Fronds Quotes & Sayings

She sat very still, listening to a stream gurgling, the breeze soughing through upper branches, the melodious kloo-klack of ravens, the nyeep-nyeep of nuthatches - all sounds chokingly beautiful. She felt she could hear the cool clean breath of growing things - fern fronds, maple leaves, white trillium petals, tree trunks, each in its rightful place. — Susan Vreeland

Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister's pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother's best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls' plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden's chamber as the ultimate sexual thrill. — Margaret Atwood

La luna hung beautifully bright over the horizon, in a sky still dark. Cold breezes blew over the river and ruffled the tall grasses along the bank, making them rustle and chatter. In their waving fronds I sensed small animals stirring. The pure song of a nightingale, a rossinhol, rang across the water, ending in a trill. It was an hour for sprites and fairies. What magic might lurk among the riverbank grasses? Anything was possible just before dawn. — Julie Berry

Encore!" Mark yells out. "With less clothes. Except you Sam, keep your shit on. — Kristen Proby

handfuls of sand and grab a couple more fronds — Abi Ketner

The little being also contributed to the amazing glow ricocheting from sprawling fronds to soaring trees to fallen leaves as its creativity advanced in a display of twirls and spins that astonished the boys. And they followed their little friend further and further into the forest. — K.N. Smith

Religion is the fruit of the Spirit, a Christian character, a true life. — Henry Ward Beecher

Altogether bad,' the host concluded. 'As you will, but there's something not nice hidden in men who avoid wine, games, the society of charming women, table talk. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly hate everybody around them. True, there may be exceptions. Among persons sitting down with me at the banqueting table, there have been on occasion some extraordinary scoundrels! ... And so, let me hear your business. — Mikhail Bulgakov

We use many expressions of fennel: blended with potato, it's an earthy, rich puree; the raw fronds add a fresh, green note; and the braised version gives it a luscious, home-cooked feel, something people can connect to - you need that in any dish. — Daniel Humm

Listening to the clack clack of the pal fronds form a percussive background to the oboe throb of the sea, he dozed off. An hour later, he woke with a start and, standing up, dusted off the seat of his trousers. White sand, in fine glittering silicon chips, clung to him, catching the sun, turning him into a patchwork fabric of diamonds and ebony. — Chris Abani

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative. — Alexandra Kleeman

If you can't face Hiroshima in the theatre, you'll eventually end up in Hiroshima itself — Edward Bond

I felt the full breadth and depth of the ocean around the sphere of the Earth, back billions of years to the beginning of life, across all the passing lives and deaths, the endless waves of swimming joy and quiet losses of exquisite creatures with fins and fronds, tentacles and wings, colourful and transparent, tiny and huge, coming and going. There is nothing the ocean has not seen — Sally Andrew

Yellow melon flowers Crawl beneath the withered peach-trees; A date-palm throws its heavy fronds of steel Against the scoured metallic sky. — John Gould Fletcher

Soldiers may grow a soul when turned to fronds,
But here the thing's best left at home with friends. — Wilfred Owen

Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches. — Octavio Paz

Night lay upon the forest. There was no moon, but the stars of Silverpelt shed their frosty glitter over the trees. At the bottom of a rocky hollow, a pool reflected the starshine. The air was heavy with the scents of late greenleaf. Wind sighed softly through the trees and ruffled the quiet surface of the pool. At the top of the hollow, the fronds of bracken parted to reveal a cat; her bluish grey fur glimmered as she stepped delicately from rock to rock, down to the water's edge. Sitting on a flat stone that jutted out over the pool, she raised her head to look around. As if at a signal, more cats began to appear, slipping into the hollow from every direction. They padded down to sit as close to the water as they could, until the lower slopes were filled with lithe shapes gazing down into the pool. — Erin Hunter

Spider-Man: "Why'd it have to be Logan? If it had been Reed or Tony we would've already built a time machine out of bamboo and palm fronds by now and been on our way. — Jason Aaron

William snorts and wakes up, his hair wild and waving like silver palm fronds. He looks like he might have had a bad dream, and Clare smiles to comfort him. He looks at her as if he's never seen her, or never seen her like this, which isn't so;he's seen her a hundred times just like this, seated across from him deep in thought,flinging her legs over the arm of the chair to get comfortable.
"Oh,here you are",he says. — Amy Bloom

