Patrick O'Brian Quotes

When the shot is afterwards subjected to white light, colour appears because of selective reflection.

I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree, past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree.

If you understand how a rainbow works, it does not make it less magnificent; it makes it more magnificent.

I just think white light generation is just one of these remarkable things to see, and actually, you know, one colour of light goes in to just water or any clear anything and out comes all the colours of the rainbow when the pulses are short and intense enough.

I never knew how soothing trees are-many trees and patches of open sunlight, and tree presences; it is almost like having another being.

Even a stunted tree reaches for sunlight.

The fruit tasted foreign but indigenous, like sunlight a tree had changed through patience.

I measure myself Against a tall tree I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear. Nevertheless, I dislike The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.

I expect a time when, or rather an integrity by which, a man will get his coat as honestly and as perfectly fitting as a tree itsbark. Now our garments are typical of our conformity to the ways of the world, i.e., of the devil, and to some extent react on us and poison us, like that shirt which Hercules put on.

I give you this toast: To the Hobbits. May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees.

Look at the bow in the cloud, in the very rain itself. That is a sign that the sun, though you cannot see it, is shining still -- that up above beyond the cloud is still sunlight and warmth and cloudless blue sky.

Every ripple on the ocean, every leaf on every tree, every sand dune in the desert, every power we never see.

When the light returns to its source, it takes nothing of what it has illuminated.

What has roots as nobody sees, Is taller than trees Up, up it goes, And yet never grows? A mountain.

For experience teacheth me that straight trees have crooked roots.

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.

The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.

Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors.