Across The Green Grass Fields Quotes

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.

Such is the dichotomy of forests. Even the smallest remembers what it was to cover nations, and the shadows they contain will whisper the knowledge to anyone who listens.

A cold wind raced across the surrounding fields of wild grass, turning the land into a heaving dark-green ocean. It sighed up through the branches of cherry trees and rattled the thick leaves. Sometimes a cherry would break loose, tumble in the gale, fall and split, filling the night with its fragrance. The air was iron and loam and growth. He walked and tried to pull these things into his lungs, the silence and coolness of them. But someone was screaming, deep inside him. Someone was talking. ("Hunger")

We have always held the land above the one who rules it.

She still didn't believe in destiny. Clay shaped into a cup was not always destined to become a drinking vessel; it was simply shaped by someone too large to be resisted.

The adults all agreed, without a word exchanged, that if Regan’s act of human heroism was to give comfort and friendship to one lonely centaur girl, they would consider her efforts to have been well spent.

In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…

They thought children, especially girl children, were all sugar and lace, and that when those children fought, they would do so cleanly and in the open, where adult observers could intervene.

If your friends would stop wanting you around because you’re not exactly like them, they’re not very good friends,

You know that part in An Imperial Affliction when Anna's walking across the football field to go to PE or whatever and she falls and goes face first into the grass and that's when she knows that the cancer is back and in her nervous system and she can't get up and her face is like an inch from the football -field grass and she's just stuck there looking at this grass up close, noticing the way the light hits it and...I don't remember the line but it's something like Anna having the Whitmanesque revelation that the definition of humannness is the opportunity to marvel at the majesty of creation or whatever. You know that part?

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America - with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers in his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home. Silver and blue, blue and silver. Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears. The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be. Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed. “Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass. The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon. Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.” Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it? The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light? Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand. “Stop,” he calls. “Halt,” he calls. But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.

I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort.

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. He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there may be no limits.

There’s nothing wrong with being limited, as long as you have people around to make sure those limitations don’t get you hurt. Or drenched.

Having thumbs is sort of like having a magical sword no one can take away from you. It’s destiny!

We're all people here. We all get to have the same chance to save the world.

Destiny wasn't real. Destiny was for people like Laurel, who could pin everything they had to an idea that the world was supposed to work in in a certain way, and refuse to let it change

or this is a dream, and you have the chance to dream about meeting Her Sunlit Majesty. Either way, telling me I don’t exist doesn’t seem like a very good way to move forward. You want to take a deep breath and try again?

Regan had known from the beginning that Laurel's love was conditional. It came with so many strings that it was easy to get tangled inside it, unable to even consider trying to break free. Laurel's love was a safe, if rigid, cocoon.

Clay shaped into a cup was not always destined to become a drinking vessel; it was simply shaped by someone too large to be resisted. She was not clay, but she had been shaped by her circumstances all the same, not directed by any destiny

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.

The world comes to life. Wisps of green steal across the fields, rich with the promise of spring. Tiny shoots push through the soil. Virgin buds uncoil at the tips of branches. Soft, fresh grass sweeps and swells across the meadows. Thornbushes blossom on the hillsides. The walnut tress have survived the winter, though their antlered crowns still stand bare. Fresh leaves reach longingly for rain from the sky.

I think of crusts and bread and butter and white plates in a sunny room. I will go back across the fields. I will walk along this grass path with strong, even strides, now swerving to avoid the puddle, now leaping lightly to a clump. Beads of wet form on my rough skirt; my shoes become supple and dark. The stiffness has gone from the day; it is shaded with grey, green and umber. The birds no longer settle on the high road.

They thought children, especially girl children, were all sugar and lace, and that when those children fought, they would do so cleanly and in the open, where adult observers could intervene. It was like they'd drawn a veil of fellow-feeling and good intentions over their own childhoods as soon as they crossed the magic line into adulthood, and left all the strange feuds, unexpected betrayals, and arbitrary shunnings behind them

Endangered Species Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time's underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving's underside. No one seeing the roots can guess at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I'm still breathing. So empty I know I'm not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse-no one takes notes-disappear, &

Destiny had never been an option.

