Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Apple (Pyrus Malus)
What plant we in this apple tree?
Sweets for a hundred flowery springs
To load the May-wind’s restless wings,
When, from the orchard-row, he pours
Its fragrance through our open doors;
A world of blossoms for the bee,
Flowers for the sick girl’s silent room,
For the glad infant sprigs of bloom,
We plant with the apple tree.
Bryant—The Planting of the Apple Tree.
Like to the apples on the Dead Sea’s shore,
All ashes to the taste.
Byron—Childe Harold. Canto III. St. 34.
Art thou the topmost apple
The gatherers could reach,
Reddening on the bough?
Shall I not take thee?
Bliss Carman—Trans. of Sappho. 53.
There’s plenty of boys that will come hankering and gruvvelling around when you’ve got an apple, and beg the core off you; but when they’ve got one, and you beg for the core, and remind them how you give them a core one time, they make a mouth at you, and say thank you ’most to death, but there ain’t a-going to be no core.
S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain)—Tom Sawyer Abroad. Ch. I.
Oh! happy are the apples when the south winds blow.
Wm. Wallace Harney—Adonais.
And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer—apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of time’s vicissitude.
Nath. Hawthorne—Mosses from an Old Manse. The Old Manse. “Time’s vicissitude.”
The Blossoms and leaves in plenty
From the apple tree fall each day;
The merry breezes approach them,
And with them merrily play.
Heine—Book of Songs. Lyrical Interlude. No. 63.
To satisfy the sharp desire I had
Of tasting those fair apples, I resolv’d
Not to defer; hunger and thirst at once
Powerful persuaders, quicken’d at the scent
Of that alluring fruit, urged me so keen.
Milton—Paradise Lost. Bk. IX. L. 584.
Like Dead Sea fruit that tempts the eye,
But turns to ashes on the lips!
Moore—Lalla Rookh. The Fire Worshippers. L. 1,018.
Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough
A-top on the topmost twig—which the pluckers forgot, somehow—
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.
Rossetti—Beauty. A combination from Sappho.
The apples that grew on the fruit-tree of knowledge
By woman were pluck’d, and she still wears the prize
To tempt us in theatre, senate, or college—
I mean the love-apples that bloom in the eyes.
Horace and James Smith—Rejected Addresses. The Living Lustres, by T. M. 5.
How we apples swim.
Swift—Brother Protestants.
After the conquest of Afric, Greece, the lesser Asia, and Syria were brought into Italy all the sorts of their Mala, which we interprete apples, and might signify no more at first: but were afterwards applied to many other foreign fruits.
Sir Wm. Temple—On Gardening.