Rotten Fruit Quotes

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Where there is a rotten root, there will always be rotten fruit. We must be rooted in Jesus Christ.
Joyce Meyer
Where there is a rotten root, there will always be rotten fruit.
Joyce Meyer
But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten from top to bottom.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
Kindness is a rotten fruit that poisons anyone who partakes of it. Throw it in the face of your enemies and let it ruin them instead.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (The Guardian (Dark-Hunter, #20; Dream-Hunter, #5; Were-Hunter, #6; Hellchaser, #5))
When we entered the first chamber of the dungeon, the stench made me recoil. It smelled like someone had mixed together kerosene, rotten fruit, stale blood, urine, and dog shit, then blown it up. How had I not noticed this before? I wasn't even breathing, but the rancid odor found its way into my nose anyway. "This place stink." "Did the guards forget to spray Febreze?" Vlad asked in mock indignation. Then he gave me a jaded look. "It s a dungeon, Leila. They re supposed to smell." Mission accomplished. The stench might have actually killed my new appetite. If Hell could fart, it would smell like this.
Jeaniene Frost (Twice Tempted (Night Prince, #2))
Don't pretend like you know me 'cause you shook some neighborhood tree and got a li'l rotten fruit.
Lauren Francis-Sharma ('Til the Well Runs Dry)
Well,” I said, “you obviously have some power. You chased off those hooligans with rotten fruit. Perhaps you have banana-kinesis? Or you can control garbage? I once knew a Roman goddess, Cloacina, who presided over the city’s sewer system. Perhaps you’re related…?” Meg pouted. I got the impression I might have said something wrong, though I couldn’t imagine what.
Rick Riordan (The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo, #1))
Let me tell you the truth about the world to which you so desperately want to return. It is a place of pain and suffering and grief. When you left it, cities were being attacked. Women and children were being blasted to pieces or burned alive by bombs dropped from planes flown by men with wives and children of their own. People were being dragged from their homes and shot in the street. Your world is tearing itself apart, and the most amusing thing of all is that it was little better before the war started. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done. And even if you avoid warfare and violent death, little boy, what else do you think life has in store for you? You have already seen what it is capable of doing. It took your mother from you, drained her of health and beauty, and then cast her aside like the withered, rotten husk of a fruit. It will take others from you too, mark me. Those whom you care about--lovers, children--will fall by the wayside, and your love will not be enough to save them. Your health will fail you. You will become old and sick. Your limbs will ache, your eyesight will fade, and your skin will grow lined and aged. There will be pains deep within that no doctor will be able to cure. Diseases will find a warm, moist place inside you and there they will breed, spreading through your system, corrupting it cell by cell until you pray for the doctors to let you die, to put you out of your misery, but they will not. Instead you will linger on, with no one to hold your hand or soothe your brow, as Death comes and beckons you into his darkness. The life you left behind you is no life at all. Here, you can be king, and I will allow you to age with dignity and without pain, and when the time comes for you to die, I will send you gently to sleep and you will awaken in the paradise of your choosing, for each man dreams his own heaven.
John Connolly (The Book of Lost Things (The Book of Lost Things, #1))
They say this fruit be like unto the world / So sweet. Or like, say I, the heart of man / So red without and yet within, unclue’d / We find the worm, the rot, the flaw. / However glows his bloom the bite / Proves many a man be rotten at the core.
Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters (Discworld, #6; Witches, #2))
How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress. A vermin-eaten saint scratching his filth for heaven is better off than you damned in clean linen. Progress doubles our tenure in a vale of tears. Man is a mistake, to be corrected only by his abolition, which he gives promise of seeing to himself. Oh, let him pass, and leave the earth to the flowers that carpet the earth wherever he explodes his triumphs. Man is inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is no Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook in the human heart. "Let there be light," we cry, and only the dawn breaks.
Peter De Vries (The Blood of the Lamb)
I cozied an apple in my hand and tried the weight of it against my palm, contemplating whether or not beaning a judge with half-rotten fruit would qualify as contempt of the court. Quite probably.
Rachel Heffington (Five Glass Slippers)
I am so thoroughly healthy and empty. No dreams, no desires. I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten
Henry Miller (Tropic of Capricorn (Tropic, #2))
The voluptuous stench of rotten fruit is the highest of all slum and jungle odours.
New Juche (Mountainhead)
What great minds lie in the dust,” said Guyal in a low voice. “What gorgeous souls have vanished into the buried ages; what marvellous creatures are lost past the remotest memory … Nevermore will there be the like; now in the last fleeting moments, humanity festers rich as rotten fruit. Rather than master and overpower our world, our highest aim is to cheat it through sorcery.
Jack Vance (Mazirian the Magician (The Dying Earth, #1))
But to Fitz she’d always be invisible. An impossible task of face and body for which he had yet to conquer. And should he somehow manage to crack her open like rotten fruit on the vine, he’d only find decay and ugliness, from which she had to assume he’d run. Damaged goods were damaged goods.
