Afire Quotes

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world.

I have loved in life and I have been loved. I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar, and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow. My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it. My heart has been rent and joined again; My heart has been broken and again made whole; My heart has been wounded and healed again; A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet. I went through hell and saw there love's raging fire, and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love. I wept in love and made all weep with me; I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men; And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes. The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear; With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved, I shook the throne of God in heaven. I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love, "Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret." She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear, "My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

Set the world afire. Just let me hand you the matches.

When left to its own devices it tends to make me look as if I’ve been set afire.

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!

The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.

I am the spark that will set the worlds afire. I am the hammer that cracks the chains.

Put out my eyes, and I can see you still; slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; and without any feet can go to you; and tongueless, I can conjure you at will. Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you and grasp you with my heart as with a hand; arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true; and if you set this brain of mine afire, upon my blood I then will carry you.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as "quothe." Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I've had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it's spoken, can mean The Flame, The Thunder, or The Broken Tree. "The Flame" is obvious if you've ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple of hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it's unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire. "The Thunder" I attribute to a strong baritone and a great deal of stage training at an early age. I've never thought of "The Broken Tree" as very significant. Although in retrospect, I suppose it could be considered at least partially prophetic. My first mentor called me E'lir because I was clever and I knew it. My first real lover called me Dulator because she liked the sound of it. I have been called Shadicar, Lightfinger, and Six-String. I have been called Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, and Kvothe Kingkiller. I have earned those names. Bought and paid for them. But I was brought up as Kvothe. My father once told me it meant "to know." I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned. I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.

A pumpkin lives but once a year when someone sets its soul afire and on that night it stirs up fear until its flame is snuffed. But e'en one night of eerie light is fright enough.

All around Molly there flowed and flowered a light as impossible as snow set afire, while thousands of cloven hooves sang by like cymbals. She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand.

Good,” he said softly. “Set the world afire. Just let me hand you the matches.

With horror he saw that her hair was already afire as the tarred stake burned about her head. He held her agonized gaze with his fierce black eyes. "I'll love you forever, and beyond," he vowed as he raised both arms and plunged his sword into her heart. ~Marcus Magnus

As Elizabeth Barrett Browning once observed poetically: "Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.

Young people, Lord. Do they still call it infatuation? That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling? Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty. Before I was reduced to singsong, I saw all kinds of mating. Most are two-night stands trying to last a season. Some, the riptide ones, claim exclusive right to the real name, even though everybody drowns in its wake. People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from greed to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people in the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: ‘Get moving!

For Grace, After a Party" You do not always know what I am feeling. Last night in the warm spring air while I was blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t interest me, it was love for you that set me afire, and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of strangers my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand, isn’t there an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside the bed? And someone you love enters the room and says wouldn’t you like the eggs a little different today? And when they arrive they are just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather is holding.

I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony, ten thousand glorious days of clouds that will instead vanish and never be seen again, line them up in jars where they might be admired in the interim and tasted again as needed.

The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.

I know what love is and it is friendship, set afire. Love is easy. Love is chemistry—a science lab. Love is as simple as connecting this together with that. Her brilliant eyes and my heated heart. But this is not love. Not yet. Genuine love is friendship. Genuine love resides only in the present moment. Genuine love is everyday. Genuine love feels no need to entertain the space away. Genuine love is up, genuine love is down and yet genuine love never wavers. Love is something else entire: it is caring. It is arguing, but with curiosity—it is giving an inch when the other is certainly wrong—it is teasing, it is empathy, it is respect, it is admiration each morning.

Chained inside the carriage is a sinful woman. When we set the carriage afire, her flesh will be roasted, her bones will be charred: she will die an agonizing death. Never again will you have such a perfect model for the screen. Do not fail to watch as her snow-white flesh erupts in flames. See and remember her long black hair dancing in a whirl of sparks!

We change from the awakening questing creatures we were once, afire with wonder, and expectancy, and doubt, to persons of opinion and authority, our habits formed, our characters moulded in a pattern

You cannot kindle afire in any other heart until it is burning within your -ELEANOR DOAN

Barely four feet tall back then, at least a foot shorter than him, and yet she’d said, “I won’t run anymore. I won’t try to leave. I’ve decided to stay and protect you.” “Why?” Midnight black eyes afire in a sun-browned face that was all sharp bones. “Because you don’t have a monster inside you.

Promises are meant to be broken, that’s what people always say, but what if I want to keep mine? To this day, I’d sooner break my bones than go back on any of the words I said so dearly to you. We’re so young, God, we’re so young. Only sixteen with a pocketful of big dreams. The world is in our hands, that’s what people always say, but what if I’m afraid to carry it? What if I don’t want to be Atlas? You, my dear, are unshakeable. You hold your cards close to your chest. Courage finds a home in the space between your ribs. I’m too young to understand, that’s what people always say, but I am old enough to see. There’s a forest fire in your eyes that sets me alight. A bravery in your heart that beats in tune to mine. My darling, you’re something out of a story. Poetry doesn’t begin to do your soul justice. Change is inevitable, that’s what people always say, but what if that change is good? There’s a lightness to my steps there wasn’t before. There’s a brightness in my heart there wasn’t before. If you held me up to a candle, my silhouette would be covered in your name. Before you, I used to care what people always say your lovely heart led me astray in unexpected ways. Sometimes I think I’m going to burst into flames. From the spark you struck inside my chest. I wonder, how do you keep from setting yourself afire? But then comes the startling yet undeniable understanding. You are fireproof, lionheart and now I am, too.

When she is crowned in jasmine, in needle-flower, in smoke and in fire, he will kneel before he and name her," repeated Rao, in common Zaban. And suddenly Malini was shivering, every inch of her afire with a mad elation that rose up, up in her blood. "He will give the princess of Parijat her fate: He will say..." He swallowed. Raised his eyes, which were fierce and wet. "Name who shall sit upon the throne, princess. Name the flower of empire. Name the head that shall reign beneath a crown of poison. Name the hand that lit the pyre." The silence was deep; a drumming tense silence, drawn taut as a bowstring. "He will name her thus," finished Rao. "And she will know.

What a miracle, I thought. One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world. Why, I had, with this simple gesture, actually increased the sum total of light in the universe, had I not?

It takes a certain intelligence to love like that – softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail of course. The world outdoes them every time.

Your lovely heart led me astray in unexpected ways sometimes I think I'm going to burst into flames from the spark you struck inside my chest I wonder, how do you keep from setting yourself afire? but then comes the startling yet undeniable understanding you are fireproof, lionheart and now I am, too

His first glimpse of Izzy Goodnight was to see her bathed in gold. The sunlight showed him, in blazing relief, a slender, gracefully curved silhouette and a corona of wild, loose hair that seemed to be afire. Holy God.

The moon is my fear. The sun is my heart afire. The stars, my love songs.

Any anger I feel vanishes. What is left cannot be described. It is guilt piled onto emptiness and set afire.

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Grieving is like being set afire. Except when you try to put out the flames they disappear; when you try to salve your wounds you find your skin unblemished. You take a breath, thinking the worst has passed, and then grief bursts into flame anew. It rages, it roars, it smolders, all at its own unfathomable whim. You can't shake it; you have no choice but to burn.

I let that swim around in my aching head for a few minutes - "the arsenal of megadeath...the arsenal of megadeath" - and then, for some reason I can't quite explain, I began to write. Using a borrowed pencil and a cupcake wrapper, I wrote the first lyrics of my post-Metallica life. This song was called "Megadeth" (I dropped the second "a"), and though it would never find its way onto an album, it did serve as the basis for the song "Set the World Afire." It hadn't occured to me then that Megadeth-as used by Senator Cranston, megadeath referred to the loss of one million lives as a result of nuclear holocaust-might be a perfectly awesome name for a thrash metal band.

Not a soul But felt a fever of the mad, and play'd Some tricks of desperation; all but mariners Plung'd in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel; Then all afire with me the King's son Ferdinand With hair up staring ( then like reeds, not hair) Was the first man that leap'd; cried Hell is empty, And all the devils are here.

If you catch a glimpse of this brightness, you will set sleep afire: for by night-faring and servitude Venus became the companion of the moon گر بو بری زین روشنی ، آتش به خواب اندر زنی / کز شبروی و بندگی زهره حریف ماه شد

Did you ever read Aurora Leigh? – “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees takes off his shoes.

Pain makes us crazy. All we want is to throw the live coal of it as far from us as we can, not thinking what we might set afire.

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

And every common bush afire with God;  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,  (Aurora Leigh, lines 61−3)

My position is quite simple. If the house is on fire one does not ask first who is to be blamed for the conflagration; one puts it out. My heart is afire.

The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too.

Scholars talk about the endless cycle of poverty and racism and classism and crime. But I don't see it as a cycle, as a circle. I see it as a locked room filled with the people who share my DNA. This room has recently been set afire and there's only one escape hatch, ten feet off the ground. And I know I have to build a ladder out of the bones of my fallen family in order to climb to safety.

Glowing taper in hand, she could almost imagine she was a star. Isolated. Insignificant amid the multitudes. Yet every bit as afire with heat and heart. Strange, how contemplating the vastness made her feel a little less alone. From far enough away, on some other world, perhaps she would appear to be part of a constellation.

The men and women of England who abolished slavery, created the educational system, or gave women the vote were not acting on the hypotheses of what the voters wanted. They were afire with faith in what people ought to want and in the end they persuaded their lethargic compatriots to give them enough support to warrant a change.

If you wait until you know everything, you never do anything.

Lord, set my heart afire with faith, because I am losing faith. Lord, touch my heart, and set it afire.

Those who babble the Lord's Prayer day and night would be the first to grin when I'm set afire.

Earth’s crammed with Heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries…

Joan Durbeyfield always manged to find consolation somewhere: 'Well, as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump car aright. And if he don't marry her afore he will after. For that he's all afire wi' love for her any eye can see.' 'What's her trump card? Her d'Urberville blood, you mean?' 'No, stupid; her face - as 'twas mine.

