Ripened Quotes & Sayings

To the Parcae
A single summer grant me, great powers, and
a single autumn for fully ripened song
that, sated with the sweetness of my
playing, my heart may more willingly die.
The soul that, living, did not attain its divine
right cannot repose in the nether world.
But once what I am bent on, what is
holy, my poetry, is accomplished:
Be welcome then, stillness of the shadows' world!
I shall be satisfied though my lyre will not
accompany me down there. Once I
lived like the gods, and more is not needed. — Friedrich Holderlin

June ripened into July, then burst and withered and dried and became August. — Lev Grossman

On nights like this, when there is anxiety about, there is a glut of lovemaking. Then the moon is our dance master. He has us move in unison. He has us trill and carol in each other's ears until the stars themselves have swollen and ripened to our cries. As ever here, we find our consolations sowing seed. — Jim Crace

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance. — Pat Conroy

A fit queen for that nest of roses was the human flower that adorned it, for a year of love and luxury had ripened her youthful beauty into a perfect bloom. Graceful by nature, art had little to do for her, and, with a woman's aptitude, she had acquired the polish which society alone can give. Frank and artless as ever, yet less free in speech, less demonstrative in act; full of power and passion, yet still half unconscious of her gifts; beautiful with the beauty that wins the heart as well as satisfies the eye, yet unmarred by vanity or affectation. She now showed fair promise of becoming all that a deep and tender heart, an ardent soul and a gracious nature could make her, once life had tamed and taught her more. — Louisa May Alcott

The pleached bower,
Where honeysuckles ripened by the sun
Forbid the sun to enter, like favorites
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride
Against that power that bred it. — William Shakespeare

The hopes that, in my own heart sown,
And cherished by such sun and rain,
As Joy and transient Sorrow shed,
Have ripened to a harvest there: — Charlotte Bronte

Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life. — Hermann Hesse

Had she been born 500 years sooner, Raphael would have chosen her as a model for his cherubs. Tendrils of bright red hair framed her face, a spray of freckles powdered her nose, and she was as plump as a perfectly ripened peach. Raphael probably would have painted out the freckles, and that would have been a mistake. Like brushing cinnamon off cinnamon toast. — E.L. Konigsburg

Much travel is needed before the raw man is ripened. — Idries Shah

We are speaking of love. A leaf, a handful of seed - begin with these, learn a little what it is to love. First a leaf, a fall of rain, then someone to receive what a leaf has taught you, what a fall of rain has ripened. No easy process, understand; it could take a lifetime, it has mine, and still I've never mastered it - I only know how true it is; that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life. — Truman Capote

No mirror ever became iron again;
No bread ever became wheat;
No ripened grape ever became sour fruit.
Mature yourself and be secure from a change for the worse.
Become the light. — Rumi

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away. — Robert Frost

Dying is strange and hard if it is not our death, but a death that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The Apple Orchard
Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit. — Rainer Maria Rilke

In the course of her education she had gone through the history usually put into the hands of young people ... now her ripened reason gave to her present study at least the advantage of novelty. — Charlotte Smith

Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain,
Your flowers feed on carrion
so do your birds;
Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap,
Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding.
No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny,
Life spurts from you, little world,
and you regard it with disdain.
Only bruised men sense your cruelty,
men whose life has lost its meaning. — James Kavanaugh

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.
Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.
A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In meditation and in our daily lives there are three qualities that we can nurture, cultivate, and bring out. We already possess these, but they can be ripened: precision, gentleness, and the ability to let go. — Pema Chodron

Even in the Moment of Our Earliest Kiss

Even in the moment of our earliest kiss,
When sighed the straitened bud into the flower,
Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;
And that I knew, though not the day and hour.
Too season-wise am I, being country-bred,
To tilt at autumn or defy the frost:
Snuffing the chill even as my fathers did,
I say with them, "What's out tonight is lost."
I only hoped, with the mild hope of all
Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,
A fairer summer and a later fall
Than in these parts a man is apt to see,
And sunny clusters ripened for the wine:
I tell you this across the blackened vine. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch - they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit - death-ripened. We shall all end like them - just a stain in the snow. — Lawrence Durrell

It was the month of May, the month when the foliage of herbs and trees is most freshly green, when buds ripened and blossoms appear in their fragrance and loveliness. And the month when lovers, subject to the same force which reawakens the plants, feel their hearts open again, recall past trysts and past vows, and moments of tenderness, and yearn for a renewal of the magical awareness which is love. — Thomas Malory

We accept it because we have seen the vision. We know that we cannot reap the harvest, but we hope that we may so well prepare the land and so diligently sow the seed that our successors may gather the ripened grain. — Liberty Hyde Bailey

As soon as the legitimate Lebanese government is convinced that the conditions have ripened and that Lebanon is able to maintain stability on its own ... Then, the Syrian forces will return to their homeland. — Bashar Al-Assad

Holy ripened fuckcheese! — Christopher Moore

The rain had ripened all the country around and the roadside grass was luminous and green from the run-off and flowers were in bloom across the open country. He slept that night in a field far from any town. He built no fire. He lay listening to the horse crop the grass at his stakerope and he listened to the wind in the emptiness and watched stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in the darkness at the edge of the world and as he lay there the agony in his heart was like a stake. — Cormac McCarthy

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident and removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long. — Edward Gibbon

The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth century ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth. — Eric Hoffer

How nice would it be to just drop from the tree, fall from forking branches a ripened fruit thudding your weight to earth without distraction, without option - thrust to ground under gravity's current to be gathered up and eaten or left there to decay and deposit that seed from the core of your being into the little plot of your death, lush ring of your composted fertilizing flesh. — Patrick Bryant

Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die. — Mary Elizabeth Frye

Yellow, mellow, ripened days, Sheltered in a golden coating; O'er the dreamy, listless haze, White and dainty cloudlets floating; Winking at the blushing trees, And the sombre, furrowed fallow; Smiling at the airy ease, Of the southward flying swallow Sweet and smiling are thy ways, Beauteous, golden Autumn days. — Will Carleton

As things turned out her choice had been happy, for seldom had two people loved more than they did; they loved with an ardour undiminished by time; as they ripened, so their love ripened with them. — Radclyffe Hall

The harvest of the Lord's field is seldom ripened by sunshine only. It must go through its days of wind, rain and storm. — J.C. Ryle

One in whom persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition. — William Wordsworth

I shall tell you a truth ... your lips taste of sweet ripened berries. I should be so forward as to take them in degust. And if it cannot be so, then I shall kneel until that day in purgatory. — Nely Cab

America Is A Gun

England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.

Brazil is football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona's hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.

Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.

Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun. — Brian Bilston

Months of silence had made him very bitter, and his bitterness had ripened, in an instant, into spite. — Eleanor Catton

Forgive me for startling you with the impetuosity of my sentiments, my dear Scarlett - I mean, my dear Mrs. Kennedy. It cannot have escaped your notice that for some time past the friendship I have had in my heart for you has ripened into a deeper feeling, a feeling more beautiful, more pure, more sacred. Dare I name it you? Ah! It is love which makes me so bold! — Margaret Mitchell

Something in one's heart takes fright, not at the thought of growing old, not at feeling one's youth used up in this mineral universe, but at the thought that far away the whole world is ageing. The trees have brought forth their fruit; the grain has ripened in the fields; the women have bloomed in their loveliness. But the season is advancing and one must make haste; but the season is advancing and still one cannot leave; but the season is advancing ... and other men will glean the harvest. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I've noticed a growth in Spike and definitely in myself. I feel like the seeds that he planted in me five years ago have ripened up to a place where I could even tackle this role in the way that I did. — Rosario Dawson

The leaves do not change color from the blighting touch of the frost, but from the process of natural decay. They fall when the fruit has been ripened and their work is done. And their splendid change of coloring is but their graceful and beautiful surrender of life, when they have finished their summer offering of service to God and man. — Tryon Edwards

