Pine Cone Quotes

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I had a dream about you last night.. you were holding a pine cone and introducing him as Gerald.
Nicole Riekhof (I Had a Dream About You)
Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.
Luther Burbank
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors.
Robert Frost
There is evidence that the honoree [Leonard Cohen] might be privy to the secret of the universe, which, in case you're wondering, is simply this: everything is connected. Everything. Many, if not most, of the links are difficult to determine. The instrument, the apparatus, the focused ray that can uncover and illuminate those connections is language. And just as a sudden infatuation often will light up a person's biochemical atmosphere more pyrotechnically than any deep, abiding attachment, so an unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship. In fact. The poetic image may be the only device remotely capable of dissecting romantic passion, let alone disclosing the inherent mystical qualities of the material world. Cohen is a master of the quasi-surrealistic phrase, of the "illogical" line that speaks so directly to the unconscious that surface ambiguity is transformed into ultimate, if fleeting, comprehension: comprehension of the bewitching nuances of sex and bewildering assaults of culture. Undoubtedly, it is to his lyrical mastery that his prestigious colleagues now pay tribute. Yet, there may be something else. As various, as distinct, as rewarding as each of their expressions are, there can still be heard in their individual interpretations the distant echo of Cohen's own voice, for it is his singing voice as well as his writing pen that has spawned these songs. It is a voice raked by the claws of Cupid, a voice rubbed raw by the philosopher's stone. A voice marinated in kirschwasser, sulfur, deer musk and snow; bandaged with sackcloth from a ruined monastery; warmed by the embers left down near the river after the gypsies have gone. It is a penitent's voice, a rabbinical voice, a crust of unleavened vocal toasts -- spread with smoke and subversive wit. He has a voice like a carpet in an old hotel, like a bad itch on the hunchback of love. It is a voice meant for pronouncing the names of women -- and cataloging their sometimes hazardous charms. Nobody can say the word "naked" as nakedly as Cohen. He makes us see the markings where the pantyhose have been. Finally, the actual persona of their creator may be said to haunt these songs, although details of his private lifestyle can be only surmised. A decade ago, a teacher who called himself Shree Bhagwan Rajneesh came up with the name "Zorba the Buddha" to describe the ideal modern man: A contemplative man who maintains a strict devotional bond with cosmic energies, yet is completely at home in the physical realm. Such a man knows the value of the dharma and the value of the deutschmark, knows how much to tip a waiter in a Paris nightclub and how many times to bow in a Kyoto shrine, a man who can do business when business is necessary, allow his mind to enter a pine cone, or dance in wild abandon if moved by the tune. Refusing to shun beauty, this Zorba the Buddha finds in ripe pleasures not a contradiction but an affirmation of the spiritual self. Doesn't he sound a lot like Leonard Cohen? We have been led to picture Cohen spending his mornings meditating in Armani suits, his afternoons wrestling the muse, his evenings sitting in cafes were he eats, drinks and speaks soulfully but flirtatiously with the pretty larks of the street. Quite possibly this is a distorted portrait. The apocryphal, however, has a special kind of truth. It doesn't really matter. What matters here is that after thirty years, L. Cohen is holding court in the lobby of the whirlwind, and that giants have gathered to pay him homage. To him -- and to us -- they bring the offerings they have hammered from his iron, his lead, his nitrogen, his gold.
Tom Robbins
Tom Dancer’s gift of a whitebark pine cone You never know What opportunity Is going to travel to you, Or through you. Once a friend gave me A small pine cone- One of a few He found in the scat Of a grizzly In Utah maybe, Or Wyoming. I took it home And did what I supposed He was sure I would do- I ate it, Thinking How it had traveled Through that rough And holy body. It was crisp and sweet. It was almost a prayer Without words. My gratitude, Tom Dancer, For this gift of the world I adore so much And want to belong to. And thank you too, great bear
Mary Oliver (Swan: Poems and Prose Poems)
and the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die.
Rudyard Kipling (The Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling: The Complete Works PergamonMedia)
what type of jam would i be? I’d like to think I’m a strawberry or raspberry jam, but I think it would be really cool to be pine cone jam or smth my mom said that they had it in Russia. But what if I was a poison berry jam, that would be so dark academia aesthetic! I know that carrot and tomato jams exist, but I was one of those stubborn picky kids who hated vegetables so I’m probably not that. I know I’d be a natural jam tho, non of that artificial flavoring around here
✧ jasmine ✧
The trees bathed their great heads in the waves of the morning, while their roots were planted deep in gloom; save where on the borders of the sunshine broke against their stems, or swept in long streams through their avenues, washing with brighter hue all the leaves over which it flowed; revealing the rich brown of the dacayed leaves and fallen pine-cones, and the delicate greens of the long grasses and tiny forests of moss that covered the channel over which it passed in the motionless rivers of light.
George MacDonald (Phantastes)
My apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines,I tell him.He only says,"Good fences make good neighbors.
Robert Frost (Mending Wall)
In glades they meet skull after skull/Where pine-cones lay--the rusted gun,/Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat/And cuddled-up skeleton;/And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,/And comrades lost bemoan:/By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged--/But the Year and the Man were gone. ("The Armies of the Wilderness")
Herman Melville
If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain. Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
The ground's soft with pine needles and the occasional crunch of a cone. The air smells like it's just been born.
Libba Bray (Going Bovine)
The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one.
Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There)
The world, once flat to his eyes, now bristled with edges and textures. He saw the tiny grooves of petals and leaves, like fingerprints, their identities written like poems across their surfaces. He saw the slow firecrackers of pine cones, popping and stretching all summer, their stiff armor like soldiers on parade, and also the rolling softness of their sap like happy tears. He understood the flurry of motes, which no longer looked like chaos fogging his vision as it had when he was Birthless. Now he could hear the tune of the world, the song of the wind, and the play of all things in it and he knew now that it was a dance, choreographed down to the smallest antennae thrust into the reeling.
Remy Wilkins (Strays)
Of candy canes and pine cones, and epic and awesome.
T.J. Klune (Wolfsong (Green Creek, #1))
It crumbled apart into ash, going from form to formlessness. To everything, it’s season. The pine cone grew into being, burned bright, and now it had disappeared. That was natural.
Katherine Howe (The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs (The Physick Book, #2))
.. the torshi shops in Bistodoh Bahman Square where vegetables, roots, even young pine cones are pickled, swimming in buckets of caraway seeds and vinegar.
Jennifer Klinec (The Temporary Bride: A Memoir of Love and Food in Iran)
So it’s not like eating people when I eat pine cones.
T.J. Klune (Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2))
On December the twenty-third, the park was hazy from clammy mists that muted and softened all color and distance. Michael had not set off for Whitelow after breakfast, so I bundled myself into my redingote that was as thick and warm as a man's, and pulled on my sable hat and muff. Even so, the chill pinched my nose as I hurried along paths of mushy leaves, sending startled birds pink-pinking up into the air. Claw-like seed pods clung to my skirts; the fine flowers of summer drooped slimy and black. I collected a few posies of evergreens to paint: stiff pine cones, jewel-like berries of black and scarlet, and oval seed pods as lustrous as pearl.
Martine Bailey (A Taste for Nightshade)
And having given up on life, the Captain suddenly began to live. A great mad joy surged through him. This emotion, coming as unexpectedly as the plunge of the horse when he had broken away, was one that the Captain had never experienced. His eyes were glassy and half-open, as in delirium, but he saw suddenly as he had never seen before. The world was a kaleidoscope, and each of the multiple visions which he saw impressed itself on his mind with burning vividness. On the ground half-buried in the leaves there was a little flower, dazzling white and beautifully wrought. A thorny pine cone, the flight of a bird in the blue windy sky, a fiery shaft of sunshine in the green gloom - these the Captain saw as though for the first time in his life. He was conscious of the pure keen air and the felt the marvel of his own tense body, his labouring heart, and the miracle of blood, muscle, nerves, and bones. The Captain knew no terror now; he soared the rare level of consciousness where the mystic feels that the earth is he and that he is the earth. Clinging crabwise to the runaway horse, there was a grin of rapture on his bloody mouth.
Carson McCullers (Reflections in a Golden Eye)
Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pine cone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with incensed and uncontrollable fury, a life’s pent-up rage. ‘No one helped me,’ he shrieked, ‘I did everything myself. I endured. I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die. No one helped me!’ The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm closing only when the tomahawk split his brain.
Annie Proulx (Barkskins)
Inside Duquet something like a tightly closed pine cone licked by fire opened abruptly and he exploded with incensed and uncontrollable fury, a life’s pent-up rage. ‘No one helped me,’ he shrieked, ‘I did everything myself. I endured. I contended with powerful men. I suffered in the wilderness. I accepted the risk I might die. No one helped me!’ The boy’s gaze shifted, the fever-boiled eyes following Duquet’s rising arm closing only when the tomahawk split his brain.