I once listened to a woman describe a group of men marching toward her house with sticks lit afire, screaming things like 'git the nigger' and 'kill the nigger bitch.' Those tiki torches weren't about protest. They were about a statement. It said, 'We're still here because we never left.

It was rare but not unheard of for an analysand tossed by tides of transference and desublimation to seek the safety of Dr. Kavalier's doorstep or by contrast inflamed with the special hatred of counter-transference to leave herself there in some desperate condition as a cruel prank like a paper sack of dog turds set afire.

The Reason for Skylarks It was nearly morning when the giant Reached the tree of children. Their faces shone like white apples On the cold dark branches And their dresses and little coats Made sodden gestures in the wind. He did not laugh or weep or stamp His heavy feet. He set to work at once Lifting them tenderly down Into a straw basket which was fixed By a golden strap to his shoulder. Only one did he drop - a soft pretty child Whose hair was the color of watered milk. She fell into the long grass And he could not find her Though he searched until his fingers Bled and the full light came. He shook his fist at the sky and called God a bitter name. But no answer was made and the giant Got down on his knees before the tree And putting his hands about the trunk Shook Until all the children had fallen Into the grass. Then he pranced and stamped Them to jelly. And still he felt no peace. He took his half-full basket and set it afire, Holding it by the handle until Everything had been burned. He saw now Two men on steaming horses approaching From the direction of the world And taking a little silver flute Out of his pocket he played tune After tune until they came up to him.

She’d been lovely the first time he’d spied her, distant and disapproving in church. She was lovely each time he peeled away her clothing, and when she lay in his arms, and when her features went dim and unfocused as he lost himself. But she was never lovelier than when she spoke this way, all afire with the knowledge of wrongs to be righted and good to be done.

During the say the traces of summer , reluctant to depart, still set the sand afire, and their bare feet could not stand it for more than five minutes at a time. But when the sun set, the crack-ridden walls of the room let in the cold night damp.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

Lösch mir die Augen aus" Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn, wirf mir die Ohren zu: ich kann dich hören, und ohne Füße kann ich zu dir gehn, und ohne Mund noch kann ich dich beschwören. Brich mir die Arme ab, ich fasse dich mit meinem Herzen wie mit einer Hand, halt mir das Herz zu, und mein Hirn wird schlagen, und wirfst du in mein Hirn den Brand, so werd ich dich auf meinem Blute tragen. "Put out my eyes, and I can see you still" Put out my eyes, and I can see you still, Slam my ears too, and I can hear you yet; And without any feet can go to you; And tongueless, I can conjure you at will. Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you And grasp you with my heart as with a hand; Arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true; And if you set this brain of mine afire, Then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.

...people who've been hit with the gospel respond naturally with radically changed lives and hearts. The church and the ministries of the church are gospel centered when they flow from hearts that are afire with wonder at the glory and grace of God, revealed in the person of Jesus.

Used to be a hobo right smart. back in the thirties. They wasnt no work I dont care what you could do. I was ridin through the mountains one night, state of Colorado. Dead of winter it was and bitter cold. I had just a smidgin of tobacco, bout enough for one or two smokes. I was in one of them old slatsided cars and I'd been up and down in it like a dog tryin to find some place where the wind wouldnt blow. Directly I scrunched up in a corner and rolled me a smoke and lit it and thowed the match down. Well, they was some sort of stuff in the floor about like tinder and it caught fire. I jumped up and stomped on it and it aint done nothin but burn faster. Wasnt two minutes the whole car was afire. I run to the door and got it open and we was goin up this grade through the mountains in the snow with the moon on it and it was just blue looking and dead quiet out there and them big old black pine trees going by. I jumped for it and lit in a snowbank and what I'm goin to tell you you'll think peculiar but it's the god's truth. That was in nineteen and thirty one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I dont think I'll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.

The effectiveness of an inspired bishop, adviser, or teacher has very little to do with the outward trappings of power or an abundance of this world’s goods. The leaders who have the most influence are usually those who set hearts afire with devotion to the truth, who make obedience to duty seem the essence of manhood, who transform some ordinary routine occurrence so that it becomes a vista where we see the person we aspire to be.

I will take you down my own avenue of remembrance, which winds among the hazards and shadows of my single year as a plebe. I cannot come to this story in full voice. I want to speak for the boys who were violated by this school, the ones who left ashamed and broken and dishonored, who departed from the Institute with wounds and bitter grievances. I want also to speak for the triumphant boys who took everything the system could throw at them, endured every torment and excess, and survived the ordeal of the freshman year with a feeling of transformation and achievement that they never had felt before and would never know again with such clarity and elation. I will speak from my memory- my memory- a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essentional fire that is poetry itself. But i will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me every time I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down. Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth. I return to the city of memory, to the city of exiled poets. I approach the one whose back is turned to me. He is frail and timorous and angry. His head is shaved and he fears the judgment of regiments. He will always be a victim, always a plebe. I tap him on the shoulder. "Begin," I command. "It was the beginning of 1963," he begins, and I know he will not stop until the story has ended.

They were match and striker, each to the other. They touched and were set afire.

As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire.

Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

Earth’s crammed with Heaven, and every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries…

Gehirn had to protect her love - and she only knew one way to do so. She lit the sky afire.

Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.

You say you’re going like a house afire, Mendl? Why don’t you jump into the flames! I wouldn’t come see you in Boiberik if you were on your deathbed!

Home was still hellish, afire with the painful realization that no matter how much I loved my parents my love could not fix them

Earth's crammed with heaven; And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries. — Elizabeth Baccett Browning

That day there was no sun only a paleness in the haze and the country was white with frost and the shrubs were like polar isomers of their own shapes. Wild rams ghosted away up those rocky draws and the wind swirled down cold and gray from the snowy reeks above them, a smoking region of wild vapors blowing down through the gap as if the world up there were all afire.

I would rather not speak with history but history came to me. It was dark before daybreak when the fire sparked. The men left on a hunt from the Pequot village here where I stand. The women and children left behind were set afire. I do not want to know this, but my gut knows the language of bloodshed. Over six hundred were killed, to establish a home for God’s people, crowed the Puritan leaders in their Sunday sermons. And then history was gone in a betrayal of smoke. There is still burning though we live in a democracy erected over the burial ground.

When you're born into a burning house, you think the whole world's afire. Our job as creativists is to take the burning embers of our past and use them to ignite a different kind of fire.

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that.

In your madness you said you loved me," she murmured shyly. His humor fled, and the smile left her lips as she continued, "You said it before, too. When the storm struck, I asked you to love me, and you said you did." Her voice was the barest of whispers. Ruark's gaze turned away from her, and he rubbed the bandage on his leg before he spoke. "Strange that madness should speak the truth, but truth it is." He met her questioning eyes directly. "Aye, I love you." The pain of longing marked his face with a momentary sadness. "And that is madness, in all truth." Shanna raised herself form his side and sat on her heels, staring down at him. "Why do you love me?" Her tone was wondrous. "I beset you at every turn. I deny you as a fit mate. I have betrayed you into slavery and worse. There is no sanity in your plea at all. How can you love me?" "Shanna! Shanna! Shanna!" he sighed, placing his fingers on her hand and gently tracing the lines of her finely boned fingers. "What man would boast the wisdom of his love? How many time has this world heard, 'I don't care, I love.' Do I count your faults and sins to tote them in a book?" ... "I dream of unbelievable softness. I remember warmth at my side the likes of which can set my heart afire. I see in the dark before me softly glowing eyes of aqua, once tender in a moment of love, then flashing with defiance and anger, now dark and blue with some stirring I know I have caused, now green and gay with laughter spilling from them. There is a form within my arms that I tenderly held and touched. There is that one who has met my passion with her own and left me gasping." Ruark caressed Shanna's arm and turned her face to him, making her look into his eyes and willing her to see the truth in them as he spoke. "My beloved Shanna. I cannot think of betrayal when I think of love. I can count no denials when I hold you close. I only wait for that day when you will say, 'I love." Shanna raised her hands as if to plead her case then let them fall dejectedly on her knees. Tears coursed down her cheeks, and she begged helplessly, "But I do not want to love you." She began to sob. "You are a colonial. You are untitled, a murderer condemned, a rogue, a slave. I want a name for my children. I want so much more of my husband." She rolled her eyes in sudden confusion. "And I do not want to hurt you more." Ruark sighed and gave up for the moment. He reached out and gently wiped away the tears as they fell. "Shanna, love," he whispered tenderly, "I cannot bear to see you cry. I will not press the matter for a while. I only beg you remember the longest journey is taken a step at a time. My love can wait, but it will neither yield nor change.

How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.

Above all else, he was afire with heavenly love, unassumingly patient, devoted to unceasing prayer, and kindly to all who came to him for comfort. He regarded as equivalent to prayer the labour of helping the weaker brethren with advice, remembering that he who said, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God’, also said, ‘Love thy neighbour’. His self-discipline and fasting were exceptional, and through the grace of contrition he was always intent on the things of heaven. Lastly, whenever he offered the sacrifice of the Saving Victim of God, he offered his prayers to God not in a loud voice but with tears welling up from the depths of his heart.

A being afire with life cannot foresee death; in fact, by each of his deeds he denies that death exists. If death does take him, he is probably unaware of the fact; it amounts to no more for him than a shock or a spasm.

My dad got me my first bow for Christmas, when I was ten. But he took it away before New Year’s.” “Did you shoot someone?” “He caught me soaking arrows in lighter fluid. I just really, really wanted to shoot a flaming arrow at something. It didn’t matter what. Still do. I feel like that would complete me: to see a burning arrow go thwock into something and set it afire. I suppose it’s how men feel when they imagine sinking balls-deep into the perfect piece of ass. I just want one sexy little thwock.” John

I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick.

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn’t it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, “That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!” Then and only then is writing worthwhile. Quite

And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated English attitude which was completely phony. It came from books they had never read, and movies they shouldn’t have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseas. Its origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfields. But nevertheless they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with them. And they did magical things like pouring whisky on each other’s hair, or setting mattresses afire, or grabbing hats on the fly from the heads of established businessmen. Of all the parties those were perhaps the best, but he had come to them too old.

A fire was lit under a giant pot that sat to one side of the kitchen, and within the pot a long-necked rooster spirit was scrubbing himself and having the time of his life. But when he noticed that new people had seen him bathing, he screamed and covered his chest with his hands.

The Flame” is obvious if you’ve ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it’s unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire.

You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You're a speck, man. You're nothing. You're not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out." You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?" He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft. I tilted my wrist so the cylinder fell into my palm, shrugged. "You're a joke, Gerry. I'm just calling it like I see it." That so?" Absolutely." I met his hard eyes with my own. "And you'll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he'll be all over the papers, and all over Hard Copy and you'll be yesterday's news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they've passed without impact." They'll remember this," Gerry said. "Believe me." Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke. I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened. Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times. And Gerry's hand exploded. And so did mine. The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry's arm and caught the wisps of Danielle's hair. Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed in ecstasy. I grabbed the razor, could barely feel it because the nerves in my hand seemed to have stopped working. I slashed into the electric tape at the end of the shotgun barrel, and Danielle dropped away toward the ice and rolled her head into the frozen sand. My broken finger came back out of the shotgun and Gerry swung the barrels toward my head. The twin shotgun bores arced through the darkness like eyes without mercy or soul, and I raised my head to meet them, and Gerry's wail filled my ears as the fire licked at his neck. Good-bye, I thought. Everyone. It's been nice. Oscar's first two shots entered the back of Gerry's head and exited through the center of his forehead and a third punched into his back. The shotgun jerked upward in Gerry's flaming arm and then the shots came from the front, several at once, and Gerry spun like a marionette and pitched toward the ground. The shotgun boomed twice and punched holes through the ice in front of him as he fell. He landed on his knees and, for a moment, I wasn't sure if he was dead or not. His rusty hair was afire and his head lolled to the left as one eye disappeared in flames but the other shimmered at me through waves of heat, and an amused derision shone in the pupil. Patrick, the eye said through the gathering smoke, you still know nothing. Oscar rose up on the other side of Gerry's corpse, Campbell Rawson clutched tight to his massive chest as it rose and fell with great heaving breaths. The sight of it-something so soft and gentle in the arms of something so thick and mountaineous-made me laugh. Oscar came out of the darkness toward me, stepped around Gerry's burning body, and I felt the waves of heat rise toward me as the circle of gasoline around Gerry caught fire. Burn, I thought. Burn. God help me, but burn. Just after Oscar stepped over the outer edge of the circle, it erupted in yellow flame, and I found myself laughing harder as he looked at it, not remotely impressed. I felt cool lips smack against my ear, and by the time I looked her way, Danielle was already past me, rushing to take her child from Oscar. His huge shadow loomed over me as he approached, and I looked up at him and he held the look for a long moment. How you doing, Patrick?" he said and smiled broadly. And, behind him, Gerry burned on the ice. And everything was so goddamned funny for some reason, even though I knew it wasn't. I knew it wasn't. I did. But I was still laughing when they put me in the ambulance.

Laughing. Kicking. Clapping on the beat. Feeling her somewhere behind him, doing the same. Wondering if she wanted as badly as he did to be out of here, to be in the dark, to be alone in the dark, where he could put his false face aside before the real one beneath could grow hot enough to set it afire.

Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured gasoline on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company’s henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children’s heads open. “In some sections such an odour of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil’s paradise.

If she submits and recognizes his extraordinary power, realizes what he is becoming, and understands that, without him, there is no future for her, then they will ravage the boy together. But if she resists, he’ll paralyze her and, as she lies in helpless witness, he’ll bite the life out of the little freak and then set the house afire. His

Are you serious?” he asks in confusion as though I misunderstand something as basic as gravity. “Boy, allegiances crumble as soon as we board that shuttle. Some of your friends will be spirited away to the Moon Lords. Others will go to the Governors of the Gas Giants. Even a few to Luna. They will remember you as a legend of their youth, but that is it. And that legend will brook no loyalty. I’ve stood where you stand. I won my year, but loyalty isn’t found in these halls. It is the way things are.” “It is the way things were,” I say harshly, suprising him. But I believe what I say. “I am something different. I freed the enslaved and let the broken mend themselves. I gave them something you older generations can’t understand.” He chuckles, irritating me. “That is the problem with youth, Darrow. You forget that every generation has thought the same.” “But for my generation it is true.” No matter his confidence, I am right. He is wrong. I am the spark that will set the worlds afire. I am the hammer that cracks the chains.

I let my sword slip to the ground, and for the second time I stood unarmed in the presence of werewolves. Kresh put his lips to my forehead, and my skin burned beneath his kiss. When his hands repositioned to take me by the waist, my breathing—already shallow—ceased entirely. Then his lips fell on mine and I was suddenly everything he claimed me to be—his mate, his wife, his world. The taste of him seemed mysteriously new and old at the same time. Every bit of tension eased as if internally I had come home again, and yet a sense of foreignness made our connection a sweet venture. My breast was afire as he continued to grasp my hips, keeping me close. I burned for him as if vampire venom were coursing through every inch of me. The man was a constellation of suns in my desire, unlike Thaddeus who hardly equaled a speck of stardust. The thought of that coward reminded me of grim news. It took every bit of willpower I possessed to tear my lips away from what they craved, and yet I remained a submissive puddle in this werewolf’s arms.

I sit here at ease, hardened and unfeeling-alas! Praying little, grieving little for the Church of God, burning rather in the fierce fires of my untamed flesh.It comes to this: I should be afire in the spirit; in reality I am afire in the flesh, with lust , laziness, idleness, sleepiness. It is perhaps because you have all ceased praying for me that God has turned away from me... For the last eight days i have written nothing, nor prayed nor studied, partly from self-indulgence, partl from another vexatious handicap.i really cannot stand it any longer; Pray for me , i beg you, for in my seclusion here i am submerged in sins. Martin Luther A writing to Melanchthon from the Wartburg Castle on July 13,1521.

Gran Gran recalled the bloodstained dress she had taken off the girl. It was made of blue silk muslin and finely embroidered, stitched by somebody who knew what they were doing. She hated having to toss the ruined garment into the stove. The smell had sickened her. Since she was a girl, she had never forgotten the odor of beautiful things set afire. Such a waste!

I don’t want to take the word slut back, like I don’t want to own a gun. It was never mine. You’ll never hear me say it to any woman, not as a joke, not with pride or affection or irony. The only definition of the word that I claim is the one of a rag dipped in lard and set afire. Call me that kind of slut. Call me flashlight. Carry me through the dark if it helps. Here, take this story and watch it burn.

III. Buddhism The Man Who Woke Up Buddhism begins with a man. In his later years, when India was afire with his message and kings themselves were bowing before him, people came to him even as they were to come to Jesus asking what he was.1 How many people have provoked this question—not “Who are you?” with respect to name, origin, or ancestry, but “What are you? What order of being do you belong to? What species do you represent?” Not Caesar, certainly. Not Napoleon, or even Socrates. Only two: Jesus and Buddha. When the people carried their puzzlement to the Buddha himself, the answer he gave provided an identity for his entire message. “Are you a god?” they asked. “No.” “An angel?” “No.” “A saint?” “No.” “Then what are you?” Buddha answered, “I am awake.” His answer became his title, for this is what Buddha means. The Sanskrit root budh denotes both to wake up and to know. Buddha, then, means the “Enlightened One,” or the “Awakened One.” While the rest of the world was wrapped in the womb of sleep, dreaming a dream known as the waking state of human life, one of their number roused himself. Buddhism begins with a man who shook off the daze, the doze, the dream-like vagaries of ordinary awareness. It begins with a man who woke up. His

Hold thy desperate hand: Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art: Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote The unreasonable fury of a beast: Unseemly woman in a seeming man! Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both! Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order, I thought thy disposition better temper’d. Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself? And stay thy lady too that lives in thee, By doing damned hate upon thyself? Why rail’st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth? Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose. Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit; Which, like a usurer, abound’st in all, And usest none in that true use indeed Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit: Thy noble shape is but a form of wax, Digressing from the valour of a man; Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury, Killing that love which thou hast vow’d to cherish; Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love, Misshapen in the conduct of them both, Like powder in a skitless soldier’s flask, Is set afire by thine own ignorance, And thou dismember’d with thine own defence. What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive, For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead; There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee, But thou slew’st Tybalt; there are thou happy too: The law that threaten’d death becomes thy friend And turns it to exile; there art thou happy: A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back; Happiness courts thee in her best array; But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench, Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love: Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable. Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed, Ascend her chamber, hence and comfort her: But look thou stay not till the watch be set, For then thou canst not pass to Mantua; Where thou shalt live, till we can find a time To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends, Beg pardon of the prince, and call thee back With twenty hundred thousand times more joy Than thou went’st forth in lamentation. Go before, nurse: commend me to thy lady; And bid her hasten all the house to bed, Which heavy sorrow makes them apt unto: Romeo is coming.

He did not see how he could be considered the breathtaking one with the prince in the room. He was everything Cassius was not. He set Cassius’s soul afire. And yet those words filled him in ways he did not know he needed filling. “You are…breathtaking, Cassius.” “Cas,” the prince whispered again. “Merrick,” Cassius tested the name on his tongue once more. “I would like to taste the brandy upon your lips. We can have tonight, can we not? Just tonight?” It was all they would ever be allowed to share. The prince would be forced to continue to court Lady Penelope or another woman, and Cassius would watch from afar and dream. “If I cannot have more, then I will gladly take one night with you.” Merrick clutched Cas’s hand, twined their fingers together, and led him to the side of his bed. “May I undress you tonight?” Shivers wracked Cassius’s body. To hear the prince make a request such as that to him… “Yes, my prince.

People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love. They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits. It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props. But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire. They fail, of course. The world outdoes them every time. While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from green to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time. Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins. Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind. Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests. I run too, finally. I say finally because I do like a good storm. I would be one of those people on the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: “Get moving!

I never ought to, while I have you to cheer me up, Marmee, and Laurie to take more than half of every burden," replied Amy warmly. "He never lets me see his anxiety, but is so sweet and patient with me, so devoted to Beth, and such a stay and comfort to me always that I can't love him enough. So, in spite of my one cross, I can say with Meg, 'Thank God, I'm a happy woman.'" "There's no need for me to say it, for everyone can see that I'm far happier than I deserve," added Jo, glancing from her good husband to her chubby children, tumbling on the grass beside her. "Fritz is getting gray and stout. I'm growing as thin as a shadow, and am thirty. We never shall be rich, and Plumfield may burn up any night, for that incorrigible Tommy Bangs will smoke sweet-fern cigars under the bed-clothes, though he's set himself afire three times already. But in spite of these unromantic facts, I have nothing to complain of, and never was so jolly in my life. Excuse the remark, but living among boys, I can't help using their expressions now and then." "Yes, Jo, I think your harvest will be a good one," began Mrs. March, frightening away a big black cricket that was staring Teddy out of countenance. "Not half so good as yours, Mother. Here it is, and we never can thank you enough for the patient sowing and reaping you have done," cried Jo, with the loving impetuosity which she never would outgrow. "I hope there will be more wheat and fewer tares every year," said Amy softly.

WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and outlive it. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow–acting suicide–murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful: Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe–inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half–aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

Don't you think Lady Standon deserves a man who sets her heart afire? Don't you deserve the same?" She leaned forward and poked him in the chest. Actually stabbed her finger into his coat as if he were a chicken on the spit. Rather like Lady Standon's harridan of a housekeeper. "I would think," she said, "a man in your position would want more. So much more." More? Whatever did that mean? More? He had no idea what she was talking about. But in a flash he had a devilish inkling of what she meant.

Hadrian, an African born, a man accurately learned in the sacred writings as well as trained in monastical and ecclesiastical discipline, and right skilful in the Greek as well as the Latin tongue. This man being called to the pope was willed of him to take the bishopric upon him and travel unto Britain. [Hadrianus, vir natione Afir, sacris literis diligenter imbutus, monasterialibus simul et ecclesiasticis disciplinis institutus, Graecae pariter et Latinae linguae peritissimus. Hunc ad se accitum Papa iussit episcopatu accepto Brittaniam venire.]

The most compelling new idea that Bratton brought to life stemmed from the broken window theory, which was conceived by the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. The broken window theory argues that minor nuisances, if left unchecked, turn into major nuisances: that is, if someone breaks a window and sees it isn’t fixed immediately, he gets the signal that it’s all right to break the rest of the windows and maybe set the building afire too. So with murder raging all around, Bill Bratton’s cops began to police the sort of deeds that used to go unpoliced: jumping a subway turnstile, panhandling too aggressively, urinating in the streets, swabbing a filthy squeegee across a car’s windshield unless the driver made an appropriate “donation.” Most New Yorkers loved this crackdown on its own merit. But they particularly loved the idea, as stoutly preached by Bratton and Giuliani, that choking off these small crimes was like choking off the criminal element’s oxygen supply. Today’s turnstile jumper might easily be wanted for yesterday’s murder. That junkie peeing in an alley might have been on his way to a robbery.

While dogs were a hole to sink money into, they were also more fun than a barrel of monkeys. There is nothing quite like hooking up a team of dogs who are raring to go. They bark and dance and just can’t wait. When you finally pull the hook and they take off at full speed (probably 25 miles an hour), there is a swish of sled runners and the wind in your face. Perhaps six furry behinds running ahead like a house afire. It is wonderful. You charge out into the boreal forest where there are no human sounds; no roads, no TVs, no nothing but you and your dogs and your wits.

Well, friends, he lost a full day of his life that weekend. Or maybe it was more? Maybe it was a day and a half? Two days? Our friend Seth called him twice during that time and it didn’t go straight to voicemail, but it went after-seeing-Seth-was-calling straight to voicemail. The sun went up, the sun went down, he realized he’d had to pee for an hour, and at some point he thought to order Chinese food (steamed chicken and vegetables, no water chestnuts, please), but mostly he remained aloft on the wind of the messages he was getting—women who wanted to LOL at his every joke, and send winkies, and pictures, and set his weary heart afire with double entendre

Thus spoke the Beauty and her voice had a cheerful ring, and her face was aflame with a great rejoicing. She finished her story and began to laugh quietly, but not cheerfully. The Youth bowed down before her and silently kissed her hands, inhaling the languid fragrance of myrrh, aloe and musk which wafted from her body and her fine robes. The Beauty began to speak again. 'There came to me streams of oppressors, because my evil, poisonous beauty bewitches them. I smile at them, they who are doomed to death, and I feel pity for each of them, and some I almost loved, but I gave myself to no one. Each one I gave but one single kiss — and my kisses were innocent as the kisses of a tender sister. And whomsoever I kissed, died.' The soul of the troubled Youth was caught in agony, between two quite irresolvable passions, the terror of death and an inexpressible ecstasy. But love, conquering all, overcoming even the anguish of death's grief, was triumphant once again today. Solemnly stretching out his trembling hands to the tender and terrifying Beauty, the Youth exclaimed, 'If death is in your kiss, o beloved, let me revel in the infinity of death. Cling to me, kiss me, love me, envelop me with the sweet fragrance of your poisonous breath, death after death pour into my body and into my soul before you destroy everything that once was me!' 'You want to! You are not afraid!' exclaimed the Beauty. The face of the Beauty was pale in the rays of the lifeless moon, like a guttering candle, and the lightning in her sad and joyful eyes was trembling and blue. With a trusting movement, tender and passionate, she clung to the Youth and her naked, slender arms were entwined about his neck. 'We shall die together!' she whispered. 'We shall die together. All the poison of my heart is afire and flaming streams are rushing through my veins, and I am all enveloped in some great holocaust.' 'I am aflame!' whispered the Youth, 'I am being consumed in your embraces and you and I are two flaming fires, burning with the immense ecstasy of a poisonous love.' The sad and lifeless moon grew dim and fell in the sky — and the black night came and stood watch. It concealed the secret of love and kisses, fragrant and poisonous, with gloom and solitude. And it listened to the harmonious beating of two hearts growing quieter, and in the frail silence it watched over the final delicate sighs. And so, in the poisonous Garden, having breathed the fragrances which the Beauty breathed, and having drunk the sweetness of her love so tenderly and fatally compassionate, the beautiful Youth died. And on his breast the Beauty died, having delivered her poisonous but fragrant soul up to sweet ecstasies. ("The Poison Garden")

Piracy, Hollywood Style: An Ode to Errol Flynn His galleon emblazoned and beckoned to the coral’s black mire, And ol’ wispy eyed Errol, the pirate, stiffened his lip: Her Majesty’s Rogue Navy may have set ol’ Bessie afire— But I’d be a fool to go down and drown with me ship!” “Fer, a pirate I am, and A pirate I’ll be, I don’t need to die ‘proper’ with false dignity— All I need is a new ship, and a flagon of ale. The latter to drown in, the former to sail! “Aye! Give me a strong wind, and twenty good men, And I’ll take to the high seas, and pirate again! And should I be lucky to spot a Royal ship in me scope— I’ll hang her good captain from ten yards of rope! “Aye! And when her cowardly crew gives me their lip, I’ll give them the ‘dignity’ to go down with their ship! Aye! Give me a strong wind and twenty good men, And I’ll take to the high seas, and pirate again!

the vows before the Superior elected. Shortly before nine o’clock he went to see Father Ignatius to say goodbye. He found him out of bed and just finished dressing. Ignatius put his arm round the younger man’s shoulders and limped with him to the door. “Rodriguez left a quarter of an hour ago”, he said. It was a very beautiful morning. “Who is going to do all those letters now?” Francis blurted out. Ignatius smiled—without answering. And suddenly Francis knew that he would never see this man again, this incredible man whom he loved more than he had loved anybody else on earth; he knew that there was between them a very special love, beyond all the ties with the other companions, born of the air and soil and blood of their country, born out of the very hardships of the battle Ignatius had waged to win him over during all those long years in Paris. And he knew that the gateway to heaven could look like a man and be a man, a small, frail, bald man, who was for Christ on earth what Saint Michael was for God in heaven. “Go”, said Ignatius. “Go and set all afire.

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as “Quothe.” Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I’ve had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it’s spoken, can mean “The Flame,” “The Thunder,” or “The Broken Tree.” “The Flame” is obvious if you’ve ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it’s unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire. “The Thunder” I attribute to a strong baritone and a great deal of stage training at an early age. I’ve never thought of “The Broken Tree” as very significant. Although in retrospect I suppose it could be considered at least partially prophetic. My first mentor called me E’lir because I was clever and I knew it. My first real lover called me Dulator because she liked the sound of it. I have been called Shadicar, Lightfinger, and Six-String. I have been called Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, and Kvothe Kingkiller. I have earned those names. Bought and paid for them. But I was brought up as Kvothe. My father once told me it meant “to know.

Dither and I like to take the ladies out. Last night Maggie showered her blue-black guts over the barstool at the Dirty Truth while I swung the bartender into the wall-sized mirror by his ankles. Dither put his many fingers into six fraternity brothers while Winnie sucked off the beer spigots, her shattered pelvis undulating obscenely, her hair and dress alive with blood beetles. Then we burst out into the streets. I sliced off heads all down Pleasant while Dither shoved swords up through the seats at the Calvin Theater. Winnie set bassinets afire at Cooley Dickinson while Maggie squatted to piss in the lobster tank in the Stop & Shop. We pinwheeled through the Bridge Street cemetery, upending ancient caskets and sending their contents into the grey sky until it looked like smoke from a great fire. It was a beautiful night; we poured wine into our lungs like drowning sots. In the pink morning we were stacked on the benches like cordwood. The sky was a sick yellow bruise. The sun was a cold dead eye. The winds raised up and shook the houses and thrashed the trees. A great fire is coming to Leeds. Pneumonic plagues and blood from the faucets and worms exploding up into bath tubs from the drains. You’re listening to WXXT. The time is 6:16 a.m. It is not too late to rise, rise and do what needs to be done. Up next, we’ve got Burton Stallhearse and the Grappling Grannies performing their version of “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.

