“
Okay, gang," I said, "according to blueprints, there's an elevator access panel on the east side of the building. We may get a little dirty, but—"
"I thought we'd just go through the doors," Liz said, flashing three beautifully engraved invitations and some wonderfully authentic fake IDs.
The tickets were $20,000 each. The Secret Service had been vetting the guest list for weeks, so Bex and I stopped beneath a streetlamp and studied Liz.
"Do I even want to know where you got those?" I asked.
Liz seemed to ponder it, and then she said, "No.
”
”
Ally Carter (Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (Gallagher Girls, #3))
“
Leaning her silly, beautiful, drunken head on my shoulder, she said, "Oh, Esther, I don't want to be a feminist. I don't enjoy it. It's no fun."
"I know," I said. "I don't either." People think you decide to be a "radical," for God's sake, like deciding to be a librarian or a ship's chandler. You "make up your mind," you "commit yourself" (sounds like a mental hospital, doesn't it?).
I said Don't worry, we could be buried together and have engraved on our tombstone the awful truth, which some day somebody will understand:
WE WUZ PUSHED.
”
”
Joanna Russ (On Strike Against God)
“
Will we turn our backs on science because it is perceived as a threat to God, abandoning all the promise of advancing our understanding of nature and applying that to the alleviation of suffering and the betterment of humankind? Alternatively, will we turn our backs on faith, concluding that science has rendered the spiritual life no longer necessary, and that traditional religious symbols can now be replaced by engravings of the double helix on our alters?
Both of these choices are profoundly dangerous. Both deny truth. Both will diminish the nobility of humankind. Both will be devastating to our future. And both are unnecessary. The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate and beautiful - and it cannot be at war with itself. Only we imperfect humans can start such battles. And only we can end them.
”
”
Francis S. Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)
“
Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it?
The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film.
This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire.
Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?
”
”
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
A weapon is a tool, and if it is beautiful, then it is beautiful because it is useful. A sword that could not fulfill its function would be ugly to my eyes no matter how fair its shape, not even if it were adorned with the finest jewels and the most intricate engraving.
”
”
Christopher Paolini (Brisingr (The Inheritance Cycle, #3))
“
There was a sort of beauty that only comes with age. A whole life engraved into facial wrinkles.
”
”
Henning Mankell (An Event in Autumn: A Kurt Wallander Mystery)
“
It's so beautiful. It has our initials," she said, running her fingertip over the engraving.
"You know me," I half joked. "Any way I can get my name on you."
She looked up. I felt her hazel eyes on my face. "I love you."
- Rimmel & Romeo
”
”
Cambria Hebert (#Hater (Hashtag, #2))
“
Life had engraved such beauty in those lines of age and wisdom ...
”
”
Rosslyn Elliott (Lovelier Than Daylight (Saddler's Legacy, #3))
“
...
But even if the minute hand, too quickly
squeezes the wick between its fingertips,
Joy
still looks like honey and sunshine in their eyes,
helping old mum and dad out of the car,
sagging like candle wax
as life, in a breeze, is gone already
whisking the leaves on their tombstone,
engraved,
no wind can ever erase them.
”
”
Ximena Escobar (The Secret Beautiful)
“
Excuse me while I throw this down, I’m old and cranky and tired of hearing the idiocy repeated by people who ought to know better.
Real women do not have curves. Real women do not look like just one thing.
Real women have curves, and not. They are tall, and not. They are brown-skinned, and olive-skinned, and not. They have small breasts, and big ones, and no breasts whatsoever.
Real women start their lives as baby girls. And as baby boys. And as babies of indeterminate biological sex whose bodies terrify their doctors and families into making all kinds of very sudden decisions.
Real women have big hands and small hands and long elegant fingers and short stubby fingers and manicures and broken nails with dirt under them.
Real women have armpit hair and leg hair and pubic hair and facial hair and chest hair and sexy moustaches and full, luxuriant beards. Real women have none of these things, spontaneously or as the result of intentional change. Real women are bald as eggs, by chance and by choice and by chemo. Real women have hair so long they can sit on it. Real women wear wigs and weaves and extensions and kufi and do-rags and hairnets and hijab and headscarves and hats and yarmulkes and textured rubber swim caps with the plastic flowers on the sides.
Real women wear high heels and skirts. Or not.
Real women are feminine and smell good and they are masculine and smell good and they are androgynous and smell good, except when they don’t smell so good, but that can be changed if desired because real women change stuff when they want to.
Real women have ovaries. Unless they don’t, and sometimes they don’t because they were born that way and sometimes they don’t because they had to have their ovaries removed. Real women have uteruses, unless they don’t, see above. Real women have vaginas and clitorises and XX sex chromosomes and high estrogen levels, they ovulate and menstruate and can get pregnant and have babies. Except sometimes not, for a rather spectacular array of reasons both spontaneous and induced.
Real women are fat. And thin. And both, and neither, and otherwise. Doesn’t make them any less real.
There is a phrase I wish I could engrave upon the hearts of every single person, everywhere in the world, and it is this sentence which comes from the genius lips of the grand and eloquent Mr. Glenn Marla: There is no wrong way to have a body.
I’m going to say it again because it’s important: There is no wrong way to have a body.
And if your moral compass points in any way, shape, or form to equality, you need to get this through your thick skull and stop with the “real women are like such-and-so” crap.
You are not the authority on what “real” human beings are, and who qualifies as “real” and on what basis. All human beings are real.
Yes, I know you’re tired of feeling disenfranchised. It is a tiresome and loathsome thing to be and to feel. But the tit-for-tat disenfranchisement of others is not going to solve that problem. Solidarity has to start somewhere and it might as well be with you and me
”
”
Hanne Blank
“
Since we possess its hymn, engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need of any woman to repeat the opening lines, potent with the admiration which her beauty inspires, for us to remember all that follows.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)
“
A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only the eye of a connoisseur would have blazed with eagerness at the sight of this painting or that, some book yellowed with age, a piece of old porcelain, or stones and coins.
