Moss It Crowd Quotes

I like being weird. Weird's all I've got. That and my sweet style.

The peace of Manderley. The quietude and the grace. Whoever lived within its walls, whatever trouble there was and strife, however much uneasiness and pain, no matter what tears were shed, what sorrows borne, the peace of Manderley could not be broken or the loveliness destroyed. The flowers that died would bloom again another year, the same birds build their nests, the same trees blossom. That old quiet moss smell would linger in the air, and the bees would come, and crickets, the herons build their nests in the deep dark woods. The butterflies would dance their merry jug across the lawns, and spiders spin foggy webs, and small startled rabbits who had no business to come trespassing poke their faces through the crowded shrubs. There would be lilac, and honeysuckle still, and the white magnolia buds unfolding slow and tight beneath the dining-room window. No one would ever hurt Manderley. It would lie always in its hollow like an enchanted thing, guarded by the woods, safe, secure, while the sea broke and ran and came again in the little shingle bays below.

We know Jesus was God. But He was also a man-He got tired; He got hungry; He knew what it was to have crowds pressing around Him all the time; He knew what it was to have His privacy invaded. But He kept right on letting the crowds into His life. He kept on teaching, healing, confronting the powers of hell- and never a cross or impatient word.

I wondered what a man I had encountered the day before on the plane en route to Chicago's O'Hare airport would have made of this. As he tried to push through a crowded aisle, he said loudly: "Life is never easy. And it's never pleasant." I couldn't let this go. I looked up at him from my seat and said, "I do hope life gives you cause to change that opinion. Otherwise you may find that opinion walking ahead of you, giving you more and more reasons to believe it.

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.

Dusk settled over our shoulders like a damp purple blanket. The river- the churn and clank of boat traffic, the shush of water, and the tangy smell of catfish and mud- was slowly beaten back by honeysuckle and cicadas and some bird that cooed the same three syllables in a lilting circle. It was all so familiar and so foreign. I pictured a young girl in a blue cotton dress running down this same road on cinnamon-stick legs. Then I pictured another girl, white and square-jawed, running before her. Adelaide. Mother. I would've missed it if I hadn't been looking: a narrow dirt drive crowded on either side by briars and untrimmed boughs. Even once I'd followed the track to its end I was uncertain- who would live in such a huddled, bent-back cabin, half-eaten by ivy and some sort of feral climbing rose? The wooden-shake shingles were green with moss; the barn had collapsed entirely.

ls the Conjugial Angel stone That here he stands with heavy head The backward-looking pillared dead Inert, moss-covered, aIl alone? The Holy Ghost trawls ln the Void, With fleshly Sophy on His Hook The Sons of God crowd round to look At plumpy limbs to be enjoyed The Greater Man casts out the line With dangling Sophy as the lure Who howls around the Heavens' colure To clasp the Human Form Divine Rose-petals fall from fallen hair That in the clay is redolent Of liquid oozings and the scent Of the dark Pit, the Beastly lair And is my Love become the beast That was, and is not, and yet is, Who stretches scarlet holes to kiss And clasps with claws the fleshly feast Sweet Rosamund, adult'rous Rose May lie inside her urn and stink Whlle Alfred's tears tum into ink And drop into her quelque-chose The Angel spreads his golden wings And raises high his golden cock And man and wife together lock Into one corpse that moans and sings

SHE TOLD ME THE EARTH LOVES US by Anne Haven McDonnell She said it softly, without a need For conviction or romance. After everything? I asked, ashamed. That’s not the kind of love she meant. She walked through a field of gray Beetle-bored pine, snags branching Like polished bone. I forget sometimes How trees look at me with the generosity Of water. I forget all the other Breath I’m breathing in. Today I learned that trees can’t sleep With our lights on. That they knit A forest in their language, their feelings. This is not a metaphor. Like seeing faces across the crowd, We are learning al the old things, Newly shined and numbered. I’m always looking For a place to lie down And cry. Green, mossed, shaded. Or rock-quiet, empty. Somewhere To hush and start over I put on my antlers in the sun. I walk through the dark gates of the trees. Grief waters my footsteps, leaving A trail that glistens.

longer; it cannot deceive them too much." Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in confirmation. "As to you," said she, "you would shout and shed tears for anything, if it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?" "Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment." "If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?" "Truly yes, madame." "Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and were set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage, you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?" "It is true, madame." "You have seen both dolls and birds to-day," said Madame Defarge, with a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent; "now, go home!" XVI. Still Knitting Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now, for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the village—had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had—that when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares who could find a living there. Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well—thousands of acres of land—a whole province of France—all France itself—lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

The area where I sat was slick with dampness. It wasn't just that the ground was moist - all around me, it felt like it was bursting: with the leaves on the trees, the undergrowth, the countless microorganisms under the ground, the flat bugs crawling over the surface, the winged insects flitting through the air, the birds perched on branches, even the breath of the larger animals that inhabited the deep forest. I could only see a small patch of sky, the part that was left open between the treetops of the forest around me. The branches seemed like a network that in some places almost obscured the sky. Once my eyes had adjusted to the faint light, I realized that the undergrowth was alive with all manner of things. Tiny orange mushrooms. Moss. Something that looked like coarse white veins in the underside of a leaf. What must be some kind of fungus. Dead beetles. Various kinds of ants. Centipedes. Moths on the back of leaves. It seemed strange to be surrounded by so many living things. When I was in Tokyo, I couldn't help but feel like I was always alone, or occasionally in the company of Sensei. It seemed like the only living things in Tokyo were big like us. But of course, if I really paid attention, there were plenty of other living things surrounding me in the city as well. It was never just the two of us, Sensei and me. Even when we were at the bar, I tended to only take notice of Sensei. but Satoru was always there, along with the usual crowd of familiar faces. And I never really acknowledged that any of them were alive in any way. I never gave any thought to the fact that they were leading the same kind of complicated life as I was.

The area where I sat was slick with dampness. It wasn't just that the ground was moist - all around me, it felt like it was bursting: with the leaves on the trees, the undergrowth, the countless microorganisms under the ground, the flat bugs crawling over the surface, the winged insects flitting through the air, the birds perched on branches, even the breath of the larger animals that inhabited the deep forest. I could only see a small patch of sky, the part that was left open between the treetops of the forest around me. The branches seemed like a network that in some places almost obscured the sky. Once my eyes had adjusted to the faint light, I realized that the undergrowth was alive with all manner of things. Tiny orange mushrooms. Moss. Something that looked like coarse white veins in the underside of a leaf. What must be some kind of fungus. Dead beetles. Various kinds of ants. Centipedes. Moths on the back of leaves. It seemed strange to be surrounded by so many living things. When I was in Tokyo, I couldn't help but feel like I was always alone, or occasionally in the company of Sensei. It seemed like the only living things in Tokyo were big like us. But of course, if I really paid attention, there were plenty of other living things surrounding me in the city as well. It was never just the two of us, Sensei and me. Even when we were at the bar, I tended to only take notice of Sensei. but Satoru was always there, along with the usual crowd of familiar faces. And I never really acknowledged that any of them were alive in any way. I never gave any thought to the fact that they were leading the same kind of complicated life as I was.

How pleasant they were, those jolly college days! As I think of them, many kindly faces and joyous voices rise before me! Where are they all? Some lying with the colours on their breast beside the Euxine Sea, and along the line of the Pacific; some struck down by the assassin’s knife in the temples at Cawnpore; some sleeping beneath the sighing of the Delhi palms, or of the sad Atlantic waves; some wasting classic eloquence on country hinds, in moss-grown village churches; some fighting the great fight, between science and death, in the crowded hospital-wards of London; some wearing honour, and honesty, and truth from their hearts, in the breathless, up-hill press of the great world; — all of them, living or dead, scattered far away over the earth, since those old days, in the shadow of the academic walls!

THE EARTH WITHOUT A SPIRITUAL DIMENSION except for the smallest white button of mushroom leading the rank-and-file up the rotting trunk of the oak, except for bulb, corm, pip, and spore and the passive mien of the autumn field when the off-kilter scatter and skyward rattle of grasshoppers have disappeared and except for the crowd of acacia thorns pointing toward all destinations possible in every direction out from the stem center of their circumferences and aside from the moss-and-mire covered bones of stripped roots and crippled branches left piled akimbo to molder among the beetles in the sinless murk of the forest floor, except for gorge, gulch, gully, and ravine, except for the moment waiting in the fist of the sycamore’s tufted fruit and in the sting of the loon’s longing before it cries and in the poise of the desert swallowtail before it lifts from the dry mountain wash and in the aim of the alligator’s undeviating glare before it swirls and sinks in the generative and ancient slough, except for the moment waiting in the green walls of palm spikes, pendants and rosettes, knots and currents of saw grasses and orchids, in the tight weave and bloat of prayers and weapons, in the moment before I move out into the empty plain of the open sky silent with sea-light, as if I were a wild and divine thing myself, to be going I know not where.

Dmitri is solemn, and so is Asher—except for a slight blush to his cheeks when his family and I start shrieking, the absolute loudest group in the crowd—but Cam saunters across the stage, saluting us all, and fist bumps Hardwick. Because that’s Cam for you.

The future will be dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths, like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. But a swarm is not merely a big crowd: Individuals in the swarm lose their identities; the computers that make up this global swarm will blend together into the seamless substance of the cyberspere.

The Ruins Of Time" Robert Lowell (Quevedo, Mire los muros de la partia mia and Buscas en Roma a Roma, (!)O peregrino!) I I saw the musty shingles of my house, raw wood and fixed once, now a wash of moss eroded by the ruin of age furning all fair and green things into waste. I climbed the pasture. I saw the dim sun drink the ice just thawing from the boldered fallow, woods crowd the foothills, sieze last summer's field, and higher up, the sickly cattle bellow. I went into my house. I saw how dust and ravel had devoured its furnishing; even my cane was withered and more bent, even my sword was coffined up in rust— there was no hilt left for the hand to try. Everything ached, and told me I must die. II You search in Rome for Rome? O Traveller! in Rome itself, there is no room for Rome, the Aventine is its own mound and tomb, only a corpse recieves the worshipper. And where the Capitol once crowned the forum, are medals ruined by the hands of time; they show how more was lost by chance and time the Hannibal or Ceasar could consume. The Tiber flows still, but its waste laments a city that has fallen in its grave— each wave's a woman beating at her breast. O Rome! Form all you palms, dominion, bronze and beauty, what was firm has fled. What once was fugitive maintains its permenance.