Bogs Quotes

“To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”

“To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”

“Though I imagine we're killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that'll seem insane to people in the future. And as doors to the next world go, a bog ain't a bad choice. It's not quite water and it's not quite land - it's an in-between place.”

“Trust is always a risk, but when placed in the right people after a trial period where they prove themselves worthy of it, it is a reward transcendent of all the emotional mire that bogs down a person’s potential.”

“And also, one is a mother in order to understand the inexplicable. One is a mother to lighten the darkness. One is a mother to shield when lightning streaks the night, when thunder shakes the earth, when mud bogs one down. One is a mother in order to love without beginning or end. ”

“That thing some people call boredom, in the correct if elusive dosage, can be a form of inoculation against itself. Once you struffle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy.”

“The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of altogether another kind from those that enveloped Letty: no troubles are for one moment to be compared with those that come of the wrongness, even if it be not wickedness, that is our own. Some clouds rise from stagnant bogs and fens; others from the wide, clean, large ocean. But either kind, thank God, will serve the angels to come down by. In the old stories of celestial visitants the clouds do much; and it is oftenest of all down the misty slope of griefs and pains and fears, that the most powerful joy slides into the hearts of men and women and children.”

“I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.”

“Monch was on no simple retreat. The journey he had plotted for himself was much longer, and took him many buckets away from Appollon to Angarr's Sorrow, the land of fetid bogs in southeastern Sarthiss. This was a world far away from everything he knew... from everyone he knew. Granted, the list of people he knew was exceptionally short, especially since Monch was horrible with names and only slightly less horrible with faces. Regardless, he did not wish to accidentally advertise his inexperience to anyone he might possibly know, which is why he travelled so far afield.There were ruins in the swamps, ruins hidden under years of neglect and heavy with decay. Things lurked in those ruins, inhuman beasts with forbidden hungers. He intended to use the dangers of the swamps as the whetstone that would hone his abilities to a razor-keen edge. Monch would test his blade against and come back all the stronger......or dead.No... that wasn't right. Given the fact that he was immortal, death really wasn't an option. So then, he would come back stronger......or something something horrible. Monch decided to fill in those particular details later on, when he had time to ponder his autobiography at length. He would tidy up that particular idiom later.”

“In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.”