undergrowth QUOTES

1 " We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love. "

― Tim Farrington , The Monk Downstairs

2 " She surveyed the undergrowth and focused on a cluster of fern fronds curled tightly against the new life they had been given. She often wondered why the fern’s new existence was so firmly wound up. But she questioned their response no longer. Oaklee felt every muscle in her body want to curl up in self-protection, to comfort the pain, anger, and fear. "

― Jesikah Sundin , Elements (The Biodome Chronicles #2)

3 " I read the paragraph again. A peculiar feeling it gave me. I don't know if you have ever experienced the sensation of seeing the announcement of the engagement of a pal of yours to a girl whom you were only saved from marrying yourself by the skin of your teeth. It induces a sort of -- well, it's difficult to describe it exactly; but I should imagine a fellow would feel much the same if he happened to be strolling through the jungle with a boyhood chum and met a tigress or a jaguar, or what not, and managed to shin up a tree and looked down and saw the friend of his youth vanishing into the undergrowth in the animal's slavering jaws. A sort of profound, prayerful relief, if you know what I mean, blended at the same time with a pang of pity. What I'm driving at is that, thankful as I was that I hadn't had to marry Honoria myself, I was sorry to see a real good chap like old Biffy copping it. I sucked down a spot of tea and began brooding over the business. "

― P.G. Wodehouse

4 " I’ve made it my mission to discover that which is off the beaten track. Somewhere in the undergrowth of the impossible. "

― Fennel Hudson , Wild Carp - Fennel's Journal - No. 4

5 " I nearly forced my own way through the undergrowth to leave the sight behind. I was afraid I'd encouraged the figure to advance by trying to see it, perhaps even by thinking about it. (" The Long Way" ) "

6 " Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over. "

7 " After many missions in a plethora of peculiar realms, he’d managed to keep the fear of monsters locked away, but his own evil terrified him more than any demon.
Snow fell hard, bodies fell harder.
The snow was blue here, a shade lighter than the crystalline trees surrounding them. They were in the ice jungle of Eltika, where the undergrowth was littered with a thousand ice shards and the tree vines emitted vapour cold enough to cause frostbite.
Arantay took time to survey the battle before his next opponent. "

― William Collins , A Darker Shade of Sorcery (The Realmers #1)

8 " It is as if we were to start hacking a path through the Amazon forest. By the time we have proceeded a hundred yards, the undergrowth takes over again. "

9 " The lounge of the private terminal in Delhi. A place of beige leather sofas and cappuccinos, set deep in that world where a seeling modernity has yet to close over the land, and where in the empty spaces that lie between the elevated roads and the coloured glass buildings there are still, like insects taking shelter under the veined roof of a leaf, the encampments of families who built them. Black pigs still thread their way through the weeds, there are still patient lorry-loads of labourers, waiting among the dazzle of the new cars, for the lights to change. One India, dwarfed and stunted, adheres like a watchful undergrowth to another India which, in very physical ways, as with the roads that fly up out of the pale land, or the chunks of monorail that rise up from the ground like the remnants of an ancient wall, or the blank closed faces of the glass buildings, wishes to shrug off its poorer opposite: to leave it behind; to shut it out; to soar over it. One man, above all, captures the mood of this time: the security guard. In him, this man of expectation – a man not rich himself, but standing guard at the doorway to a world of riches – it is possible to feel the boredom and restlessness of a world that inspires ambition, but cannot answer it. Skanda watches him watching the lounge, with eyes glazed and yellowing from undernourishment. A favourite phrase from college returns: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "

― Aatish Taseer , The Way Things Were