“
Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (Fairyland, #3))
“
Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.
”
”
Billy Collins (Picnic, Lightning)
“
Its more than a simple belief that there is good and that it should fight the evil in the world. It's a personification of Light and Darkness at their most elemental level, as forces that are so absorbed with themselves that one cannot exist without the other though they constantly try to consume one another. One of the earliest repersentations of Light and Darkness was of Light being a massive black bull and Darkness being an enormous white bull.
”
”
P.C. Cast (Burned (House of Night, #7))
“
It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they
feel the black cold of chaos.
”
”
Mary Renault (The Bull from the Sea (Theseus, #2))
“
The man in black hustled down to the wreckage, used a rock to smash the window glass, then pulled out his Raging Bull Casull .454. Before he fired a round, the woman pulled down her mask and opened her eyes. With chilling calm, she said deliberately, “God will damn your soul. Think before you make a decision that will stand for eternity.”
”
”
John M Vermillion (Packfire (Simon Pack, #9))
“
Retail therapy—usually one of my first resorts—wasn’t working; I felt like a cat that smelled pit bull.
”
”
M.L.N. Hanover (Vicious Grace (The Black Sun's Daughter, #3))
“
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds, and sharks.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
“
One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on foot / (because my truck wheels were glued / in deep mud once again), / I walked straight into / the waiting non-arms of a snake, / its tan beaded-bag skin / studded with black diamonds.
Up it coiled to speak to me a eye level. / Imagine! that sleek finger / rising out of the land's palm / and coiling faster than a Hindu rope. / The thrill of a bull snake / startled in the morning / when the mesas lie pooled / in a custard of light / kept me bright than ball lightning all day.
Praise leapt first to mind / before flight or danger, / praise that knows no half-truth, and pardons all.
”
”
Diane Ackerman (I Praise My Destroyer: Poems)
“
Bull. Fucking. Shit. He makes you comfortable.” “What’s wrong with comfortable?” “Comfortable would never set you on fire.” “Maybe I don’t want to burn.” “We all want to burn, Mad. It is dangerous, ergo, we want it.
”
”
L.J. Shen (The Devil Wears Black)
“
New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.
Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life
Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines.
Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored,
The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree
Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning.
See your rivers stirring with musk alligators
And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens.
Just open your eyes to the April rainbow
And your eyes, especially your ears, to God
Who in one burst of saxophone laughter
Created heaven and earth in six days,
And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.
”
”
Léopold Sédar Senghor (The Collected Poetry (CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French))
“
How old are you?'
The question startled him. 'Earth and Air. There are times you are no more comfortable a companion than I am. The answer to that serves no conceivable purpose, and I refuse to give it to you.'
When I was a kid I read Black Beauty. There were horse-drawn cabs in that. Are you that old?'
Older, older, older. I shall not tell you, so you may as well leave off, my primrose.'
She snorted. 'I think that means I should give up. You've started sweet-talking.'
I am torn,' the phouka said, grinning, 'between responding, 'Oh, absolutely!' and 'What do you mean, started?'' He grabbed her hand, dropped a kiss on the knuckles, and loped across the street. Eddi felt the touch of his mouth on her hand for an inexplicably long time.
”
”
Emma Bull (War for the Oaks)
“
Scholars of the Therin Collegium, from their comfortable position well inland, could tell you that the wolf sharks of the Iron Sea are beautiful and fascinating creatures, their bodies more packed with muscle than any bull, their abrasive hide streaked with every color from old-copper green to stormcloud black. Anyone actually working the waterfront in Camorr and on the nearby coast could tell you that wolf sharks are big aggressive bastards that like to jump.
”
”
Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1))
“
Ser Jorah was not a handsome man. He had a neck and shoulders like a bull, and coarse black hair covered his arms and chest so thickly that there was none left for his head.
”
”
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
“
I watched bulls bred to cows, watched mares foal, I saw life come from the egg and the multiplicative wonders of mudholes and ponds, the jell and slime of life shimmering in gravid expectation. Everywhere I looked, life sprang from something not life, insects unfolded from sacs on the surface of still waters and were instantly on prowl for their dinner, everything that came into being knew at once what to do and did it, unastonished that it was what it was, unimpressed by where it was, the great earth heaving up bloodied newborns from every pore, every cell, bearing the variousness of itself from every conceivable substance which it contained in itself, sprouting life that flew or waved in the wind or blew from the mountains or stuck to the damp black underside of rocks, or swam or suckled or bellowed or silently separated in two.
”
”
E.L. Doctorow (Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories)
“
I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees.
”
”
Peter S. Beagle (The Folk of the Air)
“
The worst part about being a prosecutor, in Matt Houlihan's opinion, 2as that even when you won, you didnt. The world was too black and white for that. ... It was like securing the bull after he'd careened through the china shop - yes, you could pen him for a whole, but you still incurred the cost of the mess he'd left in his wake.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Salem Falls)
“
Night goes away, a black bull--
body heavy with mourning and fear and mystery--
it has been bellowing horribly, monstrously,
in genuine fear of all the dead;
and day arrives, a young child
who wants trust, and love, and jokes,
--a child who somewhere
far away, in secret places
where what ends meets what is starting,
has been playing a moment
on some meadow or other
of light and darkness
with the bull who is running away...
”
”
Juan Ramón Jiménez
“
Asterion
Age 3
Mommy has a little calf.
Little calf.
Little calf.
Mommy has a little calf.
His nose is black as tar.
She calls her calf Asterion.
Asterion.
Asterion.
That's my name-Asterion.
I'm Ruler of the Stars.
”
”
David Elliott (Bull)
“
What do you want?” he growled.
“I just want to talk.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “You don't have to try to scare me.”
He kept a straight face, and his tone was seductively low. "There's hardly any room for fear when you're so bloody turned-on.”
A flash of shock hit me at his audacity. His eyes lowered to my body, but he never moved away.
“Ah, there's anger now,” he said coolly, “and a bit of embarrassment.”
He was reading me — reading my colors! And I couldn't see his at all. I felt stripped bare before him, vulnerable. I concentrated on why I'd gone there to begin with.
“I know what we are now.” I wished my voice weren't shaky.
“Congratulations.” He stood over me for a second more, savoring his power, no doubt, and then walked away, tossing the knife in the general direction of the dartboard and hitting the bull's-eye. Never missing a beat, he swaggered to a white couch with oversize pillows. He fell back onto it, propping his big, black boots on the white cushions and lounging back with arms spread wide across the back of the sofa. He stared as if daring me to talk.
I had no idea what to say or do. I didn't know anymore why I'd come. Had I just wanted to barge in and say, Ha, I know what we are! and then demand information?
”
”
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Evil (Sweet, #1))
“
Over the next hundred years, more gold would be extracted from a single mine in the Black Hills (an estimated $1 billion) than from any other mine in the continental United States.
”
”
Nathaniel Philbrick (The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn)
“
and a giant demon with a black bull’s head towered in the middle of their room,
”
”
Cindy Pon (Serpentine (Serpentine, #1))
“
The white man, as one Indian said, “was in the Black Hills just like maggots”;10 wasicu, or “the greedy one” (literally, “he-who-takes-the-fat”),11 was the term the Lakota used to describe the miners, and it later became their term for whites in general. “The love of possessions is a disease with them,” said Sitting Bull, who was never behindhand in his contempt.
”
”
Peter Matthiessen (In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's War on the American Indian Movement)
“
Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930 Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
“
An old black bull threw back his head and bawled when the cows behind him didn't keep up, as if telling them the breakfast buffet was about to be spread, and he wasn't waiting for grace.
”
”
Carolyn Brown (The Trouble with Texas Cowboys (Burnt Boot, Texas, #2))
“
Where's my sister?"
"She's setting up the island we found tonight."
Galen shakes his head. "You slithering eel. You might have told me what you were up to."
Toraf laughs. "Oh sure. 'Hey, Galen, I need to borrow Emma for a few minutes so I can kiss her, okay?' Didn't see that going over very well."
"You think your surprise attack went over better?"
Toraf shrugs. "I'm satisfied."
"I could have killed you today."
"Yeah."
"Don't ever do that again."
"Wasn't planning on it. Thought it was real sweet of you to defend your sister's honor. Very brotherly." Toraf snickers.
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying."
Galen runs a hand through his hair. "I only saw Emma. I forgot all about Rayna."
"I know, idiot. That's why I let you hit me fifty-eight times. That's what I would do if someone kissed Rayna."
"Fifty-nine times."
"Don't get carried away, minnow. By the way, was Emma boiling mad or just a little heated? Should I keep my distance for a while?"
Galen snorts. "She laughed so hard I thought she'd pass out. I'm the one in trouble."
"Shocker. What'd you do?"
"The usual." Hiding his feelings. Blurting out the wrong thing. Acting like a territorial bull shark.
Toraf shakes his head. "She won't put up with that forever. She already thinks you only want to change her so she can become another of your royal subjects."
"She said that?" Galen scowls. "I don't know what's worse. Letting her think that, or telling her the truth about why I'm helping her to change."
"In my opinion, there's nothing to tell her unless she can actually change. And so far, she can't."
"You don't think she's one of us?"
Toraf shrugs. "Her skin wrinkles. It's kind of gross. Maybe she's some sort of superhuman. You know, like Batman."
Galen laughs. "How do you know about Batman?"
"I saw him on that black square in your living room. He can do all sorts of things other humans can't do. Maybe Emma is like him."
"Batman isn't real. He's just a human acting like that so other humans will watch him."
"Looked real to me."
"They're good at making it look real. Some humans spend their whole lives making something that isn't real look like something that is."
"Humans are creepier than I thought. Why pretend to be something you're not?"
Galen nods. To take over a kingdom, maybe? "Actually, that reminds me. Grom needs you."
Toraf groans. "Can it wait? Rayna's getting all cozy on our island right about now."
"Seriously. I don't want to know."
Toraf grins. "Right. Sorry. But you can see my point, right? I mean, if Emma were waiting for you-"
"Emma wouldn't be waiting for me. I wouldn't have left."
"Rayna made me. You've never hit me that hard before. She wants us to get along. Plus, there's something I need to tell you, but I didn't exactly get a change to."
"What?"
"Yesterday when we were practicing in front of your house, I sensed someone. Someone I don't know. I made Emma get out of the water while I went to investigate."
"And she listened to you?"
Toraf nods. "Turns out, you're the only one she disobeys.
”
”
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
“
Ars Poetica
I taught my words to love,
I showed them my heart
and would not give up until their syllables
did not start to beat.
I showed them trees
and what words wouldn't rustle
I hanged, without pity, from the branches.
In the end, words
needed to resemble both me
and the world.
Then
I came to me,
I braced myself between two banks
of a river,
to present a bridge,
a bridge between a bull's horn and grass,
between black stars of light and earth,
between the temple of a woman's head and a man's,
letting words travel over me
like racing cars, electric trains,
only so they could cross faster,
only so they would learn to transport the world,
from itself,
to itself.
”
”
Nichita Stănescu (Wheel With a Single Spoke: and Other Poems)
“
A favorite liberal taunt is to accuse conservatives of clinging to an idealized past. Poor, right-wing Americans vaguely sense the world is changing and now they’re lashing out. What about the idealized past liberals cling to? They all act as if they were civil rights foot soldiers constantly getting beat up by 500-pound southern sheriffs, while every twenty-year-old Republican today is treated as if he is on Team Bull Connor. At best, the struggle for civil rights was an intra-Democratic Party fight. More accurately, it was Republicans and blacks fighting Democrat segregationists and enablers.
”
”
Ann Coulter (Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama)
“
David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
“
As the track bends north-east, the ethereal sandstone disappears. The slopes turn black with granite, and the mountain's lower ridges break into unstable spikes and revetments. Their ribs are slashed in chiaroscuro, and their last outcrops pour towards the valley in the fluid, anthropomorphic shapes that pilgrims love. The spine and haunches of a massive stone beast, gazing at Kailas, are hailed as the Nandi bull, holy to Shiva; another rock has become the votive cake of Padmasambhava.
”
”
Colin Thubron (To a Mountain in Tibet)
“
The maester had taught him all the banners: the mailed fist of the Glovers, silver on scarlet; Lady Mormont’s black bear; the hideous flayed man that went before Roose Bolton of the Dreadfort; a bull moose for the Hornwoods; a battle-axe for the Cerwyns; three sentinel trees for the Tallharts; and the fearsome sigil of House Umber, a roaring giant in shattered chains.
”
”
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
“
The world was simpler in those days, Jaime thought, and men as well as swords were made of finer steel. Or was it only that he had been fifteen? They were all in their graves now, the Sword of the Morning and the Smiling Knight, the White Bull and Prince Lewyn, Ser Oswell Whent with his black humor, earnest Jon Darry, Simon Toyne and his Kingswood Brotherhood, bluff old Sumner Crakehall. And me, that boy I was … when did he die, I wonder? When I donned the white cloak? When I opened Aerys’s throat? That boy had wanted to be Ser Arthur Dayne, but someplace along the way he had become the Smiling Knight instead.
”
”
George R.R. Martin (A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold Pt. 2)
“
I didn’t know what he was yelling about, but he said he would handle it, and I was to have you report IMMEDIATELY. He also said I could smell when you were coming because you would be like a bourbon factory. He said you were a bull-necked, flat-nosed son of a bitch who would have no cap or raincoat because you didn’t have brains enough to wear them.
”
”
Gregory Boyington (Baa Baa Black Sheep: The True Story of the "Bad Boy" Hero of the Pacific Theatre and His Famous BlackSheep Squadron)
“
No – for themselves. They were all drunkards, but Anne was the worst of the lot. Branwell, who adored her, used to pretend to get drunk at the Black Bull in order to get gin for Anne. The landlord wouldn’t have let him have it if Branwell hadn’t built up – with what devotion, only God knows – that false reputation as a brilliant, reckless, idle drunkard. The landlord was proud to have young Mr Brontë in his tavern; it attracted custom to the place, and Branwell could get gin for Anne on tick – as much as Anne wanted. Secretly, he worked twelve hours a day writing “Shirley”, and “Villette” – and, of course, “Wuthering Heights”. I’ve proved all this by evidence from the three letters to old Mrs Prunty.
”
”
Stella Gibbons (Cold Comfort Farm)
“
Finally the bull charged, the horse leaders ran for the barrera, the picador hit too far back, and the bull got under the horse, lifted him, threw him onto his back.
Zurito watched. The monos, in their red shirts, running out to drag the picador clear. The picador, now on his feet, swearing and flopping his arms. Manuel and Hernandez standing ready with their capes. And the bull, the great, black bull, with a horse on his back, hooves dangling, the bridle caught in the horns. Black bull with a horse on his back, staggering short-legged, then arching his neck and lifting, thrusting, charging to slide the horse off, horse sliding down. Then the bull into a lunging charge at the cape Manuel spread for him.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (The Short Stories)
“
I’m the family oddball, you see. Not a black sheep, I haven’t done anything dreadful. They just don’t know what to do with me, exactly.
”
”
Emma Bull (War for the Oaks)
“
Bulls rampaged through the corridor below like a crowd of Black Friday bargain hunters,
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Tower of Nero (The Trials of Apollo, #5))
“
Never let the fear of striking out get in your way. Babe Ruth
”
”
Michael W. Covel (Trend Following: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear, and Black Swan Markets (Wiley Trading))
“
Seven long years I served for thee,
The glassy hill I clamb for thee,
The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee,
And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me.
”
”
Robert Chambers
“
wasn’t big or strong, but he acted like he was. He had eyes like a pit bull, and shaggy black hair, and he always dressed in expensive but sloppy clothes, like he wanted everybody to see how
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #2))
“
In my ears I have heard the words of Sitting Bull, telling me that white people are not to be trusted. But I have also heard the words of Black Kettle, who told us to reach out a hand of peace.
”
”
Kent Nerburn (Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder)
“
I have a plan,” she announced. “The last time you said that, we woke up in a Minotaur herd’s bull pen with no pants on.” She jostled my shoulder. “But we had fun. Right?” “They pierced my nose.
