Good Wood quotes

I have looked through the list of quotations illustrating the Wood element which I gave our SOFEA students;  I am offering them here to my blog readers:


"She felt like a bulb must feel, she thought, at the supreme moment when it has nosed its little spear successfully up through the mould it has endured all the winter and gets it suddenly out into the light and the splendour of the world.  The freedom of it!  The joy of getting clear.” 
                                                                                        Elizabeth von Arnim: The pastor’s wife


The essential thing was to plot my next move.  But that was precisely what gave me the most trouble, the thing I could no longer do.  I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at all.  The only future that had ever belonged to me was the present I was living in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually overwhelmed the rest.  I had no ideas anymore.  The moments unfurled one after the other, and at each moment the future stood before me as a blank, a white page of uncertainty.”
                                                                                                        Paul Auster: Moon Palace


"He was an old man, and he hated the snow.  Pushing on toward the river, he seemed to see in the storm the mortality of the planet.  Spring would never come again.  The valley of the West River would never again be a bowl of grass and violets.  The lilacs would never bloom again.  Watching the snow blow over the fields, he knew in his bones the death of civilizations - Paris buried in the snow, London abandoned, and in the caves of the escarpment at Innsbruck a few survivors huddled over a fire of chair and table legs.  This cruel, this dolorous, this Russian winter, he thought;  this death of hope.  Cheer, valor, all good feelings had been extinguished in him by the cold.  He tried to cast the hour into the future, to invent some gentle thaw, some clement southwest wind - blue and moving water in the river, tulips and hyacinths in bloom, the plump stars of a spring night hung about the tree of heaven - but he felt instead the chill of the glacier, the ice age, in his bones and in the painful beating of his heart.”
                                                                                       John Cheever:  The Wapshot Scandal

“It is ever so with the things that Men begin:  there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.”

“Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,” said Legolas.  “And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for.”
                                                                                  J.R.R. Tolken: The Return of the King

“He was one of those sticklers for form who in every possible circumstance know the appropriate regulation, and are able to discuss it impersonally and accept it without question.”

                                                                                           Boris Pasternak: Dr Zhivago
 

“Mrs Thatcher has not come to terms with her abrupt departure from office last November.... Her interviewer says she appeared “a woman disoriented”.  Mrs Thatcher told her: “The pattern of my life was fractured.  It is like throwing a pane of glass with a complicated map upon it on the floor.”

                                                                                                  From a newspaper interview

 
And the following were things some of the things my Wood patients told me:

 "The world’s at your feet, but I have a total sense of lack of direction.  I feel rootless.”

“Damaged roots become warped maturity.”

 “All this abundance - I would like to get it into order.”  (A patient talking about spring)

 “It’s like living with somebody in forward motion all the time.” (A girl about her Wood boyfriend)