He, on top of a hill in Heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of being called his country, one of his worlds drops dead, vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And, when he weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand in hand. So, at the beginning of the projected poem, he weeps, and Country Heaven is suddenly dark. Bushes and owls blow out like sparks. And the countrymen of heaven crouch all together under the hedges and, among themselves in the tear-salt darkness, surmise which world, which star, which of their late, turning homes, in the skies has gone for ever. And this time, spreads the heavenly hedgerow rumour, it is the Earth. The Earth has killed itself. It is black petrified, wizened, poisoned, burst, cruel, kind, dumb, afire, loving, dull, shortly and brutishly hunt their days down like enemies on that corrupted face. And, one by one, these heavenly hedgerow-men, who once were of the Earth, tell one another, through the long night, Light and His tears falling, what they remember, what they sense in the submerged wilderness and on the exposed hair's breadth of the mind, what they feel on the trembling on the nerves of a nerve, what they know in their Edenic hearts, of that self-killed place. They remember places, fears, loves, exultation, misery, animal joy, ignorance and mysteries, all we know and do not know. The poem is made of these tellings. And the poem becomes, at last, an affirmation of the beautiful and terrible worth of the Earth.

Oppression and scorn, thus, were and must have been generally the share of women in emerging societies; this state lasted in all its force until centuries of experience taught them to substitute skill for force. Women at last sensed that, since they were weaker, their only resource was to seduce; they understood that if they were dependent on men through force, men could become dependent on them through pleasure. More unhappy then man, they must have thought and reflected earlier than did men; they were the firts to know that pleasure was always beneath the idea that one formed of it, and that the imagination went farther than nature. Once these basic truths were known, they learned first to veil their charms in order to awaken curiosity; they practiced the difficult art of refusing even as they wished to consent; from that moment on, they knew how to set men's imagination afire, they knew how to arouse and direct desires as they pleased: thus did beauty and love come into being; now the lot of women became less harsh, not that they had managed to liberate themselves entirely from the state of oppression to which their weakness condemned them; but, in the state of perpetual war that continues to exist between women and men, one has seen them, with the help of the caresses they have been able to invent, combat ceaselessly, sometimes vanquish, and often more skillfully take advantage of the forces directed against them; sometimes, too, men have turned against women these weapons the women had forged to combat them, and their slavery has become all the harsher for it.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

We went to dinner that night and ordered steak and talked our usual dreamy talk, intentionally avoiding the larger, looming subject. When he brought me home, it was late, and the air was so perfect that I was unaware of the temperature. We stood outside my parents’ house, the same place we’d stood two weeks earlier, before the Linguine with Clam Sauce and J’s surprise visit; before the overcooked flank steak and my realization that I was hopelessly in love. The same place I’d almost wiped out on the sidewalk; the same place he’d kissed me for the first time and set my heart afire. Marlboro Man moved in for the kill. We stood there and kissed as if it was our last chance ever. Then we hugged tightly, burying our faces in each other’s necks. “What are you trying to do to me?” I asked rhetorically. He chuckled and touched his forehead to mine. “What do you mean?” Of course, I wasn’t able to answer. Marlboro Man took my hand. Then he took the reins. “So, what about Chicago?” I hugged him tighter. “Ugh,” I groaned. “I don’t know.” “Well…when are you going?” He hugged me tighter. “Are you going?” I hugged him even tighter, wondering how long we could keep this up and continue breathing. “I…I…ugh, I don’t know,” I said. Ms. Eloquence again. “I just don’t know.” He reached behind my head, cradling it in his hands. “Don’t…,” he whispered in my ear. He wasn’t beating around the bush. Don’t. What did that mean? How did this work? It was too early for plans, too early for promises. Way too early for a lasting commitment from either of us. Too early for anything but a plaintive, emotional appeal: Don’t. Don’t go. Don’t leave. Don’t let it end. Don’t move to Chicago. I didn’t know what to say. We’d been together every single day for the past two weeks. I’d fallen completely and unexpectedly in love with a cowboy. I’d ended a long-term relationship. I’d eaten beef. And I’d begun rethinking my months-long plans to move to Chicago. I was a little speechless. We kissed one more time, and when our lips finally parted, he said, softly, “Good night.” “Good night,” I answered as I opened the door and went inside. I walked into my bedroom, eyeing the mound of boxes and suitcases that sat by the door, and plopped down on my bed. Sleep eluded me that night. What if I just postponed my move to Chicago by, say, a month or so? Postponed, not canceled. A month surely wouldn’t hurt, would it? By then, I reasoned, I’d surely have him out of my system; I’d surely have gotten my fill. A month would give me all the time I needed to wrap up this whole silly business. I laughed out loud. Getting my fill of Marlboro Man? I couldn’t go five minutes after he dropped me off at night before smelling my shirt, searching for more of his scent. How much worse would my affliction be a month from now? Shaking my head in frustration, I stood up, walked to my closet, and began removing more clothes from their hangers. I folded sweaters and jackets and pajamas with one thing pulsating through my mind: no man--least of all some country bumpkin--was going to derail my move to the big city. And as I folded and placed each item in the open cardboard boxes by my door, I tried with all my might to beat back destiny with both hands. I had no idea how futile my efforts would be.

Earth’s crammed with Heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes — The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

If there was a unifying theme in them it was that the earth was afire with beauty, a savage beauty, falling and rising and ever changing into other forms. Birds swam, fish flew, trees danced, the sky breathed. All things moved as the poetry in them thawed. The pictures of people were insideness pictures, the states of their hearts, their souls, their minds. Their shattering beauty. Grandma and Tchibi as they were, Kateri as she imagined her, Jesus as she saw him with the insideness seeing, not the seeing that is confused by the eyes.

Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget.

She was afire with passions she'd never even imagined existed, her body reacting of its own volition as it pressed and rubbed against him, seeking something she didn't understand. The excitement he was causing in her was a living thing that built and built until Evelinde couldn't bear it anymore. Only then did the Duncan let her nipple slip from his mouth with one last rasp of the tongue and lift his head to cover her mouth again. If his earlier kiss had been passionate and demanding, it was nothing compared to this one. He wielded his tongue like a weapon, thrusting it into her mouth as if thrusting a sword into an opponent. Evelinde welcomed it and parried with her own. His hand was again at her bare breast, fingers cupping and squeezing as his thumb rubbed back and forth over the sensitive nub. Evelinde groaned and found herself squeezing her thighs together as heat pooled there.

There is a different feeling, to be clicking along at a gripping pace while starting up the internals, kind of like the pre-start of a rocket launch protocol, the rapid intake and exhalation of the crisp morning air is an igniter. The actual process of the run is giving my mind the time it needs to get started, and the oxygen-rich blood pumping into my brain is like gasoline on a grass fire. By the time I am headed home, my brain is already filled with energy, awake and afire with the sheer joy of life. Oh, and endorphins. Those are good, too.

Summer Magic - 1880-1960 So many cares to vex the day, So many fears to haunt the night, My heart was all but weaned away From every lure of old delight. Then summer came, announced by June, With beauty, miracle and mirth. She hung aloft the rounding moon, She poured her sunshine on the earth, She drove the sap and broke the bud, She set the crimson rose afire. She stirred again my sullen blood, And waked in me a new desire. Before my cottage door she spread The softest carpet nature weaves, And deftly arched above my head A canopy of shady leaves. Her nights were dreams of jeweled skies, Her days were bowers rife with song, And many a scheme did she devise To heal the hurt and soothe the wrong. For on the hill or in the dell, Or where the brook went leaping by Or where the fields would surge and swell With golden wheat or bearded rye, I felt her heart against my own, I breathed the sweetness of her breath, Till all the cark of time had flown, And I was lord of life and death.

Moreover, Nancy Sinatra was afflicted, as the overwhelming majority of Americans were, with monolingualism. Lana’s richer, more textured version of “Bang Bang” layered English with French and Vietnamese. Bang bang, je ne l’oublierai pas went the last line of the French version, which was echoed by Pham Duy’s Vietnamese version, We will never forget. In the pantheon of classic pop songs from Saigon, this tricolor rendition was one of the most memorable, masterfully weaving together love and violence in the enigmatic story of two lovers who, regardless of having known each other since childhood, or because of knowing each other since childhood, shoot each other down. Bang bang was the sound of memory’s pistol firing into our heads, for we could not forget love, we could not forget war, we could not forget lovers, we could not forget enemies, we could not forget home, and we could not forget Saigon. We could not forget the caramel flavor of iced coffee with coarse sugar; the bowls of noodle soup eaten while squatting on the sidewalk; the strumming of a friend’s guitar while we swayed on hammocks under coconut trees; the football matches played barefoot and shirtless in alleys, squares, parks, and meadows; the pearl chokers of morning mist draped around the mountains; the labial moistness of oysters shucked on a gritty beach; the whisper of a dewy lover saying the most seductive words in our language, anh oi; the rattle of rice being threshed; the workingmen who slept in their cyclos on the streets, kept warm only by the memories of their families; the refugees who slept on every sidewalk of every city; the slow burning of patient mosquito coils; the sweetness and firmness of a mango plucked fresh from its tree; the girls who refused to talk to us and who we only pined for more; the men who had died or disappeared; the streets and homes blown away by bombshells; the streams where we swam naked and laughing; the secret grove where we spied on the nymphs who bathed and splashed with the innocence of the birds; the shadows cast by candlelight on the walls of wattled huts; the atonal tinkle of cowbells on mud roads and country paths; the barking of a hungry dog in an abandoned village; the appetizing reek of the fresh durian one wept to eat; the sight and sound of orphans howling by the dead bodies of their mothers and fathers; the stickiness of one’s shirt by afternoon, the stickiness of one’s lover by the end of lovemaking, the stickiness of our situations; the frantic squealing of pigs running for their lives as villagers gave chase; the hills afire with sunset; the crowned head of dawn rising from the sheets of the sea; the hot grasp of our mother’s hand; and while the list could go on and on and on, the point was simply this: the most important thing we could never forget was that we could never forget. When Lana was finished, the audience clapped, whistled, and stomped, but I sat silent and stunned as she bowed and gracefully withdrew, so disarmed I could not even applaud.

ESPN on-air personality Chris Palmer who, when he saw the black neighborhoods being set afire, tweeted “Burn that s**t down. Burn it all down.” When later the violence had reached the walls of his gated community, however, Palmer tweeted something entirely different:  Get these animals TF out of my neighborhood. Go back to where you live.

I could not imagine a death vile enough to match my desire, St. Angela writes. But it wasn't Julian that filled me and emptied me. It was that other thing I clutched close. I loved it and hurt it me. Both were true. But had I loved it because it hurt me? I don't know. But I understand the profound joy and loss in Angela's plea: Who would not be set afire with such love? What heart could keep from breaking?

The Madison’s eastward peaks—Sphinx, Helmet, and others—are fine to behold, but the valley’s beating heart is sunlight. Late on a summer afternoon, it floods across the Gravelly Range. Clear, stark, and yellow, the light singles things out from the landscape, showing each in turn. See this lone juniper on a slope of August fescue. Pruned five feet up by browsing cattle, it is a green-black gumdrop on a pin. See, says that remarkable light, how a tree contains uncommon darkness. Look at these antelope crossing the plain, hides afire. One hundred white-flanked pronghorn, small on the expanse, stick-legged. See them run, eddying together, beading into a long thin line, disappearing into cottonwood galleries along a creek.

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes— the rest sit around it and pluck blackberries. If spiritual leadership is anything. it is the capacity to see the bush burning in the middle of our own life and having enough sense to turn aside, take off our shoes and pay attention!

Earth Afire (2013) Shadows Alive (2013) Earth Awakens (2014)

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s hits, she and Harry had stumbled with unmemorable shows such as Women of the House and Hearts Afire.

I spent the two and one-half months between my meeting with the Art Commission and the beginning of my actual mural work in soaking up impressions of the productive activities of the city. I studied industrial scenes by night as well as by day, making literally thousands of sketches of towering blast furnaces, serpentine conveyor belts, impressive scientific laboratories, busy assembling rooms; also of precision instruments, some of them massive yet delicate; and of the men who worked them all. I walked for miles through the immense workshops of the Ford, Chrysler, Edison, Michigan Alkali, and Parke-Davis plants. I was afire with enthusiasm. My childhood passion for mechanical toys had been transmuted to a delight in machinery for its own sake and for its meaning to man -- his self-fulfillment and liberation from drudgery and poverty. That is why now I placed the collective hero, man-and-machine, higher than the old traditional heroes of art and legend. I felt that in the society of the future as already, to some extent, that of the present, man-and-machine would be as important as air, water, and the light of the sun. This was the "philosophy," the state of mind in which I undertook my Detroit frescoes.

But Dawes’s ride didn’t set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren’t alerted. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through—Waltham—fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro British community. It wasn’t. The people of Waltham just didn’t find out the British were coming until it was too late. If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word of mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn’t.

Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God. But only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit round and pluck blackberries. 1806-1861 BRITISH POET

Kissing her all the while, he stroked toward her center, tangling for a few brief seconds in the nest of short curls he found there before slipping a single finger between the tender folds of her femininity. Wet heat dampened his hand, a reaction he seemed to expect and enjoy, the fragrant moisture turning her slick against his touch. She gasped, the sound muffled against his lips as he tilted her hips a little more to slide deeper, using his fingers, and even the heel of his hand, in ways that drove every rational thought from her brain. Tiny breaths panted from her mouth as he caressed her in the most shockingly delicious manner, her initial embarrassment fading against a compulsive need for more. Breaking their kiss, he pressed her face against his neck. "Let go," he murmured into her ear. "Let yourself fly." And after another pair of rapturous, stroking caresses, she did- her entire body shuddering in a great, cataclysmic burst of pleasure that set every nerve and sinew afire. He held her as she shook, her cries muffled against the starched linen of his neck cloth.

Outnumbered? What about Le Favre, that little maggot in command of the French frigate? Where was he durin’ all this?” Morgan shrugged. “Bolted as soon as things got hot.” “Bolted, did he? When I catch up to him he’s goin’ to wish his arse had been blistered in butter and set afire.

Hunter turned toward her and looped an arm around her waist. His eyes were dark splashes in the moonlight. “Blue Eyes, it will be good. Trust this Comanche.” “How can it be, Hunter?” “I will make it so.” He feathered a finger across her bottom lip. Trust. His voice, his gentle touch, delved deep, turning her warm and liquid, melting her resistance. She closed her eyes. In four more days, maybe less, she would be back in Hunter’s village. “Hunter, why did you tie me to stakes again tonight? How long do you plan to do that?” “Until my touch is carved in your heart.” “Oh, Hunter, it’s already carved in my heart. When I ran from you, it wasn’t out of fear.” “You said hi, hites with a rifle. You will have no fear again. Anger, maybe much hatred, but no fear.” He trailed a knuckle along her cheek. “You made pictures of your remembering. Now I make new rememberings, so they are very much good.” Puzzled, Loretta studied his dark face. Then she realized he was referring to her memories of her mother’s death--the Comanches, the stakes, her torturous last minutes. He was deliberately evoking those memories, only to expunge them by gently loving her. When she thought of his stakes now, she thought of shivers running down her spine, of sweet kisses in moonlight, of wonderfully strong arms enfolding her with warmth. Tears sprang to her eye. “Thank you for the new memories, Hunter. They are very much good.” His face drew close. “This Comanche wants to make more new remembering.” She took a ragged breath. “I can’t. Don’t you see? To say yes is surrendering all that I am.” He manacled her wrists with his iron grip. “That too is why I tie you.” His lips brushed hers, setting her senses afire. “You will make war tomorrow?” He whispered the question into her mouth, his breath warm and sweet. His tongue touched hers. Loretta’s heart caught at the careful way he drew her against him. Tomorrow. It seemed soon enough for fighting him. For tonight, she couldn’t stop herself from loving him--one last time.

I have tried everything, Father. I’ve been kind to her. I’ve promised my strong arm will be hers forever into the horizon, until I am dust in the wind. And I’ve tried bargaining with her.” “What bargains?” Hunter shot a wary glance toward the shadows, where his mother sat listening. “After my mother left the lodge, I said that perhaps I would be a tired Comanche when the moon rose if she were to eat and drink.” “And if she didn’t, and you were not tired?” Many Horses’ dark eyes filled with laughter. He too shot a glance into the shadows. “The bargain did not please her?” Hunter shook his head. “Perhaps she is not the right woman,” Many Horses said softly. “She is the woman. I am certain of that.” “Has a spirit voice come to you during a dream?” “No, my father.” Studying the flames, Hunter grew thoughtful. “No man has a more abiding hatred for the tosi tivo than I. You know this is so. My heart burned with anger when I went to collect the yellow-hair. I wanted to kill her.” Woman with Many Robes leaned forward, her features dancing in the firelight. Hunter met her gaze. She was a woman with much wisdom. She observed the customs and seldom interrupted when men were speaking, but on those occasions when she did, only a stupid man ignored what she had to say. He waited to see if she meant to share her thoughts. When she remained silent, he cleared his throat, which was afire from the pipe, and continued. “Now, I would not kill her. She has touched me. My hatred for her has gone the way of the wind. She saved my life.” He quickly related the tale about the rattlesnake and how she had broken her silence to warn him. “You would prefer that she live for always away from you?” Hunter’s gut contracted. In that instant he realized how much he wanted the woman beside him. “I would prefer that my eyes never again fall upon her than to see her die.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,  And every common bush afire with God;  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,  (Aurora Leigh, lines 61−3) Thomas

My name is Kvothe, pronounced nearly the same as “Quothe.” Names are important as they tell you a great deal about a person. I’ve had more names than anyone has a right to. The Adem call me Maedre. Which, depending on how it’s spoken, can mean “The Flame,” “The Thunder,” or “The Broken Tree.” “The Flame” is obvious if you’ve ever seen me. I have red hair, bright. If I had been born a couple hundred years ago I would probably have been burned as a demon. I keep it short but it’s unruly. When left to its own devices, it sticks up and makes me look as if I have been set afire. “The Thunder” I attribute to a strong baritone and a great deal of stage training at an early age. I’ve never thought of “The Broken Tree” as very significant. Although in retrospect I suppose it could be considered at least partially prophetic. My first mentor called me E’lir because I was clever and I knew it. My first real lover called me Dulator because she liked the sound of it. I have been called Shadicar, Lightfinger, and Six-String. I have been called Kvothe the Bloodless, Kvothe the Arcane, and Kvothe Kingkiller. I have earned those names. Bought and paid for them. But I was brought up as Kvothe. My father once told me it meant “to know.” I have, of course, been called many other things. Most of them uncouth, although very few were unearned. I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.

On February 9th, 1942, the SS Normandie, a proud ocean liner and the pride of the French Merchant Marine, was being converted into a troop transport. A welder’s torch cut through a bulkhead and set afire a bundle of flammable rags and a stack of life jackets. The fire soon roared throughout the ship and since the internal fire protection system had been disabled, the only assistance available was from the New York City Fire Department. Fireboats pumped water onto the blaze until it caused this magnificent vessel to become unstable. I guess it never occurred to anyone that the water going into the ship, should have been pumped out! On February 10th, the ship rolled over onto its port side, sinking into the mud alongside Pier 88 in Manhattan. Investigations ensued with the thought being that this tragedy was caused by enemy sabotage. However, later findings indicated that the fire had been completely accidental. There are still some allegations contradicting this, and claims that the fire was indeed arson and involved “Lucky” Luciano, the Mafia boss who controlled the waterfront. From the time the fire started until the Normandie was righted in 1943, I watched what was happening to the now renamed USS Lafayette from a perfect vantage point at the top of the Palisades near North Street Park. It was the talk of the town and everyone continued to speculate as to who was at fault. “It must have been the Nazis,” was the conventional wisdom. The soldiers to whom I frequently talked, stationed at the searchlights and gun emplacements, were the ones who surely would know. Eventually, stripped of her superstructure, the ship was righted at great expense. There was talk of converting her into an aircraft carrier, or of cutting her down to become a smaller vessel. However, in the end she was sold for $161,680 to Lipsett, Inc., an American shipyard, where the once magnificent ship was reduced to scrap metal.

From the Geschichts-Buch comes a graphic account of those terrible days of suffering. It was stated above that the year 1621 began with much tribulation.... I cannot tell what awful devilish things were perpetrated on many good, pious and honorable sisters ... , yea, on children, both boys and girls. Women with child and mothers on their deathbed as well as virgins were most outrageously attacked. The men were burned with glowing irons and red-hot pans; their feet were held in the fire until their toes were burned off; wounds were cut into which powder was poured and then set afire; ... eyes forced out by inhuman torture; men were hung up by the neck like thieves.... Such things were openly practised by the imperial soldiery who believed themselves to be the best of Christians.... One would suppose that the devil himself would have been more fearful of the might, power, glory and majesty of God than these shameless men. May God lead them to realize it, to whom and to whose righteous judgment we commit everything.28

From the Geschichts-Buch comes a graphic account of those terrible days of suffering. It was stated above that the year 1621 began with much tribulation.... I cannot tell what awful devilish things were perpetrated on many good, pious and honorable sisters ... , yea, on children, both boys and girls. Women with child and mothers on their deathbed as well as virgins were most outrageously attacked. The men were burned with glowing irons and red-hot pans; their feet were held in the fire until their toes were burned off; wounds were cut into which powder was poured and then set afire; ... eyes forced out by inhuman torture; men were hung up by the neck like thieves.... Such things were openly practised by the imperial soldiery who believed themselves to be the best of Christians.... One would suppose that the devil himself would have been more fearful of the might, power, glory and majesty of God than these shameless men. May God lead them to realize it, to whom and to whose righteous judgment we commit everything.

... Earth's crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes; the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Rancorous ivy. On the other side of the wall, at the edge of the river, the sand burned. The river lay afire. Kingfishers fell like spots across the eyes and laughter was yellow. Every Sunday Omensetter strolled by the river with his wife, his daughters, and his dog. They came by wagon, spoke to people who were off to church, and while Furber preached, they sprawled in the gravel and trailed their feet in the water. Lucy Omensetter lay her swollen body on a flat rock. Furber felt the sun lapping at her ears. It was like a rising blush, and his hands trembled when he held them out to make the bars of the cross. May the Lord bless you and keep you . . . He closed his eyes, drifting off. They would see how moved he was, how intense and sincere he was. Cause His light to shine upon you . . . He would find the footprints of the dog and imprint of their bodies. All the days of your life . . . The brazen parade of her infected person. Watchman. Rainbows like rings of oil around her. Watchman. Shouldn’t we be? I spy you, Fatty, behind the tree. He wanted to rub the memory from his eyes. Glittering. Beads of water stood on her skin and drop fled into drop until they broke and ran, the streaks finally fading. Her navel was inside out—sweet spot where Zeus had tied her. She was so white and glistening, so . . . pale, though darker about the eyes, the nipples dark. Open us to evil. He made a slit in his lids. Burn our hearts. Shawls of sunlight spilled over the backs of the pews. Nay-ked-nessss. The droplets gathered at the point of her elbow and hung there, the sac swelling until it fell and spattered on her foot. Nay . . . nay. To enclose her like the water of the creek had closed her. Nay . . . Proper body for a lover. Joy to be a stone. Please, the peep-watch is over. Please hurry now. Hurry. Get out of my church.

He awakes in a mindless terror of the silence, the motionlessness. He screams. He is afire from head to foot with want, with desire, with intolerable impatience. He gasps for breath and screams until his head is filled and throbbing with the sound. He screams until his chest aches, until his throat is sore. He can bear the pain no more and his sobs weaken and subside. He listens. He opens and closes his fists. He rolls his head from side to side. Nothing helps. It is unbearable. He begins to cry again, but it is too much for his strained throat; he soon stops. He waves his hands and kicks his feet. He stops, able to suffer, unable to think, unable to hope. He listens. Then he falls asleep again.

I look down and see that Colter has returned and has gone on lock-solid, drop-dead point about twenty feet in front of us, head and shoulders hunched and crouched, bony ass stuck way up in the air, body half-twisted, frozen, as if cautioning us of some hidden, deadly betrayal: and green eyes afire, stub tail motionless. We ease forward, adrenaline-drunk. Nothing happens. And then it does. The cock-bird climbs towering above and then flares and accelerates away; Tim fires twice, I fire twice, Colter runs shrieking after the untouched bird, and from across that spartan landscape we hear the cattlewomen snort small laughs of disbelief, and one of them says, “Oops, they missed again.”   We

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside: then all that ink and labor are wasted, because I can’t print the result.

They set the kindling afire to consume the body of a man who had but one goal—to make the Bible readable for everyone.

When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.

Children couldn’t stomach the truth, adults believed. Children had to be protected from the harsh realities of the world.

one whose soul panted after God as the roe pants after the water brook, and the measure in which God revealed Himself to his seeking heart set the good man's whole life afire with a burning adoration rivaling that of the seraphim before the throne. His love for God extended to the three Persons of the Godhead equally, yet he seemed to feel for each One a special kind of love reserved for Him alone. Of God the Father he sings:

Heat zips like a laser beam from his eyes to my cheeks and sets them afire.

One day we passed a gas station with a bunch of velvet Elvises hanging over clotheslines. He nodded once. “Pop stars may set the world afire, but they come and go. They’re a flash in the pan. So are their songs. But good hymns? They live past the people who wrote them. Hymns never die.” He looked down at me. “How many Grammys did Elvis win?” I shrugged. “Two.” He palmed the sweat off his face. “For what song?” Another shrug. Dad loved the history of music. And he loved to share it. “In the mid-1880s,” he began, “a Swedish preacher named Boberg wrote and published a poem. No music. Just words. A few years later he attended a meeting and heard his poem sung back to him, attached to an old Swedish melody. Nobody really knows how or who put the two together. Then in the 1920s, a missionary named

Autumn died in technicolor all around us. Bright yellows and reds afire, burnished oranges and rusty greens painted the leaves that floated from the branches, collected in the grass.

It was the last of the dancers whom my Master embraced next. He caught the man’s face in his hands as if it were love, and drank again, grasping at the man’s throat so that I saw the blood just for an instant, a veritable deluge which my Master then covered with his mouth and his bent head. I could see the blood pump into my Master’s hand. I couldn’t wait for him to raise his head, and this he did very soon, sooner even than he had left his last victim, and he looked at me dreamily and his countenance afire. He looked as human as any human in the room, even crazed with his special drink as they were with their common wine.

I'm there now. Tell me I will succeed. That it's the world blinking out and not me, like the ones I've loved and tried to pull back. Tell me he'll never set the world afire. Tell me so I can finally go to sleep. The woman buried beneath my candle won't let him. She props me up. Sits by my bed. She tells me my state isn't fixed; there is no rope binding my wrists; there is always a window to climb out of. She tells me I can save myself and find a place I love before the world dissolves. She stays, even when I turn cruel and out of phase. I learn to leave. I leave before he sets himself ablaze. The fire in his skin and hair. I can't see it but I know it's happening. I can't see it because I'm already so far away. I'm out of here now, forever.

...I imagine I'll have a reckoning. That’s what this is all leading to, and there’s no avoiding it. Every man has one whether he knows it or not. Sometimes he blows past it at speed. Sometimes he steps over it like an unmarked grave. And sometimes it’s a dire affair fraught with the type of stuff that delivers him afire, still smoking as he comes crashing down.

you broke my treaties and stole my land Memories set afire and set adrift

In the beginning was the light and light was with life and the light was life and the earth quickened, and we came out of the ground to yearn forever and never reach the light but to tumble through generations, our skins afire with this lust for the light and we go toward the light or we go toward nothing and we become nothing. That is all.

The town was sacked, the ships in the harbor set afire, Lord Darklyn beheaded.

The subarctic world of the Koyukon is dominated by physical forces that may be incomprehensible to an inexperienced outsider. If the spiritual powers of this environment seem ethereal, its physical powers are the opposite. The land itself is massive, both in its extent and in the amplitude of its up-thrown mountains. Great rivers carve the terrain, running each spring with a chaos of fractured ice, periodically spilling over their banks to submerge the flats and make islands of the hills. The summer day lasts for months yet is too short against winter's darkness. And finally the weather, the omnipotent cold, the snow and storms, and the brief summer heat, when forests are set afire by passing thunderstorms.

The impossible is always in a desperate search for hands set afire by a heart of faith. For it is the ‘fire’ ignited by the ‘faith’ that drives such hands to undertake the task of freeing the impossible to be the possible.

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

To be able to set your soul afire, she thought, to be able to draw men and women to you at your will, to be brilliant, fearless of consequences, what would she not give to live a life like that?

I have loved in life and I have been loved. I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar, and have been raised above life’s joy and sorrow. My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it. My heart has been rent and joined again; My heart has been broken and again made whole; My heart has been wounded and healed again; A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet. I went through hell and saw there love’s raging fire, and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love. I wept in love and made all weep with me; I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men; And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes. The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear; With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved, I shook the throne of God in heaven. I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love, “Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret.” She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear,“My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.” COMPLETE SAYINGS , 693

These sufferings set my soul afire with love for God and for immortal souls. Love endures everything, love is stronger than death, love fears nothing…

their wives at the same time. Later, they’d have to explain it all to the sheriff, but when the sheriff finally reached him, he had to keep it short before leaving with Barbara and Beth to walk to the restaurant for the reception. He simply said, “Luck, there are four cans of kerosene still under the church. I think that Jameson was planning to not only blow up the church but start a massive fire with the coal oil under there. He could have set the whole town afire.” Luck pretty much summed up the day when he said, “You just couldn’t have a traditional wedding; could you?” Even Barbara laughed when Carl said that he didn’t know because this was his first and only wedding. “Well, I’ll take care of the kerosene and the rest. Just come by later with your father and Tom Wilson to make your statements.” Carl said, “Thanks, Luck.” He took Barbara’s arm and followed his parents as they headed for the hotel. Beth was perched on her grandpapa’s shoulders. Tom and Emily walked behind them leading a long line of guests. _____ After the long reception luncheon, the wedding party returned to the boarding house. Beth had been told that the house would no longer accept tenants and that now she would have her own room upstairs. She was initially upset that her mama and papa might be angry with her. Then Carl explained that now that she was almost grown up, she needed her privacy. But if she had any bad dreams or was afraid for

I often felt the Passion of the Lord Jesus in my body, although this was imperceptible [to others], and I rejoiced in it because Jesus wanted it so. But this lasted for only a short time. These sufferings set my soul afire with love for God and for immortal souls. Love endures everything, love is stronger than death, love fears nothing…

The Confederates accidentally set their own city afire when they burned supplies to keep them from Union hands. The flames spread out of control and reduced much of the capital to ruins.

