Sweet Grass Quotes & Sayings

What makes it smell so sweet?" they wanted to know. "Because everything,
every little wild plum-blossom, every little tiny crocus and anemone and violet and every tree-bud and grass-blade is working to help make the prairie nice. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

The foot that is familiar with the grass belongs usually to a man of lighter heart than he whose soles seldom wander from the pavement; and the best elixir vitae is a run, as often as we can contrive it, amid the sweets of new and lovely scenery, where nature sits, fresh from the hand of the Creator, almost chiding us for our delay. — Leopold Hartley Grindon

How not to miss those days when the sun was a happy companion that stayed to play all year round and kissed me a careless nut brown? When Mother caught the sweet rain in her well behind the house, and the air was so clear that the grass smelled green? — Rani Manicka

I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams were coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me. — Donna Tartt

Give a bull grass, sweet water and a willing heifer and he is happy. But a man is never content. If no gadflies of worry exist he will invent them. — Alison Fell

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied. — Stephen King

Tears

The first woman who ever wept
was appalled at what stung
her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Saltwater. Seawater.
How was it possible?
Hadn't she and the man
spent many days moving
upland to where the grass
flourished, where the stream
quenched their thirst with sweet water?
How could she have carried these sea drops
as if they were precious seeds;
where could she have stowed them?
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
that dripped in her hands when she caught them.
Not even the man. Only she
carried the sea inside her body. — Lisel Mueller

The grass he walked through was new and a sweet smell clung to his clothes. There was blue dye on his hands from the wild irises ... that the color of the sky was a shade that could never be replicated in any photograph, just as Heaven could never be seen from the confines of Earth. — Alice Hoffman

For flowers that bloom about our feet;
For tender grass, so fresh, so sweet;
For song of bird, and hum of bee;
For all things fair we hear or see,
Father in heaven, we thank Thee! — Ralph Waldo Emerson

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines — Jean Toomer

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. — Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I bear a basket lined with grass;
I am so light, I am so fair,
That men must wonder as I pass
And at the basket that I bear,
Where in a newly-drawn green litter
Sweet flowers I carry, -- sweets for bitter.

Lilies I shew you, lilies none,
None in Caesar's gardens blow, --
And a quince in hand, -- not one
Is set, because their buds not spring;
Spring not, 'cause world is wintering.... — Gerard Manley Hopkins

Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel's guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. — William Gibson

When I came to you out of all that dust and heat and toil, I positively smelt violets at once. But not the sweet violet - you know, that early dark violet that smells of melting snow and spring grass. — Leo Tolstoy

I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a spirit in my feet
Has led me -who knows how?
To thy chamber-window, Sweet!

The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream -
The champak odours fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart,
As I must die on thine,
O beloved as thou art!

Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
Oh press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

My pride in Joachim Mahlke was as sweet as chocolate creams. — Gunter Grass

Some daughter of one of the gentry planters, perhaps? Those girls had the domestic virtues. But - he was comfortable enough with his good servants at Fairfield House. His yearnings had little relation to somebody to preside over his household. Somehow, to Cornelis, these young ladies of the planter gentry were not alluring, vital. The most attractive of them, Honoria Macartney, he could hardly imagine beside him perpetually. Honoria had the dead-white skin of the Caucasian creole lady whose face has been screened from the sun since infancy.

("Sweet Grass") — Henry S. Whitehead

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities. — Robert Duvall

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps-often but old bottles and vials, though ... He burns, too, the purest of oil ... It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and genuineness, even as the traveler on the prairie hunts up his own supper of game. — Herman Melville

Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head. — Emily Bronte

The two thought themselves alone. But all the while, one watched with the night-wide eyes of love. While they paced the pebbled paths between the silent flowers' spiked arrays, sage Thyme spied upon each pale sigh, peeping between bloom and leaf. And while they sat side by side and hand in hand on the stained stone bench beneath the spreading wisteria, Thyme watched unwinking from the midnight face of the mute sundial. And while they lay lazy on the soft grass, swearing the sweet oaths of love and longing, and whispering as they parted that though long lives might pass like a night and the New Sun sunder the centuries, yet never should they ever part, Thyme crept and cried, counting seconds that spilled with the sand from the hourglass, and scenting the soft breezes that cooled the child's burning cheek with his sad spice. The — Gene Wolfe

It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left untouched by the plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the fields there comes at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet, and on the low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among it. — Leo Tolstoy

I am not blind, nor deaf. I know you all believe me weak, frightened, feeble. Your father knew me better. Oberyn was ever the viper. Deadly, dangerous, unpredictable. No man dared tread on him. I was the grass. Pleasant, complaisant, sweet-smelling, swaying with every breeze. Who fears to walk upon the grass? But it is the grass that hides the viper from his enemies and shelters him until he strikes. — George R R Martin

There, on the far side of of the Atlantic, would be Maine, but despite the shared ocean, her island and this one were worlds apart. Where Inishmaan was gray and brown, its fragile man-made soil supporting only the hardiest of low-growing plants, the fertile Quinnipeague invited tall pines in droves, not to mention vegetables, flowers, and improbable, irrepressible herbs. Lifting her head, eyes closed now, she breathed in the damp Irish air and the bit of wood smoke that drifted on the cold ocean wind. Quinnipeague smelled of wood smoke, too, since early mornings there could be chilly, even in summer. But the wood smoke would clear by noon, giving way to the smell of lavender, balsam, and grass. If the winds were from the west, there would be fry smells from the Chowder House; if from the south, the earthiness of the clam flats; if from the northeast, the purity of sweet salt air. — Barbara Delinsky

It was an innocent enough activity, after all; like looking at the sky, perhaps, when the sun was going down and had made the clouds copper-red, or looking at a herd of fine cattle moving slowly over the land when rains had brought on the sweet green grass. These were pleasures which the soul needed from time to time, and she would wait for Mma Makutsi until she had examined the shoes from all angles. — Alexander McCall Smith

His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to pity, and its own particular movements which he tried hard to follow. He had learned from it how to keep his eyes down on the road, so that he could see no one, and how important it was never to look back - although there were times when memories of an earlier life filled him with grief and he lay face down upon the grass until the sweet rank odour of the earth brought him to his senses. But slowly he forgot where it was he had come from, and what it was he was escaping. — Peter Ackroyd

Your job is to abide in my pasture
Eating sweet grass and drinking pure water,
And sharing both with others -
That is a lamb's business. — Jessica Coupe

But Christopher obeyed a higher calling: the intoxicating call of green grass and sunshine, the sweet scent of the earth on one of the last days of summer. — Sy Montgomery

His tongue swept in, gentle and sweet, but also intense. She tasted spearmint, like he'd been chewing gum. He smelled like grass from the field.
One hand smoothed a path up her back under her sweatshirt but over her tank. His palm made lazy circles on her back that mimicked the rhythm of their kiss. It was a light, almost reverent touch, and she finally knew what Katie meant when she had once said she loved kissing so much she could do it for hours alone. If this was how it was supposed to be done, sign her up for a marathon event. — Jeanette Murray

Soldier! Let me cradle your head and caress your face, let me kiss your dear sweet lips and cry across the seas and whisper through the icy Russian grass how I feel for you ... Luga, Ladoga, Leningrad, Lazarevo ... Alexander, once you carried me, and now I carry you. Into my eternity, now I carry you.
Through Finland, through Sweden, to America, hand outstretched, I stand and limp forward, the galloping steed black and riderless in my wake. Your heart, your rifle, they will comfort me, they'll be my cradle and my grave.
Lazarevo drips you into my soul, dawn drop by moonlight drop from the river Kama. When you look for me, look for me there, because that's where I will be all the days of my life. (Tatiana) — Paullina Simons

The golden line is drawn between winter and summer. Behind all is blackness and darkness and dissolution. Before is hope, and soft airs, and the flowers, and the sweet season of hay; and people will cross the fields, reading or walking with one another; and instead of the rain that soaks death into the heart of green things, will be the rain which they drink with delight; and there will be sleep on the grass at midday, and early rising in the morning, and long moonlight evenings. — Leigh Hunt

The earth shook under their tread as their strong feet sank into the wet turf. A tiny haze and a sweet smell went up where they had crushed the grass and scattered the dew. Some were naked, some robed. But the naked ones did not seem less adorned, and the robes did not disguise in those who wore them the massive grandeur of muscle and the radiant smoothness of flesh. Some were geared but no no one in that company struck me as being of any particular age. One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless
heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. Here it was all like that. — C.S. Lewis

