Barren meaning

Adjective: barren

Pronunciation:(ba-run)

Barren meaning:

• Providing no shelter or sustenance

Synonyms: bare, bleak, desolate, stark

• Not bearing offspring

• Completely wanting or lacking

Synonyms: destitute, devoid, free, innocent, empty

• Having little or no vegetation; desolate and lifeless

Noun: barren

Pronunciation:(ba-run)

Barren meaning:

• An uninhabited wilderness that is worthless for cultivation

Synonyms: waste, wasteland
Quotations:

1. Pablo Neruda – I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
2. J.R.R. Tolkien – I want to be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.
3. Langston Hughes – Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that can not fly.Hold fast to dreams for when dreams go life is a barren field frozen with snow.
4. Karen Kingsbury – I tell of hearts and souls and dances. Butterflies and second chances;Desperate ones and dreamers bound,Seeking life from barren ground,Who suffer on in earthly fate the bitter pain of agony hate,Might but they stop and here forgive would break the bonds to breathe and live and find that God in goodness brings a chance for change, the hope of wings to rest in Him, and self to die and so become a butterfly.
5. Khaled Hosseini – I didn’t remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.
6. Iyanla Vanzant – The road of life is strewn with the bodies of promising people. People who show promise, yet lack the confidence to act. People who make promises they are unable to keep. People who promise to do tomorrow what they could do today. Promising young stars, athletes, entrepreneurs who wait for promises to come true. Promise without a goal and a plan is like a barren cow. You know what she could do if she could do it, but she can’t. Turn your promise into a plan. Make no promise for tomorrow if you are able to keep it today. And if someone calls you promising, know that you are not doing enough today.
7. Lewis Carroll – I love the stillness of the wood; I love the music of the rill:I love the couch in pensive mod Upon some silent hill. Scarce heard, beneath yon arching trees, The silver-crested ripples pass; and, like a mimic brook, the breeze whispers among the grass. Here from the world I win release, Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude, Break into mar the holy peace Of this great solitude. Here may the silent tears I weep Lull the vested spirit into rest, As infants sob themselves to sleep Upon a mothers breast. But when the bitter hour is gone,And the keen throbbing pangs are still, Oh, sweetest then to couch alone Upon some silent hill!To live in joys that once have been, To put the cold world out of sight,And deck life’s drear and barren scene with hues of rainbow-light. For what to man the gift of breath, If sorrow be his lot below; If all the day that ends in death be dark with clouds of woe?Shall the poor transport of an hour repay long years of sore distress-The fragrance of a lonely flower Make glad the wilderness? Ye golden house of life’s young spring, Of innocence, of love and truth!Bright, beyond all imagining, Thou fairy-dream of youth!I’d give all wealth that years have piled, The slow result of Life’s decay, To be once more a little child for on bright summers day.
8. Susanna Clarke – I reached out my hand, England’s rivers turned and flowed the other way. I reached out my hand, my enemies’s blood stopped in their veins. I reached out my hand; thought and memory flew out of my enemies’ heads like a flock of starlings;My enemies crumpled like empty sacks.I came to them out of mists and rain;I came to them in dreams at midnight;I came to them in a flock of ravens that filled a northern sky at dawn;When they thought themselves safe I came to them in a cry that broke the silence of a winter wood. The rain made a door for me and I went through it;The stones made a throne for me and I sat upon it;Three kingdoms were given to me to be mine forever;England was given to me to be mine forever.The nameless slave wore a silver crown;The nameless slave was a king in a strange country. The weapons that my enemies raised against me are venerated in Hell as holy relics;Plans that my enemies made against me are preserved as holy texts;Blood that I shed upon ancient battlefields is scraped from the stained earth by Hell’s sacristans and placed in a vessel of silver and ivory.I gave magic to England, a valuable inheritance but Englishmen have despised my gift magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it. Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me;The first shall be governed by thieves and murderers; the second shall conspire at his own destruction;The first shall bury his heart in a dark wood beneath the snow, yet still feel its ache;The second shall see his dearest possession in his enemy’s hand. The first shall pass his life alone he shall be his own gaoler;The second shall tread lonely roads, the storm above his head, seeking a dark tower upon a high hillside. I sit upon a black throne in the shadows but they shall not see me.The rain shall make a door for me and I shall pass through it;The stones shall make a throne for me and I shall sit upon it. The nameless slave shall wear a silver crown the nameless slave shall be a king in a strange country.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche – You desire to LIVE “according to Nature”? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves indifference as a power—how could you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavoring to be different? And granted that your imperative, “living according to Nature,” means actually the same as “living according to life”—how could you do differently? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature “according to the Stoa,” and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature falsely, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that because you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a part of Nature? But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to “creation of the world,” the will to the causa prima.
10. Sylvia Plath – Elm by Sylvia Plath I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: It is what you fear.I do not fear it: I have been there.Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfaction’s?Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?Love is a shadow.How you lie and cry after it listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, Echoing, echoing.Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? This is rain now, this big hush.And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. Scorched to the root my red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs. A wind of such violence will tolerate no by standing: I must shriek.The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren.Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.I let her go. I let her go diminished and flat, as after radical surgery. How your bad dreams possess and endow me.I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out looking, with its hooks, for something to love.I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me;All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.Clouds pass and disperse.Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart?I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face so murderous in its strangle of branches?——Its snaky acids kiss.It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

