Marsh Quotes
Quotes tagged as "marsh"
Showing 1-24 of 24
“Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn’t know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.”
― The House of Madame Tellier and Other Stories
― The House of Madame Tellier and Other Stories
“Thoreau the “Patron Saint of Swamps” because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, “my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.”
― Walden and Other Writings
― Walden and Other Writings
“What’s a treaty? It’s a piece of paper. An agreement means nothing in itself. It’s the power to force others to comply with that agreement—that’s all that counts. That’s the sham of this whole thing.”
- General Marsh”
―
- General Marsh”
―
“She knew the shapes of all the trees; still some seemed to dart here and there, moving with the moon. For a while she was so stiff she couldn't swallow, but on cue, the familiar songs of tree frogs and katydids filled the night. More comforting than three blind mice with a carving knife. The darkness held an odor of sweetness, the earthy breath of frogs and salamanders who'd made it through one more stinky-hot day. The marsh snuggled in closer with a low fog, and she slept.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“Ducking beneath the low-hanging limbs of giant trees, she churned slowly through thicket for more than a hundred yards, as easy turtles slid from water-logs. A floating mat of duckweed colored the water as green as the leafy ceiling, creating an emerald tunnel. Finally, the trees parted, and she glided into a place of wide sky and reaching grasses, and the sounds of cawing birds. The view a chick gets, she reckoned, when it finally breaks its shell.
Kya tooled along, a tiny speck of a girl in a boat, turning this way and that as endless estuaries branched and braided before her. Keep left at all the turns going out, Jodie had said. She barely touched the throttle, easing the boat through the current, keeping the noise low. As she broke around a stand of reeds, a whitetail doe with last spring's fawn stood lapping water. Their heads jerked up, slinging droplets through the air. Kya didn't stop or they would bolt, a lesson she'd learned from watching wild turkeys: if you act like a predator, they act like prey. Just ignore them, keep going slow. She drifted by, and the deer stood as still as a pine until Kya disappeared beyond the salt grass.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
Kya tooled along, a tiny speck of a girl in a boat, turning this way and that as endless estuaries branched and braided before her. Keep left at all the turns going out, Jodie had said. She barely touched the throttle, easing the boat through the current, keeping the noise low. As she broke around a stand of reeds, a whitetail doe with last spring's fawn stood lapping water. Their heads jerked up, slinging droplets through the air. Kya didn't stop or they would bolt, a lesson she'd learned from watching wild turkeys: if you act like a predator, they act like prey. Just ignore them, keep going slow. She drifted by, and the deer stood as still as a pine until Kya disappeared beyond the salt grass.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“I had never liked, even feared a little, this wild reach of marsh and mud flats where everything seemed turned away from the land, looking off desperately toward the horizon as if in mute search for a sign of rescue.”
― The Sea
― The Sea
“On every trip to Kya's, Tate took school or library books, especially on marsh creatures and biology. Her progress was startling. She could read anything now, her said, and once you can read anything you can learn everything. It was up to her. "Nobody's come close to filling their brains," he said. "We're all like giraffes not using their necks to reach the higher leaves."
Alone for hours, by the light of the lantern, Kya read how plants and animals change over time to adjust to the ever-shifting earth; how some cells divide and specialize into lungs or hearts, while others remain uncommitted as stem cells in case they're needed later. Birds sing mostly at dawn because the cool, moist air of morning carries their songs and their meanings much farther. All her life, she'd seen these marvels at eye level, so nature's ways came easily to her.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
Alone for hours, by the light of the lantern, Kya read how plants and animals change over time to adjust to the ever-shifting earth; how some cells divide and specialize into lungs or hearts, while others remain uncommitted as stem cells in case they're needed later. Birds sing mostly at dawn because the cool, moist air of morning carries their songs and their meanings much farther. All her life, she'd seen these marvels at eye level, so nature's ways came easily to her.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“Clouds of mosquitoes and gnats blow through the hot, wet air of the marsh where the Thistlewitch lives. My boots sink into the gluey mud. The trees are draped heavily in creeper and poisonous trumpet vine, swaths of it blocking the path. In the brown water, things move.”
― The Stolen Heir
― The Stolen Heir
“Out of some far recess of the sky a tinkling of little bells falls soft upon the listening land. Then again silence. Now comes a baying of some sweet-throated hound, soon the clamor of a responding back. Then a far clear blast of hunting horns, out of the sky into the fog.
High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks , and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.”