But the furniture and paintings of different ages, the bric-a-brac that meant nothing to anyone but had been marked for them both by a happy hour or memorable moment, and the ocean of books and sheet music breathed a warm life that oddly stimulated the mind and aesthetic sense. Present everywhere was vigilant thought. The beauty of human effort shone here, just as the eternal beauty of nature shone all around.
pp. 492-493
”
”
Ivan Goncharov (Oblomov)
“
He turned over towards the light and lay gazing into the glass paperweight. The inexhaustibly interesting thing was not the fragment of coral but the interior of the glass itself. There was such a depth of it, and yet it was almost as transparent as air. It was as though the surface of the glass had been the arch of the sky, enclosing a tiny world with its atmosphere complete. He had the feeling that he could get inside it, and that in fact he was inside it, along with the mahogany bed and the gateleg table, and the clock and the steel engraving and the paperweight itself. The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
”
”
George Orwell (1984)
“
At his leisure, the lieutenant allowed the unforgettable spectacle to engrave itself upon his mind. With one hand he fondled the hair, with the other he softly stroked the magnificent face, implanting kisses here and there where his eyes lingered. The quiet coldness of the high, tapering forehead, the closed eyes with their long lashes beneath faintly etched brows, the set of the finely shaped nose, the gleam of teeth glimpsed between full, regular lips, the soft cheeks and the small, wise chin…
Wherever the lieutenant's eyes moved his lips faithfully followed. The high, swelling breasts, surmounted by nipples like the buds of a wild cherry, hardened as the lieutenant's lips closed about them. The arms flowed smoothly downward from each side of the breast, tapering toward the wrists, yet losing nothing of their roundness or symmetry…The natural hollow curving between the bosom and the stomach carried in its lines a suggestion not only of softness but of resilient strength, and while it gave forewarning to the rich curves spreading outward from here to the hips it had, in itself, an appearance only of restraint and proper discipline. The whiteness and richness of the stomach and hips was like milk brimming in a great bowl, and the sharply shadowed dip of the navel could have been the fresh impress of a raindrop, fallen there that very moment. Where the shadows gathered more thickly, hair clustered, gentle and sensitive, and as the agitation mounted in the now no longer passive body there hung over this region a scent like the smoldering of fragrant blossoms, growing steadily more pervasive…
Passionately they held their faces close, rubbing cheek against cheek…Their breasts, moist with sweat, were tightly joined, and every inch of the young and beautiful bodies had become so much one with the other that it seemed impossible there should ever again be a separation…From the heights they plunged into the abyss, and from the abyss they took wing and soared once more to dizzying heights…As one cycle ended, almost immediately a new wave of passion would be generated, and together -with no trace of fatigue- they would climb again in a single breathless movement to the very summit.
”
”
Yukio Mishima (Patriotism)
“
Jacob thought about going home. He still had some American change, which he kept in an empty matchbox in his sock drawer, and one night, after he had finished his pancakes and jam, he took the coins out, spread them on the kitchen table, and admired the burnt sienna patina of one of the pennies, which in the candlelight was iridescent with violet and green where people’s touch had salted it. The portrait of Lincoln was ugly and noble, and Jacob took off his glasses to look more closely. On the other side, an erratic line of shrubbery was engraved beside the Lincoln monument’s steps. The idealism seemed to be in Lincoln rather than in the coin’s design, which was homely. It was so homely, in fact, that there was a kind of democratic grandeur to it. It was the most beautiful currency in the world. Jacob was on the verge of tears.
”
”
Caleb Crain (Necessary Errors)
“
The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion. The history of the garden says it all, beautifully. There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone – the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes – the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. By the time he’d finished it looked like this (the sketch book). The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.
”
”
Tom Stoppard (Arcadia (Faber Drama))
“
This novel humbled me in a number of ways. I was reading manuscripts for a magazine called Accent, and had in front of my prose-bleary eyes a piece called “A Horse in a London Flat.” And I was in a doze. More dreariness. More pretension. When will it all end? How shall I phrase my polite rejection? Something, I don’t remember what it was now, but something ten pages along woke me up, as if I had nearly fallen asleep and toppled from my chair. Perhaps it was the startle of an image or the rasp of a line. I went back to the beginning, and soon realized that I had let my eyes slide over paragraphs of astonishing prose without responding to them or recognizing their quality. That was my first humiliation. I then carried the manuscript to my fellow editors, as if I were bringing the original “good news,” only to learn that they were perfectly familiar with the work of John Hawkes and admired it extravagantly. Hadn’t I read The Cannibal, or The Goose on the Grave? Where had I been! What a dummy! (Though my humiliation would have been worse if I had written that rejection.)
A number of years had to erode my embarrassment before I could confess that I had not spotted him at once (as I initially pretended). What a dummy indeed. The Lime Twig is a beautiful and brutal book, and when it comes to the engravement of the sentence, no one now writing can match him.
”
”
William H. Gass (A Temple of Texts)
“
No salvation comes from exhumed gods; we must penetrate deeper into substance. If I take a fossil, say, a trilobite, in my hand (marvelously preserved specimens are found in the quarries at the foot of the Casbah), I am transfixed by the impact of mathematical harmony. Purpose and beauty, as fresh as on the first day, are still seamlessly united in a medal engraved by a master's hand. The bios must have discovered the secret of tripartition in this primordial crab. Tripartition then frequently recurs, even without any natural kinship; figures, in transversal symmetry, dwell in the triptych.
How many millions of years ago might this creature have animated an ocean that no longer exists? I hold its impression, a seal of imperishable beauty, in my hand. Some day, this seal, too, will decay or else burn out in cosmic conflagrations of the future. The matrix that formed it remains concealed in and operative from the law, untouched by death or fire.
”
”
Ernst Jünger (Eumeswil)
“
At this time of life one has already been wounded more than once by the darts of love; it no longer evolves by itself, obeying its own incomprehensible and fatal laws, before our passive and astonished hearts. We come to its aid, we falsify it by memory and by suggestion. Recognising one of its symptoms, we remember and re-create the rest. Since we know its song, which is engraved on our hearts in its entirety, there is no need for a woman to repeat the opening strains—filled with the admiration which beauty inspires—for us to remember what follows.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)
“
Well, tell me boy," she said, "what have you been reading?"
Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery,
naming as his favorites those books which he felt would win her
approval. As he had read everything, good and bad, that the town
library contained, he was able to make an impressive showing.
Sometimes she stopped him to question about a book--he rebuilt the
story richly with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her
wholly. She was excited and eager--she saw at once how abundantly
she could feed this ravenous hunger for knowledge, experience,
wisdom. And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild
ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled desire was
now to be ruddered, guided, controlled. The way through the
passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would now be
charted for him. Before he went away she had given him a fat
volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings
of love and battle, of the period he loved best.
He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who
killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of
banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in
valiant and beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of
Erasmus. Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best story
he had ever read.
”
”
Thomas Wolfe
“
Jacques was so impressed with the beauty of the curve known as a logarithmic spiral (Figure 37; the name was derived from the way in which the radius grows as we move around the curve clockwise) that he asked that this shape, and the motto he assigned to it: "Eadem mutato resurgo" (although changed, I rise again the same), be engraved on his tombstone.
The motto describes a fundamental property unique to the logarithmic spiral-it does not alter its shape as its size increases. This feature is known as self-similarity. Fascinated by this property, Jacques wrote that the logarithmic spiral "may be used as a symbol, either of fortitude and constancy in adversity, or of the human body, which after all its changes, even after death, will be restored to its exact and perfect self.
”
”
Mario Livio (The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number)
“
Girls and young women are also starving because the women’s
movement changed educational institutions and the workplace enough
to make them admit women, but not yet enough to change the maleness
of power itself. Women in “coeducational” schools and colleges are still
isolated from one another, and admitted as men manqué. Women’s
studies are kept on the margins of the curriculum, and fewer than 5
percent of professors are women; the worldview taught young women
is male. The pressure on them is to conform themselves to the masculine
atmosphere. Separated from their mothers, young women on campus
have few older role models who are not male; how can they learn how
to love their bodies? The main images of women given them to admire
and emulate are not of impressive, wise older women, but of girls their
own age or younger, who are not respected for their minds. Physically,
these universities are ordered for men or unwomaned women. They
are overhung with oil portraits of men; engraved with the rolling names
of men; designed, like the Yale Club in New York, which for twenty
years after women were admitted had no women’s changing room, for
men. They are not lit for women who want to escape rape; at Yale,
campus police maps showing the most dangerous street corners for
rape were allegedly kept from the student body so as not to alarm
parents. The colleges are only marginally concerned with the things
that happen to women’s bodies that do not happen to the bodies of the
men. Women students sense this institutional wish that the problems
of their female bodies would just fade away; responding, the bodies
themselves fade away.
”
”
Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth)
“
But at the age, already a little disillusioned, which Swann was approaching, at which one knows how to content oneself with being in love for the pleasure of it without requiring too much reciprocity, this closeness of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one’s earliest youth, the goal toward which love necessarily tends, still remains linked to it by an association of ideas so strong that it may become the cause of love, if it occurs first. At an earlier time one dreamed of possessing the heart of the woman with whom one was in love; later, to feel that one possesses a woman’s heart may be enough to make one fall in love with her. And so, at an age when it would seem, since what one seeks most of all in love is subjective pleasure, that the enjoyment of a woman’s beauty should play the largest part in it, love may come into being—love of the most physical kind—without there having been, underlying it, any previous desire. At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it—filled with the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle—where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other—we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu, #1))
“
Of all the works by Victor Hugo the poetic generation of 1880 preferred above all the Chansons des Rues et des Bois ('Songs of the Streets and Woods') and the late poems such as Ce que dit Ia Bouche d'Ombre ('What says the mouth of shadow'), written during a period of intense spiritualism. Quite apart from drawings done during seances, for the most part caricatures, hob-goblins and ghouls, the graphic work of Hugo is that of a visionary. Wood engravers beautifully reproduced these visions as illustrations for Le Rhin ('The Rhine') or Les Travailleurs de la Mer ('The Toilers of the Sea'). Drawn beside cursed romantic castles and storm-tossed lighthouses, ink blots become angels or skeletons, accidental stains become souls or flowers, ambiguities and metamorphoses provide prodigious leaven for the imagination: 'The magnificent imagination which flows through the drawings of Victor Hugo like the mystery in the sky' (Baudelaire).
”
”
Philippe Jullian (The symbolists)
“
In Fleury’s day, however, the grass was cut and the graves well cared for. Besides, as you might expect, he was fond of graveyards; he enjoyed brooding in them and letting his heart respond to the abbreviated biographies he found engraved in their stones . . . so eloquent, so succinct! All the same, once he had spent an hour or two pondering by his mother’s grave he decided to call it a day because, after all, one does not want to overdo the lurking in graveyards. This decision was not a very sudden one. From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had once had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian. The truth was that the tide of sensitivity to beauty, of gentleness and melancholy, had gradually ebbed leaving Fleury floundering on a sandbank. Young ladies these days were more interested in the qualities of Tennyson’s “great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman” than they were in pallid poets, as Fleury was dimly beginning to perceive. Louise Dunstaple’s preference for romping with jolly officers which had dismayed him on the day of the picnic had by no means been the first rebuff of this kind. Even Miriam sometimes asked him aloud why he was looking “hangdog” when once she would have remained silent, thinking “soulful”. All
”
”
J.G. Farrell (The Siege of Krishnapur)
“
The reader cannot have failed to turn over the admirable works of Rembrandt, that Shakespeare of painting. Amid so many marvellous engravings, there is one etching in particular, which is supposed to represent Doctor Faust, and which it is impossible to contemplate without being dazzled. It represents a gloomy cell; in the centre is a table loaded with hideous objects; skulls, spheres, alembics, compasses, hieroglyphic parchments. The doctor is before this table clad in his large coat and covered to the very eyebrows with his furred cap. He is visible only to his waist. He has half risen from his immense arm-chair, his clenched fists rest on the table, and he is gazing with curiosity and terror at a large luminous circle, formed of magic letters, which gleams from the wall beyond, like the solar spectrum in a dark chamber. This cabalistic sun seems to tremble before the eye, and fills the wan cell with its mysterious radiance. It is horrible and it is beautiful.
”
”
Victor Hugo (Complete Works of Victor Hugo)
“
after many hours of feasting and dance, the King and Queen took their sleeping girl to her bedchamber. “Good night, little bird,” said the Queen as she kissed Snow. The girl’s cheek felt as soft as silk on the Queen’s lips. She left the child to her dreams. She was sure they were filled with lovely ladies spinning in circles and colorful dresses and banners swirling all around her. The King took his new wife by the hand and led her to their chamber. The sun, now coming through their curtains, was casting an otherworldly glow. They stood there for a moment looking at each other. Bliss. “I see you have opened my gift,” the King said looking at the mirror. The mirror was oval-shaped and beautifully ornate, gilded, with serpentine designs around the perimeter, and crowned with an engraving of a headpiece fit for a Queen. It was nearly perfect. But something about it made her feel that same uneasiness that had shaken her before the ceremony. Her chest tightened and the room suddenly felt oppressively confining. “What is the matter, my love?” the King asked. The Queen moved to speak, but she could not. “You don’t like it?” he asked, looking crestfallen. “No, my love, it…I’m just…tired. So tired,” she finally muttered. But she couldn’t take her eyes off of the mirror.
”
”
Serena Valentino (Fairest of All (Villains, #1))
“
If you give me the name of the contraceptive shot you had, I will source for more of them. I am keen that nothing interrupts our enjoyment of each other.” His tone indicated the understatement of the millennium.
“It’s called Depo-Provera. It’s supposed to last three months or so, and Paul has a few more doses.” When he’d injected me, I’d said, “The idea of living another three months feels far-fetched right now.” He’d replied, “Better safe than sorry, huh?”
Aric nodded. “I will be on the lookout for it.”
Aric raised a brow at that. Then, seeming to make a decision, he eased me aside to get out of the bed. “I have something for you.” As he strode to our closet, I gawked at the sight of his flawless body.
The return view was even more rewarding.
He sat beside me and handed me a small jewelry box. “I want you to have this.”
I opened the box, finding a gorgeous gold ring, engraved with runes that called to mind his tattoos. An oval of amber adorned the band. Beautiful. The warm color reminded me of his eyes whenever he was pleased.
“My homeland was famous for amber—from pine.” He slipped the ring on my finger, and it fit perfectly. Holding my gaze, he said, “We are wed now.”
First priest I find, I’m goan to marry you. Jack’s words. I recalled the love blazing from his gray gaze before I stifled the memory. “Aric, th-this is so beautiful. Thank you.”
The symbol of his parents’ marriage had been derived from trees. Another waypoint.
”
”
Kresley Cole (Arcana Rising (The Arcana Chronicles, #4))
“
Lucifer Sansfoi
Varlet Sansfoi
Omer Perdiu
I.B.Perdie
Billy Perdy
I'll unwind your
guts from Durham
to Dover
and bury em
in Clover--
Your psalms I'll 'ave
engraved
in your toothbone--
Your victories
nilled--
You jailed under
under a woman's skirt
of stone--
Stone blind woman
with no guts
and only a scale--
Your thoughts & letters
Shandy'd about
in Beth
(Gaelic for grave)
Your philosophies
run up your nose
again--
Your confidences
and essays bandied
in ballrooms
from switchblade
to switchblade
--Your final
duel with
sledge hammers--
Your essential secret twinned
to buttercups
& dying--
Your guide to 32
European cities
scabbed in Isaiah
--Your red beard
snobbed in
Dolmen ruins
in the editions
of the Bleak--
Your saints and
Consolations bereft
--Your handy volume
rolled into
an urn--
And your father
And mother besmeared
at thought of you
th'unspent begotless
crop of worms
--You lay
there, you
queen for a
day, wait
for the "fun-
sucked frogs"
to carp at you
Your sweety beauty
discovered by No Name
in its hidingplace
till burrs
Part from you
from lack
of issue,
sinew, all
the rest--
Gibbering quiver
graveryard Hoo!
The hospital
that buries
you
be Baal,
the digger
Yorick,
& the shoveler
groom--
My rosy tomatoes
pop squirting
from your awful
rotten grave--
Your profile,
erstwhile
Garboesque,
mistook by earth-
eels for some
fjord to
Sheol--
And your timid
voice box
strangled
by lie-hating
earth
forever.
May the plighted
Noah-clouds
dissolve in grief of you--
May Red clay
be your center,
& woven into necks,
of hogs, boars,
booters & pilferers
& burned down
with Stalin, Hitler
& the rest--
May you bite
your lip that
you cannot
meet with God--
or
Beat me to a pub
--Amen
The Almoner,
his cup hat
no bottom,
nor I
a brim.
Devil, get thee
back
to the russet caves.
”
”
Jack Kerouac (Scattered Poems)
“
Reaching into his sporran, he pulled out a small bundle wrapped in fine linen. “I want to give ye somethin’, somethin’I want ye to wear this day.”Carefully, he unfolded the linen and held his hand out to her.
Josephine’s eyes widened with curiosity and joy. “’Tis beautiful, Graeme!”
“It be a brooch that each MacAulay lad receives when he turns six and ten. I want ye to have it.”
Josephine carefully took it and studied it closely. Made of pewter, in the center of the brooch were two hands, one decidedly masculine, the other feminine. The masculine hand held the feminine hand in his palm. In the center of her palm was a tiny ruby. To one side, the circle had been engraved to look like stars twinkling near a crescent moon. On the other were the words aeterna devotione. Eternal devotion.
Tears filled her eyes as she looked into his. “Ye want me to have this?”
