Nymph Quotes

“She wakes in a puddle of sunlight.
Her hands asleep beside her.
Her hair draped on the lawn
like a mantle of cloth.”
― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair

“A nymph of the woods such as you were,”
― Mary Shelley, Mathilda Mary Shelley

“And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell
By slow Meander's margent green,
And in the violet-imbroider'd vale
Where the love-lorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
That likest thy Narcissus are?”
― John Milton, The Complete Poems

“She was all in pink, and a wreath of little pink wild roses lay close about her head, making her, with her tall young slimness, look like a Botticelli nymph.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Making of a Marchioness

“...you are not what you seem - you're a Sylph - you leave and the air retains your image - you haunt me...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“With her wild red hair draped around her pallid visage, she could easily be mistaken for a nymph from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. But then again, those nymphs were rarely hung-over or quite such a freckled, busty little thing.”
― Renate Linnenkoper, Exogenesis

“Overheard on a Saltmarsh"

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.
No.

Give them me. Give them me.
No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

They are better than stars or water,
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

Hush, I stole them out of the moon.

Give me your beads, I want them.
No.

I will howl in the deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.”
― Harold Monro, Collected poems;

“She is the nymph who keeps enticing me the sailor evey time!”
― Avijeet Das

“She is a beauty. Yes, a marble nymph; angelic eyes, unearthly lips…”
― Alexander Pushkin

“It was only then that she realized how closely he held her, and how the gentle incline of the hill brought her almost eye to eye with him.
One side of his mouth twitched. "Your cheeks are like cherries."
She tucked her chin into the fur cowl at her neck. "It's cold," she said, defensively.
He shook his head. "I am not complaining. I think they're rather charming. They make you look like a winter nymph.”
― Sarah MacLean, A Rogue by Any Other Name

“Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“She is the nymph who keeps enticing me the sailor every time!”
― Avijeet Das

“Suddenly, she was not pretty at all; she looked like a thousand-year-old teenager who wanted something she knew she couldn’t have.”
― Tom Holt, Expecting Someone Taller

“She climbed out, and stood like a water nymph, her body agleam and asparkle with its dew, her skin like rare silk, smooth as a star's glance. Down fell her hair like smoke. She stretched her arms to the moon, and laughed, aglow with the warmth gotten of her swim.”
― Warwick Deeping, Uther and Igraine

“The nymph who laments, guardian of our spring of tears,
Dares come only within the compass of praising, of song, -
She who watches over the settling of the precipitate,
That it be clear, on that same rock

That bears the gates and the altars. -
See, about her shoulders so tranquil there rises
The sensation that she must be the youngest
Of those sisters, to be disposed so.

Exultation knows, and fierce Desire acknowledges, -
Only Lamentation must still learn; with a maiden’s hand
She counts out the old sorrows through the night.

But suddenly, slantwise and unpractised,
She holds aloft a constellation of our voices
Against the heavens, left unobscured by her breath.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I liked The Water Nymph. It was a dark-haired woman sitting in a dimly lit deep green forest on a gray stone slab overlooking a dark blue spring. It was a contemplative, moody piece and the girl looked the way I imagined I would if I were alone and someone was staring at me without my knowing that they were there.”
― Margot Berwin, Scent of Darkness

“Above, a vivid painting hung over the fireplace. Inside its frame, a woman was transforming into a tree.
The lower half of her body was bark and roots, plunging into soil, while her waist and chest arched upwards and her outstretched hands reached for the sky. The nymph's dark hair was a knotted mass of branches around her head, sprouting bright green leaves.
It was the myth of Daphne---the nymph who begged the river god to save her from Apollo and was turned into a laurel tree.
"It must be a terrible thing to lose," Hawthorne said, making her jump.
He looked up from where he crouched near the fire: to the woman in the frame. His left forearm was streaked with black ash.
"What's a terrible thing to lose?"
Hawthorne's eyes glittered as he studied the nymph. "Your humanity."
"But it was her choice," said Emeline, feeling defensive of Daphne. If the river god hadn't turned her into a laurel, she would have fallen prey to Apollo. "She asked to be saved."
Firelight flickered over Hawthorne's face as his gray-eyed gaze caught hers and held it.
"Saved," he murmured, considering this. "Is that really what the river god did? As a tree, her life is forfeit. She'll never be human again. She'll never laugh or sing, ponder or love, again. Don't you think she would have preferred the river god defeat Apollo, or at the very least warn him away, instead of taking something so precious from her?”
― Kristen Ciccarelli, Edgewood