Middle season 12- 2026

 

Ohio buckeye blossoms in FB, the very beginning of growth on my Canadian hemlock in the front yard, the one azalea bush that is thriving in the yard, the backyard poppies now with nodding heads.

Tuesday April 21

1. The honeysuckle on the driveway is blooming
2. There are tiny beginnings of what I think will be pine cones on the Canadian hemlock

Wednesday April 22

1. Backyard tulips worn torn exhausted. Tattered. Loose toothed. Loose petaled. Unfresh 
2. The clementine dropped a delicious lickable Drop of clementine nectar on my wrist. 
3. Bleeding hearts blooming. 
4. Lilacs full on vibrant blooming now.
5. Some of these oak trees have hanging stuff. Tassles. Catkins?
6. 6:33. Cardinals singing loudly. They my bedroom window. 
7. Opened my bedroom window to let in cooler. Air and birdsong enters. 
8. 7:24. Now the cardinals ar hoolia and mourning doves are welcoming the growing dusk. 

Thursday. April. 23

1. Bald cypress has been putting out tiny leaves for a week or so. 1/2 long now. 
2. This is the week of leafing out 
3. Was surprised to see how many leaves were on silver maple last night. 
4. Many trees leaf out. Few so captivating as the oak tree in the courtyard. 
5. At night waking up to pee. The moon on the bathroom tile. And just visible theu new leaves of the silver maple. 
6. Bald cypress brown branches leaves in an untidy climb by the school door; nearby tentative new leaves poke out of spring branches of “this year’s tree” which is of course the same. 

Friday Apr 24

1. Dawn chorus of robins and cardinals. 5:27. By 5:44 they have calmed a bit. Birds are still talking a lot… but it’s not such a thick 3d woven carpet of sound. 
2. A richly colored purple tulip. With narrow stem and leaves, is growing now, after all the other tulips have lost their petals or have only one tooth remaining. 
3. Hawk
4. 2 geese going for walk on forest path grassy area outside forest preserve. 
5. Each Ginko leaf area has 4-5 individual leaves coming out. 
6. Redbuds look good against tan stone houses. So do purple flowers tha froth over rocks. 
7. Already the sun is too high during commuting time to properly light up the flowers from behind. 
8. Horse chestnuts pre blooming. Structures in place but no bloom. The leaves don’t look fully inflated yet. Each stem has handful of leaves. 
9. Sitting in front of one while waiting to pick up Susan barber at the train. Behind me ginkgo tree. Filled with small light green leaves. 
10. Redbud petals flowering for a second time — on the forest folios-/ on the stone patio. On the crushed gravel path. 
11. Big spiderweb taking up maybe a quarter of this young tree. First spiderweb of the year?
12. Salt Creek is backed down within its banks, not worrying hurrying. 
13. Many helicopters from the maple tree now pretty yellow while before it was green
14. We startled each other, the great blue heron and me, and he ended up preaching in the tall, dead tree
15. I’m in shorts today and a T-shirt. The first time this year at Fuller Berg.
16. Horse chestnut trees have some 12 inches of growth before the flowering
17. The Red Wing blackbird with very bright epilot sitting in the blooming red bud
18. Turtle is awake and moving around in the scummy pond made out of an area that has stopped flow
19. Long beak on this bird with a white belly and tan top that is rooting around in the skinny Pond area scummy not skinny
20. Merlin says all of that chattering all of those different sounds. They’re just goldfinches.
21. For four Canada geese going down South Creek Rapids like it’s a waterslide. Raging rapids waterslide.
22. All of the trout lilies flowers are gone the leaves still exist
23. To birdwatchers binoculars aimed at the same place. I see nothing.
24. I’d like some more darn tough dress socks then
25. Red buds in general are beginning to fade and drop and the tree itself is just as much green as pink now
26. Feeling the wind picking up coolness from the salt Creek while I’m on the bridge
27. Some may apples open in the sunny area. I’d forgotten, but they look like big open white flowers a single one.
28. D is for dada. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-our-time/id73330895?i=1000755761130
29. Moon fills bathroom floor 3/4 big or more. 11:30. After the winds changed. And blew something down. 