L. Donsky-Levine (The Bad Girl)
I imagine us in Eden— two black boys in Paradise, naked, no fig leaves. Adam and Eve are long gone, so Kieran and Michael inherit the garden and the serpent is forgotten and the fruit on the tree of knowledge has gone rotten
Dean Atta (The Black Flamingo)
Beautiful, enticing, forbidden fruit will be offered to you when your "hunger" is greatest. If you are foolish enough to reach for it, your fingers will sink into the rotten mush on the back side. That's the way sin operates in our lives. It promises everything. It delivers nothing but disgust and heartache.
James C. Dobson (Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future)
You needn't consume every opinion placed before you.   If the fruit is rotten, do you eat it?  
Andrea Michelle (Kalopsia: The Best Contemporary, Modern Poetry for Young People for Free!)
The outer layer of epidermis slid off in my hand like the rind of a rotten fruit.
Judy Melinek (Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner)
I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.
Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful)
They threw rotten fruit at me and told me next time it would be acid.
Geraldine Brooks (Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women)
If you keep feeding your soul with rotten fruits, don’t expect your bones to be strong enough for a climb.
Shweta Tale
Face Book is a tutti - frutti garden. There are all the kinds of fruits here, bitter or sweet, tasteless or sour taste, fresh or rotten fruits, all together mixed in....sweet harmony!
Dina Stylianou
Noam did kill Brennan. He shot his head open like a rotten fruit. He abandoned Dara to the quarantined zone. He let—his own mother killed herself to get away from him. And who could blame her?
Victoria Lee (The Fever King (Feverwake, #1))
The vinedresser does a curious thing with the rotten fruit. He turns it back into the soil and there, underground, by some spectacular organic miracle of nature, it fertilizes a future harvest.
Beth Moore (Chasing Vines: Finding Your Way to an Immensely Fruitful Life)
Even the hills and fields are flowing, so why do you feel you’re all alone, tears hugging you to yourself ? The world is a tree bowed down with fruit, while you bend over stealing rotten apples.
Neil Douglas-Klotz (The Sufi Book of Life: 99 Pathways of the Heart for the Modern Dervish)
MARSYAS:        Beware! Easily trips the big word "dare." Each man's an Œdipus, that thinks He hath the four powers of the Sphinx, Will, Courage, Knowledge, Silence. Son, Even the adepts scarce win to one! The Thoughts—they fall like rotten fruits. But to destroy the power that makes These thoughts—thy Self? A man it takes To tear his soul up by the roots! This is the mandrake fable, boy!
Aleister Crowley (Aha!)
Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run.
Virginia Woolf (The Waves)
I only became aware that my eyes had filled with tears when I noticed some commotion in the treetops, far off outside the perimeter wall. I blinked and looked again. There were monkeys out there fighting, screaming and pelting one another with rotten fruit.
Kage Baker (In the Garden of Iden (The Company, #1))
the multiple angry assaults on the “traditional family” are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the “covenantal family” of the Bible into the hated “hierarchical family” of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others. Still
Os Guinness (Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion)
I imagine us in Eden— two black boys in Paradise, naked, no fig leaves. Adam and Eve are long gone, so Kieran and Michael inherit the garden and the serpent is forgotten and the fruit on the tree of knowledge has gone rotten.” ― Dean Atta, The Black Flamingo
Dean Atta (The Black Flamingo)
Marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France; the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.
Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful)
And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition. And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder. And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.
Mervyn Peake (The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy)
To the Druids, a man was not separate from the universe or born into it from elsewhere. He was, like the trees and their leaves and blooms, part of nature. As a flower breaks out from a twig, so does man appear in the world from the womb of the universal mother. Man is an embodiment and emanation of nature. Consequently, a man who felt himself apart from nature was considered unsane. This was the law of the Druids and of Shaman everywhere. Perverted men were sacrificed to save the tribe from calamity. Trees are capable of producing sour and rotten fruit and, likewise, civilizations produce sour and rotten men and women who constitute a hazard to themselves and everyone around them. Thus rites of initiation were instigated to make sure the impure had no chance of attaining positions of power. The removal of these strict telestic rites gave mentally and morally toxic men access to the thrones of the world. Once in command, such types were wont to promote others of their kind and conspire against the morally and spiritually superior men they despise.
Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
to know your past is to know your future. Where lies the strength of the stem and the fruits of the branches when the roots are rotten
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah (The Arduous Errand: a voyage across the ocean)
All that night, after I shut the door and left Number 16 empty, I went looking for the parts of my city that have lasted. I walked down streets that got their names in the Middle Ages: Copper Alley, Fishamble Street, Blackpitts where the plague dead were buried. I looked for cobblestones worn smooth and iron railings gone thin with rust. I ran my hand over the cool stone of Trinity’s walls and I crossed the spot where nine hundred years ago the town got its water from Patrick’s Well; the street sign still tells you so, hidden in the Irish that no one ever reads. I paid no attention to the shoddy new apartment blocks and the neon signs, the sick illusions ready to fall into brown mush like rotten fruit. They’re nothing; they’re not real. In a hundred years they’ll be gone, replaced and forgotten. This is the truth of bombed-out ruins: hit a city hard enough and the cheap arrogant veneer will crumble faster than you can snap your fingers; it’s the old stuff, the stuff that’s endured, that might just keep enduring. I tilted my head up to see the delicate, ornate columns and balustrades above Grafton Street’s chain stores and fast-food joints. I leaned my arms on the Ha’penny Bridge where people used to pay half a penny to cross the Liffey, I looked out at the Custom House and the shifting streams of lights and the steady dark roll of the river under the falling snow, and I hoped to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.
Tana French (Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad #3))
Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement (I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monkeys in Costa Rica . . .), but they do not use projectiles as lethal weapons in hunting or combat. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are quite pathetic at throwing.94 Imagine
Peter Turchin (Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth)
When one rotten apple is exposed to ones that are not, it will cause the fruit to ripen faster and eventually rot. This is because as apples ripen, they give off a hormone in a gaseous form called ethylene which is a catalyst for ripening fruit. So too, life, when you are surrounded by people who have a bad influence on you, their negative energy will sooner or later affect you.
Ani Rich (A Missing Drop: Free Your Mind From Conditioning And Reconnect To Your Truest Self)
I’ve never been with a boy who hasn’t seen me naked. It’s always the squeaky futon, bear-it-all, turn-off-the-lights quickstep. Don’t chalk it up to “daddy issues.” Maybe I’m sick of keeping private parts private. I don’t want rainwater secrets on my lips, tasting of “don’t make too much noise”. October’s dust in my lungs, maybe I don’t want bits of four AM lingering in my subconscious. Smokers breathe in fire, coat their insides in ash. Is that suicide or arson? Listen to me, listen to me. I’m alive. I’M ALIVE. I’m naked and bruised, but I’m alive. I’m not a piece of fruit. Don’t press into my flesh, looking for soft spots. My whole body is tender and rotten, but I’m alive. I’m alive and just because you can see it all, doesn’t mean you know it all
Taylor Rhodes (Sixteenth Notes: the breaking of the rose-colored glasses)
But the wireless operator was thinking: these storms had lodged themselves somewhere or other, as worms do in a fruit; a fine night, but they would ruin it, and he loathed entering this shadow that was ripe to rottenness.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Night Flight)
rotten fruits and vegetables n. distressed produce sewage plant n. wastewater conveyance facility sewage sludge n. 1. regulated organic ingredients 2. bioslurp 3. organic biomass Some people may call the residue of treated sewage "sludge," but to John Gonzales of the Reno-Sparks, Nevada, sewage treatment plant it's "organic biomass." 4. biosolids It might look like sludge to you, but others call it "biosolids." 5. regulated wastewater residuals
William D. Lutz (Doublespeak Defined: Cut Through the Bull**** and Get the Point!)
Tomatoes. Why tomatoes?  Think of it like this: Strength was how hard you could throw a tomato. Dexterity was how fast you could get to a tomato and allowed you to slice the fruit without hurting yourself. Constitution let you eat rotten tomatoes without getting sick. Intelligence let you know that a tomato was a fruit, while wisdom let you know not to put it in a fruit salad. Charisma allowed you to sell a tomato-based fruit salad. Perception let you spot tomatoes
Dakota Krout (Ritualist (The Completionist Chronicles, #1))
I had to watch my uncle get strung up when I was a child,” she finally said after she returned from the faraway place in her mind. “The white man would only sell us the rotten fruit and vegetables from their bug-infested baskets. We had to collect that mess from the back of the store like we were a pack of wild mutts picking through garbage. My uncle had had enough of his apples having maggots crawling out of them, so he started farming his own vegetables for us to eat. The white man didn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. It’s amazing how their minds work. The way their minds work is the reason we call them devils because only a devil could think the way they do. They were mad about the loss of profit because they no longer had us buying the filthy rot they peddled. “My uncle produced such a high quality of fruits and vegetables that he had white folks coming to buy from him. It wasn’t too long after this started, those devils came in their white hoods and burned his garden to ash. Then they strung him up. We were forced to watch my uncle dangle from the neck while he pissed and shit himself. God will forgive my mouth saying it because he knows I only speak the truth. The evilness that resides inside the mind of those devils still exists in the minds of the ones who wear cop’s uniforms and judge’s robes. This is what our boys are up against. Our boys are at war! They freed us from our chains, so that they could lock us in their jails.
D.E. Eliot (Own Son)
Who" The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in, Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth. October’s the month for storage. The shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach: Old tools, handles and rusty tusks. I am at home here among the dead heads. Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won’t notice. My heart is a stopped geranium. If only the wind would leave my lungs alone. Dogsbody noses the petals. They bloom upside down. They rattle like hydrangea bushes. Mouldering heads console me, Nailed to the rafters yesterday: Inmates who don’t hibernate. Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze, A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted, Their veins white as porkfat. O the beauty of usage! The orange pumpkins have no eyes. These halls are full of women who think they are birds. This is a dull school. I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet, Without dreams of any sort. Mother, you are the one mouth I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways. I said: I must remember this, being small. There were such enormous flowers, Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely. The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry. Now they light me up like an electric bulb. For weeks I can remember nothing at all.
Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
To claim that the supernatural and irrational form the basic characteristics of religion is much the same as noticing only the rotten apples and then claiming that the basic features of the fruit named apple are a flaccid bitterness and a harmful effect produced in the stomach.
Leo Tolstoy (A Confession and Other Religious Writings)
Do you know what it’s like to have so much love inside you and no one to give it to? To be the vessel of unwanted light? My father said even the sweetest things turn sour if there’s no one to consume them. Jewels tarnish. Flowers die. Fruit goes rotten. Love turns to bitterness and hatred and rage.
Neel Patel (Tell Me How to Be)
Love Are you fleeing from Love because of a single humiliation? What do you know of Love except the name? Love has a hundred forms of pride and disdain, and is gained by a hundred means of persuasion. Since Love is loyal, it purchases one who is loyal: it has no interest in a disloyal companion. The human being resembles a tree; its root is a covenant with God: that root must be cherished with all one's might. A weak covenant is a rotten root, without grace or fruit. Though the boughs and leaves of the date palm are green, greenness brings no benefit if the root is corrupt. If a branch is without green leaves, yet has a good root, a hundred leaves will put forth their hands in the end.
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
The way of life is towards fulfillment, however, wherever it may lead. To restore a human being to the current of life means not only to impart self-confidence but also an abiding faith in the processes of life. A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and Tightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow-men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that’s is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. Beginnings and endings are only partial steps in the eternal process. The process is everything … the way … the Tao. The way of life! A grand expression. Like saying Truth. There is nothing beyond it … it is all. And so the analyst says Adapt yourself! He does not mean, as some wish to think—adapt yourself to this rotten state of affairs! He means: adapt yourself to life! Become an adept! That is the highest adjustment—to make oneself an adept.
Henry Miller (Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1))
Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen. Then one of them, beautifully darting, accurately alighting, spiked the soft, monstrous body of the defenceless worm, pecked again and yet again, and left it to fester. Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run. Yellow excretions were exuded by slugs, and now and again an amorphous body with a head at either end swayed slowly from side to side. The gold-eyed birds darting in between the leaves observed that purulence, that wetness, quizzically. Now and then they plunged the tips of their beaks savagely into the sticky mixture.
Virginia Woolf (The Waves)
stands of stunted trees. There was little to eat: a few fruits here and there, always either unripe or worm-rotten. Salva’s peanuts were gone by the end of the third day. After about a week, they were joined by more people—another group of Dinka and several members of a tribe called the Jur-chol. Men and women, boys and girls, old and young, walking, walking. . . . Walking to nowhere. Salva had never been so hungry. He stumbled along, somehow moving one foot ahead of the other, not noticing the ground he walked on or the forest around him or the light in the sky. Nothing was real except his hunger, once a hollow in his stomach but now a deep buzzing pain in every part of him. Usually he walked among the Dinka, but today, shuffling along in a daze, he found he had fallen a little behind. Walking next to him was a young man from the Jur-chol. Salva didn’t
Linda Sue Park (A Long Walk to Water: Based on a True Story)
She took out her chest of gold, and flung a handful of it or so into the fire, and the gold boiled up and poured out over the whole of the hut, until every part of it both inside and out was gilded. But when the gold began to bubble up the old hag grew so terrified that she fled as if the Evil One himself were pursuing her, and she did not remember to stoop down as she went through the doorway, and so she split her head and died. This whole sequence is just deeply bizarre. Mind you, I’d try to avoid wildly spewing molten gold myself, so I can’t argue with the crone. But seriously, if the house was filthy and she gilded it, wouldn’t that still be pretty nasty? Have you ever seen when people paint over a surface without cleaning it first, and you get weird dust lumps and gunk? I’m seeing an episode of Hoarders with every surface gilded. Rotten fruit? Gild it! Back issues of Hag Quarterly? Gild ’em! Dress you wore to the troll-prom twenty-seven years ago? Gild it! Cockroaches? Gild them and use them as festive napkin rings!
T. Kingfisher (The Halcyon Fairy Book)
Mankind - proud conqueror and king swings its flag of primal glory to the winds Titans of the power-myth that failed Neanderthal hunger for the flesh of war so frail So weak, so hollow-minded the primat flock responds the jester race submits For each day of war is a failure for man, enslaved in her mordial genes Illusions bleed from their fetid cores, bent to their rotten extremes We, the plague of Terra Firma, nature's grand and last mistake plant the poisoned seed of cancer, set the severed fruits awake Burning like frozen relics in god's archaic graveland Burn the visionaire Kill the ideaologies Mankind must die The doves and the angels return to their graves with flames on their pestilent wings while mushroom-clouds haunt their virginwhite skies to rape their utopian dreams Living the last days of evolution's end from the nest of humanity, the graveland vultures rend
Anders Friden
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. But in a strong light there was no good spin you could put on it. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting your time in at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home. It was better never to have been born—never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything. And all this mental thrashing and tossing was mixed up with recurring images, or half-dreams, of Popchik lying weak and thin on one side with his ribs going up and down—I’d forgotten him somewhere, left him alone and forgotten to feed him, he was dying—over and over, even when he was in the room with me, head-snaps where I started up guiltily, where is Popchik; and this in turn was mixed up with head-snapping flashes of the bundled pillowcase, locked away in its steel coffin.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
On every family tree you have two kinds of fruit; ripe and rotten.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Anyone who has tasted rotten fruit is right to object to rottenness. But they’re wrong to object to fruit itself! There’s good fruit and bad fruit. There’s righteous happiness and sinful happiness.
Randy Alcorn (Happiness)
You needn't consume every opinion placed before you.   If the fruit is rotten, do you eat it?
Andrea Michelle (Kalopsia: The Best Contemporary, Modern Poetry for Young People for Free!)
MARCH 17 YOU WILL UPROOT ANY ROOTS OF WICKEDNESS FROM YOUR LIFE TAKE HEED TO walk in the way of goodness and keep to the paths of righteousness. For My upright and blameless children will dwell in My land. But the wicked will be cut off from the earth, and the unfaithful will be uprooted from it. I have this day given you My authority and power over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out and to pull down, to destroy and to throw down, to build and to plant. My ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. But if your roots are holy, so will be your branches. When I grafted you into the true vine, which is My Son, you now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root. But remember this: you do not support the root; My Son, Jesus, is the root who supports you. JEREMIAH 1:10; ROMANS 11:17–19; HEBREWS 12:15 Prayer Declaration I lay the ax to the root of every evil tree in my life. Let every ungodly generational taproot be cut and pulled out of my bloodline in the name of Jesus. Let the roots of wickedness be as rottenness. I speak to every evil tree to be uprooted and cast into the sea. Let every root of bitterness be cut from my life. Let Your holy fire burn up every ungodly root in the name of Jesus.
John Eckhardt (Daily Declarations for Spiritual Warfare: Biblical Principles to Defeat the Devil)
Love is often described as a fruit you can just reach out with your hand and pluck. However, one should beware, that although glowing in color, the fruit could be poisonous, tainted, or rotten.
R.J. Intindola
We only ever got pig blood. This wasn't because it was the only type of animal blood the butcher had. "Pigs are dirty," my mum said once. "It's what your body deserves." But it turns out that pigs aren't naturally dirty. Rather, humans keep pigs in dirty conditions, feeding them rotten vegetables, letting the mud in their too-small pens mix with their feces; the filth of the pig is just symptomatic of the sins of the human. Wild pigs eat plants. They've even been shown to clean fruit in creeks before eating it, and they never eat or roll around in their own feces. I told my mum this, but she was adamant that the pig was the filthiest animal and was what we deserved.
Claire Kohda (Woman, Eating)
He thought about the stats in a way appropriate for a non-gamer. Tomatoes. Why tomatoes?  Think of it like this: Strength was how hard you could throw a tomato. Dexterity was how fast you could get to a tomato and allowed you to slice the fruit without hurting yourself. Constitution let you eat rotten tomatoes without getting sick. Intelligence let you know that a tomato was a fruit, while wisdom let you know not to put it in a fruit salad. Charisma allowed you to sell a tomato-based fruit salad. Perception let you spot tomatoes among strawberries. Luck was your likelihood of finding a tomato in a place that only grew potatoes. Karmic luck? No idea how it related, but it sounded dangerous. He
Dakota Krout (Ritualist (The Completionist Chronicles, #1))
I walk through the fire, following her voice and I emerge, singed but not charred. I walked through the fire to her voice. She is my friend. I will always walk through the fire for her, with her. ~ in "Dare the Flame
Michael Nanfito (Rotten Fruit in an Unkempt Garden: A Memoir in Poetry and Prose)
We walked and talked amid the vines. The bees followed and buzzed the juicy offerings. I watched as they sipped, tonguing the vined fruit. We walked in the heat and scent and the Father talked of the natural world and hinted at books to be read and Music, and how the world reflected some larger potential. I struggled with his words. No one had ever spoken to me like that. His words seduced. Their easy flow thrummed and I could see things that day that I had never imagined. We walked and I noted the bees, how they fed and then staggered in ragged lines across the broad grape leaves. The Father said they were making themselves drunk on the older berries in which the juice had begun to ferment in the hot sun. They wobbled and stumbled like old men. He said the bees were drunk, but they fell to the ground and buzzed one last time and then lay still. He said they were drunk. They seemed dead . . .
