visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere From Wikiquote, the free quote compendium
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.