years,Brooding on my own sorrow, my own pain,Saying I am a barren bough. ExpectNor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough. — Stephen Vincent Benet

The great sins and fires break out of me like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. I am a walking fire, I am all leaves ... — Edith Sitwell

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste'
'It seems big enough when you're in it, Sir.'
'And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific is only a molecule'
'I see,' said I at last. 'She couldn't fit into Hell. — C.S. Lewis