Undergrowth Quotes

The Mockery Bird regarded him with a roguish eye, head on one side, and took a few slow steps into the clearing. With its head on one side and its foot tentatively raised, it seemed like some sort of lanky, avian dancing master. It stepped forward among the guava stems with a mincing delicacy and then shuffled its wings like someone shuffling a pack of cards. He noticed that it had very long eyelashes which it raised and lowered over its large gaily-sparkling eyes. ... There was another complicated rustle and flurry in the undergrowth and then, projected into the clearing by its own nervous eagerness, came a female Mockery Bird making strange, peeting noises, which became a soothing babble when she caught sight of the male. She went up to her mate and briefly preened his throat feathers as an over-zealous wife will straighten the tie of her consort. ... Here in front of him, cossetting each other, were two birds which were thought to be extinct. (Gerald Durrell)

Fumbling in total darkness, they reached out to each other, naked, he penetrated her with desire and she received him eagerly, and they exchanged eagerness and desire until their bodies were locked in embrace, their movements in harmony, her voice rising from the depth of her being, his totally submerged, the cry that is born, prolonged, truncated, that muffled sob, that unexpected tear, and the machine trembles and shudders, probably no longer even on the ground but, having rent the screen of brambles and undergrowth, is now hovering at dead of night amid the clouds, Blimunda, Baltasar, his body weighing on hers, and both weighing on the earth, for at last they are here, having gone and returned.

José Saramago

Each green leaf or each needle is in effect a remarkably well-regulated metal factory. Its operation can be demonstrated experimentally. With the falling of the leaves or needles this supply of metals is scattered by the wind, and the more undergrowth there is, the greater is the dispersion of organic metal salts, which during the winter are pressed down hard by the snow.

Viktor Schauberger

The damage caused by modern forest technology is so devastating, because this energy interchange cannot evolve as it does in a natural forest. When there is a variety of tree types and undergrowth, energy is created in the whole forest area.

Viktor Schauberger

He went down with three bullets in his body. That left me in command. I was right out there in the open. And those machine guns were spitting fire and cutting down the undergrowth all around me something awful.

Alvin York

I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch, treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-Bear Woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in its speculative cunning, and even imagine I had met it before in some city byway.

H. G. Wells

Swift Summer into the Autumn flowed, And frost in the mist of the morning rode . And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath, Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth, Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue, Livid, and starred with a lurid dew. And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould Started like mist from the wet ground cold; Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead With a spirit of growth had been animated! Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum, Made the running rivulet thick and dumb, And at its outlet flags huge as stakes Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.

Percy Bysshe Shelley