Light In The Forest Quotes & Sayings

I like to play complex characters and the duality, and trying to reach for the light, it's more interesting really. I've gotten to play so many types of guys and I just try to find the humanity in each one of them the best I can. — Forest Whitaker

The inside of the forest differed a lot than the outside. From the outside, it looked like the trees were spread apart enough to get some light in, but when I went inside, it was completely dark and the branches blocked out almost all sunlight. This — Jason Ryu

There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time. — Ayn Rand

Seeing the mystery of forest leaves and the wonder in a water-polished stone, a light had come on him, a bright, bright hope, that this was the true world, all around him, truer than his darkening sight. And ever after that and forever, he hoped for himself, and whenever he thought of dark and practical deeds, why, that light distracted him toward this dream he had ... — C.J. Cherryh

It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of light are shards of snow, one imagines the sun lives upon a snow crested peak on this day. One would say she is a woman who wears a gown of winter frost that blinds the eyes. Helplessness has weakened me. Wandering has wearied my legs. — Roman Payne

I feel his intense gaze skimming my face and force myself to look him in the eye. This time, when he leans closer, I know what he wants. He traces my jaw with his fingertips, then moves lower to my chin. My eyelids flutter closed when he tips my face up.
Oh my God. Sam Donavon is going to kiss me.
The forest holds its breath.
I hold my breath.
Our lips brush, light as eyelashes. His fingers trail back into my hair, tilting my head. Hot cinnamon dances across my mouth.
I'm drowning.
And then my name, roared at the top of familiar lungs, cracks the silent night. — Kate Avelynn

The fallen leaves in the forest seemed to make even the ground glow and burn with light — Malcolm Lowry

It is impossible to grasp another human's inner world. But even in the darkness of the densest forest, there can always be the light of a firefly. — Krupakar

The light from his torch painted the barren forest in shades of his own reflection, black-haired, gray-eyed and pale for want of a touch. He pulled his cloak close, unable to determine which made him more uncomfortable: the dreary woods or the new moon settling onto his heart like a cloud of moths. — F.T. McKinstry

Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. Tristan would stare into the darkness of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed and sleep like a dead man. — Neil Gaiman

In the river meadows, alders, brambles and wild vines formed a magical jungle, dappled with shimmering, greenish light and spangled with twirling forest particles. Marshy pools lay sparkling among the elderberries and leaning beeches. — Nina George

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. — Jack London

There were dozens of pictures similar to the one I had found in the Brooklyn Museum; the same forest, the same moon, the same silence. The moon was always full in these works, and it was always the same: small, perfectly round circle in the middle of the canvas, glowing with the palest white light. After I had looked at five or six of them, they gradually began to separate themselves from their surrounds, and I was no long able to see them as moons. They became holes in the canvas, apertures of whiteness looking out onto another work. Blakelock's eye, perhaps. A blank circle suspended in space, gazing down at things that were no longer there. — Paul Auster

Often, beyond the next turning, footfalls of a herd galloping across stone were heard, or further in the distance, with reassuring grunts, a wild boar could be seen, trotting with steady stride along the edge of the road with her sow and a whole procession of young in tow. And then one's heart beat faster upon advancing a little into the subtle light: one might have said that the path had suddenly become wild, thick with grass, its dark paving-slabs engulfed by nettles, blackthorn and sloe, so that it mingled up time past rather than crossing country-side, and perhaps it was going to issue forth, in the chiaroscuro of thicket smelling of moistened down and fresh grass, into one of those glades where animals spoke to men. — Julien Gracq

Over on our left the other three tanks of our Troop are misshapen black beetles swimming in a cauldron of fire...great spouts of flame illuminate a long vista of forest...in a hurricane of blast the tops of the trees dance against a sky of incandescent orange. The explosions, starting as vermilion pinpricks, bulge into leaping rainbows of light. A huge square object rises lazily above the trees, turns slowly over and over, then drops into the writhing forest. — Ken Tout

Soon the trees affected not only her mood but her understanding. Each year a trunk put on a new ring of growth, and within those rings she found the tree's own story. She listened to the scent of it, the feel, the sound, and her mind gave it words- soil, water, sap, light ... and before, night and rain, dry and sun, wind and night ... the drowsy stillness of leaves in a rainfall, the sparkling eagerness of leaves in the sun, and always the pulling up of the branches, the tugging down of the roots, the forever growing in tow directions, joing sky and soil, and a center to keep it strong ...
-Rin, Forest Born — Shannon Hale