Annie Proulx (Barkskins)
In a valley shaded with rhododendrons, close to the snow line, where a stream milky with meltwater splashed and where doves and linnets flew among the immense pines, lay a cave, half, hidden by the crag above and the stiff heavy leaves that clustered below. The woods were full of sound: the stream between the rocks, the wind among the needles of the pine branches, the chitter of insects and the cries of small arboreal mammals, as well as the birdsong; and from time to time a stronger gust of wind would make one of the branches of a cedar or a fir move against another and groan like a cello. It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles. There was a narrow path beside the stream, which led from a village-little more than a cluster of herdsmen's dwellings - at the foot of the valley to a half-ruined shrine near the glacier at its head, a place where faded silken flags streamed out in the Perpetual winds from the high mountains, and offerings of barley cakes and dried tea were placed by pious villagers. An odd effect of the light, the ice, and the vapor enveloped the head of the valley in perpetual rainbows.
Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3))
During his time as a graduate student, he had done data collection for a study of Pinus contorata. Of all the varieties of pine to rise off Earth, lodgepole pine had been the most robust in low-g environments. His job had been to collect the fallen cones and burn them for the seeds. In the wild, lodgepole pine wouldn’t germinate without fire; the resin in the cones encouraged a hotter fire, even when it meant the death of the parental tree. To get better, it had to get worse. To survive, the plant had to embrace the unsurvivable.
James S.A. Corey (Caliban's War (Expanse, #2))
By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis, Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose the firs with cones upon them; Bright before it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp wood-smoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth, and rotting pine-cones. That is the true smell of the Himalayas, and if once it creeps into the blood of a man, that man will at the last, forgetting all else, return to the hills to die. —Rudyard Kipling
Ruskin Bond (The Writer on the Hill: The Very Best of Ruskin Bond)
It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles. There was a narrow path beside the stream, which led from a village-little more than a cluster of herdsmen's dwellings - at the foot of the valley to a half-ruined shrine near the glacier at its head, a place where faded silken flags streamed out in the Perpetual winds from the high mountains, and offerings of barley cakes and dried tea were placed by pious villagers. An odd effect of the light, the ice, and the vapor enveloped the head of the valley in perpetual rainbows.
Philip Pullman
Eli keeps showing me random things." he said, shaking his head. "Like what?" I whispered, not able to help myself. "His toes in the dirt, chicken noodle soup, Legos, pine cones, and Calico. Always Calico." He shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “What do you think he’s trying to tell me?” "Those are his favorite things. He’s telling you his greats.
Amy Harmon
Butterbean!” came Katherine’s voice from the woods.  Chaz wondered, as he lazily chucked another pine cone onto the fire, if he were given an infinite amount of time and paper, and were asked to continue writing what he thought the next word he was going to hear out of Katherine’s mouth just a moment ago, how many centuries and libraries’ worth of paper he would go through before he came up with the word “butterbean”.
Robert Bevan (Critical Failures)
This is how Raimbaut saw him, as with quick assured movements he arranged the pine cones in a triangle, then in squares on the sides of the triangle, and obstinately compared the pine cones on the shorter sides of the triangle with those of the square of the hypotenuse. Raimbaut realised that all this moved by ritual, convention, formulas, and beneath it there was ... what? He felt a vague sense of discomfort come over him at knowing himself to be outside all these rules of a game. But then his wanting to avenge his father's death, his ardor to fight, to enroll himself among Charlemagne's warriors—wasn't that also a ritual to prevent plunging into the void, like this raising and setting of pine cones by Sir Agilulf? Oppressed by the turmoil of such unexpected questions, young Raimbaut flung himself to the ground and burst into tears.
Italo Calvino (The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount)
But it was Aldo’s pen that became his most forceful tool. He started a newsletter for rangers called the Carson Pine Cone. Aldo used it to “scatter seeds of knowledge, encouragement, and enthusiasm.” Most of the Pine Cone’s articles, poems, jokes, editorials, and drawings were Aldo’s own. His readers soon realized that the forest animals were as important to him as the trees. His goal was to bring back the “flavor of the wilds.
Marybeth Lorbiecki (Things, Natural, Wild, and Free: The Life of Aldo Leapold (Conservation Pioneers))
I thought that you would be frozen in awe when you found the sequence, when you heard a bird's song repeating my Morse code, my cry for help, my S.O.S, when you saw the same numbers in the petals of a flower and the structure of a pine cone, when you saw with your own eyes the interconnectedness of all things. But I was wrong. You searched for a male god, a creator, an intelligent designer, or you banished the beauty and mystery of the world beneath the cold concrete grave of closed-eye skepticism. The few of you who could still hear my music felt tortured and misunderstood; you reached out for any conspiracy theory large enough to explain your alienated despair, your sense that the Earth was dying and no one cared. But listen to me -- you are not alone. Run your fingers through the grass and grab it in your fists, feel my pulse echoing through your blood. You. Are. Not. Alone. And I -- I am not dead yet.