Saturday April 25

1. Dogwood just beginning to open today
2. A second orchid bud gotten far and is opening. 

Sunday. April 26

1. Can barely hear the meditation instructor on my computer because the cardinal outside the window is singing so loudly. 
2. All of the yellow dandelions in the yard next-door have turned old with gray hair
3. Now there are two orchid blooms open one facing One Direction, one facing almost exactly in the opposite direction
4. The honeysuckle and the lilac are still blooming
5. White low bushes across the front of the Landscaping those are blooming now white frothy
6. The heads of the poppies in the back yard are now bent over. All facing the sunny side. 

Monday. April 27

1. Dandelion fields are white. Recently just yellow. 
2. Iris heads up on stalks. On commute. 
3. Massive dandelion at school. 5 central flowers 24” tall. 12 other flowers that I can see that are lower. More shrub than weed. 
4. Tree in parking lot now enough leaves to act as an umbrella and leave a rain shadow on the asphalt
5. The general leafing out going on now. Norwegian maple thick heavy dark green. Locust tree in field park. Maybe not fully formed but all the tiny leaves on fronds present. 
6. Birds talking like crazy. Robins sparrows goldfinches according to Merlin
7. Now some yellow spears. Flowers. Iris. Open. 

Tuesday Apr 28

1. Pine trees Green, putting on noticeable new growth, lighter green at the tips sometimes they continue to have a little round caps pushed out as though
2. Cypress leaves now a full inch long
3. Big clumps of maple helicopters, turning yellow and some light brown in the trees even the brown ones are natural yet they’re still soft compliable
4. Most of Delilah blossoms still purple and on the bush, but there’s also quite a lot of that on the ground is still purple on the ground. Lilac blossoms. 

Wednesday a 29

1. Some redbud trees have dark buds coming right out of the trunk
2. Second round of tulips later blooming in backyard. 
3. Poppies waiting in place with bent heads. Temps in 50s highs
4. Been worried about Canadian hemlock. Thinking it looked haggard. But then I saw tiniest pine ones forming and now undeniable little sprigs of growth suggested. 
5. A hosta growing rapidly has speared a dry leaf in the front yard. 
6. The big hosta in back yard has grown very large very quickly. Glad I took two of them out. 

Thursday, April 30

1. Watched three helicopters spin their way down thru the cool spring morning. From the place where the cardinal sings. No wind. 
2. Leftover , dropped still vibrant red tulip blossom (one sheet of it) on the grass in the dirt of plantings. 
3. Lilacs on 58th st are done now. Cones of brown crumbly leftover blossoms 
4. Not all of the ends have tassles but may do. I too a pic. 
5. Tops of dogwood flowers centers turning red. More than towards the bottom. 

Report from 3x10 #12 - 2026

 

Basement

I continued scraping the linoleum backing off of the floor (with a large putty knife... slowly, over days); begin laying out flooring and realize that the east wall is bowed and uneven; puzzled that out; bought a 90* laser level, puzzled out how I can run a crooked first row to get to the second straight row.  images at the top show the "completed" (or rough draft) first row and laser in action.  I went to Menards to buy 6-mil plastic to put on the floor.

Garden

The N-S raised bed has thinned radishes growing; I added some arugula to the EW raised bed on 4/26.  On the same day I planted two more rows of peas in the big garden along with half rows of radish, arugula, simpson lettuce, spinach.

Guitar

I finished the month without a bang.  I focused on the first two pages of Bach's BWV 1004 lute suite.  I continued to play BWV 999 every day and alternate between the carcassi and scarlatti pieces to keep them on my fingers.

Haiku

No stopping!  I wrote daily to get to 195 in a row by April 30.  ( was also in the AM copying out the haikus from a book I read recently here)

Learn from the pine. By Basho

Ushibori by Kawase 1930 AIC Bruce Goff Collection

 Learn from the pines by Basho

LEARN about pines from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo.

