Cypresses Quotes & Sayings

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me — Christina Rossetti

I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why do they call it a 'mental' illness? The pain isn't just in my head; it's everywhere, but mainly at my throat and in my heart. Perhaps my heart is broken. — Sally Brampton

And it's so pretty and secluded," went on Mrs. Digby, "with these glorious rhododendrons. Look how pretty they are, all sprayed with the water
like fairy jewels
and the rustic seat against those dark cypresses at the back. Really Italian. And the scent of the lilac is so marvellous!"
Mr. Spiller knew that the cypresses were, in fact, yews, but he did not correct her. A little ignorance was becoming in a woman. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Along the avenue of cypresses,
All in their scarlet cloaks and surplices
Of linen, go the chanting choristers,
The priests in gold and black, the villagers ... — D.H. Lawrence

Although it was autumn and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had temporarily taken over from me the burden of grieving. — John Banville

Helen

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses. — H.D.

Today I walked on the lion-coloured hills with only cypresses for company, until the sunset caught me, turned the brush to copper set the clouds to one great roof of flame above the earth, so that I walk through fire, beneath fire, and all in beauty. Being alone I could not be alone, but felt (closer than flesh) the presence of those who once had burned in such transfigurations. My happiness ran through the centuries in one continual brightness. Looking down, I saw the earth beneath me like a rose petaled with mountains, fragrant with deep peace. — Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth

At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes. — Thomas Pynchon

The cypresses are always occupying my thoughts. — Vincent Van Gogh

the incisive observational powers of a female surgeon cutting out her own heart. — Patti Smith

I used to love the storms when I was younger,' Grump said. "I would climb the cypresses and leap into the sky and roar at the thunder. There's nothing like flying into the rain and embracing the wind. It's true freedom. — Aaron Burdett

It's only in winter that the pine and cypress are known to be evergreens. — Confucius

The cypress boat is frequently a symbol of fluctuating intention. — Arthur Waley

A little fight in you. I like that. — Heath Ledger

At home in Moscow everything was in its winter routine; the stoves were heated, and in the morning it was still dark when the children were having breakfast and getting ready for school, and the nurse would light the lamp for a short time. The frosts had begun already. When the first snow has fallen, on the first day of sledge-driving it is pleasant to see the white earth, the white roofs, to draw soft, delicious breath, and the season brings back the days of one's youth. The old limes and birches, white with hoar-frost, have a good-natured expression; they are nearer to one's heart than cypresses and palms, and near them one doesn't want to be thinking of the sea and the mountains. — Anton Chekhov

It is so still and transcendent, the cypress trees poise like flames of forgotten darkness, that should have been blown out at the end of the summer. For as we have candles to light the darkness of night, so the cypresses are candles to keep the darkness aflame in the full sunshine. — D.H. Lawrence

Only after Winter comes do we know that the pine and the cypress are the last to fade. — Confucius

Bid me despair, and I'll despair,Under that cypress tree;Or bid me die, and I will dareE'en Death, to die for thee. — Robert Herrick

He said, 'Gosh, Dad, that mean's we're not going to any more bowl games.' — Jim Colletto

The oak ... has not the efficacy of the fir , nor the cypress that of the elm . — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

For there no yew nor cypress spread their glom But roses blossom'd each rustic tomb. — Thomas Campbell

It was easy to conjure him up this morning, when everything was quiet and still. A little, ginger-bearded man; she had been taller than him by half a head. She had never felt the slightest physical attraction towards him. 'What was love, after all?' thought Parminder, as a gentle breeze ruffled the tall hedge of leyland cypresses that enclosed the Jawandas' big
back lawn. Was it love when somebody filled a space in your life that yawned inside you, once they had gone?
'I did love laughing', thought Parminder. 'I really miss laughing.'
And it was the memory of laughter that, at last, made the tears flow from her eyes. They trickled down her nose and into her coffee, where they made little bullet
holes, swiftly erased. She was crying because she never seemed to laugh any
more ( ... ). — J.K. Rowling

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay. — George Washington Cable

The forno in Cortona bakes a crusty bread in their wood oven, a perfect toast. Breakfast is one of my favorite times because the mornings are so fresh, with no hint of the heat to come. I get up early and take my toast and coffee out on the terrace for an hour with a book and the green-black rows of cypresses against the soft sky, the hills pleated with olive terraces that haven't changed since the seasons were depicted in medieval psalters. Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. — Anonymous

He lies below, correct in cypress wood, And entertains the most exclusive worms. — Dorothy Parker

Our job is to make others feel better and to find happiness. It will ultimately make you happy and abundant. — Debasish Mridha

Ah, you may sit under them, yes. They cast a good shadow, cold as well-water; but that's the trouble, they tempt you to sleep. And you must never, for any reason, sleep beneath a cypress.' He paused, stroked his moustache, waited for me to ask why, and then went on: 'Why? Why? Because if you did you would be changed when you woke. Yes, the black cypresses, they are dangerous. While you sleep, their roots grow into your brains and steal them, and when you wake up you are mad, head as empty as a whistle.' I asked whether it was only the cypress that could do that or did it apply to other trees. 'No, only the cypress,' said the old man, peering up fiercely at the trees above me as though to see whether they were listening; 'only the cypress is the thief of intelligence. So be warned, little lord, and don't sleep here. — Gerald Durrell

She inhales the peppery warm breath of the cypresses. She loves their scent. It's a scent that seems to make moments memories even before they've stopped happening. — Glenn Haybittle

And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there. I saw how little it weighed on the scale of things whether I lived or died, though my life was precious to me. And of those two thoughts I forged a mood by which I stood ready to grasp each smallest chance to live, yet in which I cared not too much whether I saved myself or not. By that mood, as I think, I did live; it has been so good a friend to me that I have endeavored to wear it ever since, succeeding not always, but often. — Gene Wolfe

It is for that moment when I might steady you so you don't fall, I have added my blood to an inkwell. Indelible now will be my mark on history's canvas and upon any sincere debate of God where reason finally prevails. And when you have the strength, you too may find another to hold up. They lean against each other in a storm, those cypresses grown tall together ... through the years. If they had not trusted and protected one another the way they do, they would not have survived and given us their grace and shade - a place for our eyes to meet. Our friendship can be like this: a needed lift, a sail, a pillar, a springboard to taste the unfathomable. It is to tend you as you come into being, like a new world, that causes me to stay, gives me a purpose. Of course I thank you for that ... for letting me help. — Rumi