Wind Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay — Lyme Bay being that largest bite from the underside of England's outstretched southwestern leg — and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

Absence is to love what wind is to fire;
It extinguishes the small, it kindles the great.

Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy

Hurry and hurry, autumn leaves hurrying on the rainy wind, snow hurrying out of the sky, life hurrying to death, gods hurrying to oblivion.

What delight To back the flying steed, that challenges The wind for speed! - seems native more of air Than earth! - whose burden only lends him fire! - Whose soul, in his task, turns labour into sport; Who makes your pastime his! I sit him now! He takes away my breath! He makes me reel! I touch not earth - I see not - hear not. All Is ecstasy of motion!

James Sheridan Knowles

My wind is turned to bitter north,
That was so soft a south before;
My sky, that shone so sunny bright,
With foggy gloom is clouded o'er
My gay green leaves are yellow-black,
Upon the dank autumnal floor;
For love, departed once, comes back
No more again, no more.

Arthur Hugh Clough

What the reason of the ant laboriously drags into a heap, the wind of accident will collect in one breadth.

Friedrich Schiller

For some the wind can fleshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers' tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.

Her mind emptied of everything but the gusting wind and how fragile Wolf looked in that heartbeat, like one movement could break him open.

In 1864, black Union troops were involved in operations against Lee's army outside Richmond and Petersburg, and some of them are taken prisoner. Lee puts them to work on Confederate entrenchments that are in Union free-fire zones. When Grant gets wind of this, he threatens to put Confederate prisoners to work on Union entrenchments under Confederate fire unless Lee pulls out. So Grant was willing to embrace an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth retaliation policy based upon Confederate treatment of black prisoners. For Grant, it was the color of the uniform, not the skin, that mattered.

Brooks D. Simpson

My heart is a garden tired with autumn,
Heaped with bending asters and dahlias heavy and dark,
In the hazy sunshine, the garden remembers April,
The drench of rains and a snow-drop quick and clear as a spark;
Daffodils blowing in the cold wind of morning,
And golden tulips, goblets holding the rain -
The garden will be hushed with snow, forgotten soon, forgotten -
After the stillness, will spring come again?

Again he struck the harp and began the jig. But this time it was such music as never came from a harp. It was the wildest, strangest music you ever heard, full of the sound of birds and the cries of animals and the wind and the rain, and the thunder and the lightning, and the dashing of huge waves against the shores of a great cold ocean that was formed from ice that had made its way slowly down from Ultima Thule. It was the sound of a world before mankind. It was the sound of the great merriment God must have known during the long days of Creation.

Robertson Davies

The sunshine filtered in through the billowing white curtains. Tatiana knew there would be only an instant, a brief flicker of time that bathed her with the possibilities of the day. In a moment it would all be gone. And in a moment it was. Still...that sun streaking through the room, the distant rumble of buses through the open window, the slight wind. This was the part of Sunday that Tatiana loved most: the beginning.

Paullina Simons

Time is a brisk wind, for each hour it brings something new... but who can understand and measure its sharp breath, its mystery and its design?

For as long as I can recall, I enjoyed reading. I literally read books from cover to cover. Then I started wondering where words come from. Who made them up? Who said that that opening in a wall was to be called a window? Then I discovered that each word comes with a biography. These words have fascinating stories to tell, if only we take the time to listen. For example, the word window comes from Old Norse in which it meant wind's eye. How much more poetic can you get?

And for the last three minutes on the wind of a windless day I have heard the sound of drums and flute...

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn't necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Margaret Atwood

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything—cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks—press inexorably on and on.

Comrades, I've voyaged long and far on sea and soul,
my eyes have seen disease, gods, ghosts, and men, and yet
in no land have I seen a more false, murderous siren
than that wind-headed, babbling, blind bitch-hound called Hope!

Nikos Kazantzakis

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Confession, he said, must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.

So be it the wind and sun
That reared thy limbs and lit thy veins with life
Have blown and shone upon thee not for nought—
If these have fed and fired thy spirit as mine
With love, with faith that casts out fear, with joy,
With trust in truth and pride in trust — if thou
Be theirs indeed as theirs am I, with me
Shalt thou take part and with my sea-folk — aye,
Make thine eyes wide and give God wondering thanks
That grace like ours is given thee — thou shalt bear
Part of our praise for ever.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

I've been scared and battered. My hopes the wind done scattered. Snow has friz me, Sun has baked me, Looks like between 'em they done Tried to make me Stop laughin', stop lovin', stop livin'— But I don't care! I'm still here!

Langston Hughes