A tree full of ripened fruits bows down naturally, because of the weight of the fruits and its willingness to make its fruits accessible to others. — A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened. — Orison Swett Marden

What began as hunger simply to leave Jelucan had ripened into genuine wanderlust. — Claudia Gray

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit. — George Eliot

I know what it's like. I've seen it played out a zillion times. You're waiting for that magical day when someone makes the connection and recognizes who you really are. Maybe they'll first catch the sparkle in your eye. Or perhaps they'll marvel at your insights and the depth of your spirit. Someone who will help you connect the dots, believe in yourself, and make sense of it all. Someone who will understand you, approve of you, and unhesitatingly give you a leg up so that life can pluck your ready, ripened self from the branch of magnificence. Well, I'm here to tell you, your wait is over. That someone, is you. — Mike Dooley

Man is the nobler growth our realms supply, And souls are ripened in our northern sky. — Anna Letitia Barbauld

October, here's to you. Here's to the heady aroma of the frost-kissed apples, the winey smell of ripened grapes, the wild-as-the-wind smell of hickory nuts and the nostalgic whiff of that first wood smoke. — Ken Weber

We contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.
I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, not she that She for me. — Italo Calvino

Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple. — Phillips Brooks

Quinces are ripe...when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. they are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. but even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate--useless...until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak-up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. to answer your questionlove is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched. ~The Book of Salt — Monique Truong

Sweetness. That was the first surprise. He'd heard so many tart words from these lips . . . but her kiss was sweet. Cool and sweet, with a hint of true decadence beneath. Like a sun-ripened plum at the height of summer. Ready to fall into his hand at the slightest inducement. — Tessa Dare

The realization of what wisdom actually was slowly blossomed and ripened in Siddhartha - and he discovered what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. Slowly this blossomed in him, was reflected back at him from Vasudeva's old, childlike face: harmony, knowledge of the eternal perfection of the world, unity. — Hermann Hesse

When bounteous autumn rears her head, he joys to pull the ripened pear. — John Dryden

Pears cannot ripen alone. So we ripened together. — Meridel Le Sueur

Trees bend low with ripened fruit; clouds hang down with gentle rain; noble people bow graciously. This is the way of generous things. — Bhartrhari

Fulfill - you can far more than fulfill - the brightest anticipations of those who, in the name of human freedom, and in the face of threats that have ripened into terrible realities since, fought that battle which placed you where you now stand. — Robert Dale Owen

Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Inevitably I came to associate any wine I met with a specific place and a particular slant of history. I learned to perceive more than could be deduced from an analysis of the physical elements in the glass. For me, an important part of the pleasure of wine is its reflection of the total environment that produced it. If I find in a wine no hint of where it was grown, no mark of the summer when the fruit ripened, and no indication of the usages common among those who made it, I am frustrated and disappointed. Because that is what a good, honest wine should offer. — Gerald Asher

It is the privilege of the rich
To waste the time of the poor
To water with tears in secret
A tree that grows in secret
That bears fruit in secret
That ripened falls to the ground in secret
And manures the parent tree
Oh the wicked tree of hatred and the secret
The sap rising and the tears falling. — Stevie Smith

I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial. — Thomas Jefferson

I visit the orchards of God and look at the spheric product
And look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green. — Walt Whitman

With addiction, a client's fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana - the fear of Fear itself. — Geoffrey Wood

In May, when the grass was so green it hurt to look at it, the air so overpoweringly sweet you had to go in and turn on the television just to dull your senses- that's when Claire knew it was time to look for the asparagus in the pastures. If it rained she wondered if she should check our secret places for morels. In June, when the strawberries ripened, we made hay and the girls rode on top of the wagon. I was ever mindful of the boy who had fallen off and broken his neck. In July, the pink raspberries, all in brambles in the woods and growing up our front porch, turned black and tart. In August, the sour apples were the coming thing. In September there were the crippled-up pears in the old orchard. In October, we picked the pumpkin and popcorn. And all winter, when there was snow, we lived for the wild trip down the slopes on the toboggan. — Jane Hamilton

Chinese were bornwith an accumulated wisdom, a natural sophistication, an intelligent naivete, and unless they were transplanted too young, these qualities ripened in them ... If ever I am homesick for China, now that I am home in my own country, it is when I discover here no philosophy. Our people have opinions and creeds and prejudices and ideas but as yet no philosophy. — Pearl S. Buck

Could I fight against rumor? I did not think so, for rumor had no grave and only bore seeds. It germinated in the air, thrived in the sun, and ripened in the shadows. It would not die in the rain and fly only higher in the wind. — Weina Dai Randel

Unto us all our days are love's anniversaries, each one In turn hath ripened something of our happiness. — Robert Bridges

One may decide that the nipple most nearly resembles a newly ripened raspberry (never, be it noted, the plonk of water on a pond at the commencement of a drizzle, a simple bladder nozzle built on the suction principal gum bubble, mole, or birth ward, bumpy metal button, or the painful red eruption of a swelling), but does one care to see his breakfast fruit as a sweetened milky bowl of snipped nips? no. — William H Gass

Truly, everything in this world depended on time. Time ripened all. If you had time, you succeeded in working the human mud internally and turning it into spirit. Then you did not fear death. If you did not have time, you perished. — Nikos Kazantzakis

And never since harvests were ripened, / Or laborers born, / Have men gathered figs of the thistle, / Or grapes of the thorn! — Phoebe Cary

A wanton women is ripened fruit,' Constanze intoned,'begging to be plucked by the Goblin King. — S. Jae-Jones

I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which I have also imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. — Anonymous

We were green: we ripened and grew golden.
The Sea terrified us: we learned how to drown.
Squat and earthbound, we unfolded huge wings.
We started sober: are love's startled drunkards.
You hide me in your cloak of nothingness
Reflect my ghost in your glass of being
I am nothing, yet appear: transparent dream
Where your eternity briefly trembles. — Rumi

Her aunt seemed to her aggressive and foolish, and to see it so clearly - to judge Mrs. Penniman so positively - made her feel old and grave. She did not resent the imputation of weakness; it made no impression on her, for she had not the sense of weakness, and she was not hurt at not being appreciated. She had an immense respect for her father, and she felt that to displease him would be a misdemeanour analogous to an act of profanity in a great temple; but her purpose had slowly ripened, and she believed that her prayers had purified it of its violence. — Henry James

The change in the girl's face was more subtle, almost invisible; it was not joy, there was no sparkle, but something like a serene contentment. It was as though she had ripened, as though there were a growing plenitude in her, never there before. — Georges Simenon

The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only 'ripened'; they have begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind. — Leon Trotsky

She looked like autumn, when leaves turned and fruit ripened. — Sarah Addison Allen

He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with "sort of," and "the ways in which"; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Slowly blossomed, slowly ripened in Siddhartha the realisation, the knowledge, what wisdom actually was, what the goal of his long search was. It was nothing but a readiness of the soul, an ability, a secret art, to think every moment, while living his life, the thought of oneness, to be able to feel and inhale the oneness. — Hermann Hesse

The point is not merely to succeed but to become a deeper, more complex, more mature person through your struggle. You allow the alchemy of your challenging journey to etch itself into your character, making you into a rich personality. Then whatever work you do will have the quality of your experience and your capacity to be ripened by it. Doing — Thomas Moore

August is ripening grain in the fields blowing hot and sunny, the scent of tree-ripened peaches, of hot buttered sweet corn on the cob. Vivid dahlias fling huge tousled blossoms through gardens and joe-pye-weed dusts the meadow purple. — Jean Hersey

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist. — Wallace Stevens

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? — Leo Tolstoy

Like a fruit hidden among its leaves, which has grown and ripened unobserved by man, until it falls of its own accord, there came upon us one night the kitchen-maid's confinement. — Marcel Proust

What seems to tend to the church's ruin is often overruled to the ruin of the church's enemies, whose pride and malice are fed by Providence, that they may be ripened for destruction. — Matthew Henry