A Place in the Forest On the way there a pair of startled wings clattered up, that was all. You go there alone. There is a tall building which consists entirely of cracks, a building which is perpetually tottering but can never collapse. The thousand-fold sun floats in through the cracks. In this play of light an inverted law of gravity prevails: the house is anchored in the sky and whatever falls, falls upwards. You can turn round there. There you are allowed to grieve. You can dare to see certain old truths which are otherwise kept packed, in storage. The roles I have, deep down, float up there, hang like the dried skulls in the ancestral cabin on some out-of-the-way Melanesian islet. A childlike aura round the gruesome trophies. So mild it is, in the forest. — Tomas Transtromer

Few of us have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. — Neil Gaiman

So rests the sky against the earth. The dark still tarn in the lap of the forest. As a husband embraces his wife's body in faithful tenderness, so the bare ground and trees are embraced by the still, high, light of the morning. I feel an ache of longing to share in this embrace, to be united and absorbed. A longing like carnal desire, but directed towards earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light. Content? No, no, no - but refreshed, rested - while waiting. — Dag Hammarskjold

The infinitesimal seedlings became a forest of trees that grew courteously, correcting the distances between themselves as they shaped themselves to the promptings of available light and moisture, tempering the climate and the temperaments of the Scots, as the driest land became moist and the wettest land became dry, seedlings finding a mean between extremes, and the trees constructing a moderate zone for themselves even into what I would have called tundra, until I understood the fact that Aristotle taught, while walking in a botanic garden, that the middle is fittest to discern the extremes. ("Interim") — William S. Wilson

If I lived anywhere else for the sheer love of it, it would only be farther and farther north, chasing the boreal up to the Yukon or the Northwest Territories. There's something about living beside a great stretch of forest, both as participant and as witness, that is endlessly absorbing, at once enchanting and distressing. The former because there are vistas and qualities of light in the spaces of the everyday that are otherworldly, requiring an absolute halting of all activity and an undivided attention to just that light at that time. The latter because there is an incredible amount to learn to feel as though you have some small right to be here, holding fast on the patch of ground you stand on. — Jenna Butler

Fiction's essential activity is to imagine how others feel, what a Saturday afternoon in an Italian town in the 2nd Century looked like. My ambition is solely to get some effect, as of light on stone in a forest on a September day. — Guy Davenport

Most of you will have heard the maxim "correlation does not imply causation." Just because two variables have a statistical relationship with each other does not mean that one is responsible for the other. For instance, ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don't light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Haagan-Dazs. — Nate Silver

Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The Bird of Paradise, it seemed, had beckoned us on and led us in, to stand here in this place high in the land of volcanoes. It was here in Bali, after returning from the Toraja Star Children, that I first recognized what they meant by us all being born half of heaven and half of earth. And after the mounted warsports of Sumba it was in Balinese ritual that I saw with new eyes the battle for balance between light and darkness. And after Borneo, returning to the sacred Banyan tree and its simian custodians, I had felt that all great trees, what's left of them, do indeed link heaven and earth in a single forest of life. — Lawrence Blair

It is evident that the chief feeling induced by woody country is one of reverence for its antiquity. There is a quiet melancholy about the decay of the patriarchal trunks, which is enhanced by the green and elastic vigor of the young saplings; the noble form of the forest aisles, and the subdued light which penetrates their entangled boughs, combine to add to the impression; and the whole character of the scene is calculated to excite conservative feeling. The man who could remain a radical in a wood country is a disgrace to his species. — John Ruskin

I love fire. As a child I loved setting light to things. I'd always be in the forest putting matches to pieces of wood. I've always regarded fire as my friend. — Olga Kurylenko

Chapter 3, The Dark Forest ... The sound of flowing water echoed in the distance and then the path converged upon a creek full of fast, rippling, white water cascading over brown and red colored rocks. Moss dangled across the pathway and swung back and forth as the trespassers moved under the green vegetation. Bright yellow fingers of sunlight attempted to filter through the dense tundra to touch the moist earth until finally, the appendages of light disappeared completely. "Come children, this way," called Mrs. Beetle leading her group over a moldy, moss-laden, wood bridge. — M.K. McDaniel

In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden - a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants. — Diane Ackerman

