Clouds

Clouds are visible masses of water droplets or frozen ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of the Earth or another planetary body. When the water in clouds becomes sufficiently condensed, it falls as rain.

• I've also grown weary of reading about clouds in a book. Doesn't this piss you off? You're reading a nice story, and suddenly the writer has to stop and describe the clouds. Who cares? I'll bet you anything I can write a decent novel, with a good, entertaining story, and never once mention the clouds. Really! Every book you read, if there's an outdoor scene, an open window, or even a door slightly ajar, the writer has to say, "As Bo and Velma walked along the shore, the clouds hung ponderously on the horizon like steel-gray, loosely formed gorilla turds." I'm not interested. Skip the clouds and get to the fucking. The only story I know of where clouds were important was Noah's Ark.
  • George Carlin, "Seven Things I'm Tired Of", Brain Droppings (1997), pp. 5–6.

• The clouds have thunderously poured down water; A sound the cloudy skies have given forth. Also, your own arrows proceeded to go here and there.
  • David, Psalms 77:17.

• Then the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven, and all the tribes of the earth will beat themselves in grief, and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
  • Jesus, Matthew 24:30.

• I agree that clouds often look like other things — fish and unicorns and men on horseback — but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
  • Stephen King, Bag of Bones (1998).

• If you wish,
  

I shall grow irreproachably tender:

not a man, but a cloud in trousers!

• Vladimir Mayakovsky, "The Cloud in Trousers" (1915).

• Was I deceiv'd, or did a sable cloud
  Turn forth her silver lining on the night?
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), line 22.

• There does a sable cloud
  Turn forth her silver lining on the night,
  And casts a gleam over this tufted grove.
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), line 223.

• The low'ring element
  Scowls o'er the darken'd landscape.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book II, line 490.

• Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it
  Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.
  • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle 2, line 19.

• Do you see yonder cloud, that's almost in shape of a camel?
  By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.
  Methinks it is like a weasel.
  It is backed like a weasel.
  Or, like a whale?
  Very like a whale.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act III, scene 2, line 312.

• Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds.
  • William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), Act IV, scene 5, line 220.

• …feathery curtains,
  Stretching o'er the sun's bright couch.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), Book II.

• Far clouds of feathery gold,
  Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
  Like islands on a dark blue sea.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), Book II.

• …fertile golden islands,
  Floating on a silver sea.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), Book II.

• Once I beheld a sun, a sun which gilt
  That sable cloud, and turned it all to gold.
  • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night VII, line 815.

A poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley - Full text online

• I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
  From the seas and the streams;
  I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
  In their noonday dreams.
  From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
  The sweet buds every one,
  When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
  As she dances about the sun.
  I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
  And whiten the green plains under,
  And then again I dissolve it in rain,
  And laugh as I pass in thunder.
  • St. 1.

• I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
  And the nursling of the Sky;
  I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
  I change, but I cannot die.
  • St. 7.

• For after the rain when with never a stain
  The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
  And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
  Build up the blue dome of air,
  I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
  And out of the caverns of rain,
  Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
  I arise and unbuild it again.
  • St. 7 (A cenotaph is an empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere).

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 122-23.

• Have you ever, looking up, seen a cloud like to a Centaur, a Pard, or a Wolf, or a Bull?
  • Aristophanes, Clouds. Gerard's translation. (Compare Hamlet, III. 2).

• Rocks, torrents, gulfs, and shapes of giant size
  And glitt'ring cliffs on cliffs, and fiery ramparts rise.
  • James Beattie, Minstrel, Book I.

• I saw two clouds at morning
  Tinged by the rising sun,
  And in the dawn they floated on
  And mingled into one.
  • John G. C. Brainard, I Saw Two Clouds at Morning.

• Were I a cloud I'd gather
  My skirts up in the air,
  And fly I well know whither,
  And rest I well know where.
  • Robert Bridges, Elegy, The Cliff Top, A Cloud.

• O, it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
  Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
  To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
  Or let the easily persuaded eyes
  Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould
  Of a friend's fancy.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fancy in Nubibus.

• Our fathers were under the cloud.
  • I Corinthians. X. 1.

• Though outwardly a gloomy shroud,
  The inner half of every cloud
  Is bright and shining:
  I therefore turn my clouds about
  And always wear them inside out
  To show the lining.
  • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Mrs. A. L. Felton), Wisdom of Folly.

• The clouds,—the only birds that never sleep.
  • Victor Hugo, The Vanished City.

• There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand.
  • I Kings, XVIII. 44.

• See yonder little cloud, that, borne aloft
  So tenderly by the wind, floats fast away
  Over the snowy peaks!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christus, The Golden Legend (1872), Part V, line 145.

• By unseen hands uplifted in the light
  Of sunset, yonder solitary cloud
  Floats, with its white apparel blown abroad,
  And wafted up to heaven.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo, Part II. 2.

• But here by the mill the castled clouds
  Mocked themselves in the dizzy water.
  • E. L. Masters, Spoon River Anthology, Isaiah Beethoven.

• So when the sun in bed,
  Curtain'd with cloudy red,
  Pillows his chin upon an orient wave.
  • John Milton, Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity.

• If woolly fleeces spread the heavenly way
  No rain, be sure, disturbs the summer's day.
  • Old Weather Rhyme.

• When clouds appear like rocks and towers,
  The earth's refreshed by frequent showers.
  • Old Weather Rhyme.

• Clouds on clouds, in volumes driven,
  Curtain round the vault of heaven.
  • Thomas Love Peacock, Rhododaphne, Canto V, line 257.

• May I create plain fields by collecting clouds
  and bedeck them with arching rainbows.
  • Suman Pokhrel, 'Song of Soul'

• Who maketh the clouds his chariot.
  • Psalms. CIV. 3.

• I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
  From the seas and the streams;
  I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
  In their noonday dreams.
  
  From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
  The sweet buds every one,
  When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
  As she dances about the sun.
  I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
  And whiten the green plains under,
  And then again I dissolve it in rain,
  And laugh as I pass in thunder.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud.

• Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,
  Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air,
  Thy battlements hang o'er the slopes and the forests,
  Seats of the gods in the limitless ether,
  Looming sublimely aloft and afar.
  • Bayard Taylor, Kilimandjaro.

• Yonder cloud
  That rises upward always higher,
  And onward drags a laboring breast,
  And topples round the dreary west,
  A looming bastion fringed with fire.
  • Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849), XV.

• The clouds that gather round the setting sun
  Do take a sober coloring from an eye
  That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.
  • William Wordsworth, Ode, Intimations of Immortality, Stanza 11.