The wind gusted through the palms and the fronds rubbed together like crumpled tissue paper. It carried the scent of manure and gasoline and the orchard behind the fence. It blew under the thin material of my dress, and I shivered when it slipped over my skin. I envied its reckless abandon, the way it touched without fear. — Heather Demetrios

studying some fronds — Rachel Caine

She surveyed the undergrowth and focused on a cluster of fern fronds curled tightly against the new life they had been given. She often wondered why the fern's new existence was so firmly wound up. But she questioned their response no longer. Oaklee felt every muscle in her body want to curl up in self-protection, to comfort the pain, anger, and fear. — Jesikah Sundin

He set a brisk pace through the trees, but not so fast that he failed to notice the brilliant green fronds of new bracken beginning to unfurl, or the first pale buds of primroses pushing out of their green coverings. Birdsong filled the air, and the fresh scent of growing things. — Erin Hunter

Making love requires no thought. You move as the fronds of a palm tree move in the breeze. It is all instinct. All wonder. When you love someone, your lips are incomplete until they are oiled by a kiss. You can say 'I love you' a thousand ways but you can say it better with silence and a kiss. — Chloe Thurlow

The small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above each eye, still
numbering the units in each group;
the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise — Marianne Moore

Lacy little green fronds waved up through clear liquid; it reminded me of a forest stream in early spring, just after the ice has melted. I picked up a frond, and as I put it in my mouth, I experienced a moment of cool, pure freshness.
"What is it?" I asked Jake, enchanted.
"Mozuku, a special kind of seaweed from Okinawa. You don't think it's slimy?"
"Slippery, but I love the way it feels in my mouth. — Ruth Reichl

That boy could wear a banana leaf and a propeller beanie and look beautiful."
"That how you like your boys, Kiz?" asked Cactus.
"Oh yes. All my boys. I'll issue him a banana leaf and a propeller beanie at once and induct him into my boy-harem."
Evie snorted. "Boy harem! Imagine - their little propellers all spinning as they fan you with palm fronds."
"While they satisfy my every whim," added Cactus. Kizzy snorted.
"Forget it. I don't lend out my boys."
"Come on, no one likes a greedy slave owner."
"My boys aren't slaves! They stay because they want to. I give them all the elk meat they can eat. And Xbox, you know, to keep their thumbs nice and agile. — Laini Taylor

Western Red Cedar bark and cones are distinct. The foliage is not coniferous ... the tree has flat intricate fronds that branch out like lace. It droops down, hanging fingers from each branch. In certain lights, it looks like a tree made of ferns. — Ned Hayes

To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill. — Helen Oyeyemi

I buried her like a pagan. I put deer bones in with her, for her journey; a blanket, for warmth; flowers, cedar fronds, stones from places we'd been, grouse feathers, a tidbit of raw venison hamburger, and a swatch of my own hair. A headstone, a footstone. I planted an aspen tree above the headstone, to give her shade, and to someday provide leaf-music in the breeze. It took a long time before I was worth a damn again. How to measure the eleven years of magic she brought to us? How, now, to say thank you? Too late, as usual, for these sorts of things. — Rick Bass

The sick mind can not bear anything harsh.
[Lat., Mensque pati durum sustinet aegra nihil.] — Ovid

Her bulk seemed to fill the world, blocking out the horizon and casting a shadow over the magicians huddled on the wall. The enchantment appeared to encompass everything upon her person, for as she grew, so did the fronds of seaweed draped over her, and the pretty amber pendant on her breast expanded till it was itself the height and breadth of a grown man.
"Midsommer!" roared Lord Burrow. "Look to your wife!"
"He can hardly miss her", remarked Prunella. — Zen Cho

I never ever, ever say anything against my husband to anyone except my husband. Everyone gets in fights, and I think the natural propensity for women is, 'Oh I want to talk to someone.' But the minute you take what bothers you outside the bond between you and your husband, you let someone else into the relationship and that causes a wedge. — Jen Lancaster

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around. — Richard Russo

Below me, clusters of palm trees were painted green-gold. Tousled by the wind, their fronds resembled tangles of unspooled cassette tape. — Louisa Hall