Michael Nanfito (Rotten Fruit in an Unkempt Garden: A Memoir in Poetry and Prose)
Rotten. Like all forbidden fruit, he appears lush and supple. A golden apple covered in a thin vermillion wax layer and a tantalizing taste of plush caramelized flavour. Hues of red and brown are woven into the skin, a perfect marriage of color that gets infected until it warps, sodden with the foul stench of bacteria. On the outside, he shines and shimmers in the sunlight. However, his insides are shriveled fruit that festers as pus oozes through its thick skin. Ryu Suzuki is indeed rotten to the core.
jk jones
Rotten. Like all forbidden fruit, he appears lush. But his insides are brown and sodden with the foul stench of bacteria. They are covered with rot and deterioration. On the outside, he shines and shimmers in the sunlight. But inside, the shriveled fruit festers as pus oozes through its thick skin. Ryu Suzuki is indeed rotten to the core.
J.K. Jones (Claw of Exile: He kills to Survive (Exiled #1))
Side jobs that came my way provided an excellent tutorial on working the street: Learn how to hustle – a buck and an opportunity. How to read a man, his eyes and his intent. Guard your own and keep your own counsel. Make them say a number first and stay or go based on your own designs. Never lie but never give in. When they try to manhandle the situation, and get up in your face about it, step in even closer. If they talk too loud, pretending they're tough, lower your voice, make them lean in to hear and get them off balance. Always give a man an out. Never shame them, but create their indebtedness to you. Assume authority quietly. Yea, I learned a lot and I learned it well.
Michael Nanfito (Rotten Fruit in an Unkempt Garden: A Memoir in Poetry and Prose)
inherit the garden and the serpent is forgotten and the fruit on the tree of knowledge has gone rotten.
Dean Atta (The Black Flamingo)
imagine us in Eden— two black boys in Paradise, naked, no fig leaves. Adam and Eve are long gone, so Kieran and Michael inherit the garden and the serpent is forgotten and the fruit on the tree of knowledge has gone rotten.
Dean Atta (The Black Flamingo)
This we share. Scars and knowledge and broken safety that was never really in the first place, because we were born to bad apples. The difference is, he grew far from the fruit that tree bore, while I'm rotten at the core, even if I'm good at hiding it.
Tess Sharpe (The Girls I've Been)
Do you know what it's like to have so much love inside you and no one to give it to? To be the vessel of unwanted light? My father said even the sweetest things turn sour if there's no one to consume them. Jewels tarnish. Flowers die. Fruit goes rotten. Love turns to bitterness and hatred and rage.
Neel Patel (Tell Me How to Be)
Our inability to identify rotten fruit on the branches means that we are especially unable to identify a problem at the root.
Douglas Wilson (Writers to Read: Nine Names That Belong on Your Bookshelf)
Evangelicals capitulated. Evangelicals prevaricated. Evangelicals tolerated. Evangelicals participated. Jesus said, "By their fruits you shall know them." Evangelical fruit — the results of evangelicals’ actions in civic life — today is rotten. Racism rotted it.
Anthea Butler (White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America)
There we were, a shipping clerk and a janitor discussing theories in aesthetics while all about us men drawing 10 times our salaries were lost out on the limb reaching for rotten fruit. What does this say for the American way of life?
Charles Bukowski (On Writing)
And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition.
Mervyn Peake (The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy)
But the truth is, Angie—you’re part of the problem. You only go for the low-hanging fruit, and you act all shocked when half of it is rotten.
Shirlene Obuobi (On Rotation)
Jesus, who is the Well of living water, the Word of freedom, and the Way of fruitfulness will reign in the glorious, well-watered Garden, and we will spend eternity worshiping and serving him. We will behold him fully, and his name will be written on our foreheads, never to be erased (see Revelation 22:4). No longer will our identity roots be tangled with lies. No longer will the weeds of sin threaten to destroy us. No longer will we harvest rotten fruit. No longer will we languish, struggle, toil, and encounter trouble. We will enjoy the fruit of the glory of God as we drink deeply of the living water forever and ever (see John 4:14; Revelation 22:1).
Gretchen Saffles (The Well-Watered Woman: Rooted in Truth, Growing in Grace, Flourishing in Faith)
If you want to renounce the world and to be instructed in life according to the Gospels, do not place yourself in the hands of an inexperienced master or one subject to the passions; for then you will be taught, not the ways of the Gospels, but those of the devil. Good masters impart good teaching, but the evil teach evil. Bad seed produces rotten fruit.