I think that I shall never know
Why I am thus, and I am so.
Around me, other girls inspire
In men the rush and roar of fire,
The sweet transparency of glass,
The tenderness of April grass,
The durability of granite;
But me- I don't know how to plan it.
The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlock
Were- shall we say?- born out of wedlock.
They broke my heart, they stilled my song,
And said they had to run along,
Explaining, so to sop my tears,
First came their parents or careers.
But ever does experience
Deny me wisdom, calm, and sense!
Though she's a fool who seeks to capture
The twenty-first fine, careless rapture,
I must go on, till ends my rope,
Who from my birth was cursed with hope.
A heart in half is chaste, archaic;
But mine resembles a mosaic-
The thing's become ridiculous!
Why am I so? Why am I thus? — Dorothy Parker

He pulled the knitting away from her, throwing it in the grass, then sank down on his knees in front of her, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his head in her lap. He was shaking, she realized, and the tears were pouring down her face, onto him, as she stroked his long, silken hair and cried.
She didn't care what it sounded like - the hiccupping noises, the choking sobs.
Her own body was shaking, racked by the final release, and he sat back on his heels and pulled her out of the chair, into his arms, holding her so tightly that a weaker woman might break, whispering to her in Japanese, sweet, loving words, letting her cry.
She was a strong woman, and her tears, so long denied, only made her stronger.
His heart was pounding against hers, his hands firm and tender, pushing the hair away from her tear-drenched face. When he kissed her she couldn't breathe, and she didn't care. — Anne Stuart

Look what I found, Eight!"
Eight disappears from the grass and reappears up in the air next to the Chest. He wraps his arms around it and hugs it. Slime and all. Then he teleports back to the edge of the lake, the Chest still in his hands. "I can't believe it," Eight finally says. "All this time, it was right here." He looks stunned.
"It was inside a Mog ship at the bottom of the lake," I say, walking out of the water.
Eight disappears again and teleports directly in front of me, our noses practically touching. Before I can register how nice his warm breath feels on my face, he picks me up and kisses me hard on the mouth as he twirls me around. My body stiffens and I suddenly have no idea what to do with my hands. I don't know what to do at all, so I just let it happen. He tastes salty and sweet at the same time. The whole world disappears and I feel as if I'm floating in darkness. (Rise of the Nine) — Pittacus Lore

The rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. — Kenneth Grahame

and there she was standing on the grass, which seemed to have turned green, and with the sun pouring down on her and warm sweet wafts about her and the fluting and twittering and singing coming from every bush and tree. She clasped her hands for pure joy and looked up in the sky and it was so blue and pink and pearly and white and flooded with springtime light that she felt as if she must flute and sing aloud herself — Frances Hodgson Burnett

I was not scared, though, and I could not have told you why I was not scared. I trusted Lettie, just as I had trusted her when we had gone in search of the flapping thing beneath the orange sky. I believed in her, and that meant I would come to no harm while I was with her. I knew it in a way that I knew that grass was green, the roses had sharp, woody thorns, that breakfast cereal was sweet. — Neil Gaiman

There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and all the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat died in the clothing (acrid and gray the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed-off lather of horse sweat, of the men at the table, Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the clear night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream. — Ernest Hemingway,

Before the bud swells, before the grass springs, before the plough is started, comes the sugar harvest. It is sequel of the bitter frost; a sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter. — John Burroughs

Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass. — Ray Bradbury

Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older
a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.
Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.
To perceive of the earth as round needed something else
standing up!
that hadn't yet happened.
What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of the dust.
When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,
sweet cousin. — Mary Oliver

Can't we go another way?"
"Nope. Only way to reach the green grass of Oregon or the sweet gold of California is through hell itself."
I roll my eyes. The Major has been especially colorful since his amputation, cussing and exaggerating and telling tall tales. He reminds me of Daddy, except not fit for female company. — Rae Carson

There, below the cliffs, is a bay of sand where the rocks stand up like the fangs of wolves, and no boat or swimmer can live when the tide is breaking round them. To right and left of the bay the sea has driven arches through the cliff. The rocks are purple and rose-coloured and pale as turquoise in the sun, and on a summer's evening when the tide is low and the sun is sinking, men see on the horizon land that comes and goes with the light. It is the Summer Isle, which (they say) floats and sinks at the will of heaven, the Island of Glass through which the clouds and stars can be seen, but which for those who dwell there is full of trees and grass and springs of sweet water . . .' The — Mary Stewart

A breeze had come up and there was the scent of loam in the air. Hay and fertilizer. Sweet grass and wild ginger. April. — Alice Hoffman

And when the rains were over and it was October and the birds were in song again, I could lie in the sun on sweet-smelling grass and gaze up through a pattern of oak leaves into a blind-blue heaven. And I would thank my God for leaves and grass and the smell of things, the smell of mint and myrtle and bruised clover, and the touch of things, the touch of grass and air and sky, the touch of the sky's blueness. — Ruskin Bond