Maples of the United States face a grave enemy. The most highly regarded models predict that the climate of New England will become hostile to sugar maples within fifty years. Rising temperatures will reduce seedling success and regeneration will thereby start to fail. It already is failing. Insects will follow, and the oaks will get the upper hand. Imagine New England without maples. Unthinkable. A brown fall instead of hills afire. Sugar houses boarded up. No more fragrant clouds of steam. Would we even recognize our homes? Is that a heartbreak we can bear?

Yet now all the world seemed to be afire. Whole forests burst into flame; whole towns burnt as fiercely as ever Magdeburg had burnt. “Ah,” said Philander Groot, “it could be the End, after all, my friends.” “And good riddance to it,” I said. “It is a poor world, a bad world, a decadent world. It expects love without sacrifice. It expects immediate gratification of its desires, as a child might, as a beast might. And if it does not receive gratification it becomes pettish and destroys in a tantrum. What’s the use of seeking a Cure for its Pain, Philander Groot? What’s the use of attempting, by any means, to divert it from its well-earned doom?” “Because we are alive, I suppose, Captain Von Bek. Because we have no choice but to hope to make it better, through our own designs.” Philander Groot seemed amused by me. “The world is the world,” said Sedenko. “We cannot change it. That is for God to do.” “Perhaps He thinks it is for us to do,” said Groot quietly.

Marius’s laugh set my skin afire.

It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog’s, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jedda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.

What once I threw away with disdain, without a second thought, I now cherish with a heightened sensitivity. How stupid our young thoughts of immortality. How dangerous our contempt, our judgment, our arrogance regarding what all of us will ultimately become, and much sooner than we think. As if in youth, we hold some secret to life and love and eternal happiness. As if what we bring to the table will always be on our terms, our contracts neatly spelled out, a happily-ever-after always guaranteed. Now, how enticing to feel this spark of remembrance, this heat, this flame set afire in my heart, an alarm sounding through my soul.

There's no denying you'll find yourself in places you won't want to be, seeing things you wish you weren't seeing, but resistance to now is resistance to the very life you're living.

Bingwen didn’t argue. What good would it do? When adults became defiant in public, no amount of evidence, however irrefutable, would make them change their minds.

Before she could utter another word, Albert’s voice boomed from the hallway. “I will kill him. If he has so much as hurt one hair on her head, I will kill him.”Albert stood with his hands on his hips, in full battle gear. Chain mail, helm, sword and dirks. The half helm did not cover his face entirely. And it could do nothing to mask his fury. Purple with rage, his eyes afire with barely controlled rage, he stood with his shoulders back and a fierce glare that warned he meant every word he spoke. “Albert, I be so sorry,”she told him. “I do no’ken how he came to know about the sword or why he wants it.” “Joie,”Albert said as he took one step forward. “I do no’give one bloody wit about the Gladius. Ye are me sister now and I would never do a thing to bring you any pain. But Laurin? I love her with all me heart.” He needn’t say more. The pain, the anguish, blended with fury, were clearly evident. “I will not ask you to show any of them any mercy,”she told him.“Laurin is the sister of my heart. Please,”she choked on her words. “Bring her home.

But this time, in the eerie, snow-swept glow of the flashlight, she not only heard, but also saw what had haunted her, as well. A translucent 19th century style hearse, pulled by a team of black stallions, their eyes aglow with an almost blinding green light. The driver, covered in a tattered greatcoat and top hat, and his eyes afire with the same greenish glow, paid no attention to her as he went about his work driving the team; saying only in his otherworldly voice, Giddyup! Then it was all gone, disappeared in the snow. She didn’t know if she were more mesmerized, or scared.

The four Daughters stood together, their moon amulets glistening. Seen through a veil of fog, they appeared spectral. "Goddesses," Lambert whispered, his eyes afire. "You look ravishing. I'm not sure which one of you I will destroy tonight." "No chance," Catty answered with a wicked grin. Her eyes dilated as if energy were building inside her.

This magnificent city that I only knew from photographs had been devastated. The infamous submarine bunkers had been bombed, and the bunkers that survived were later dynamited. I could understand this, but why civilian houses had also been leveled and set afire by incendiary bombs was beyond me. Each British Lancaster bomber delivered up to 8,000 pounds of bomb loads each night, with as many as 1,000 bombers over the target on a given night. During these raids, this great port city was set alight like a Roman candle! American B-17 and B 24 bombers also came during the daytime. Operation Gomorrah was conducted day and night causing a howling noise as the Feuersturm firestorm sucked the air out of the city to feed itself. With surface temperatures reaching 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, asphalt streets actually melted, leaving people trapped in the black molten gunk. Winds of 150 miles per hour fanned flames that reached an altitude of over 15,000 feet! I lost an aunt, who was a beautiful young woman in her twenties, along with her husband and baby. Her older sister also perished in the flames. They all now lie buried in a mass gravesite, which I visited in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. The stories I heard from people who could still talk about them, without totally choking up, were unbelievable. It was said that over 50 miles of street frontage were set ablaze and totally reduced to ashes during the raids, and another 133 miles were severely damaged. An estimated 1,500 people were killed on the first night of the raids and many more were wounded. Those who survived were suddenly homeless and without possessions. The total casualties were estimated at approximately 45,000 people. At the end of it, Hitler refused to come to the city and sent Hermann Göring instead! This was never forgotten or forgiven by das volk, the people. What is it with us? Why do we as human beings have to experience war after war? It seems that we never learn and so perhaps we will have to witness even worse in the future.

Grieving is like being set afire. Except when you try to put out the flames they disappear; when you try to salve your wounds you find your skin unblemished. You take a breath, thinking the worst has passed, and then grief bursts into flame anew. It rages, it roars, it smolders, all at its own unfathomable whim. You can’t shake it; you have no choice but to burn.

Let’s set the place afire.

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.1 So said the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Religion without concern for the present is useless; all who seek God in a broken world should avoid it. Religion is activism set afire by faith through love for God and neighbor. Good religion opposes humanity’s self-destructive nature and longs to conquer our inherent violence. Religion’s goal for its adherents is to loose them on society as burning lights who expose all that harms and corrupts so that we all share in the bounty of God’s creation. Religion is always a political force through its call to goodness.

The sky was afire with undulating layers of tangerine orange, carousel pink, periwinkle blue.

WE WERE ALL VILLAINS in the beginning. For hundreds of years, prodigies were feared by the rest of the world. We became hunted. Tormented. Feared and oppressed. We were believed to be witches and demons, freaks and abominations. We were stoned and hanged and set afire while crowds gathered to watch with cruel eyes, proud to be ridding the world of one more pariah. They were right to be afraid.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.*2

Best friends, one afire with hope, the other both weary and wary.

To be a person is to be a mortal. It is to be a death waiting to happen to a body. But it is also, until that moment comes, to be alive. I love the word alive, how it springs to action. It has real spark, like afire, alight, afoot. It’s jaunty. It quickens and pops from stillness to breath. Listen: Living. Alive. The two words mean the same, but I like the second one better.

I think the trees, all afire with orange and red leaves, made the chill bearable. My favourites were the ones that looked like they glowed gold when the sun hit them just right. As we passed them, I rolled down the window and tilted my head and squinted just to see if I could make them glow even more.

What harm have the trees done them?" he said. "Must they punish the grass for their own faults? Men are savages, who would set a land afire because they have a quarrel with other men.

wrong. I am the spark that will set the worlds afire. I am the hammer that cracks the chains.

am the spark that will set the worlds afire. I am the hammer that cracks the chains.

The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Crypto-sphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of undone things was the summation of intelligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing. He dived within, becoming part of it, surrendering completely to it to accept it into him and dissolve himself within it. He was a flake within the fall, an insect sucked up into the whirlwind, a bacterium caught within a water droplet forced whirling within the hurricane's howl. He was a particle of dust from the plain thrown up by the hoof of one horse within the charging line, a grain of sand upon the storm-besieged beach, a fleck of ash from the eruption's endless detonations, a mote of soot from the continent afire, a molecule within the encroaching dust, an atom from the star's heart thrown out in its last, majestic, exhaustive blast. Here was the meaning at the core of meaninglessness and the meaninglessness at the centre of meaning. Here every action, every thought, each nuance of every least important mental event within any creature mattered utterly and fundamentally; here, too, the fates of stars, galaxies, universes and realities were as nothing; less than ephemera, beneath triviality. He swam through it all as it coursed through him. He saw backwards and forwards throughout time forever, seeing everything that had happened and everything that would happen and knew it was all perfectly true and completely false at once, without contradiction. Here the chaos sang songs of sweet pure reason and reserve, here the loftiest aims and finest achievements of humans and machines were articulations of psychopathic insanity. Here the data winds howled, dissociated as plasma, abrading as blown sand. Here the lost souls of a billion lives had poured and shattered and tattered and dissolved and mixed with a trillion extracted, excerpted strings and sequences and cycles of mutated programs, evolved virus and garbled instructions, themselves irretrievably compounded with uncountable irrelevant facts, raw figures and scrambled signals. He saw, heard, tasted and felt it all, and was submerged within it and borne over it; he carried within him, always there and just collected, the seed of something else, something at once supersessant and insignificant, and foolish, wise and innocent all together. He stepped ashore from a molten ocean of chaos, walked calmly from the belching volcano mouth, floated comfortably on the supernova's radiation wave-front to the dust-rich depths, always holding his charge.

What was I measured against a being of such enormity? Only a man. But we are their siblings. The same will that set her soul afire before time began conceived me