Hands Held High

Famous quotes containing the words hands, held and/or high:

    Have you seen but a bright lily grow
    Before rude hands have touch’d it?
    Have you mark’d but the fall of the snow
    Before the soil hath smutch’d it?
    Have you felt the wool of the beaver,
    Or swan’s down ever?
    Or have smelt of the bud of the brier,
    Or the nard in the fire?
    Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
    O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!
    Ben Jonson (1572–1637)

    The earth is not earth but a stone,
    Not the mother that held men as they fell
    But stone, but like a stone, no: not
    The mother, but an oppressor, but like
    An oppressor that grudges them their death,
    As it grudges the living that they live.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)