It is a full moon night. The moonlight is soft and silver. You are in an open field, and everything glows around you. The silky grass comes up to your waist, swaying in the breeze like the waves of the sea. You stroke your hand across it slowly, its greens and its silvers, the soft strands of it against your palm. You take a deep breath. Deep, deep. You let it out slowly. Your lungs fill with the scent of the night. The rich earth, the fresh air, the smell of the forest. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. With each breath, you can feel yourself filling with moonlight. It is casting its kind glow on all the shadows inside. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. You walk forwards. The grass and dirt are soft beneath your bare feet. You wade through the grass. Everything is calm but filled with life. With the tranquil energy of the moonlight. You look around. This place is yours. You belong to it as it belongs to you. You are safe here. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. As you look around you realize—you are part of this land. You are the moonlight that streams down. You are the grass that sways. You are the leaves that murmur. You are the earth and you are the air. You are no more and no less than it. You have been filling yourself up with problems and fears. With I shoulds and shouldn’ts. But here, you see how simple it really is. You are the force of the raging river, the might of a mountain, the strength of a tree. You do not expect more or less from them than what they are. Their existence is enough. So is yours. You are a creature of the moonlight. You are a creature of the earth. You let yourself be with that feeling. With that knowledge. That power. That at the most fundamental of levels, you are the same as the earth around you. You are another creature, free to live in balance with itself and the world. You have no duty here. You are not that important. You are important enough to let yourself live. Let yourself be. You take another deep breath. You let it out slowly. You fill yourself with moonlight. With the calm it brings. The peace. All the pieces of you that have been rattled through the day are settled at night. You take a deep breath. You let it out

Regan thought it must be nice, to believe children were innocent angels incapable of intrigue or cruelty.

In the cold of winter, the wind blows the snow off the ground and waves of white come sweeping across our tiny stretch of lawn and hit the house in sprinklings of icy snow. Invisible streams of air seep through the cracks of the old windows and the smell of our rice-scented home swims in the currents of cold. Outside, the sound of police sirens resonates in the rippling, urgent winter winds. In the warmth of spring, the wind transforms the empty parking lot by the corner Laundromat into a field of fallen petals as crab apple trees release their blooms and the hard pavement feels the soft brush of tender, ephemeral beauty. Wet rain falls into shattered concrete and the pools of black water lie still for the pink and white and red petals to swim in. The wind carries the voices of laughing children into our house as we watch the petals sway to and fro in the dark puddles across our street. In the heat of hot summer, the green grass grows while the yellow dandelions die, and in the wake of their demise the wind carries their spirits and their seeds across open lots, rotting houses, small yards, littered avenues, and everywhere there are little parachutes of pollen floating away. Late into the night, we listen to the voices of friends and neighbors talking outside on their porches, hear the clinking of cans, turn our heads toward their laughter and their tears, and the wind loses its appeal for a season because the pull of people grows strong across the fertile green.

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America—with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers of his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

anyone who answered a friend’s honesty with horror and rejection had never been a friend in the first place.