I went outside. Tried taking in the billions of stars above, lingering long enough to allow each point of light the chance to scratch a deep hole in the back of my retina, so that when I finally did turn to face the dark surrounding forest I thought I saw the billion eyes of a billion cats blinking out, in the math of the living, the sum of the universe, the stories of history , a life older than anyone could have ever imagined. And even after they were gone
fading away together, as if they really were one
something still lingered in those sweet folds of black pine , sitting quietly, almost as if it too were waiting for something to wake. — Mark Z. Danielewski

So here I am, my father's daughter, as the light breaks through the forest, writing down the names of my children and my husband, my friends and even the world at large - like our brothers and sisters in Iraq or Haiti or Burundi - and beside these scrawled names, I am writing out the words of Scripture. Not like promises or talismans, not like magic spells, no. But to give language to what I yearn for, what I believe, and even what I hope. It's my way of walking in the counsel of the Holy Spirit, may our hearts be fixed and established on Jesus. I — Sarah Bessey

Respect the man of noble races other than your own, who carries out, in a different place, a combat parallel to yours
to ours. He is your ally. He is our ally, be he at the other end of the world.
Love all living things whose humble task is not opposed in any way to yours, to ours: men with simple hearts, honest, without vanity and malice, and all the animals, because they are beautiful, without exception and without exception indifferent to whatever "idea" there may be. Love them, and you will see the eternal in the glance of their eyes of jet, amber, or emerald. Love also the trees, the plants, the water that runs though the meadow and on to the sea without knowing where it goes; love the mountain, the desert, the forest, the immense sky, full of light or full of clouds; because all these exceed man and reveal the eternal to you. — Savitri Devi

As he observed her in musing silence, a novel thought occurred to him. It slipped through his mind so subtly that it seemed to mingle like smoke with his physical perceptions, with the way the dim light through the stained-glass window fell across her hair in little iridescent rainbows, and the scent of old tobacco and dust lingered in the room. He wondered - absurdly - if this was what she had come for - simply to sit in the stillness and be alive and share it with him.
Something inside, something tiny he hadn't even known was there, seemed to unfold, to spread tentative petals open like a desert flower sensing rain.
She turned and looked up at him, her great unblinking eyes full of forest wisdom. He thought foolishly: Let me stay here. I need this. — Laura Kinsale

She walked as if through a forest. The pillars were furrowed like ancient trees, and into the woods the light seeped, colorful and as clear as song, through the stained-glass windows. High overhead animals and people frolicked in the stone foliage, and angels played their instruments. At an even higher, more dizzying height, the vaults of the ceiling arched upward, lifting the church toward God ... The song cut through her like a blinding light. Now she saw how deep in the dust she lay. — Sigrid Undset

Heavens is here 'neath the mountain walls,
In the song of the wind and the waterfalls,
In the watchful stars that blanket the night
And the music of birds before the dawn light.

Heaven is here in our mountain keep.
In the silence and dim of the forest deep,
From the chestnut tall as the mightiest mast,
To the laurel flowers in the shadow it casts.

Heaven is here on theses mountains high,
In ancient stone castles that challenge the sky,
In the thunder and flash that ring from their fight
And the meadows made gold by the day's final light. — Michael Oechsle

The rhythm of life runs in cycles. There are times in the darkness and times in the light. The energy of life is like the rain forest in Borneo. Things live, grow, die, fall to the forest floor, rot and then they are born again-Olympia Dukakis — Ellyn Spragins

See yonder fire! It is the moon slow rising o'er the eastern hill. It glimmers on the forest tips, and through the dewy foliage drips In little rivulets of light, and makes the heart in love with night. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

THE ROBIN
O Robin, sing! for the secret of eternity is in song.
I wish I were as you, free from prisons and chains.
I wish I were as you; a soul flying over the valleys,
Sipping the light as wine is sipped from ethereal cups.
I wish I were asyou, innocent, contented and happy
Ignoring the future and forgetting the past.
I wish I were as you in beauty, grace and elegance
With the wind spreading my wings for adornment by the dew.
I wish I were as you in beauty, a thought floating above the land
Pouring out my songs between the forest and the sky.
O Robin, sing! and disperse my anxiety.
I listen to the voice within your voice
that whispers in my inner ear; — Kahlil Gibran