Elijah blinked in dazzling sunlight and took a deep breath. The sweet-pepper scent of meadow grass told him immediately where he was. Winded, he skidded to a halt as the portal spat him out. Above him stretched skies of cornflower blue, dotted with threadbare white clouds sailing over like cotton galleons on the summer breeze. — Sharon Sant

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

(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them
the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind
should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not. — Jerome K. Jerome

He wouldn't spend another standing in the darkness, hot and sick and shaking inside with a confused mess of feelings that weren't worth analyzing. That he shouldn't have felt anyway.
With Rachel gone it was like balancing on the edge of a cliff - and all the little wildflowers, the netting of grass and roots that kept the cliff from sliding into the sea below, were gone. It was just Matt standing there looking down, waiting to fall.
Even Rachel's memory, the sweet recollection of all they had built, all they had shared, was no longer strong enough to fight gravity. From the moment he had looked across the wet grass and seen Nathan Doyle standing in the shadow of a stone saber-toothed tiger, something had changed inside him. Something battened down had torn free, like a sail taking its first deep breath of sea air.
It terrified him.
And at the same time it exhilarated him.
Which terrified him all the more. — Josh Lanyon

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call 'God's birds' because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known? — George Eliot

There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, ... — Alfred Lord Tennyson

common table sugar, or sucrose, is a carbohydrate made up of two simple sugars, fructose and glucose. All plants produce sucrose, but a few contain very large quantities. Natives in the land now called New Guinea, the massive island north of Australia, discovered a tropical grass that came to be known as sugarcane, perhaps around 8000 BC. The sweet-tasting stalks were eventually carried to other lands, including India, where juices pressed from sugarcane were first boiled to produce crystals. Darius — Richard J. Johnson

Spring with its wavin' green grass and heaps of sweet-smellin' flowers on every hill and in every dale. — Roy Bean

Sweet love, sweet thorn, when lightly to my heart. I took your thrust, whereby I since am slain, And I lie disheveled in the grass apart, A sodden thing bedrenched by tears and rain. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Because the air had smelled so sweet, and the sky had been black velvet, spangled with points of diamond light that didn't flicker at all, only burned constant and cold. Because the grass had been wet with dew, and the trees had been heavy with fruit. Because she had wanted to know what was at the end of the long path between the trees, and because she hadn't wanted to turn back before she understood everything. Because for the first time in forever, she'd felt like she was going home, and that feeling had been enough to move her feet, slowly at first, and then faster, and faster, until she had been running through the clean night air, and nothing else mattered, or would ever matter again. — Seanan McGuire

Kuntaw died on the most beautiful day in a thousand years. The October air was sweet and every faint breath a pleasure. Wind stirred and he said, "Our wind reaching me here." A small cloud formed in the west. "Our small cloud coming to me." The hours passed and the small cloud formed a dark wall and approached. A drop fell, another, many, and Kuntaw said, "Our rain wetting my face." His people came near him, drawing him into their eyes, and he said, "Now . . . what . . ." The sun came out, the brilliant world sparkled, susurration, liquid flow, stems of striped grass what was it what was it the limber swish of a released branch. What, now what. Kuntaw opened his mouth, said nothing, and let the sunlight enter him. — Annie Proulx

Reading Myself
Like thousands I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire
somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus ...
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work live long
enough for the sweet tooth bear to desecrate
this open book..my open coffin — Robert Lowell

O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh! When we are dead, my best beloved and I, close well above us, that we may rest forever, sending up grass and blossoms to the sky. — Conrad Aiken

She was a sweet, pretty thing and he'd have walked the world over to get her a blade o' grass she wanted. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Oh, my fellow men, do not defile your bodies with sinful foods. We have corn, we have apples bending down the branches with their weight, and grapes swelling on the vines. There are sweet-flavored herbs, and vegetables which can be cooked and softened over the fire, nor are you denied milk or thyme-scented honey. The earth affords a lavish supply of riches, of innocent foods, and offers you banquets that involve no bloodshed or slaughter; only beasts satisfy their hunger with flesh, and not even all of those, because horses, cattle, and sheep live on grass. — Pythagoras