― A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks , and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness, but without yet disclosing whence it comes. At last a glint of sun reveals the approach of a great echelon of birds. On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.”
― A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
“Living in a stupid country is living in a marsh! You are surrounded by the reptiles and the alligators! Refusing hell is the best path to eliminate the hell!”
―
―
“The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, - melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man.”
― The Log of the Sun a Chronicle of Nature's Year
― The Log of the Sun a Chronicle of Nature's Year
“Louisiana from twenty-thousand feet used to look like a fine and verdant boot with long marsh appendages reaching out into the Gulf of Mexico and interspersed with hundreds of inlets and clandestine waterways like Jean Lafitte would hole up and hide their booty.”
― Tiny Righteous Acts
― Tiny Righteous Acts
“A Gathering of Frogs by Stewart Stafford
Through the fence with friends,
And into the back field frontier,
Past the growing pile of lumber,
Shivers for the Halloween bonfire.
Down the slope to a boundary hedge,
Rusty bathtub lying like a crime scene,
And into the deepening marsh beyond,
For the ritual kidnapping of frogspawn.
Frogs leap through reeds and tall grass,
The bulbous jelly of many eyes located,
Scooped surgically into a container,
Up to our fort to study our live plunder.
Tongues of smoke from our twig fire,
On the derelict path between estates,
Crisps consumed in the darkening chill,
Then, satiated, a walk home for dinner.
© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
―
Through the fence with friends,
And into the back field frontier,
Past the growing pile of lumber,
Shivers for the Halloween bonfire.
Down the slope to a boundary hedge,
Rusty bathtub lying like a crime scene,
And into the deepening marsh beyond,
For the ritual kidnapping of frogspawn.
Frogs leap through reeds and tall grass,
The bulbous jelly of many eyes located,
Scooped surgically into a container,
Up to our fort to study our live plunder.
Tongues of smoke from our twig fire,
On the derelict path between estates,
Crisps consumed in the darkening chill,
Then, satiated, a walk home for dinner.
© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
―
“There was one my dad told me, setting down the book, since he knew the story by heart, about a fairy queen who lived in the center of the marsh. She was both beautiful and terrible, angry at times and kind at others, and rarely seen by mortals. Mostly she took the form of a great blue heron, surveying her kingdom and all the creatures in it. She disdained most humans, except those she helped make the passage into the next world. But if a living person had a sincere wish and she deemed it noble, she would rise up out of the swamp in her true form, with her Spanish-moss hair and her eyes like the sharpest sunbeams, and she would ask the human to perform a nearly impossible task. If they did, she would grant the wish.”
― The Marsh Queen
― The Marsh Queen
“It was now 1952, so some of the claims had been held by a string of disconnected, unrecorded persons for four centuries. Most before the Civil War. Others squatted on the land more recently, especially after the World Wars, when men came back broke and broke-up. The marsh did not confine them but defined them and, like any sacred ground, kept their secrets deep. No one cared that they held the land because nobody else wanted it. After all, it was wasteland bog.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“At first, every few minutes, she sat up and peered through the screen. Listening for footsteps in the woods. She knew the shapes of all the trees; still some seemed to dart here and there, moving with the moon. For a while she was so stiff she couldn't swallow, but on cue, the familiar songs of tree frogs and katydids filled the night. More comforting than three blind mice with a carving knife. The darkness held an odor of sweetness, the earthy breath of frogs and salamanders who'd made it through one more stinky-hot day. The marsh snuggled in closer with a low fog, and she slept.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“Months passed, winter was easing gently into place, as southern winters do. The sun, warm as a blanket, wrapped Kya's shoulders, coaxing her deeper into the marsh. Sometimes she heard night-sounds she didn't know or jumped from lightning too close, but whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“But after thinking a minute she said, "No, I cain't leave the gulls, the heron, the shack. The marsh is all the family I got.”
― Where the Crawdads Sing
― Where the Crawdads Sing
“And what a strange emotion disappointment was to circumnavigate. It wasn't a mountain to climb, or a valley to trek. It didn't share the emotional highs that anger brought, nor was it low enough to wallow in depression. It was slow and stagnant, like a marsh on a moor. It sapped your will and made your legs tired. I knew it well.”
― An Olive Grove in Ends
― An Olive Grove in Ends
“In silence, we watched the water shimmer like a peacock's feather in that shining foil of soft tide in retreat.”
― Beach Music
― Beach Music
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