Fog rolls between the blackened trees.
Reminds me of hell, actually.
I pull away from Tucker, shivering.
God, I need therapy, I think.
Right. As if I can picture telling my story to a shrink, stretched out on a sofa talking about how I'm part angel, how all angel-bloods have this purpose we're put on earth to fulfill, how on the day of my purpose I happened to bump into a fallen angel. Who literally took me to hell for about five minutes. Who tried to kill my mother. And how I fought him with a type of holy light. Then I had to fly off to save a boy from a forest fire, only I didn't save him. I saved my boyfriend instead, but it turns out that the original boy didn't need saving, anyway, because he's part angel, too.
Yeah, somehow I have a feeling that my first visit to a therapist would end up with me in a straitjacket getting comfy in my new padded cell. — Cynthia Hand

His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink. — Dara Horn

The leaves streamed down, trembling in the sun. They were not green, only a few, scattered through the torrent, stood out in single drops of green so bright and pure that it hurt the eyes; the rest were not a color, but a light, the substance of fire on metal, living sparks without edges. And it looked as if the forest were a spread of light boiling slowly to produce this color, the green rising in small bubbles, the condensed essence of spring. The trees met, blending over the road and the spots of sun on the ground moved with the shifting of the branches, like a conscious caress. — Ayn Rand

I love this place; I love mountains and big skies and forests. And the weather is still supremely beautiful even though the lower peaks are powdered with fresh snow. But Heavens! What sun. It never has an ending. I am basking at this minute - half past four - too hot without a hat, & the sky is that transparent blue only to be seen in autumn - the forest trees steeped in light. — Katherine Mansfield

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out. — Denis Diderot

Just as certain seeds require a forest fire to crack open their shells, crisis burns away our limited self-concepts, allowing our deeper nature to come forth. We must remember that our suffering carries the seed of our salvation; our problems are actually our answered prayers, and our darkness really is the light in potential. — Derek Rydall

I'd forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn't cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was "sublime" in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth's skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight. — Julene Bair

And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again. — H.G.Wells

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around ... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind ... And of course, the usual mess - apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody's handkerchief, somebody's penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow. — Arkady Strugatsky

with a mouth of lush church grass I stand at the crossroads drinking the light of faith on the shores of eternity I lead my body, on like a dun horse in the dusk toward the forest somewhere — Karl Ove Knausgard

I shall now call myself;
I shall now call.
In the forest of my heart, seeing myself,
I shall love myself and love myself.
I shall be my own quest,
My absolute wealth.
The journey of light supreme will commence
In the heart of freedom. — Sri Chinmoy

There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space ... then there's a race - between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up. Sometimes, you can make your own space. — Terry Pratchett

We take it for granted, the world that we love - and we're destroying it so quickly. The light of dawn on the prairie. The silvery flash of fish in a stream. The cry of a hawk over a forest. Everybody has their own idea of the beautiful, and we'll surely miss it when it's gone. — Johan Rockstrom

So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall through I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without even beholding day. — H.P. Lovecraft

Ever since childhood Yurii Andreievich had been fond of woods seen at evening against the setting sun. At such moments he felt as if he too were being pierced by shafts of light. It was as though the gift of the living spirit were streaming into his breast, piercing his being and coming out at his shoulders like a pair of wings. The archetype that is formed in every child for life and seems for ever after to be his inward face, his personality, awoke in him in its full primordial strength, and compelled nature, the forest, the afterglow, and everything else visible to be transfigured into a similarly primordial and all-embracing likeness of a girl. Closing his eyes, "Lara," he whispered and thought, addressing the whole of his life, all God's earth, all the sunlit space spread out before him. — Boris Pasternak

I am left to wonder, will anyone else see it?
That day in the forest when I looked upon the marble bear, alive with the setting sun, what did I witness? Was it only sunlight on stone, or Father's spirit, or a reflection of my own?
It seems to me now that such a moment requires a kind of trinity: you and I and the thing itself. — Eowyn Ivey

Giant hogweed is considered extremely dangerous because its sap, in combination with ultraviolet light, can burn human skin. Every year, millions are spent digging up plants and destroying them, without any great success. However, hogweed can spread only because the original forested meadows along the banks of rivers and streams no longer exist. If these forests were to return, it would be so dark under the forest canopy that hogweed would disappear. The same goes for Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed, which also grow on the riverbanks in the absence of the forests. Trees could solve the problem if people trying to improve things would only allow them to take over. — Peter Wohlleben

Winter had long since come. It was freezing cold. Torn-up sounds and forms appeared with no evident connection from the frosty mist, stood, moved, vanished. Not the sun we are accustomed to on earth, but the crimson ball of some other substitute sun hung in the forest. From it, strainedly and slowly, as in a dream or a fairy tale, rays of amber yellow light, thick as honey, spread and on their way congealed in the air and froze to the trees. — Boris Pasternak

