Puffball Quotes

But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

Oh, putrid puffballs! Stop winding us all up like this or I’ll tie a knot in your tail!

…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." –Maxine Hong Kingston

I feel as dry and empty as an autumn puffball— I feel as though the wind could blow my fur away.

In a while the organism will repair itself, and I, the ghost within it, will be my old self again. But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float toward his end.

Washington’s hair was reddish brown, and contrary to a common belief, he never wore a wig. The illusion that he did so derived from the powder that he sprinkled on his hair with a puffball in later life.

But in the end he was so tired and hungry that, rather than walk to Utah, he decided to take his chances in a moss-and-puffball suit on a shock pancake thrown into the air by a giant catapult. Besides, the thing was insanely alluring.

The tree crowns were packed together like puffballs, displaying every possible hue, tint, and shade of green. Chartreuse, emerald, lime, aquamarine, teal, bottle, glaucous, asparagus, olive, celadon, jade, malachite—mere words are inadequate to express the chromatic infinities.

I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puffball, on and on.

When we arrived in Wilmington, looking forward to a steak with all the trimmings, one snooty puffball says to us, "We don't accept women in trousers," to which Willy says, "Would you accept a boot in your behind?

It was one of those red-gold early October days, the air crisp and tart as heady as applejack, and even at dawn the sky was the clear, purplish blue that only the finest of autumn days brings. There are maybe three such days in a year. I sang as I lifted my traps, and my voice bounced off the misty banks of the Loire like a challenge. It was the mushroom season, so after I had brought my catch back to the farm and cleaned it out, I took some bread and cheese for breakfast and set out into the woods to hunt for mushrooms. I was always good at that. Still am, to tell the truth, but in those days I had a nose like a truffle pig's. I could smell those mushrooms out, the gray chanterelle and the orange, with its apricot scent, the bolet and the petit rose and the edible puffball and the brown-cap and the blue-cap. Mother always told us to take our mushrooms to the pharmacy to ensure we had not gathered anything poisonous, but I never made a mistake. I knew the meaty scent of the bolet and the dry, earthy smell of the brown-cap mushroom. I knew their haunts and breeding grounds. I was a patient collector.

The Wheel Revolves You were a girl of satin and gauze Now you are my mountain and waterfall companion. Long ago I read those lines of Po Chu I Written in his middle age. Young as I was they touched me. I never thought in my own middle age I would have a beautiful young dancer To wander with me by falling crystal waters, Among mountains of snow and granite, Least of all that unlike Po’s girl She would be my very daughter. The earth turns towards the sun. Summer comes to the mountains. Blue grouse drum in the red fir woods All the bright long days. You put blue jay and flicker feathers In your hair. Two and two violet green swallows Play over the lake. The blue birds have come back To nest on the little island. The swallows sip water on the wing And play at love and dodge and swoop Just like the swallows that swirl Under and over the Ponte Vecchio. Light rain crosses the lake Hissing faintly. After the rain There are giant puffballs with tortoise shell backs At the edge of the meadow. Snows of a thousand winters Melt in the sun of one summer. Wild cyclamen bloom by the stream. Trout veer in the transparent current. In the evening marmots bark in the rocks. The Scorpion curls over the glimmering ice field. A white crowned night sparrow sings as the moon sets. Thunder growls far off. Our campfire is a single light Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls. The manifold voices of falling water Talk all night. Wrapped in your down bag Starlight on your cheeks and eyelids Your breath comes and goes In a tiny cloud in the frosty night. Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise. Ten thousand years revolve without change. All this will never be again.

Crossing the slide they entered the deep woods once more, the sun winnowed in tall fans among the spiring trunks, greengold and black verrniculated on the forest floor. With his cane the old man felled regiments of Indian Pipe, poked the green puffballs to see the smoke erupt in a poisonous verdant cloud. The woods were damp with the early morning and now and again he could hear the swish of a limb where a squirrel jumped and the beaded patter of waterdrops in the leaves. Twice they flushed mountain pheasants, Scout sidestepping nervously as they roared up out of the laurel.

... the exotic spices arriving daily from the East Indies and the Americas, the crates of sweet oranges and bitter lemons from Sicily, the apricots from Mesopotamia, the olive oil from Naples, the almonds from the Jordan valley... I have seen and smelled these delicacies at market. But does any English person know how to cook with such foods? I think back to my time in France and Italy, of all the delicacies that passed across my tongue. And then to the gardens I've seen in Tonbridge with their raised beds of sorrel, lettuce, cucumbers, marrows, pumpkins. Already the banks are starred bright with blackberries and rose hips, with damsons and sour sloes, the bloom still upon them. Trees are weighted down with green apples and yellow mottled pears and crab apples flushed pink and gold. Soon there will be fresh cobnuts in their husks, and ripe walnuts, and field mushrooms, and giant puffballs.

