in Thoreau’s Journal:

I was walking at five [PM] and found it stinging cold.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

When we have experienced many disappointments, such as the loss of friends, the notes of birds cease to affect us as they did.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

A mild, thawy day. The needles of the pine are the touchstone for the air. Any change in that element is revealed to the practiced eye by their livelier green or increased motion. They are the tell-tales. Now they are (the white pine) a cadaverous, misty blue, anon a lively silvery light plays on them, and they seem to erect themselves unusually, while the pitch pines are a lighter yellowish green than usual. The sun loves to nestle in the boughs of the pine and pass rays through them.

––The scent of bruised pines leaves where a sled has passed is a little exciting to me now.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The present seems never to get its due. It is the least obvious, neither before nor behind, but within us. All the past plays into this moment, and we are what we are. My aspiration is one thing, my reflection another; but, overall, myself and condition––is and does.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

It is remarkable that the straw-colored sedge of the meadows, which in the fall is one of the least noticeable colors, should now, that the landscape is mostly covered with snow, be perhaps the most noticeable of all objects in it for its color, and an agreeable contrast to the snow…

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The ponds are yielding a good crop of ice.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Now we have quite another kind of ice. It has rained hard, converting into a very thin liquid the snow which had fallen on the old ice, and this, having frozen, has made a perfectly smooth but white snow ice. It is white like polished marble (I call it marble ice), and the trees and hill are reflected in it, as not in the other….

Surely the ice is a great and absorbing phenomenon. Consider how much of the surface of the town it occupies, how much attention it monopolizes! We do not commonly distinguish more than one kind of water in the river, but what various kinds of ice there are!

in Thoreau’s Journal:

The winter, cold and bound out, as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it…But the winter was not given to us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields.

If it is a cold and hard season, its fruit no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty. It took the cold and bleakness of November to ripen the walnut, but the human brain is the kernel which the winter itself matures.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Men lie behind the barrier of a relation as effectually concealed as the landscape by a mist; and when at length some unforeseen accident throws me into a new attitude toward them, I am astounded as if for the first time I saw the sun on the hillside.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Perhaps I can never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall thus have taken them out of.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life, and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. It is….less artificial. I feel that in the other case I should have no proper frame for my sketches. Mere facts and names and dates communicate more than we suspect. Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew, and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

in Thoreau’s Journal:

…I looked back from the top of hill into this deep dell, where the white pines stood thick, rising one above another, reflecting the sunlight, so soft and warm by contrast with the snow, as never in summer, for the idea of warmth prevailed over the cold which the snow suggested, though I saw through and between them to a distant snow-clad hill…I was on the verge of seeing something, but I did not. If I had been alone, and had had more leisure, I might have seen something to report.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

Between winter and summer there is, to my mind, an immeasurable interval.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

The increased length of the days is very observable of late. What is a winter unless you have risen and gone abroad frequently before sunrise and by starlight.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

No second snow-storm in the winter can be so fair and interesting as the first.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Every leaf and twig was this morning covered with a sparkling ice armor.

in Thoreau’s Journal:

1856

Here, where you cannot walk at all in the summer, is better walking than elsewhere in the winter.

1855

In certain places, standing on their snowiest side, the woods were incredibly fair, white as alabaster….I doubt if I can convey an idea of the appearance of the woods yesterday.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

When we are amiable, then is love in the gale, and in sun and shade, and day and night; and to sigh under the cold, cold moon for a love unrequited is to put a slight upon nature; the natural remedy would be to fall in love with the moon and the night, and find our love requited.

 in Thoreau’s Journal:

Every man’s wood-lot was a miracle and surprise to him, and for those who could not go far there were the trees in the street….