2
" February. Get ink, shed tears.Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,While torrential slush that roarsBurns in the blackness of the spring.Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,Race through the noice of bells and wheelsTo where the ink and all you grievingAre muffled when the rainshower falls.To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,Fall down into the puddles, hurlDry sadness deep into the eyes.Below, the wet black earth shows through,With sudden cries the wind is pitted,The more haphazard, the more trueThe poetry that sobs its heart out. "
4
" Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine. "
― Henry David Thoreau , Walden
5
" A child in London asked her father what autumn was, having heard it spoken of these days, and the father in explanation said it was a season, though not a major one. In cities, this father said, you did not feel autumn so much, not as you felt the heat of summer or the bite of winter air, or even the slush of spring. He said that, and then the next day sent for the child and said he had been talking nonsense. 'Autumn is on now,' he said. 'You can see it in the parks,' and he took his child for a nature walk. "
― William Trevor , The Love Department
6
" It had started snowing, a thick wet layer of slush that won't stick. There are no cars on the road, nothing but big white flakes falling onto our faces, erasing the buildings around us, and the low swish of our feet on the road as we try to keep our footing, a soft wheeze humming from the bottom of my lungs from too much smoking.In the middle of Nation Road, Mazzie turns to me without any warning. She grabs my arm and we both fall down, and then we're sitting there in the middle of the bare road, and for a few seconds we just sit there, quite, listening to the eerie silent noise of snow falling against land.Snow covers Mazzie's eyelashes, making her look like a tiny ice princess– the closest she will ever come to wearing makeup." You look pretty," I say." Shut up. "
7
" Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, " This is and no mistake. "
10
" She was called a cook, but there was no real evidence she had even a small amount of ability to do this. Every meal, no matter how much you thought you liked it before, would be ruined forever after having one of Margery’s slop versions of it. Burger and Chips or Lasagne, as Mike liked, were gruesomely murdered by the time Margery had used the ingredients (and added some special ones of her own!) to deliver a pile of gruel. It did not matter what the menu said; when served, it was always green, even if none of the ingredients were actually green!
“Nexxxttt! Hey, you, I said NEXXTT!!!” she shouted at the violet boy who had hesitated to wonder if life was really worth this. “What’s your name, boy? Speak up now and tell me which class you are in?”
This was a usual evil method Margery used so children had to give up holding their breath and smell the putrid stench of her sweaty BO mixed with the green muck she scooped from a giant vat beside her. The poor boy nearly passed out when it hit him, but, fortunately, his friend helped him stay up. He quickly grabbed his tray and sloshed his green slush all over as he ran for freedom.
NNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEXXXXXXXXXXXTTTTTTT!!! "
― , Back on Track
11
" She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone. "
― William Gibson , Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)