It's just the two of us. She shows me more secret passageways through the woods until the trees clear to reveal a large, moonlit meadow. We stop at the edge. Emma's looking at me expectantly, and at first I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see. I see tall, unkempt grass surrounded by trees. Then, like my eyes are playing tricks on me, fluorescent green lights flash on and off in the field, some of them rising up like bubbles in a pot of boiling water, some shooting across and lighting up the ground below them. "Whoa." "Pretty, right?" Emma says, turning her neck slowly from me to the meadow. "I almost never see fireflies." "I did some research, and they're not even supposed to exist west of Kansas. I have no idea why there's so many of them here." We walk through the field together, and in the blinking green lights I can see Emma's hand inches from my own, I see the curves and dips of her face in profile and I wonder how it is that I can find the space between things beautiful. Emma stops for a second and reaches into the waist-high grass, her hand disappearing in the dark. She pulls it back out to reveal a berry I have never seen before, not in the smorgasbord of rainbow-colored fruit at American grocery stores and definitely not anywhere in Mexico. It is the size of a child's fist, and the skin is prickly, like a lychee's. "When I was a kid, if I was mad at my mom, I'd hide out here for the day, picking out berries," Emma says. "I had no way of knowing if they were poisonous, but I'd feast on them anyway." She digs her thumb into the skin to reveal a pulpy white interior. She takes a bite out of it and then hands it to me. It's sweet and tangy and would be great in a vinaigrette, as a sauce, maybe along with some roasted duck. "I don't even think anyone else knows about these, because I've never seen them anywhere else. I'm sure she'd put it on her menu if she found out about them, but I like keeping this one thing to myself." We grab them by the handful, take them with us down the hill toward the lake. Sitting on the shore, gentle waves lapping at our ankles, we peel the berries one by one. A day or two ago, I thought of Emma as pretty. Tonight, her profile outlined by a full moon, she looks beautiful to me. I wish I could drive the thought away, but there it is anyway. The water---or something else about these nights---really does feel like it can cure hopelessness.

She stepped inside.

I can be beautiful and limited at the same time...There's nothing wrong with being limited, as long as you have people around to make sure those limitations don't get you hurt

Newborn leaf clusters on the surrounding trees had a look of pale green popcorn. Tufts of onion grass sprouted across the soccer field, releasing their sweet scent.

I can be beautiful and limited at the same time.

There’s nothing wrong with being limited, as long as you have people around to make sure those limitations don’t get you hurt.

Children in a Field" They don't wade in so much as they are taken. Deep in the day, in the deep of the field, every current in the grasses whispers hurry hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume like a rumor, impelling them further on. It is the way of girls. It is the sway of their dresses in the summer trance- light, their bare calves already far-gone in green. What songs will they follow? Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm or harm the border promises, whatever calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless through the high grass and into the willow- blur, traceless across the lean blue glint of the river, to the long dark bodies of the conifers, and over the welcoming threshold of nightfall.

Time passed fast and I was coming out from the reputed engineering college at last after the same Professor had intervened with the college authority for holding the examination in spite of political troubles, prevailing during seventies in Calcutta. The sprawling complex of the university would suddenly vanish from my view. I would be missing the chirping of the birds in early morning, view of green grass of the football field right in front of our building, badly mauled by the students and pedestrians who used to cut short their journey moving across the field, whistling of steam trains passing parallel to the backside of boundary wall of our building, stentorian voice of our Professors, ever smiling and refreshing faces of the learned Professors every day. I would definitely miss the opportunity of gossiping on a bench by the lake side with other students, not to speak of your girlfriend with whom you would try to be cozy with to keep yourself warm when the chilling breeze, which put roses in girls’ cheeks but made sinuses ache, cut across you in its journey towards the open field during winter. The charm of walking along the lonely streets proscribed for outsiders and bowing occasionally when you meet the Professors of repute, music and band for the generation of ear deafening sound - both symphony and cacophony, on Saturdays and Sundays in the auditorium, rhythmic sound of machines in the workshop, hurly-burly of laughter of my friends, talks, cries at the top of  their lunges in the canteen and sudden departures of all from the canteen on hearing the ding-dong sound of the big bell hung in the administration building indicating the end of the period would no longer be there. The street fighting of two groups of students on flimsy grounds and passionate speeches of the students during debate competition would no longer be audible. Shaking of long thin pine trees violently by the storm flowing across these especially during summer, shouting and gesticulation of students’ union members while moving around the campus for better amenities or administration, getting caught with friends all around with revolvers in hand during the violent Naxalite movement, hiding in the toilet in canteen to avoid beating by police personnel, dropping of mangoes from a mango tree which spread its wings in all directions during the five years we were in the college near our building and running together by us to pick the green/ripe mangoes as fast as possible defying inclement weather and rain etc. were simply irresistible. The list was endless. I was going to miss very much the competition among us regarding number of mangoes we could collect for our few girlfriends whom we wanted to impress! I