Sarah Warden (Blood of Earth (Vampires for Earth, #2))
If Mr. Castillo had been in charge of building the Ark, Noah would have wound up with a boat the size of the New Jersey." "It still wouldn't have been big enough for all those animals," said Freddie. "Honestly, Freddie," I said. "Don't you know a joke when you hear one?" "Sure," he said. "Just the same, Val, with the few people the Ark had aboard, there wouldn't be enough of them to shovel all the-" I threw a pine cone at him and chased him back to camp.
Debra Doyle
This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear. I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.
Henry David Thoreau (The Journal, 1837-1861)
A pine cone cannot fall from a tree unless God is involved. A bumblebee cannot pollenate a flower or sting your arm apart from the will of God. Money cannot enter or exit your bank account apart from the sovereignty of God. Little Ernest cannot be born or be buried in that grave just a half-mile from my house apart from God’s will. Legislation cannot be passed in this country or in any other apart from God’s sovereignty. You hold this book in your hands because God sovereignly allows you to hold this book in your hands. Everything is under His sovereign rule. Some of us believe that God is a bit like the president. He has a lot of power and authority, but there are checks and balances to limit Him. He is limited by our human choices, the events of the future, the wrongs of the past, or by those who do not believe in Him. Some of His legislations could be vetoed. His popularity can ebb and flow. But God is not like that at all. There are no limits to His rule and power.
Justin Buzzard (The Big Story: How the Bible Makes Sense out of Life)
The white pines, like all pines, are wind pollinated. But unlike most pines, whose seeds are carried from the cones to the Earth by the wind (which limits their spread), the white pines seeds are carried to new locations, up to ten miles away, by birds and there they are planted in the ground at exactly the right depth for optimum sprouting. The seeds that the birds do not eat, and they very rarely eat all of them, germinate, and grow new pines. This is how the pine forest spreads to new locations.
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
Each seed was made of an embryo, a seed coat, and something nutritious, almost like a packed lunch. The Mother Plant, like me, wanted only the best for her babies. Some plants, like dandelions, scattered their seeds in the wind, while others, like some pines, needed fire to open their cones. Somehow, the Mother knew to dry her seeds almost completely so they would sleep until the time was right to wake. Each seed held a trace of life that would spark when given water, when given the appropriate conditions.
Diane Wilson (The Seed Keeper)
We had spent hours combing the forest for the biggest, brownest, heaviest, cleanest pine cones it could offer, hoping that maybe, just maybe, if we found exactly the right ones, our mother would let us go home. We had bled for them. And now she was telling us that we had to abandon them. We were confused and more than a little demoralized, but we dutifully piled our pine cones near some bushes while our mom started playing “who can yell ‘help’ the loudest and the most” by herself. It was a pretty anticlimactic game and we lost interest quickly. We didn’t understand why she had suddenly become so intensely interested in playing these stupid games. Did she not realize it was getting dark?
Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half)
She had to think fast if she wanted to maintain the illusion that we were still hanging out in the forest on purpose. We didn’t want to find pine cones. We wanted to go home. But we didn’t really have a choice. Our leader wanted us to collect pine cones, so we obeyed, hoping that we could placate her as quickly as possible and move on. We had severely underestimated how difficult the task was going to be. We’d gather a bunch of pine cones, then trot over to our mother and ask her if we had found enough to be able to go home. “No. But maybe there are more on the other side of that hill,” she’d say. So we’d march over the hill to look for more. When we were on the other side of the hill, she’d say, “See where Murphy is on the far side of that meadow? I bet there are bigger pine cones over there. Let’s go find out!” Then she wanted browner pine cones. Then heavier pine cones. Several hours later, we had come no closer to meeting our mother’s ludicrous standards. We were beginning to lose hope.
Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half)
At that hour of dawn Agilulf always needed to apply himself to some precise exercise: counting objects, arranging them in geometric patterns, resolving problems of arithmetic. It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence. He, Agilulf, always needed to feel himself facing things as if they were a massive wall against which he could pit the tension of his will, for only in this way did he manage to keep a sure consciousness of himself. But if the world around was instead melting into the vague and ambiguous, he would feel himself drowning in that morbid half light, incapable of allowing any clear thought or decision to flower in that void. In such moments he felt sick, faint; sometimes only at the cost of extreme effort did he feel himself able to avoid melting away completely. It was then he began to count: trees, leaves, stones, laces, pine cones, anything in front of him. Or he put them in rows and arranged them in squares and pyramids. Applying himself to this exact occupation helped him overcome his malaise, absorb his discontent and disquiet, reacquire his usual lucidity and composure.