St. Nikodimos (The Philokalia)
I pictured the eggs inside of my body like they were grapes gone bad. Sour, rotten fruit, skin bruised and fuzzy with mold, caving in on themselves.
Chelsea G Summers
I pictured the eggs inside of my body like they were grapes gone bad. Sour, rotten fruit, skin bruised and fuzzy with mould, caving in on themselves.
Danielle Valentine
Just like Adam and Eve, you've got choices. Dating is an apple-sorting bonanza. You're after the golden delicious, not the rotten Granny Smith. But beware, some apples are Oscar-worthy actors, all shiny on the outside but a letdown once you sink your teeth in. It's a fruit salad of chance, so brace yourself and take that first bite.
Kim Lee (The Big Apple Took a Bite Off Me: A funny memoir of a SoHo-living foreigner who survived NYC)
Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it. I can’t bear to think of it in there somewhere, the love. Like the perfect pit of some otherwise rotten fruit.
Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful)
You needn't consume every opinion placed before you. If the fruit is rotten, do you eat it?
Andrea Michelle (Kalopsia: The Best Contemporary, Modern Poetry for Young People for Free!)
But you don’t belong to that class. Mere pundits are like diseased fruit that becomes hard and will not ripen at all. Such fruit has neither the freshness of green fruit nor the flavour of ripe. Vultures soar very high in the sky, but their eyes are fixed on rotten carrion on the ground. The book-learned are reputed to be wise, but they are attached to ‘woman and gold’.
Ramakrishna (Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna)
She was nervous with them all gathered in the little space she’d carved out for herself, but they didn’t seem to mind the places where she had shoved dirty laundry into piles for later sorting, or the fat crack in the shower tiles, or the understocked refrigerator, fruit all rotten and forgotten. They settled in like they were welcome. And they were. For the first time, she wanted to show them that internal part of her world.
Mallory Pearson (We Ate the Dark)
Dissociative and adjustment disorder is a bitch, but she’s my bitch, best friends forever. Functioning depression is my bestie’s little sister that I can’t get rid of, so I have no choice but to let her stay. Sometimes she behaves but most of the time, she’s just a pain in the ass.
D.W. Cole (Rotten Fruit)
The devil asked me how I knew my way around the halls of hell. I told him I did not need a map for the darkness I know so well.” - t.m.t.
D.W. Cole (Rotten Fruit)
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.
D.W. Cole (Rotten Fruit)
The rotten fruit… The rotten fruit be of the same rotten spirit of the soul that has thrown themselves to the burning pit to be destroyed. As the rotten tree gives of the rotten sour fruits what can you possibly do with bad luck of bad food. The fortune of the futures for told in the roots of the trees that communicate with the earth. To give the language of Mother Earth power to speak to every living thing a purpose tomorrow. The rotten fruit be of the destruction of the planet that causes the confusion of the concern to whatever the wars are about. When you have a bad apple, you don’t leave it in the bunch. The rot spreads quickly. If you don’t separate them from the rest. As it starts the decomposition process of returning to the soil. See the rotten fruit have the purpose of the leaves, the trees as well as the roots. However, the rot be spread of the disease to the sickly of saplings it becomes of the poison ivy. I be lying if I said I didn’t think it was deserved. It just wasn’t of my doing. The rotten fruit is not of my core of character it be of yours though. Clearly, I can prove it. I will throw a pebble into the population of many people you have hurt. As the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree now does it. A lot to be said about rotten fruit don’t you think. Now you may speculate on what it all means.
Jennifer Breslinlin (The Poetry of Emotion)
...when I became pregnant with my third kid, these seemingly small moments of nonconsent replayed in my mind—the obligatory pelvic exam, the needle in my arm, the bruise like rotten fruit, the lithotomy position someone put me in both times. Sure, both births were beautiful, vaginal, natural—tick, tick, tick on the boxes of imaginary birth "success." But these were the moments I couldn't shake, that wedged themselves in and made me angry, ill.
Allison Yarrow (Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood)
The first cause of depleted soil is lack of nourishment or ghafla (heedlessness). When our lives lack the water and oxygen of thikr, (remembrance: salah, athkar, Quran), the tree will suffer and cannot grow properly. We will see the result as unhealthy or rotten fruit (actions). The cure is the remembrance of Allah.
Yasmin Mogahed (Healing the Emptiness: A guide to emotional and spiritual well-being)
For instance, some swore that when the wind changed or a new season approached you could still smell cooking. When the leaves from the plane trees turned gold, rumours swelled of cream and port and roast chicken. Delicious at first, then as the day grows, turning acrid and sour. And when the wisteria bloomed, whispers flew of apricots and butter and clafoutis, similarly mouth-watering in the beginning, but then growing sickly sweeter by the evening, till you needed to breathe through your mouth to escape the decaying scent of rotten fruit.