Don't follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.

The basis of art is change in the universe. What's still has changeless form. Moving things change, and because we cannot put a stop to time, it continues unarrested. To stop a thing would be to halve a sight or sound in our heart.

Cherry blossoms whirl, leaves fall, and the wind flits them both along the ground. We cannot arrest with our eyes or ears what lies in such things. Were we to gain mastery over them, we would find that the life of each thing had vanished without a trace.

Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of things-mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity-and enjoy the falling blossoms and the scattering leaves.

One should know that a hokku is made by combining The secret of poetry lies in treading the middle path between the reality and the vacuity of the world.

One must first of all concentrate one's thoughts on an ob-ject. Once one's mind achieves a state of concentration and the space between oneself and the object has disappeared, the essential nature of the object can be perceived. Then express it immediately. If one ponders it, it will vanish from the mind.

Sabi is the color of the poem. It does not necessarily refer to the poem that describes a lonely scene. If a man goes to war wearing stout armor or to a party dressed up in gay clothes, and if this man happens to be an old man, there is something lonely about him. Sabi is something like that.

When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write.

Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a mo-ment.

Composition must occur in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree, or a swordsman leaping at his enemy. It is also like cutting a ripe watermelon with a sharp knife or like taking a large bite at a pear.

Is there any good in saying everything?

In composing hokku, there are two ways: becoming and making. When a poet who has always been assiduous in pursuit of his aim applies himself to an external object, the

color of his mind naturally becomes a poem. In the case of the poet who has not done so, nothing in him will become a poem; he consequently makes the poem through an act of personal will.

Haikai exists only while it's on the writing desk. Once it's taken off, it should be regarded as a mere scrap of paper.

There are three elements in baikai. Its feeling can be called loneliness (sabi). This plays with refined dishes, but contents itself with humble fare. Its total effect can be called elegance. This lives in figured silks and embroidered bro-cades, but does not forget a person clad in woven straw. Its language can be called aesthetic madness. Language resides in untruth and ought to comport with truth. It is difficult to reside in truth and sport with untruth. These three elements do not exalt a humble person to heights. They put an exalted person in a low place.

The profit of haikai lies in making common speech right.

If you describe a green willow in the spring rain it will be excellent as a renga verse. Haikai, however, needs more homely images, such as a crow picking mud snails in a rice paddy.

The hokku has changed repeatedly since the distant past, but there have only been three changes in the haikai link.

In the distant past, poets valued lexical links. In the more recent past, poets have stressed content links. Today it is best to link by reflection (utsuri), reverberation (bibiki), scent (nioi), or status (kurai).

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this some-thing can be called, for lack of a better name, a windswept spirit, for it is much like thin drapery that is torn and swept away by the slightest stirring of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind or another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, or at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either by its unquenchable love of po-etry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore it hangs on to it more or less blindly.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

After wandering from place to place I returned to Edo and spent the winter at a district called Tachibana, where I am still, though it is already the second month of the new year.

During this time I tried to give up poetry and remain silent, but every time I did so a poetic sentiment would solicit my heart and something would flicker in my mind. Such is the magic spell of poetry. Because of it, I abandoned everything and left home; almost penniless, I have kept myself by going around begging. How invincible is the power of poetry to reduce me to a tattered beggar.

There is a common element permeating Saigyo's lyric po-etry, Sog's linked verse, Sesshu's painting, and Rikyu's tea seremony. It is the poetic spirit Jurabo, the spirit that

s never found others. Indeed, ever

of the seasons.

leads one to follow nature and become a triend with things

For a person who has the spirit, everything he sees becomes a flower, and everything he imagines turns

oubts of one pear

into a moon.