Italo Calvino (The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount)
You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella. You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air. You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways. On russet floors, by waters idle, The pine lets fall its cone; The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing In leafy dells alone; And traveler's joy beguiles in autumn Hearts that have lost their own. On acres of the seeded grasses The changing burnish heaves; Or marshalled under moons of harvest Stand still all night the sheaves; Or beeches strip in storms for winter And stain the wind with leaves. Possess, as I possessed a season, The countries I resign, Where over elmy plains the highway Would mount the hills and shine, And full of shade the pillared forest Would murmur and be mine. For nature, heartless, witless nature, Will neither care nor know What stranger's feet may find the meadow And trespass there and go, Nor ask amid the dews of morning If they are mine or no.
A.E. Housman (Last Poems)
Six Significant Landscapes" I An old man sits In the shadow of a pine tree In China. He sees larkspur, Blue and white, At the edge of the shadow, Move in the wind. His beard moves in the wind. The pine tree moves in the wind. Thus water flows Over weeds. II The night is of the colour Of a woman's arm: Night, the female, Obscure, Fragrant and supple, Conceals herself. A pool shines, Like a bracelet Shaken in a dance. III I measure myself Against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun, With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way ants crawl In and out of my shadow. IV When my dream was near the moon, The white folds of its gown Filled with yellow light. The soles of its feet Grew red. Its hair filled With certain blue crystallizations From stars, Not far off. V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts, Nor the chisels of the long streets, Nor the mallets of the domes And high towers, Can carve What one star can carve, Shining through the grape-leaves. VI Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses -- As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon -- Rationalists would wear sombreros.
Wallace Stevens (The Collected Poems)
In their urge for survival, the seed-bearing trees hit upon countless different devices for carrying pollen from one flower to another, but essentially the methods fall into two main categories. The first is wind-pollination, which requires the presence of light, small, dry pollen grains, easily shaken from the stamens, or male flowers. To receive the tiny bits of pollen that are blown about by the wind, the stigmata of flowers must be long, or feathery, or sticky, or so constructed as to trap the fine dust. All conifers are pollinated this way, as are the poplar, ash, birch, oak, beech, and certain other species. But since this method is so haphazard, a disproportionately high percentage of pollen is wasted and these trees must produce immense quantities of pollen in order that even a tiny amount will be effective. Scientists have estimated that a single stamen of a beech tree, for example, may yield 2,000 grains, while the branch system of a vigorous young birch can produce 100 million grains a year. One pine or spruce cone alone releases between 1 and 2 million grains of pollen into the air: In Sweden, which is covered with spruce forests, an estimated 75,000 tons of pollen are blown from the trees each year.
Richard M. Ketchum (The Secret Life of the Forest)
There are circumstances which can only be created and remedied in a crucible of fury, fire, and destruction like the serotinous cones of the Jack Pine and Lodgepole Pine trees. Only after exposed to extreme heat and enormous pressures will the cone open to begin anew and flourish amongst the cleansed but desolate landscape. Also, like the unpredictable restrained power of a dormant volcano storing it's potential energy over long periods of time gives way to this planets most enchanting display of scenic beauty to stark nightmarish backdrops. Egos are like wildfires to me because they start small but uncontrolled they will get out-of-hand and devour without prejudice. However, egotistical people are part of life and the best defense is a good offense with fire breaks dug in advance anticipation and left in place for when the right conditions present themselves where you must decide to fight that fire or be consumed by it.
Donavan Nelson Butler
Vasilisa Yuzhnina PRIVATE, HAIRDRESSER My specialty… My specialty is men’s haircuts… A girl comes… I don’t know how to cut her hair. She has luxuriant wavy hair. The commander enters the dugout. “Give her a man’s haircut.” “But she’s a woman.” “No, she’s a soldier. She’ll be a woman again after the war.” All the same… All the same, as soon as the girls’ hair grew a little, I’d curl it during the night. We had cones instead of curlers… Dry pine cones… We could at least curl the forelock…
Svetlana Alexievich (The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II)
Mending Wall Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.' Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.