During his sweet sleep, there was an angelic creature and in her eyes a look of joyous elation that filled Kevin's mind with anticipation of her possible existence in the real world. This freckle-faced vision with her wild mane of untamed blonde curls nightly left an unexplainable ache in his soul. In his dreams, she would appear to him as a mirage of hope. He could feel the love in her heart, for it seeped through her very essence into the air between them. She lay next to him in the grass as they quietly observed the sky above. Her hand seemed to be always just out of his reach. Kevin wanted to hold her hand so badly it was torturous. Her hand was just about touching his but not quite. Then her fingers brushed a path across his fingertips as if to say in the exquisite beauty of the moment, I will always be right here. — Kim Cormack

I got what I wanted, I guess. I'm here, in this home that I worked so hard to insulate from the problems of the world, our happy little bubble. The girls have their father every night. Adam has a newfound respect for me, the New Rachel, for the glittering, sharp edge that's emerged like a razor in the grass. When I think about my old self, I feel pity and yearning at the same time. Poor Old Rachel, the sweet, naive idiot. And lucky Old Rachel, so completely happy. There's one niggling thought I can't shake, one that keeps me awake at night. What would I tell my daughters if they came to me with the news that their husband had a mistress? That he told her, my precious daughter, that sex with the other woman was amazing? Stay and work things out. Oh, and get that STD panel ASAP, darlings! But do stay. Take all that hurt and betrayal and just ball it up and swallow it. Want to bake cookies? — Kristan Higgins

They watched the elk gallop and mull about like a new texture being laid, and their presence against the mountains in that high sweet grass was a trellis alive and for a moment it seemed as if the world was reinventing itself and the boy was filled with an inexplicable hope. — Robert Gatewood

Judith:"And where, then, is your sweetheart, Deerslayer?"
Deerslayer: "She's in the forest, Judith - hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain - in the dew on the open grass - the clouds that float about in the blue heavens - the birds that sing in the woods - the sweet springs where I slake my thirst - and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God's Providence! — James Fenimore Cooper

It has taken almost half my life away from Ireland for me to truly feel what home really is, and it is not what I was expecting. In the end it was not a place, or a past, or any sort of single, dazzling epiphany. It was all the little things. Cold butter spread thick on sweet wheaten bread or hot, subsiding potatoes; the scent of wet, black soil; a bushy spine of grass on a one-track road; wide iron gates leading to high beech corridors; the chalky smell of a cow's wet muzzle, and, most of all, in Seamus Heaney's words, the sound of rivers in the trees. — Trish Deseine

And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamors for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture. — Jeanette Winterson

RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have tromped the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH! For its very sound meant rolling in sweet fields with roistering chestnut mares, mouths bearded with grass, plunging your head fathoms deep in trough water so the sea poured cavernously through your head. RELISH! — Ray Bradbury

Then a soft air, a simple melody, rose to the ears of the suddenly hushed court; and for me, it was May Day again, and I was no longer cold, for the sun burned bright and the grass smelled of its sour-sweet bruisings and an old man fashioned a ballad for the Nut-Brown maid, who would ever be true to her lover. I leaned towards the brightness and, in an abandonment of joy and because there was none to see, tore off my henin and let my nut-brown hair fall to my knees. For I would be a child again, for five minutes, and remember the time when men stopped to gaze at me, with my chaplet of flowers crowning that at which they all marvelled, and longed to touch and stroke and possess. — Rosemary Hawley Jarman

He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs ... This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven? — Ernest Hemingway,

It tastes good, garlic and salt in it,
with the half-sweet white wine of Orvieto
on scanty grass under great trees
where the ramparts cuddle Lucca.
It sounds right, spoken on the ridge
between marine olives and hillside
blue figs, under the breeze fresh
with pollen of Apennine sage.
It feels soft, weed thick in the cave
and the smooth wet riddance of Antonietta's
bathing suit, mouth ajar for
submarine Amalfitan kisses.
It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost
when wind, sun, sea upbraid
justly an unconvinced deserter. — Basil Bunting

Sudden Light
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall, - I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more? — Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The warm, pulsing breath of the sweet grass surged through the open windows in a fashion to turn the head of a stone image. It was exotic, too sweet, exaggerated, like everything else in this climate! Cornelis turned over again, seeking a cool place on the broad bed. Then he sat up in bed, impatiently throwing off the sheet. A thin streak of moonlight edged the bed below his feet. He slipped out of bed, walked over to a window. He leaned out, looking down at the acres of undulating grass. There seemed to be some strange, hypnotic rhythm to it, some vague magic, as it swayed in the night wind. The scent poured over him in great, pulsing breaths. He shut his eves and drew it in, abandoning his senses to its effect.

("Sweet Grass") — Henry S. Whitehead