I'll tell you what I don't believe, Alwyn. I don't believe there's a pretty forest in the sky with castles and a white light and God and all his angels waiting to welcome all the good people in. And you and me standing there sick with nerves while they check us out to see if we've made the grade. That sounds too much like immigrating to Australia. — Beverly Rycroft

But I see you're not standing in a bleedin' shadow, Perks, nor have you done anything to change your bleedin' shape, you're silhouetted against the bleedin' light and your sabre's shining like a diamond in a chimney-sweep's bleedin' ear'ole! Explain!"
"It's because of the one C, sarge!" said Polly, still staring straight ahead.
"And that is?"
"Colour, sarge! I'm wearing bleedin' red and white in a bleedin' grey forest, sarge! — Terry Pratchett

I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters. — Winston Churchill

I remember thinking all I wanted to do was to sit right there, in a newly built house, in a circle of light in the middle of the forest and be as stupid as I liked. — Karl Ove Knausgard

Light is important to us humans. It influences our moods, our perceptions, our energy levels. A face glimpsed among trees, dappled by the shadows and the green-tinged light reflected from the forest, will seem quite different to the same face seen on a beach in hard, dry, sunlight, or in a darkening room at twilight, with the shadows of a venetian blind striped across it like a convict's uniform. — John Marsden

In the darkest forest, Where trees bled into the rivers and no light reached the ground. I saw the demon crawling behind me whispering everything I don't want to hear. I screamed and ran to escape it until I lost all my breath and fell on my knees. Until it laughed maniacally and whispered in my ear again "you cannot run from yourself". — Akshay Vasu

I thought that you would bring everything into my life. I thought you are my Jesus. You are my priest, my light. So I always believed you are my only home here. I feel so insecure because I am so scared of losing you. That's why I want to control you. I want you are in my view always and I want cut off your extension to the world and your extension to the others.
I think of those days when I travelled in Europe on my own. I met many people and finally I wasn't so afraid of being alone. Maybe I should let my life open, like a flower; maybe I should fly, like a lonely bird. I shouldn't be blocked by a tree, and I shouldn't be scared about losing one tree, instead of seeing a whole forest. — Xiaolu Guo

Love doesn't save, it raises you up and makes you bigger, it lights you up from inside and carves out that light like wood in the forest. It nestles in the hollows of empty days, of thankless tasks, of useless hours, it doesn't drift along on golden rafts or sparkling rivers, it doesn't sing or shine and it never proclaims a thing. But at night, once the room's been swept and the embers covered over and the children are asleep
at night between the sheets, with slow gazes, not moving or speaking
at night, at last, when we're weary of our meager lives and the trivialities of our insignificant existance, each of us becomes the well where the other one can draw water ... — Muriel Barbery

The air is blue and keen and cold,
With snow the roads and fields are white;
But here the forest's clothed with light
And in a shining sheath enrolled.
Each branch, each twig, each blade of grass,
Seems clad miraculously with glass:

Above the ice-bound streamlet bends
Each frozen fern with crystal ends. — William Sharp

She had imagined her mind would be bare before his, naked under a scorching desert sun, with neither shelter nor refuge. Instead, it was like playing hide-and-seek in the light and shadow of a forest, discovering and inventing a new language of double meaning, subtlety, poetry, and image. As a linguist, she was captivated; as a lover, she was enraptured. Nothing could be said the same way twice. — Karen Lord

Here, day was not the decorous successor to night known to us at home, lazily resuming sway over a drowsy world when the darkness thins and dies, bequeathing its lost kingdom to the unwilling light. This struggling, sun-born life in forest, swamp and teeming air was too urgent and too ephemeral to wait for the going of night before resuming its unchanging day-labor of growth, fruition and exhaustion once more. Day extended its reign into the darkness, stealing precious time from the night, and when the sky paled perceptibly at last the feeling of full day was already abroad on this impatient earth. — E. Arnot Robertson

Her foot rammed into a mossy log, knocking her off balance. Even in the fading light she could see that there was nothing up ahead but more forest. She looked at the ground. The path had disappeared.
"There's no road left," she said, panic in her voice. She whipped her head around to face Driggs. "So Dead End really is a dead end?"
He smirked at her. "What, you thought it was just a cute name?"
"Driggs," she said, trying to keep her tone steady, "show me the way to that cabin, or I swear to God I'll feed you to the first bear that inevitably shows up to eat us. — Gina Damico

I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness. — Michael Grant

We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The tree that never had to fight
for sun and sky and air and light
but stood out in the open plain
and always got it share of rain,
never became a forest king
but lived and died a scrubby thing.
Good timber does not grow with ease.
The stronger wind, the stronger trees. — Douglas Malloch

Bathed in light, submerged in sound and rapt in feeling, the sentient body, at once both perceiver and producer, traces the paths of the world's becoming in the very course of contributing to its ongoing renewal. Here, surely, lies the essence of what it means to dwell. It is, literally to be embarked upon a movement along a way of life. The perceiver-producer is thus a wayfarer, and the mode of production is itself a trail blazed or a path followed. Along such paths, lives are lived, skills developed, observations made and understandings grown. But if this is so, then we can no longer suppose that dwelling is emplaced in quite the way Heidegger imagined, in an opening akin to a clearing in the forest. To be, I would now say, is not to be in place but to be along paths. The path, and not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming. — Tim Ingold

As he rose to his feet he noticed that he was neither dripping nor panting for breath as anyone would expect after being under water. His clothes were perfectly dry. He was standing by the edge of a small pool - not more than ten feet from side to side in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sun overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others - a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive. — C.S. Lewis

She went as through a forest
the columns were furrowed like ancient trees, and in through the forest flowed the light, many-hued and clear as song, from the pictured windows. High up above her, beasts and men sported among the stone leafage, and angels played
and yet far, dizzily far higher, the vaulting soared, lifting the church towards God. In a hall that lay to one side, worship was being held at an altar. Kristin sank down on her knees by a pillar. The singing cut into her like a too strong light. Now she saw how low she lay in the dust ... Pater noster. Credo in unum Deum. Ave Maria, gratia plena. — Sigrid Undset

Inkblot shadows of the canopy swayed and rolled on the forest floor in the cloudy light, almost as if the ground itself was moving. — Tony DiTerlizzi

It is as if the moon and the trees have switched places. The sky is plunged into the heavy cloud-lidded darkness that seems to come every night, but in the valley below, the trees - or the places between the trees, it is impossible to tell the source - are fully lit, glowing. The woods are alight like an ember, bluish white and cradled by the rolling hills. It's like a beacon, I think with a chill. So this is what happens when the world goes black. The forest steals the light from the sky. Cole straightens beside me, taking ragged breaths. I cannot stop staring at the glowing trees. It is strange and magical. Almost lovely. The wind song has become simply a song, clear and articulate, as if made by an instrument instead of the air. It is all a perfect dream. — Victoria Schwab

The cloudless day is richer at its close;
A golden glory settles on the lea;
Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool repose
To mellowing landscape, and to calming sea.
And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light,
The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines;
Freed form the noonday glare, the favour'd sight
Increasing grace in earth and sky divines.
But ere the purest radiance crowns the green,
Or fairest lustre fills th' expectant grove,
The twilight thickens, and the fleeting scene
Leaves but a hallow'd memory of love! — H.P. Lovecraft

Sam started to move away, and she pulled him closer.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Shhh," he said. "I'm just going to grab the blanket and turn out the light. I'll be right back."
Bella chuckled sleepily and waved her right hand. The blanket lifted off the back of the chair where she'd left it and came slowly sailing across the room to drape itself over their entwined bodies. A snap of her fingers and the single lamp in the kitchen went out.
Sam blinked in the sudden darkness. "You're a very handy woman to have around," he said.
"You have no idea," she replied, and proceeded to demonstrate that she wasn't quite as tired as he'd thought. — Deborah Blake

The whole world may say there is light and there is rainbow in the sky and the sun is rising,
but if my eyes are closed what does it mean to me?
The rainbows, the colors, the sunrise,
the whole thing is non-existential to me.
My eyes are closed, I am blind.
And if I listen to them too much,
and if I start believing in them too much,
and if I borrow their words and I also start talking about the rainbow that I have not seen,
about colors which I cannot see,
about the sunrise which is not my experience,
I may be lost in the forest of words. — Osho

It was approaching night, the conversation having taken up the better part of a day. Out of the fragile light a fourth perezoso spoke, the olders and wisest of them, who had to descend to the forest floor on business no more than once every two or three weeks, but then required many hours to accomplish what was necessary. He said, "The truth is this. Dropped casually from the safety of our beloved branches, our shit would be merely shit. Hard and shapely as our patient nature makes it, it is still shit. But when we plant it in the ground where the jaguar walks, it becomes precious as jewels. — Lon Otto

The individual is not a cog in a monstrous machine; it is within his power to modify the very laws which imprison him and the very relationship maintained by the Judge with the accused and witnesses. If it is true, as the Baal Shem says, that it is possible for man to hide the light of dawn emanating from the forest simply by shielding his eyes with his hands, still it is no less true that he can rediscover it by merely moving his hands. — Elie Wiesel

Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless - a perfect part of a perfect tapestry. — Irvin S. Cobb

I stood and let the feeling of that place fill me. I have often wondered if this was what religious people feel when they pray. It is a feeling of reverence and awe, serenity and belonging. The light breeze, the smell of the forest, the rushing water, the whispering leaves - they seem to fill me, like my soul is opening up and being swept clean. It is the only thing in my life I could call spiritual. — Marie Sexton

To wonder sadly, did I say? No: a new influence began to act upon my life, and sadness, for a certain space, was held at bay. Conceive a dell, deep-hollowed in forest secresy; it lies in dimness and mist: its turf is dank, its herbage pale and humid. A storm or an axe makes a wide gap amongst the oak-trees; the breeze sweeps in; the sun looks down; the sad, cold dell becomes a deep cup of lustre; high summer pours her blue glory and her golden light out of that beauteous sky, which till now the starved hollow never saw. A new creed became mine - a belief in happiness. — Charlotte Bronte

But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing and it is indeed a crime to allow the heart's energies to dissipate with the fading of light on the horizon. I can't be sure. I brood upon it and sleep little. I wait like a denied lover for the blue glow of dawn. — James Lee Burke

Forests are places where we can get back in touch with our inner selves, where we can walk on soft ground, breathe in natural scents, taste berries, listen to the leaves crackling - all the senses are awakened in the subdued light and stress melts away like snow in the snow. — Pierre Lieutaghi

The crags of the mountain were ruthless in the moon; cold, deadly and shining. Distance had no meaning. The tangled glittering of the forest roof rolled away, but its furthermost reaches were brought suddenly nearer in a bound by the terrifying effect of proximity in the mountain that they swarmed. The mountain was neither far away nor was it close at hand. It arose starkly, enormously, across the lens of the eye. The hollow itself was a cup of light. Every blade of the grass was of consequence, and the few scattered stones held an authority that made their solid, separate marks upon the brain - each one with its own unduplicated shape: each rising brightly from the ink of its own spilling. — Mervyn Peake

call the Elements of Earth and Water into me. I call to the energy given and received, bound to the creatures of the Green Forest. I ask that you come together and show your Light in the form of this tree. For all and forever! We are fae together! May no monster or creature of Darkness ever tear us asunder! — Elle Casey

The thorns thinned out and the trees grew taller and straighter, their branches not beginning until a few feet over our heads. The white, peeled bark of the birches looked buttery in the long, slanting afternoon light, and their leaves were a delicate gold. — Maggie Stiefvater

The torches ran off, and I found myself in a forest, at night, without any light, on skis, and that was not fun - particularly because I was drunk. Luckily at some point I started to see the light of the ski lift. To be in the forest in the middle of the night, it's terrible. — Roman Polanski

The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face. — Octavio Paz

It is a test," Hugh repeated adamantly. "The trio must show themselves to be worthy." "Then what's my test?" Jordan pressed. "You already passed it. In the forest, you sacrificed yourself without a fight, proving you were a Warrior who could achieve his goals through peace and nonviolence." "Then what about my test?" Rhun asked. "It came with you." Hugh bowed his head toward the cub. "You, a Knight of Christ, took pity and mercy on a creature you believed to be born of darkness, defying the edicts of your order to kill it on sight. For such mercy, you came away with a miracle of light and grace. — James Rollins

Later she sat on the ground in the forest between school and home, and spring was so bright and beautiful, the warm air touched her so tenderly, she could almost feel herself changing into a flower. Her light dress felt like petals.
"I love everything," she heard herself say.
"So do I," a voice answered.
Pearl straightened up and looked around. No one was there. — William Steig

I was still looking at the floor of the forest, and I was seeing again the pattern of the leaves moving across the light in the sky, and across my skin. — Ned Hayes