Robert Frost
It was too cold to sit outside and watch the harvest moon across the river valley, so they sat in the drawing-room and Mrs. Halliday said it would be nice to have a fire. George lit it. It flared and died down. Good advice flowed over George from every side. Mrs. Halliday said she had told Hubback how to lay a fire for at least twenty years and that was the result. First some shavings, she said, and Caxton always had plenty, or very small chips of pine or fir; only Hubback wouldn’t go to the carpenter’s shed for them and Caxton wouldn’t bring them into the drawing-room. Meanwhile George rearranged the fire and relit it. After a few sulks it began to crackle and then to blaze. George put dry pine cones on it and a couple of logs and it settled down to burn properly. “But couldn’t he leave the shavings at the back door?” said Edith. “You see,” said Mrs. Halliday, “if he left them there, and he might if I spoke to him myself, Hubback wouldn’t bring them into the house.” “But couldn’t you tell him to bring them into the drawing-room?” said Edith, who had much of the Pomfret tenacity of purpose. “I could, my dear. Indeed I quite often have,” said Mrs. Halliday, without complaint, merely stating an ineluctable law of nature. “But he always manages not to hear.” “Well, then, couldn’t Hubback bring them from the back door to the drawing-room?” said Edith. “No,” said Mrs. Halliday. “You see it isn’t her place to do it,” and this she said with such simplicity that Edith could not for the life of her tell whether her hostess believed what she said or not. Our own opinion, for what it is worth, is that Mrs. Halliday was feeling older and more tired than she liked to admit and was prepared to let things pass that earlier she would have fought and conquered.
Angela Thirkell (Enter Sir Robert)
The yearly cycle of Sakha subsistence related to the natural environment is apparent in their calendar. The new year begins in May, or the month of fish spawning (Yam). June is Bes, or pine, July is Ot, or grass, August is Atyrd'akh, or rake, and September is Balagan, a style of Sakha house. Grass and rakes are, of course, references to grass cutting subsistence practices, while balagan are the traditional wooden houses that the Sakha use during the winter, as opposed to uraha, which are cone-shaped white birch houses used in summer. The names for October, November, December, January, and February are Altynn'y, Setinn'l, Akhsynn'y, Tokhsunn'u, and Olunn'u. These mean, respectively, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months counting from the new year in May. The spring months of March and April are called Kulun Tutar and Muus Ustar, or the months of foals and flowing ice, respectively. These are references to the rush of foal births and the thawing of the Lena River. In actuality, foals are not born until April and drift ice does not appear until May. Although these last two months show a slight delay between events and names, the calendar indicates how the Sakha engage in pastoralism, grass cutting, and fishing activities throughout the year. It is also interesting that the winter months between October and February are given simple numeric names.
Hiroki Takakura (Arctic Pastoralist Sakha: Ethnography of Evolution and Microadaptation in Siberia (Modernity and Identity in Asia Series))
The wind whirls and whistles and strip pink blooms from the mimosas, scatters twigs, broken limbs, pine needles and pine cones across our yard, and robs the pecan trees of a thousand leaves. The storm eventually dies, but the bruised trees continue to weep into the night, still shimmering with dewy leaves when the sun comes up the next morning.
Brenda Sutton Rose
We folded up newspapers and made them into boats. We'd see whose would float the longest before it got bogged down, soggy, and sank. My father gave us a few pennies each day, which we'd toss and try to land on rocks.We'd wade in and get them again and again.Then we'd flip them in one final time to make a wish. Bliss and I could keep ourselves entertained for hours, but of course we became more and more aware that the whole forest was right there -- waiting for us to explore. We didn't go far at first, not beyond where we could hear Mom call for us from the back door of the barn, but it gave us a whole new playground. We found a fallen log that we walked like a plank. There was a tree with a low straight branch that we could dangle and swing from. We gathered pine cones and tossed and batted them with twigs.