Lily Graham (The Last Restaurant in Paris)
The Bible Is Full of Hypocrites It’s not just modern people who struggle to live consistently with what they believe. The Bible reveals again and again the timeless tension of humanity grappling with hypocrisy. Moses, the prophet of Israel, doubted God and resisted God’s call on his life. Abraham and Isaac, two of the three great patriarchs of Israel, both put their wives in harm’s way in order to protect themselves. Jacob, the third great patriarch, was a liar. Joseph, who would later save Israel from ruin, arrogantly taunted his brothers. David, the man after God’s own heart and author of most of the Psalms, committed adultery and murder. Solomon, the son of David and the wisest king of his time, was a womanizer. Rahab, a hero of the faith who protected and hid the Israelite spies, was a prostitute. Many of the great kings such as Asa and Hezekiah, who “did right in the eyes of the LORD,”[8] flirted with idolatry and finished poorly. That’s just the Old Testament. I can allow my hypocrisy to be brought into the light by God and others. In the New Testament, we also see plenty of hypocrisy. Thomas initially refused to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Paul admitted to “all kinds of covetousness.”[9] Peter had an abrasive personality. Peter and Barnabas fell into old patterns of elitism and exclusion, retreating relationally from their Gentile brothers and sisters. The Corinthian church, affectionately referred to by Paul as “saints” and daughters and sons of the Father, also bore some rotten fruit. They judged one another, created major divisions over minor doctrines, committed adultery, filed lawsuits against one another, had more divorces than healthy marriages, paraded their “Christian liberty” before those with a sensitive conscience, and slighted the poor, disadvantaged, and disabled in their midst.
Scott Sauls (Jesus Outside the Lines: A Way Forward for Those Who Are Tired of Taking Sides)
When we would take the van to go places, the neighbor’s kids would throw things at us—rotten fruit, eggs—and eggs hurt. When you get hit in the face with an egg, that hurts, and sometimes it would actually break the skin. They would never let us go back in the house to change. I remember one time they took us to the beach to walk the boardwalk and we had gotten pelted pretty good. So here we are, a gaggle of pregnant girls marked with this stuff, and it smelled. I was thinking to myself, “You know, they tell us not to make a spectacle of ourselves, to maintain our dignity, but they go out of their way to make sure we’re humiliated.” We
Ann Fessler (The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade)
When we travel, colors seem brighter and people nicer. Once we plant roots, and realize our fruits are getting rotten by the storms of ignorance and the winds of bad attitude in others, that's when we realize we need more sunshine than strong roots.
Robin Sacredfire
Bernie Saunders is like a fly buzzing around a bowl of rotten fruit. Long hail this fly!
Marge Simon
I don't know how long I spent wandering about the supermarket creating meals in my mind. Hot roast chicken and mayonnaise sandwiches. Pizzas on crispy bases. Big, heaving bowls of spaghetti Bolognese. Crunchy, cheesy nachos with sour cream. I did a full circle and ended back in the fruit and veg section. Next to the peaches were boxes filled with tomatoes still clinging to their vines. The ripe tomato smell was almost sexual. It filled my nostrils as I lifted the box. There were some slightly rotten ones near the bottom of the box, but the rest were just perfect, thick with the perfume of their green vines, fat and red.
Hannah Tunnicliffe (The Color of Tea)
The modern Presidents Club was founded by two men who by all rights should have loathed each other. There was Harry Truman, the humble haberdasher from Missouri, hurled into office in the spring of 1945, summoning to the White House Herbert Hoover, a failed Republican president who had left town thirteen years earlier as the most hated man in America, his motorcades pelted with rotten fruit. They were political enemies and temperamental opposites. Where Truman was authentic, amiable, if prone to eruptions of temper, Hoover could be cold, humorless, incapable of small talk but ferociously sure of the rightness of his cause.
Nancy Gibbs (The Presidents Club)
However, in the markets losses should be viewed like the light bulbs or rotten fruit mentioned earlier: part of the business and taken with equanimity. Loss is not the same as wrong, and loss is not necessarily bad.
Jim Paul (What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars)
There are striking examples of the same thing in our own day. For example, the multiple angry assaults on the “traditional family” are the rotten fruit of Christians corrupting the beauty and strength of the “covenantal family” of the Bible into the hated “hierarchical family” of the stereotypes so loved by feminists and others.
Os Guinness (Fool's Talk: Recovering the Art of Christian Persuasion)
Now Santa put toys, fruit and nuts in the stockings of good children, while bad children got coal, or birch switches, which was better than back in Zurich, where bad children received horse manure and rotten vines (although not yet in stockings). In Zurich, Samichlaus also brought trees for all children, while in Germany the Christmas tree remained, for the moment, something for the prosperous and the urban. The less prosperous became familiar with the custom in institutions – in schools, hospitals, orphanages and the like – where they had become a feature of charitable giving: patrons and donors attended candle-lighting ceremonies, at which carols were sung and gifts were handed to the poor.
Judith Flanders (Christmas: A Biography)