Mon frère, Claude,' urged Florence, leading me to a youth just like herself in broad shape and countenance. He talked rapidly with Florence, all the while tending a tiny copper saucepan. Then breaking off his talk, he reached for a teaspoon, and with all the worshipfulness of a priest at an altar, Claude tasted the shining stock, his face blank to all but his sense of taste. 'Quintessence,' whispered Florence, sniffing in awe at the rising steam. 'For many days the meat is reduced to create the soul of the sauce.' Then with measured care he reached for a lemon and squeezed in four steady drops. The name of the dish was souffle, as the French write it. I wrote the particulars down, as it was a most magical dish. Who would have guessed that egg whites fraught for a long while could make a dish rise like a cloud? Once it had risen in a hot oven, Claude dressed the souffle with a ring of honeyed quintessence. It quivered on a pretty porcelain plate like a gently steaming puffball.

Dear Dandelions, I am part of you. Adults hate you all when you spread in their garden beds or manicured lawns, but in my eyes, you all are beautiful. Just like you, I’ve been through many stages in my life. Many people have come and gone, but you all have always been here. I do not know if you know, but your milky white puffballs have been my umbrella through trying times. When it rains in life, I always find myself making a wish on a dandelion. When I feel like things are way over my head, you all have been my parachute, and I might not land softy, but I always land steadily. I might not always know my future, but after I make a wish on the dandelion's furry sphere that resembles a white globe, I have hope that my future will be filled with peace and joy. The one thing I crave in life is peace. For once, while I lie under the tree filled with so much wisdom, I have finally found a measure of peace. It is an amazing feeling. I wonder what peace feels like? I will continue to wait. I’ve waited this long. Until then, I am willing to accept knowing what a portion of this peace feels like. Waiting for the seeds to emerge in my life.

During the Second World War a giant puffball was found under an oak tree in Kent, and was suspected of being a new kind of bomb (later it was labelled ‘Hitler’s Secret Weapon’ and put on exhibition to raise funds for the war effort).

He points to the hydrangeas growing in profusion, tall puffballs the size of cabbages, green and purple and pink. "You know, you can grow different colors on the same plant," he tells me. "Depends on how much acid you make the soil." Orange and red camellias line the garden's perimeter. They have no scent, as if to balance the heavy sweetness over the front porch.

No one gives a shit about dandelions. If they’re lucky, they are a sore sight to the eyes from the beginning. They are immediately uprooted or trampled, doused in poison, and left to shrivel into their quick death. Then there are the unfortunate flowers that somehow fucking survive, just to become little puffballs ripped from their roots, used to blow for someone’s personal entertainment, and what’s left is tossed aside, zero fucks given.

It was a last-year’s-generation parrot-cat, a hyacinth-blue puffball on sim-yellow paws rimmed round the edges with brownish stains. It had a matching tuxedo ruff and goatee and piercing golden eyes that caught and concentrated the filtered sunlight.

Delicious shivers slid down her spine as she assessed his cool, sensual face. His eyes were the deepest shade of brown, dark like the forest floor she'd hidden on before she'd taken a chance to claim victory for her team. A hint of a cleft in his chin and full lips in a beautifully shaped mouth softened what might have otherwise been a severe expression. As his gaze raked up and down her body, her nipples tightened and she crossed her arms over her chest, silently thanking the '80s for her massive puffball sleeves.

The yard was filled, people spilling out into the road, and I realized I had never seen so many members of these two congregations intermingled. It looked like Birchie and Wattie were holding court under the puffball tree, seated side by side with lifted chins and crossed ankles. A steady stream of pilgrims brought them smiles and news and, in Lois Gainey’s case, a huge plate of muffins. Birchie and Wattie took all these offerings as their simple due, these little old ladies acting as the hinge between the two communities gathering in the yard. They were the human overlap. Inside me I was growing a boy who belonged here in this yard. Today, in this unrepeated hour, the Mack lawn looked like his birthright.

Generally, in suburban areas, you’re likely to find the ubiquitous little brown mushrooms, puffballs, shelf mushrooms (which look like shelves on tree trunks,) slime molds, or some variety of what is largely called a toadstool

hors d’oeuvres: gougères, little cheesy puffballs; pissaladière, an onion tart; and brandade au morue, which was salt cod whipped with cheese and potatoes, ready to be scooped up with slices of toasted baguette.

The dull bell the hanger made of her closet as she pulled her jumper from the thin wire shoulders which sprang up and off the closet rod and clattered down the back wall to the floor. She left the hanger lying on the boards, its twisted wire neck rounding into a hook which circled a kitten of dust whose white grayness reminded her of a puffball she had once blown that lofted in tact from its stem to the cement of the sidewalk.

Thought you might want some room to breathe," Elend said. "I can only imagine how it must make you feel to be surrounded by a virtual army of puffballs.