Quotes by Theodore Wood

“You have heard the wood-dove calling in the lone stillness of the summertime; you have found the unheeded brooklet singing and babbling where no ear comes to hear. Under dead leaves and snow-banks the delicate arbutus unfolds its simple blossom, answering some heavenly call for color. So, too, this other flower of womanhood. Jennie was left alone, but, like the wood-dove, she was a voice of sweetness in the summer-time. Going about her household duties, she was content to wait, without a murmur, the fulfilment of that process for which, after all, she was but the sacrificial implement.””

“From all enchanted things of earth and air, this preciousness has been drawn. From the south wind that breathed a century and a half over the green wheat; from the perfume of the growing grasses waving over heavy-laden clover and laughing veronica, hiding the green finches, baffling the bee; from rose-lined hedge, woodbine, and cornflower, azure blue, where yellowing wheat stalks crowd up under the shadow of green firs. All the devious brooklets’ sweetness where the iris stays the sunlight; all the wild woods hold of beauty; all the broad hills of thyme and freedom thrice a hundred years repeated. “A hundred years of cowslips, bluebells, violets; purple spring and golden autumn; sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings; the night immortal; all the rhythm of time unrolling. A chronicle unwritten and past all power of writing; who shall preserve a record of the petals that fell from the roses a century ago? The swallows to the house-tops three hundred”

“Hothouse Flowers"I hate the flower of wood or common field.I cannot love the primrose nor regretThe death of any shrinking violet,Nor even the cultured garden's banal yield.The silver lips of lilies virginal,The full deep bosom of the enchanted rosePlease less than flowers glass-hid from frost and snowsFor whom an alien heat makes festival.I love those flowers reared by man's careful art,Of heady scents and colors: strong of heartOr weak that die beneath the touch of knife,Some rich as sin and some as virtue pale,And some as subtly infamous and frailAs she whose love still eats my soul and life.””

“At Kapiti Plains our tents, our accommodations generally, seemed almost too comfortable for men who knew camp life only on the Great Plains, in the Rockies, and in the North Woods. My tent had a fly which was to protect it from the great heat; there was a little rear extension in which I bathed - a hot bath, never a cold bath, is almost a tropic necessity; there was a ground canvas, of vital moment in a land of ticks, jiggers, and scorpions; and a cot to sleep on, so as to be raised from the ground. Quite a contrast to life on the round-up! Then I had two tent boys to see after my belongings, and to wait at table as well as in the tent.””

“A modernist is convinced not only that modern art is the most adequate response to modern conditions but also that modernity itself offers the best possible solutions, so far, to the enigmas of human nature and human possibility, even of societies and polities do not always avail themselves of those solutions. The project of modern life, modern life conceived a a project, believes in its own correct orientation. Sigmund Freud proposed not just a new account of human personality but what he was sure was the true account. Even Theodor W. Adorno. who repudiated the Enlightenment as a betrayal of philosophy, nevertheless believed that modern art was moving in the right direction. The 'emancipation' from the classical ideal in the twentieth-century, for example, is an aspect for Adorno of the 'unfolding of the truth-content of art.””