Those who do not see the flower are no different from barbarians, and those who do not imagine the security by entering

moon are akin to beasts. Leave barbarians and beasts be-

hind; follow nature and return to nature.

wished

Every form of insentient existence-plants, stones, or

to measure

be a scholar, but it

utensils -has its individual feelings similar to those of men.

chable love of po-

an the art of writ-

When we observe calmly, we discover that all things have

their fulfillment.

it more or less

One need not be a haikai poet, but if someone doesn't live inside ordinary life and understand ordinary feelings, he's not likely to be a poet.

Clad in a black robe, I was neither a priest nor an ordinary man, for I wandered ceaselessly, like a bat that passes for a bird at one time and a mouse at another.

I always feel when sitting in company with Kikaku at the same party that he is anxious to compose a verse that will please the whole company. I have no such intention.

Le's admirable to have an undistracted mind, praiseworthy to be without worldly talent and knowledge. The same can be said of a homeless wanderer, but leading a life so liberated requires an iron will.

Since ancient times, those with a feeling for poetry did not mind carrying knapsacks on their backs or purting straw sandals on their feet or wearing simple hats that barely pro. tected them from the elements. They took delight in dinci plining their minds through hardship and thereby attaining a knowledge of the true nature of things.

One needs to work to achieve enlightenment and then re. turn to the common world.

The bones of haikai are plainness and oddness.

A verse that has something interesting in it is all right, even if its meaning isn't very clear.

Eat vegetable soup rather than duck stew.

The style I have in mind is a light one both in form and in structure, like the impression of looking at the sandy bed of a shallow river.

The leaves of the basho tree are large enough to cover a lute. When they flutter in the wind, they remind me of the injured tail of a phoenix, and when they are torn, they remind me of a dragon's ears. The tree does bear flowers, but unlike other flowers there is nothing gay about them. The big trunk of the tree is untouched by the ax, for it is utterly useless to build with. The monk Huai-su wrote on the leaves, and Chang Heng-ch'u saw the new leaves unfurling and took incentive in hsi studies. I love the tree, however, for its very uselessness. I take my ease in its shade and am fond of it because it is so easily torn by wind and rain.

Better Late Than Never!

 From People I Mostly Admire

Talking to Sapolsky for me today was a series of one aha moment after another in a way that almost never happens to me when I talk to other economists. The things other economists say to me almost never surprised me. Mostly we agree on things, and when we disagree, it's usually pretty easy to figure out why. It almost always comes down to a disagreement over assumptions, and sometimes one or both of us can be convinced to change our assumptions a bit.

But fundamentally, economists have a shared model of how the world works. So rarely is my understanding of a problem transformed by another economist. The conversation with Sapolsky, however, it really stopped me in my tracks. I've been thinking about crime and criminal justice for a long time, so my views are pretty well developed. But today I think in changed, I always thought it was obvious that retribution was an appropriate use of the criminal justice system and that moral outrage should criminals make sense.

But honestly, I suspect I've been wrong about that for the last twenty five years. Better late than never.

List of Character Descriptions

 from the internetj.  This might be good for class.

1. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

” … Her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever.”

2. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

” … in the last years she continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing. She looked as if the nimbus of humanity were fading away and she were turning monkey. Tendrils grew from her eyebrows and coarse white hairs sprouted on her lip and chin. When she put on an old dress the bosom hung empty and the hem swept the floor. Old hats fell down over her eyes. Sometimes she put her hand over her mouth and laughed, her eyes closed and her shoulder shaking.” 

3. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Phyllida’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.”

4. China Miéville, This Census-Taker

“His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.”

5. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“And then the hot air congealed in front of him, and out of it materialized a transparent man of most bizarre appearance. A small head with a jockey cap, a skimpy little checked jacket that was made out of air … The man was seven feet tall, but very narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin, and his face, please note, had a jeering look about it.”

6. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Mama BekwaTataba stood watching us—a little jet-black woman. Her elbows stuck out like wings, and a huge white enameled tub occupied the space above her head, somewhat miraculously holding steady while her head moved in quick jerks to the right and left.”

7. John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.”

8. A.S. Byatt, Possession

“He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or happy, which was not often in these difficult days, into a smile of amused friendliness and pleasure which aroused feelings of warmth, and something more, in many women.”

9. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“He did not look like anything special at all.”

10. Henry Lawson, The Bush Girl

“Grey eyes that grow sadder than sunset or rain, fond heart that is ever more true Firm faith that grows firmer for watching in vain — She’ll wait by the sliprails for you.”

11. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I am an invisible man. 
No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: 
Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.
 I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -
- and I might even be said to possess a mind. 
I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me.”

12. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced–or seemed to face–the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”

13. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“My brother Ben’s face, thought Eugene, is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory; his high white head is knotted fiercely by his old man’s scowl; his mouth is like a knife, his smile the flicker of light across a blade. His face is like a blade, and a knife, and a flicker of light: it is delicate and fierce, and scowls beautifully forever, and when he fastens his hard white fingers and his scowling eyes upon a thing he wants to fix, he sniffs with sharp and private concentration through his long, pointed nose…his hair shines like that of a young boy—it is crinkled and crisp as lettuce.”

14. Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

“A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”

15. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“[Miss Havisham] had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker…”

16. John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“For such and extraordinary athlete—even as a Lower Middler Phineas had been the best athlete in the school—he was not spectacularly built. He was my height—five feet eight and a half inches…He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did, which flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted, unemphatic unity of strength.”

17. Ambrose Bierce, Chickamauga

“-the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.”

18. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“…your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”

19. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes – just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor – an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.”  

20. William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Inside the floating cloak he was tall, thin, and bony; and his hair was red beneath the black cap. His face was crumpled and freckled, and ugly without silliness.”

21. Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character: vanity of person and of situation. He had been remarkably handsome in his youth, and at fifty-four was still a very fine man. . . .”

22. Andrew Lang, The Crimson Fairy Book

“When the old king saw this he foamed with rage, stared wildly about, flung himself on the ground and died.”

23. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“He was commonplace in complexion, in feature, in manners, and in voice. He was of middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps remarkably cold, and he certainly could make his glance fall on one as trenchant and heavy as an axe… Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint expression of his lips, something stealthy — a smile — not a smile — I remember it, but I can’t explain.” 

24. Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind.”

25. Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

“He followed with his eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously, confidingly, producing a penny from one lad’s elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another’s neck and collar, half a crown from another’s hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers: “Well, this is rather queer!””

26. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say.” 

27. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Her skin was a rich black that would have peeled like a plum if snagged, but then no one would have thought of getting close enough to Mrs. Flowers to ruffle her dress, let alone snag her skin. She didn’t encourage familiarity. She wore gloves too. I don’t think I ever saw Mrs. Flowers laugh, but she smiled often. A slow widening of her thin black lips to show even, small white teeth, then the slow effortless closing. When she chose to smile on me, I always wanted to thank her.”

28. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up…”

29. Henry James, The Aspern Papers

“Her face was not young, but it was simple; it was not fresh, but it was mild. She had large eyes which were not bright, and a great deal of hair which was not ‘dressed,’ and long fine hands which were–possibly–not clean.”  

30. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni Book One: The Musician

“She is the spoiled sultana of the boards. To spoil her acting may be easy enough,—shall they spoil her nature? No, I think not. There, at home, she is still good and simple; and there, under the awning by the doorway,—there she still sits, divinely musing. How often, crook-trunked tree, she looks to thy green boughs; how often, like thee, in her dreams, and fancies, does she struggle for the light,—not the light of the stage-lamps.”

31. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Living among those white-faced women with their rosaries and copper crosses…” 

32. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and was changed, was still upon her.” 

33. Rudyard Kipling, Many Inventions

“He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

34. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.” 

35. Hugh Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle

“For a long time he said nothing. He kept as still as a stone. He hardly seemed to be breathing at all. When at last he began to speak, it sounded almost as though he were singing, sadly, in a dream.”

36. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

37. Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality, for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing.”