“Aye, I do, Joie,”he said as he placed a kiss on her forehead. “Me great-great-great grandfather presented a brooch just like this to his wife, me great-great-great grandmum. But no’until the first anniversary of their weddin’day. ’Twas a symbol of the great love they had found with one another. ’Tis tradition for the MacAulay men to only give their brooch to a woman who has stolen their heart, a woman they love and trust above all else.”
Tears trailed down her cheeks, her heart beating so rapidly she was certain it would burst through her breastbone at any moment.
“I do no’quite understand how it happened, or how it happened so quickly, Joie, but it has. Amorem in corde meo ut arctius coccino colloeandus arctius ideo astra,”Graeme said first in Latin and then again in Gaelic, “Toisc go bhfuil do ghrá eitseáilte isteach i mo chroí i corcairdhearg, mar sin tá sé eitseáilte amonst na réaltaí.”He placed a tender kiss on her cheek. “As yer love be etched into me heart in crimson, so it be etched amongst the stars,”he told her. “As me grandda said those words to me grandmum all those many years ago, I say them to ye.
”
”
Suzan Tisdale (Isle of the Blessed)
“
Another day, sheltering beneath trees in a rain-shower, I uncovered a doorway long obliterated by undergrowth. After pulling shrubbery aside, I stepped inside a long deserted summerhouse, fronted by cracked marble columns and ironwork, the rear extending deep into the hillside. Though still filthy, even after I cleared away the tenacious vines, the windowpanes gave sufficient greenish light for me to sketch indoors. In a cobwebbed corner stood a gardener's burner that must once have coaxed oranges or other delicate shrubs to life. With that alight, I found a chair and sat with my shawl muffled around me as I sketched.
The marble statues that lined the walls were fine copies of the Greek masters, with muscular limbs and serene faces, though sadly disfigured with a blueish-green patina. As an exercise, I copied a figure of a handsome boy, admiring the sculptor's rendering of tensed muscle, the body frozen just an instant before extending in action. My mind drifted to Michael, the uncertainty hanging over us, my urges to please him, my need to move beyond this stupid impasse. As I sketched the statue's blind eyes I half-heartedly followed his line of sight.
I stood and looked more closely at the statue. "What are you looking at?" I said out loud. A green stain blotted the boy's cheek, ugly but also strangely beautiful, for the color was a peacock's viridian. For the first time I noticed the description, "HARPOCRATES- SILENCE", engraved on the pediment, and had a vague recollection of a Roman boy-god who personified that virtue. He held one index finger raised coyly to his lips, while his other hand pointed towards a low arch in the wall. I paced over to the spot at which he pointed. The niche was filled with gardener's trellis that I removed with rising excitement. Behind stood an oak doorway set low in the wall. As I lifted the latch, it opened onto a blast of chilly darkness. Lighting the stub of a candle at the stove, I propped the door open and ventured inside.
At once I knew this was no gardeners' store, but another tunnel burrowing into the hillside. Setting forth with the excitement of new discovery, my footsteps rang out and my breath fogged before me in clouds. The place had a mossy, mineral smell, and save for the dripping of water, was silent. Though at first the tunnel ran straight, it soon descended an incline, and my feet splashed into muddy puddles. Who, I wondered, had last passed through that door?
”
”
Martine Bailey (A Taste for Nightshade)
“
There was only one thing in the room that was different.
For a moment or so he couldn't see what the one thing that was different was, because it too was covered in a film of disgusting dust. Then his eyes caught it and stopped.
It was next to a battered old television on which it was only possible to watch Open University Study Courses, because if it tried to show anything more exciting it would break down.
It was a box.
Arthur pushed himself up on his elbows and peered at it.
It was a grey box, with a kind of dull lustre to it. It was a cubic grey box, just over a foot on a side. It was tied with a single grey ribbon, knotted into a neat bow on the top.
He got up, walked over and touched it in surprise. Whatever it was was clearly gift-wrapped, neatly and beautifully, and was waiting for him to open it.
Cautiously, he picked it up and carried it back to the bed. He brushed the dust off the top and loosened the ribbon. The top of the box was a lid, with a flap tucked into the body of the box.
He untucked it and looked into the box. In it was a glass globe, nestling in fine grey tissue paper. He drew it out, carefully. It wasn't a proper globe because it was open at the bottom, or, as Arthur realized turning it over, at the top, with a thick rim. It was a bowl. A fish bowl.
It was made of the most wonderful glass perfectly transparent, yet with an extraordinary silver-grey quality as if crystal and slate had gone into its making.
Arthur slowly turned it over and over in his hands. It was one of the most beautiful objects he had ever seen, but he was entirely perplexed by it. He looked into the box, but other than the tissue paper there was nothing. On the outside of the box there was nothing.
He turned the bowl round again. It was wonderful. It was exquisite. But it was a fish bowl.
He tapped it with his thumbnail and it rang with a deep and glorious chime which was sustained for longer than seemed possible, and when at last it faded seemed not to die away but to drift off into other worlds, as into a deep sea dream.
Entranced, Arthur turned it round yet again, and this time the light from the dusty little bedside lamp caught it at a different angle and glittered on some fine abrasions on the fish bowl's surface. He held it up, adjusting the angle to the light, and suddenly saw clearly the finely engraved shapes of words shadowed on the glass.
"So Long," they said, "and Thanks ..."
And that was all. He blinked, and understood nothing.
For fully five more minutes he turned the object round and around, held it to the light at different angles, tapped it for its mesmerizing chime and pondered on the meaning of the shadowy letters but could find none. Finally he stood up, filled the bowl with water from the tap and put it back on the table next to the television. He shook the little Babel fish from his ear and dropped it, wriggling, into the bowl. He wouldn't be needing it any more, except for
watching foreign movies
”
”
Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4))
“
From an essay on early reading by Robert Pinsky:
My favorite reading for many years was the "Alice" books. The sentences had the same somber, drugged conviction as Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, an inexplicable, shadowy dignity that reminded me of the portraits and symbols engraved on paper money. The books were not made of words and sentences but of that smoky assurance, the insistent solidity of folded, textured, Victorian interiors elaborately barricaded against the doubt and ennui of a dreadfully God-forsaken vision. The drama of resisting some corrosive, enervating loss, some menacing boredom, made itself clear in the matter-of-fact reality of the story. Behind the drawings I felt not merely a tissue of words and sentences but an unquestioned, definite reality.
I read the books over and over. Inevitably, at some point, I began trying to see how it was done, to unravel the making--to read the words as words, to peek behind the reality. The loss entailed by such knowledge is immense. Is the romance of "being a writer"--a romance perhaps even created to compensate for this catastrophic loss--worth the price? The process can be epitomized by the episode that goes with one of my favorite illustrations. Alice has entered a dark wood--"much darker than the last wood":
[S]he reached the wood: It looked very cool and shady. "Well, at any rate it's a great comfort," she said as she stepped under the trees, "after being so hot, to get into the--into the--into what?" she went on, rather surprised at not being able to think of the word. "I mean to get under the--under the--under this, you know!" putting her hand on the trunk of the tree. "What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it's got no name--why to be sure it hasn't!"
This is the wood where things have no names, which Alice has been warned about. As she tries to remember her own name ("I know it begins with L!"), a Fawn comes wandering by. In its soft, sweet voice, the Fawn asks Alice, "What do you call yourself?" Alice returns the question, the creature replies, "I'll tell you, if you'll come a little further on . . . . I can't remember here".
The Tenniel picture that I still find affecting illustrates the first part of the next sentence: So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice's arm. "I'm a Fawn!" it cried out in a voice of delight. "And dear me! you're a human child!" A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.
In the illustration, the little girl and the animal walk together with a slightly awkward intimacy, Alice's right arm circled over the Fawn's neck and back so that the fingers of her two hands meet in front of her waist, barely close enough to mesh a little, a space between the thumbs. They both look forward, and the affecting clumsiness of the pose suggests that they are tripping one another. The great-eyed Fawn's legs are breathtakingly thin. Alice's expression is calm, a little melancholy or spaced-out.
What an allegory of the fall into language. To imagine a child crossing over from the jubilant, passive experience of such a passage in its physical reality, over into the phrase-by-phrase, conscious analysis of how it is done--all that movement and reversal and feeling and texture in a handful of sentences--is somewhat like imagining a parallel masking of life itself, as if I were to discover, on reflection, that this room where I am writing, the keyboard, the jar of pens, the lamp, the rain outside, were all made out of words.
From "Some Notes on Reading," in The Most Wonderful Books (Milkweed Editions)
”
”
Robert Pinsky
“
engraved rim. “It’s beautiful.” “He’ll probably melt it down.” “No,” she breathed,
”
”
Lauren Royal (The Duke's Reluctant Bride (Sweet Chase Brides, #3))
“
Is that the Crystal Palace? Oh, it must be. It’s so beautiful—much more so than the engravings I’ve seen.” The building, which covered an area of more than nine acres, housed an international show of art and science called the Great Exhibition. Win had read about it in the French newspapers, which had aptly termed the exhibition one of the great wonders of the world. “How long since it was completed?” she asked, her step quickening as they headed toward the glittering building. “Not quite a month.” “Have you been inside? Have you seen the exhibits?” “I’ve visited once,” Merripen said, smiling at her eagerness. “And I saw a few of the exhibits, but not all. It would take three days or more to look at everything.” “Which part did you go to?” “The machinery court, mostly.” “I do wish I could see even a small part of it,” she said wistfully, watching the throngs of visitors exiting and entering the remarkable building. “Won’t you take me?” “You wouldn’t have time to see anything. It’s already afternoon. I’ll bring you tomorrow.” “Now. Please.” She tugged impatiently on his arm. “Oh, Kev, don’t say no.” As Merripen looked down at her, he was so handsome that she felt a pleasant little ache at the pit of her stomach. “How could I say no to you?” he asked softly.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
“
George Sand, dreaming beside a path of yellow sand, saw life flowing by. “What is more beautiful than a road?” she wrote. “It is the symbol and the image of an active, varied life” (Consuelo, vol. II, p. 116). Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.
”
”
Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)
“
One of Brown’s best monograph sketches, for example, narrates the tragedy of Charles Stull, a deaf and mute man from Philadelphia who decided to cross the Oregon Trail, alone and on foot, during the peak emigration year of 1852. Stull died of cholera at Castle Creek, just west of Ash Hollow. He was found by the members of a passing wagon train, who examined his body and found $2.75 in his pockets, along with a certificate attesting to his graduation from the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and Dumb in Philadelphia. I learned from Brown’s account how crowded the trail was that year, and new details about the cholera plagues. Brown also portrayed how early-nineteenth-century educators and philanthropists founded schools for the deaf and circulated beautifully illustrated pamphlets on sign language. Stull was an exemplary product of that era. He was one of the first students at the Philadelphia school for the deaf, and he and his brother, an engraver, published one of the first sign-language manuals, an illustrated broadsheet titled An Alphabet for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb. The
”
”
Rinker Buck (The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey)
“
Fifty years earlier, before its sandstone blocks were carried off to serve as the foundations of a factory in a nearby town, the ruins of a little temple had stood upon that hill. And it was there, in the footings of a vanished temple, by the remnants of a prehistoric shrine, that Quibell and Green uncovered a vast agglomeration of courtly objects, a cache such as had not been seen before and has never since been equalled in all of Egypt: a pair of beautiful life-sized pharaonic statues made of sheets of beaten copper; a golden image of a hawk with glittering obsidian eyes still standing in its ancient shrine; two splendidly engraved cosmetic palettes; some prehistoric slaughtering knives; a remarkable collection of stone vases; a heap of mace heads piled like potatoes, some of which were vividly engraved in a manner similar to the cosmetic palettes. And in amongst all this, suffused by ground-water and penetrated by the roots of thorn and halfa grass, lay a mass of ivories which, Quibell remarked, ‘resembled potted salmon’, but on inspection proved to be hundreds of separate and delicately carved objects from the time of the first kings but which were so cemented and decayed that they are still under restoration to this day.
”
”
John Romer (A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid)
“
A book, cover open, the first page is magic,
light filtering through a forest of leaves, each gray stroke subtle perfection blended beautifully, something moves, stirring in my depths, water flows from the second page,
pouring out around me until I’m swimming,
tossed back and forth from rock to rock, along the monotone rivers bumpy edges, page three is stark white, its emptiness echoes inside me, reverberations making their way up to silence what’s bouncing around in my head, fingers follow fingers, turning and turning and turning, till I near the end of the line, at last admitting the journey is over, yet another path is open, hidden in plain sight, pages releasing their hold on one another to reveal the treasure, and lead me to what I had no idea I was seeking, bodies folded into one under silken skin lips and hands, and my heartbeat hammering in my chest, fire burning in my cheeks, along with something more, something new, terrifying and strong, with one final turn a name burns itself into my brain, letters forever engraved, who would have thought, someone already knows what bounces round my head, in sudden hast, the flock returns to its pasture, grazing on gossip and sugary smothered breakfast, as I quietly fade into the background, a wolf desperate to be a sheep, my discovery hides out of sight, waiting to serve as a catalyst, there’s more than one of us here.
”
”
Alexander C Eberhart
“
A book, cover open, the first page is magic, light filtering through a forest of leaves, each gray stroke subtle perfection blended beautifully, something moves, stirring in my depths, water flows from the second page, pouring out around me until I’m swimming, tossed back and forth from rock to rock, along the monotone rivers bumpy edges, page three is stark white, its emptiness echoes inside me, reverberations making their way up to silence what’s bouncing around in my head, fingers follow fingers, turning and turning and turning, till I near the end of the line, at last admitting the journey is over, yet another path is open, hidden in plain sight, pages releasing their hold on one another to reveal the treasure, and lead me to what I had no idea I was seeking, bodies folded into one under silken skin lips and hands, and my heartbeat hammering in my chest, fire burning in my cheeks, along with something more, something new, terrifying and strong, with one final turn a name burns itself into my brain, letters forever engraved, who would have thought, someone already knows what bounces round my head, in sudden hast, the flock returns to its pasture, grazing on gossip and sugary smothered breakfast, as I quietly fade into the background, a wolf desperate to be a sheep, my discovery hides out of sight, waiting to serve as a catalyst, there’s more than one of us here.
”
”
Alexander C. Eberhart (There Goes Sunday School (There Goes Sunday School #1))
“
Are we just going to take it? Without even Chaol’s permission?” Elide chewed on her lip. Aelin snickered. “Let’s consider ourselves swords-for-hire. And as such, we have fees that need to be paid.” She hefted a round, golden shield, its edges beautifully engraved with a motif of waves. Also Asterion-made, judging by the craftsmanship. Likely for the Lord of Anielle—the Lord of the Silver Lake. “So, we’ll take what we’re owed for today’s battle, and spare His Lordship the task of having to come down here himself.” Gods, he loved her.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
“
As the handsome guardian’s hand closed around my neck now, his beautifully engraved gauntlet reflecting the glare of the twin suns overhead like a golden mirror, it was a miracle I didn’t crack open and yield my secrets like a piece of overripe fruit.
”
”
Callie Hart (Quicksilver (Fae & Alchemy, #1))
“
Engrave beautiful and delightful thoughts in your mind. Forgive, let go, be good and keep positive. The Universe is after all a lovely place to be in and it will take care of you. It will bestow you with all the happiness that you can imagine because what you draw on the canvas of your mind, comes to picture.
”
”
Sanchita Pandey (Voyage to Happiness!)
“
Blake took great pride in his skill: "I defy any man to cut cleaner strokes than I do, or rougher when I please." But he also acknowledged that "engraving is eternal work.... I curse and bless engraving alternately because it takes so much time and is so intractable, though capable of such beauty and perfection.
”
”
Leo Damrosch (Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake)
“
It’s so beautiful. It has our initials,” she said, running her fingertip over the engraving.
“You know me,” I half joked. “Any way I can get my name on you.”
She looked up. I felt her hazel eyes on my face. “I love you.
”
”
Cambria Hebert (#Hater (Hashtag, #2))
“
In the middle of April 1945, we paid for three spaces on a truck, that would take a few families to the border. The night before we left, all three knapsacks ready, we looked around the house: the furniture in the dining room and bedroom, all brought by the parents from Vienna, the beautiful grandfather clock that had to be wound once a month - all these were part of our lives. Father, without saying a word, opened the clock, cut through the spring, took the two beautifully engraved, gilded weights and threw them in the garbage. He did not want anybody to enjoy that clock, that was brought from Vienna in 1918 and was chiming the quarter, half and the hours for our entire life, in good times and bad. It was the only spiteful act that I ever saw him perform, this quiet, gentle man.
”
”
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
“
Hate nothing or no one. Hatred makes you blind to see the real beauty in things or people. When you live your life through hate, your heart will get heavier by the increasing number of engraved ill feelings that in turn will make your brain process only actions of odium.
”
”
John Taskinsoy
“
I dreamed a dream that I missed you
I longed for you, desired you, wanted you
like the sun playing hide and seek with the clouds, both travel across the sky, in opposite directions
emotions rose and fell, I found you in my heart
flowing and falling like a high waterfall
aluminated by a rainbow, flying birds
the mist rising from the impact of the waterfall
I found myself with myself
thinking beautiful thoughts of you
you don’t need to know all my thoughts
my heart asks no permission to love
love is my own to give to who I want
you are the inspiration behind these words
that my heart and soul write here
but I would never name you
for your name is invisibly engraved
in each word that is written here
I love you
”
”
Kenan Hudaverdi
“
O SON OF MAN!
Veiled in My immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of My essence, I knew My love for thee; therefore I created thee, have engraved on thee Mine image and revealed to thee My beauty.
O SON OF MAN!
I loved thy creation, hence I created thee. Wherefore, do thou love Me, that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of life.
O SON OF BEING!
Love Me, that I may love thee. If thou lovest Me not, My love can in no wise reach thee. Know this, O servant.
O SON OF BEING!
Thy Paradise is My love; thy heavenly home, reunion with Me. Enter therein and tarry not. This is that which hath been destined for thee in Our kingdom above and Our exalted dominion"
- Baháʼu'lláh, Hidden Words, Arabic verses 3-6
”
”
Bahaullah
“
I have four pets,’ Bjørnar Nicolaisen tells me at 69.31°N, ‘two cats and two sea eagles. I feed them all together on the shore, there by the throne, with the best fish in the world!’ He gives a huge laugh, and points east through the window of his living room: snow-filled fields sloping away to a rocky beach that borders a fjord several miles in width. Steel-blue water in the fjord, choppy where the currents are running. Far across the fjord, ranks of smooth-snowed peaks gleam in the late sunlight. They are shaped more wildly than any mountains I have ever seen before. Witches’ hats and shark fins and jabbing fingers, all polished white as porcelain. I cannot see a throne on the shore, though. ‘Here, try these.’ He hands me a pair of binoculars. Black leather-clad barrels, weathered in places to brown. Polished eye-pieces – and a Nazi eagle engraved into the left-hand barrel-back. ‘Wehrmacht-issue,’ says Bjørnar. ‘Beautiful lenses. An officer’s. When my father was dying, he asked me what I wanted from his possessions. “One thing only,” I told him, “the binoculars you took from the Germans.”‘ I lift the binoculars and the shoreline leaps to my eyes, close enough to touch. Calibrated cross-hairs float in my vision. I pan right along the beach. Nothing. I switch back left. Yes, there, a chair of some kind – but six or seven feet tall, built from driftwood lashed and nailed together. It looks like something the ironborn of Westeros might have made. ‘I take the eagles a cod or a saithe whenever I come back from a good day’s fishing. I feed them by my chair, there.’ ‘Bjørnar, you are the only person I know who counts sea eagles among his pets.’ ‘I am more of a cat person,’ Bjørnar replies. ‘Than a dog person or than an eagle person?’ ‘Than a people person!’ Bjørnar laughs and laughs – a deep, explosive laugh coming from far inside his chest.
”
”
Robert Macfarlane (Underland: A Deep Time Journey)
“
But he tried out the dagger, and it changed to a nice silvery sword, beautiful and ornate. He’d expected a little engraving of Rua making a rude gesture. And of course as he thought about it, that exact thing appeared on the blade. Huh. This offered a ton of possibilities.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Dawnshard (The Stormlight Archive, #3.5))
“
Curve of buttocks and bare shoulders, diaphanous fabric skimming over full, rounded breasts, a gentle swell of belly. Fertile and feminine. Curves and plumpness artfully displayed in a glorification
of womanhood.
”
”
Lisa Medved (The Engraver's Secret)
“
You were almost a child then, a bonny child, but untried. But now I can see the dear lines that time and care and pain and sickness and trouble and poverty have engraved on your face, and they have only made you more lovely. I think it’ll be like that in heaven, Margaret, we’ll see the lines that life has put upon us; in some it will have cut away all the faults and mistakes and follies, and there will be little left, but with those who have been faithful in the testings, it will show up a wondrous beauty!
”
”
Grace Livingston Hill (The Strange Proposal)
“
A magnitude 9.2 earthquake,” he said. “When something that powerful occurs, the Earth moves on its axis. So many people, all over Tohoku, were looking up at the sky on that night, filled with intense feelings. And looking at the stars, I became aware of the universe, the infinite space all around and above us. I felt as if I was looking into the universe, and I was conscious of the earthquake as something that had taken place within that vast expanse of empty space. And I began to understand that this was all part of a whole. Something enormous had happened. But whatever it was, it was entirely natural; it had happened as one of the mechanisms of the universe. “It’s engraved in my mind: the pitiless snow, and the beautiful shining, starry sky, and all those countless dead bodies drifting onto the beach. Perhaps this sounds pretentious, but I realized that when I began my work, giving support to people whose lives had been destroyed, I had to attend to the hearts of human beings and their suffering and anguish. But I also
”
”
Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)
“
the Chairman of the Committee would present to each investigator a large, very lovely wooden plaque with a beautifully engraved brass plate. The investigator’s name was elegantly etched in and, below it, was the notation that he had provided “outstanding service” in the investigation.
”
”
Gaeton Fonzi (The Last Investigation: What Insiders Know about the Assassination of JFK)
“
I am Hansje, born and bred in the north Netherlands where I bathed from age one in lakes, river and cold-water outdoor pools. Here in Warwickshire, where I have lived for some thirty-three years, I am among other things a swimmer, and if you ever wish to swim in the beautiful Avon, then do tell me and I will show you to the best and secret places. I have never experienced the profound sense of loss of someone I have never met as when I learnt that Roger had died. Many sentences in each of his books are as if engraved in me, find a resting place, a recognition, they are magnifying glass, lens and microscope to the natural world, a watery surface through which I look to see the earth clarified.
”
”
Robert Macfarlane (Landmarks)
“
His favorite aspect was an engraving above the door in a room with mulberry fruit-and-leaf wallpaper; the room was on the ground floor with large windows set into the back wall that made it seem almost part of the garden it overlooked. The engraving read, TRUTH, BEAUTY, LIGHT, and Edward could not stop staring at it in wonder and saying, "You see, this house was meant for me.
”
”
Kate Morton (The Clockmaker's Daughter)
“
When Daryl and I began a new life together at Mulberry Hill I knew as everyone knows that our earthly stay is short but it was not yet a truth engraved on my heart as it is today. Vita brevis... just words written up on a wall. Watch your step. No smoking. Life is short. Life at this moment seemed as infinite as the quiet evening sky and I was filled with a sense of continuity of all beautiful things.
”
”
Joan Lindsay (Time without clocks)