15 Ways to Describe Rain

Tread Softly, W.B. Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

From scribbled writing found on index card, unknown book

The Secret Garden: One theory has it that these private enclaves came about in the Middle Ages, when the patriarchal church sought to wrest power from women---in part by usurping their long-held role in the healing and horticultural arts. To avoid inquisition and punishment, women who continued to raise potent medicinal herbs and plants (for reasons both salubrious and nefarious) were forced to do so in stealth, often by moonlight and in gardens sequestered from prying eyes.

From 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

Let the swallow build in the drawing room and the thistle thrust aside the tiles and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of armchairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.

From a Letter by Robert Howard

Listen, I’ll tell you; we are sparks of star dust, atoms of unknown power, powerless in ourselves but making up the whole of some great power that uses us as ruthlessly as fire uses fuel. We are parts of an entity, futile in ourselves. We are merely phases of electricity; electrons endlessly vibrating between the magnetic poles of birth and death. We cannot escape these trails in which our paths lie. We do not, as individual entities, really exist, we do not live. There is no life, there is no existence; there is simply vibration. What is life but an uncompleted gesture, beginning in oblivion and ending in oblivion? What man of history ever really accomplished what he desired to accomplish? No, what men name life is simply the sparkle of an electron as it flashes from the pole of birth to the pole of death. There is no beginning, nor will there ever be an end to the thing.

Artephius, followed by blogger's own work

Artephius: “Isn’t it only too well known that ours is a cabalistic Art? That is, to be revealed only orally and overflowing with mysteries? Poor fool. How can you be so naïve as to believe that we would teach you openly and clearly the greatest and most important of our secrets? I assure you that whoever tries to explain in the ordinary and literal sense of the words what the hermetic philosophers have written will find himself caught in the meanderings of a labyrinth from which he can never escape, because he lacks Ariadne’s thread as guide.”

It will never be quite as it appears. The man in the white robes with the dark hair whispers as you come near words that never quite reach your ear. Until, just then, as the sun’s lower rim touches the top of the pine trees on the horizon, and a single word emerges from his insect buzz: Janus. For it was on your mother’s birthday that you were born and that was also the day she died.

It was January and the doctor said that there were remains of fetal bones in your mother’s womb and they all thought, though none of them said it, “there was another one in there with her and She must have eaten it.” The nurse thought a quick death in the Janus winds would be the most humane thing to do but the winds took pity on you and instead of chilling your flesh into unbearable blue pain leading to a peaceful sleep as they had with a hundred other babes that winter, they picked you up and nestled you into a cloud where all shone pink and gold with strands of cloud like cotton candy creating bright fathomless caves. You flew on the winds through those caves three days and then were dropped onto the roof of a widowed basket weaver.

The Great Gatsby, page 100

"But his heart was in a constant turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the washstand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the patterns of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination, they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing."