Quotations

«As long as you're green, you're growing. As soon as you're ripe, you start to rot.»

«A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.»

«Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry / Full and fair ones; come and buy; / If so be, you ask me where / They do grow? I answer there, / Where my Julia's lips do smile; / There's the land, or cherry-isle.»

«And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.»

«And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle, saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe.»

«And whatsoever is first ripe in the land, which they shall bring unto the LORD, shall be thine; every one that is clean in thine house shall eat of it.»

«DAWN, n. The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.»

«Always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.»

«Death eats up all things, both the young lamb and old sheep; and I have heard our parson say, death values a prince no more than a clown; all?s fish that comes to his net; he throws at all, and sweeps stakes; he?s no mower that takes a nap at noon-day, but drives on, fair weather or foul, and cuts down the green grass as well as the ripe corn: he?s neither squeamish nor queesy-stomach?d, for he swallows without chewing, and crams down all things into his ungracious maw; and tho? you can see no belly he has, he has a confounded dropsy, and thirsts after men?s lives, which he guggles down like mother?s milk.»

«'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine, And after one hour more 'twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale»