Meadowland Quotes

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. [--] [T]ime spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space.

To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.

Little soul, little perpetually undressed one, do now as I bid you, climb the shelf-like branches of the spruce tree; wait at the top, attentive, like a sentry or look-out. He will be home soon; it behooves you to be generous. You have not been completely perfect either; with your troublesome body you have done things you shouldn’t discuss in poems. Therefore call out to him over the open water, over the bright water with your dark song, with your grasping, unnatural song—passionate, like Marie Callas. Who wouldn’t want you? Whose most demonic appetite could you possibly fail to answer? Soon he will return from wherever he goes in the meantime, suntanned from his time away, wanting his grilled chicken. Ah, you must greet him, you must shake the boughs of the tree to get his attention, but carefully, carefully, lest his beautiful face be marred by too many falling needles.

I have decided to sleep under the stars... Tonight heaven is my roof, and the hedges my walls... The field folds me in soft wings.

you rise at dawn in May you can savour the world before the pandemonium din of the Industrial Revolution and 24/7 shopping.

I am fluent in snark. Bethany only notices snark when snark grabs her off the sidewalk, throws her in the back of a sketchy van with tinted windows, drives to the middle of the Meadow-lands in the dead of night, and uses a heavy blunt instrument to smack her repeatedly about the head as it screams, “I’M SNARK. DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME? I’M SNARKY SNARKY SNARK!” And even then she’s like, “Ohhhh? Snark? Is that you?

And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.

We can all write about suffering with our eyes closed. You should show people more of yourself; show them your clandestine passion for read meat.

The new day dawned in a haze of soft sunshine. It crept across the countryside suddenly to expand and burst forth over all the peaceful woods and meadowland. Blue-gold tinged with pink, each dewdrop turned into a scintillating jewel, spiders' webs became glittering filigree, birdsong rang out as if there had never been a day as fresh and beautiful as this one.

Temperance lived with his second family in the Meadowlands, and we visited them sparingly because my mom was always afraid of being poisoned. Which was a thing that would happen. The first family were the heirs, so there was always the chance they might get poisoned by the second family. It was like Game of Thrones with poor people. We’d go into that house and my mom would warn me.

Watching you stare into space in the tidy rows of the vegetable garden, ostensibly working hard while actually doing the worst job possible, I think you are a small irritating purple thing and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth because you are all that's wrong with my life and I need you and I claim you.

Shortly after the American Revolution, Craig decided to start a new life in a freer place. Joining his brother Lewis, he led an exodus of six hundred people to what is present-day Kentucky. The group called itself “the Travelling Church.” The Kentucky they arrived in was a place of transition, new and unknown. To many, even the state’s name was a mystery. The Cherokee said it meant “dark and bloody ground,” but the Iroquois’s interpretation of Kanta-ke translated to “meadow-land.” The Wyandote interpreted it as “the land of tomorrow,” while the Shawnee claimed it meant “at the head of the river.” Others said it was simply a name invented by white people. The frontiersmen who had lived

STAR DREK Human beings are such slobs that, from now on, pigs must declare us the other white meat. Do you know that right now there is so much discarded trash in outer space that three times last month the International Space Station was almost hit by some useless hunk of floating metal—not unlike the International Space Station itself? So really, you’ve got to give the human race credit: only humans could visit an infinite void and leave it cluttered. Not only have we screwed up our own planet; somehow we have also managed to use up all the space in space. Now, history shows over and over again that if the citizens of Earth put their minds to it, they can destroy anything. It doesn’t matter how remote or pristine, together, yes, we can fuck it up. The age of space exploration is only fifty years old, and we have already managed to turn the final frontier into the New Jersey Meadowlands.12

He may well build other nests, which he will display to any female who enters his territory. If she likes any of his pads she will move in, decorate, and bear his children. A slapper seeking a Premier League husband could not be more shallow.

He may well build other nests, which he will display to any female who enters his territory. If she likes any of his pads she will move in, decorate, and bear his children. A slapper seeking a Premier League husband could not be more shallow. Mind you, he is no moral giant. As soon as he has ensconced one female, he will try to tempt another Jenny Wren into one of his spare nests, where she too will give birth to his progeny. The little cock then travels between his families, a bigamous commercial traveller in a 1930s thriller.

To say homeboy, daydream, decanter, meadowland, rhythm. To say anything. To listen to the sum of every silence. To give name to the space full of promise. And then to fall silent.

«We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory» Louise Glück, Nostos, Meadowlands, Harper Collins, 1996

Without the herbivore, grass is without value. Without the valuable cover of grass, the soil is without life. Without life, the terrestrial world becomes valueless and simply unhappy. The uniform diversity of the meadowland demonstrates that value co-creates the valuable via the tool of time. Time and value. Seeing and being. Grass is nothing at all. The community of grass is all.

Jersey City’s railroads were built by Irish immigrants, men from Con-naught and Munster who dug a crucial tunnel through the Palisades in the late 1850s, linking waterfront rail terminals with tracks laid in the meadow-lands to the west and the vast continent that lay beyond.

They killed farming a year or so later. And they killed it by putting cabs on tractors. No longer was the farmer alive to the elements, or even close to the earth.

High summer and one can hear the universe; so overwhelming is e accumulated sound of growing in the meadow and in hedges, of pollen being released, of particles moving in the heat, that all the minute motions together create a continuous him: the sound of summer.

Dimonte was waiting for him in the Meadowlands parking lot. He leaned out of his red Corvette. “Get in.” “A red Corvette,” Myron said. “Why aren’t I surprised?” “Just get in.” Myron opened the door and slid into the black leather seat. Though they were parked with the engine off, Dimonte gripped the steering wheel with both hands and stared in front of him. His face was sheet-white. The toothpick hung low. He kept shaking his head over and over. Yet again, the subtlety. “Something wrong, Rolly?

Almost all the things I love are to do with grass. Geese, sheep, cows, horses. Even dogs eat grass.

Nothing conserves like poverty.

So when you see an old lady wearing a beehive, it’s because it’s from a time when she was most happy. I think that’s true about music as well. There is a period from 1986 to 1996 where it’s impossible to articulate the impact that new music had on my life. There was so much stuff coming out during that time that I was obsessed with, like the Dead Kennedys and the Breeders. It isn’t as simple as saying that’s when I was happiest, but it was a time when music had an emotional impact on me. When I was putting up the 43 Folders site, I had The Meadowlands by The Wrens on repeat for over a week and it became like a good friend.

Dinner with Tony and Eleanora at the Meadowlands plays out like a Woody Allen film Patrick can’t look away from despite the criminality of the director.

I suddenly realize that the swifts have gone. No fanfare. Just a prestidigitator's trick, a disappearance into the morning's mist. Inside I sigh a little. One of life's allotment of summers is over.

November is one of my favourite months, with its faded afternoons of cemetery eeriness, and its churchy smell of damp musting leaves.