Sample sentences:

1. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
2. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
3. Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
4. I met a barren woman in the barrens of central Africa.
5. Where have you been?” she cried. “Damn you, where have you been?” She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn.When she tried to get by, the magician stood in her way. “You don’t talk like that,” he told her, still uncertain that Molly had recognized the unicorn. “Don’t you know how to behave, woman? You don’t curtsy, either.”But Molly pushed him aside and went up to the unicorn, scolding her as though she were a strayed milk cow. “Where have you been?” Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn’s old dark eyes that looked down.”I am here now,” she said at last.Molly laughed with her lips flat. “And what good is it to me that you’re here now? Where where you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?” With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. “I wish you had never come. Why did you come now?” The tears began to slide down the sides of her nose.The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, “She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world.””She would be.” Molly sniffed. “It would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue.” She reached up then to lay her hand on the unicorn’s cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, “It’s all right. I forgive you.
6. Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
7. Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?
8. (I)f you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the road will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the light. But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.
9. I am barren of words. For no sounds from my mouth are worthy of your hearing
10. Miracles do happen. You must believe this. No matter what else you believe about life, you must believe in miracles. Because we are all, every one of us, living on a round rock that spins around and around at almost a quarter of a million miles per hour in an unthinkably vast blackness called space. There is nothing else like us for as far as our telescopic eyes can see. In a universe filled with spinning, barren rocks, frozen gas, ice, dust, and radiation, we live on a planet filled with soft, green leaves and salty oceans and honey made from bees, which themselves live within geometrically complex and perfect structures of their own architecture and creation. In our trees are birds whose songs are as complex and nuanced as Beethoven’s greatest sonatas. And despite the wild, endless spinning of our planet and its never-ending orbit around the sun–itself a star on fire–when we pour water into a glass, the water stays in the glass. All of these are miracles.
11. When a golden girl can win prayer from out the lips of sin,When the barren almond bears,And a little child gives away its tears,Then shall all the house be still and peace come to Canterville.
12. My mother named me after a miracle of nature: Waris means desert flower. The desert flower blooms in a barren environment where few living things can survive.
13. Happiness there’s just no accounting for happiness,or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away.And how can you not forgive?You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned,that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone.No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitch hikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep mid afternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair.It comes to the monk in his cell.It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink.It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night.It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,to rain falling on the open sea,to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
14. Eugenie, you’re a woman without equal, and no matter how much you annoy the hell out of me and no matter how much I try to get you out of my head—and believe me, both occur regularly—I can’t stay away from you. Even if you were barren, I’d take you as my consort in an instant and spend the rest of my life with you — childless, so long as it meant you’d be by my side. I would gladly bring you to my bed with no other thoughts than taking joy from your body. It would be enough.”- Dorian
15. But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now-now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean all the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he now saw that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes-and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name.
16. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom…It was like a flute song forgotten in another existence and remembered again. What? How? Why? This singing she heard that had nothing to do with her ears. The rose of the world was breathing out smell. It followed her through all her waking moments and caressed her in her sleep.
17. There is the image of the man who imagines himself to be a prisoner in a cell. He stands at one end of this small, dark, barren room, on his toes, with arms stretched upward, hands grasping for support onto a small, barred window, the room’s only apparent source of light. If he holds on tight, straining toward the window, turning his head just so, he can see a bit of bright sunlight barely visible between the uppermost bars. This light is his only hope. He will not risk losing it. And so he continues to staring toward that bit of light, holding tightly to the bars. So committed is his effort not to lose sight of that glimmer of life-giving light, that it never occurs to him to let go and explore the darkness of the rest of the cell. So it is that he never discovers that the door at the other end of the cell is open, that he is free. He has always been free to walk out into the brightness of the day, if only he would let go.
18. Charming,” Puck commented, gazing around in distaste. “I love the barren, dead feel they’re going for. Who’s the gardener, I wonder? I’d love to get some tips.
19. Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift that your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.
20. I am barren of words my female. For no sounds from my mouth are worthy of your hearing.
21. Each year, the hoopla over the Tony Awards gives way to Broadway’s most barren season – the dog days of summer, a period that typically sees the fewest number of new shows open of any time of the year.
22. Prime Minister Tony Abbott says Australia will continue flying humanitarian missions over Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq until safety can be guaranteed for the thousands of Yazidi refugees hiding in the barren region.
23. Liverpool fans have been warned by Jamie Carragher that their wait for a league title will exceed the 26 barren years experienced by Manchester United.
24. Arsene Wenger believes keeping Arsenal competitive in their barren years has been the most important achievement of his reign.
25. A barren road takes us to the heavily fortified border between North and South Korea.
26. Deserts are often thought of as barren places where not much is afoot.
27. Others went barren years ago, now producing few if any new stars.
28. The woman whose sons have died is richer than a barren woman.
29. A barren woman is like a leaking pot.
30. He had to spend many barren days.