Riel Nason (All the Things We Leave Behind)
Elegy" Wind buffs the waterstained stone cupids and shakes Old rain from the pines’ low branches, small change Spilling over the graves the years have smashed With a hammer— forget this, forget that, leave no Stone unturned. The grass grows high, sweet-smelling, Many-footed, ever-running. No one tends it. No One comes....And where am I now?.... Is this a beginning, A middle, or an end?.... Before I knew you I stood middle, or an end?.... Before I knew you I stood In this place. Now I forsake the past as I knew it To feed you into it. But that is not right. You step Into it. I find you here, in the shifting grass, In the late light, as if you had always been here. Behind you two torn black cedars flame white Against the darkening fields.... If you turn to me, Quiet man? If you turn? If I speak softly? If I say, Take off, take off your glasses.... Let me see Your sightless eyes?.... I will be beautiful then.... Look, the heart moves as the moths do, scuttering Like a child’s thoughts above this broken stone And that. And I lie down. I lie down in the long grass, Something I am not given to doing, and I feel The weight of your hand on my belly, and the wind Parts the grasses, and the distance spills through— The glassy fields, the black black earth, the pale air Streaming headlong toward the abbey’s far stones And streaming back again.... The drowned scent of lilacs By the abbey, it is a drug. It drives one senseless. It drives one blind. You can cup the enormous lilac cones In your hands— ripened, weightless, and taut— And it is like holding someone’s heart in your hands, Or holding a cloud of moths. I lift them up, my hands. Grave man, bend toward me. Lay your face.... here.... Rest....! took the stalks of the dead wisteria From the glass jar propped against the open grave And put in the shell-shaped yellow wildflowers I picked along the road. I cannot name them. Bread and butter, perhaps. I am not good With names. But nameless you walked toward me And I knew you, a swelling in the heart, A silence in the heart, the wild wind-blown grass Burning— as the sun falls below the earth— Brighter than a bed of lilies struck by snow. — Brigit Pegeen Kelly, The Orchard: Poems (BOA Editions Ltd., 2004)
Brigit Pegeen Kelly (The Orchard (American Poets Continuum))
The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
leaking in through the window, which told him they were now traveling into woodlands. The sharp odors of pine—wood, bark, cones, and needles—slivered through the air like blades, but beneath that, the fox recognized softer clover and wild garlic and ferns, and also a hundred things he had never encountered before but that smelled green and urgent. The boy sensed something now, too. He pulled his pet back to him and gripped his baseball glove more tightly. The boy’s anxiety surprised the fox. The few times they had traveled in the car before, the boy had been calm or even excited. The fox nudged his muzzle into the glove’s webbing, although he hated the leather smell.
Sara Pennypacker (Pax)
On a more homely level, it is at Day’s Lock that the annual Poohsticks Championships are held, the contestants standing on the white painted bridge and dropping their twigs or pine cones (‘in a twitchy sort of way, if you know what I mean, Pooh’) into the weir stream below.
A.J. Mackinnon (The Unlikely Voyage of Jack De Crow: A Mirror Odyssey from North Wales to the Black Sea)
The circadian rhythm is an inner clock that follows the twenty-four hours in a day. The master clock sits in the master hormone gland in the middle of the brain, where it regulates the sleep-wake cycle and governs the clocks for the entire body. Each internal organ has its own clock, too, which is somehow coordinated by and with the master clock, so different functions turn on at different times of day. Next to the master hormone gland is a pine cone–shaped gland that makes melatonin, the hormone that induces sleep. The pine cone and the master gland talk to each other, synchronizing their roles to maximize a good night’s rest.
Cynthia Li (Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness)
C​G/B​C To play the drums ​F​C/F​G To be picked for teams ​C​C/F​C A safe place to pee ​Em​Am Tall trees to climb ​F​C/E​G A dark blue bike ​C​G​C For her to notice me ​E Don’t braid my hair ​Am Don’t make me wear ​G That bridesmaid’s dress, oh joy ​C​G/B​C That school today ​F​C/E​G Will be easy I pray ​C​G​C Or to just wake up a boy C (Muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles) C Thou shalt learn to wink ​G Thou shalt learn all the knots ​F Thou shalt cuss liberally ​C Thou shalt not trash talk ​G the girls ​​F Thou shalt not let the world make you hard ​​C Thou shalt learn to dance and lead C (Muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles) C Thou shalt acquire scars ​G Thou shalt start a pine cone war ​F Thou shalt practice throwing punches ​C Thou shalt not wear a skort ​G Get dirty ​​F In your pockets thou shalt keep A special rock a pocket knife your grubby mitts ​C And several melodies G Tomboy! Tomboy! Tomboy! F​Dm​G​C Tomboy! Tomboy! Tomboy! (Muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles, muscles) (repeating) C I always have a piece of string G I want to practice French kissing F Don’t cry so much all of the time G I shine my armour every night G Tomboy! Tomboy! Tomboy! F​Dm​G​C Tomboy! Tomboy! Tomboy! C Thou shalt learn to wink G Thou shalt learn all the knots ​F Thou shalt cuss liberally ​C Thou shalt not trash talk ​G the girls ​​F Thou shalt not let the world make you hard make you bad ​​C Thou shalt learn to dance and lead G Tomboy! Tomboy! Tomboy! F​Dm​G​C Just to be a good Tomboy!
Ivan E. Coyote (Tomboy Survival Guide)
He gathered the huge pine-cones from the branches of the tree. Then he set one alight with bright blue fire, and threw it whizzing down among the circle of the wolves. It struck one on the back, and immediately his shaggy coat caught fire, and he was leaping to and fro yelping horribly. Then another came and another, one in blue flames, one in red, another in green. They burst on the ground in the middle of the circle and went off in coloured sparks and smoke. A specially large one hit the chief wolf on the nose, and he leaped in the air ten feet,
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit (Middle Earth, #0))
Before Chiara's eyes, a cottage sprang from the ground, with a pale blue door and windows with painted doves. "Oh, my!" Chia exclaimed. Inside, the cottage was sparsely furnished, with four wooden chairs covered in blue cotton cushions, a table with hearts carved along the edges, an oven that smelled like chocolate and cherries, and a harpsichord in the corner by the window. But it was everything Chiara could have dreamt of. A home of her own. "This spot is one of my favorites," Agata narrated. "Absolutely lovely. Look there, you've a view of the Silver Brook, and in the mornings the moon crickets sing most beautifully." Chiara inhaled. All the smells she had loved most from home---the wild grass, the pine cones from the trees, the fresh loaves Papa baked before dawn, the musty parchment from Ily's music paper. They flooded her nostrils all at once, as if she'd brought them with her.
Elizabeth Lim (When You Wish Upon a Star)
If me and you were stranded on an island, and there wasn’t another dick in sight; I’d still fuck myself with a pine cone before I touch you.
A.E. Via (Promises Part 4 (Bounty Hunters, #4))
Leary and Haynes published a fanzine called Strange V.D., which featured the most horrendous medical photographs they could find accompained by captions describing fictitious diseases like “taco leg” and “pine cone butt.
Michael Azerrad (Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991)
Jaylen fully enjoyed his time in Maine. It was a beautiful state, the summers so pleasant along the coast where the breeze carried the salty scent of the sparkling, clean Atlantic. He had watched the season’s change to Autumn with its golden birch, the occasional ruby red Japanese maple each framed against the backdrop of the omni-present cone laden pines. Now the air turned to chill with even more crisp mornings trumpeting the harbinger of the inevitable winter.
Mike Bennett (Las Vegas on Twelve Dollars a Day)
I swooned quietly with my first bite. The dish sang with the flavors of Spain and was packed with chunks of browned rabbit, chorizo, and mussels. It was spectacular and camaraderie crushing. "Who made this? Who possibly had time for this?" I was talking through a mouthful of Arboro rice. "I made this once in culinary school and it took an entire day of my life that I'll never get back." "Reza made it." Carlo used an empty mussel shell to pluck the meat out from another shell. "He said he cooked it over an open fire with orange and pine branches for kindling." Carlo grinned at me, a dribble of olive oil snaking its way down his chin. "According to Reza, it's the pine cones, though, that really do the trick. I'm sure you discovered that yourself when you made it on the day you'll never get back." I nibbled on a cut of caramelized chorizo but didn't have the chance to reply.
Kimberly Stuart (Sugar)
Deity Candle Colors Images and Symbols Pan Purple, brown, green Goat, pan pipes, caves, mountain forests Gaia Green, blue, brown Serpent, bees, harvested crops, green calcite, amber, honeysuckle Hecate Black, orange Snake, black dog, raven Venus Pink, white Spring flowers, pine cones Bacchus Red, purple Chalice, lion, bull Diana Silver, white Bow and arrow, forest animals, vegetation
Lisa Chamberlain (Wicca Magical Deities: A Guide to the Wiccan God and Goddess, and Choosing a Deity to Work Magic With (Wicca for Beginners Series))
what type of jam would i be? I’d like to think I’m a strawberry or raspberry jam, but I think it would be really cool to be pine cone jam or smth my mom said that they had it in Russia. But what if I was a poison berry jam, that would be so dark academia aesthetic! I know that carrot and tomato jams exist, but I was one of those stubborn picky kids who hated vegetables so I’m probably not that. I know I’d be a natural jam tho, non of that artificial flavoring around here
Jasmine
The opposing counsel declares that clear-cutting saves forests. “If people don’t harvest, millions of acres will blow down or burn in devastating crown fires.” It’s out of her field, but Patricia can’t let it go. “Clear-cuts increase windthrow. And crown fires only happen when fires are suppressed for too long.” She lays it out: Fire regenerates. There are cones—serotinous—that can’t open without flame. Lodgepole pines hold on to theirs for decades, waiting for a fire to spring them. “Fire suppression used to seem like rational management. But it costs us much more than it has saved.” The counsel for her side winces. But she’s in too deep for diplomacy now.
Richard Powers (The Overstory)
Pines spinning out cones in perfect Fibonacci swirls.
Richard Powers (The Overstory)