”
”
Hailey Edwards (Lie Down with Dogs (Black Dog, #2))
“
In the pit of the night, the blackness engulfing me would stretch to the very ends of eternity. I would hear the clattering of hooves and the huffing of breath through the bull’s snout and I would claw at the covers, desperately trying to bury myself and holding my breath until stars exploded against my tightly closed eyelids and I had to gasp for air, terrified of what I would see when I surfaced.
”
”
Jennifer Saint (Ariadne)
“
The little black dog dashed out and away down the street toward the beach. They got him back with difficulty but he continued to bark eagerly as if he were trying to tell his owners some thrilling secret.
”
”
Stephen W. Meader (Bat: The Story of a Bull Terrier)
“
XXIV.
And more than that - a furlong on - why, there!
What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
Or brake, not wheel - that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? With all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware
Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.
XXV.
Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood,
Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth
Desperate and done with; (so a fool finds mirth,
Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood
Changes and off he goes!) within a rood -
Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black dearth.
XXVI.
Now blotches rankling, coloured gay and grim,
Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss, or substances like boils;
Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him
Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim
Gaping at death, and dies while it recoils.
XXVII.
And just as far as ever from the end!
Naught in the distance but the evening, naught
To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon's bosom friend,
Sailed past, not best his wide wing dragon-penned
That brushed my cap - perchance the guide I sought.
XXVIII.
For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,
Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place
All round to mountains - with such name to grace
Mere ugly heights and heaps now stolen in view.
How thus they had surprised me - solve it, you!
How to get from them was no clearer case.
XXIX.
Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when -
In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then
Progress this way. When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts - you're inside the den.
XXX.
Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! those two hills on the right,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight;
While to the left a tall scalped mountain ... Dunce,
Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight!
XXXI.
What in the midst lay but the Tower itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart,
Built of brown stone, without a counterpart
In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf
Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf
He strikes on, only when the timbers start.
XXXII.
Not see? because of night perhaps? - why day
Came back again for that! before it left
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft:
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, -
Now stab and end the creature - to the heft!'
XXXIII.
Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers, my peers -
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
XXXIV.
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.
”
”
Robert Browning
“
In the quiet back streets of Lérida and Barbastro I seemed to catch a momentary glimpse, a sort of far-off rumour of the Spain that dwells in everyone's imagination. White sierras, goatherds, dungeons of the Inquisition, Moorish palaces, black winding trains of mules, grey olive trees and groves of lemons, girls in black mantillas, the wines of Málaga and Alicante, cathedrals, cardinals, bull-fights, gypsies, serenades—in short, Spain.
”
”
George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia)
“
Hello?' Horus spoke in my mind. 'Any intention of calling for help, or are you happy to die on your own?'
'Yeah,' I snapped back at him. 'The sarcasm is real helpful.'
Truthfully, I didn't think I had enough energy left to summon my avatar, even with Horus's help. My fight with the Apis Bull had nearly tapped me out, and that was before I got chased by an axe demon and kicked out of a window.
I could hear Bloodstained Blade stomping his way back down the stairs. I tried to rise and almost blacked out from the pain.
'A weapon,' I told Horus. 'I need a weapon.'
I reached into the Duat and pulled out an ostrich feather.
"Really?" I yelled
Horus didn't answer.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Serpent's Shadow (The Kane Chronicles, #3))
“
The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spread-eagled. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn. It was an invention of the night's or of the old-wives of the night - a fable, immemorially old - recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold and retold to the gnomic children in the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast - a tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and coloured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life. It was a night with a bull's mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded.
”
”
Mervyn Peake (Gormenghast (Gormenghast, #2))
“
(Again, don’t swallow that bull about “cancel culture.” “Cancellation” usually amounts to experiencing public pressure to be accountable and do better, feeling uncomfortable for a moment, and perhaps briefly losing a bag, while remaining rich and famous.)
”
”
Tamara Winfrey Harris (The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America)
“
When he was a child, he followed me like a shadow, the black bull-calf branded with our shame; he never let me forget him. He would have dogged me to the hunt, on shipboard, to the Summer Palace; he wept when I sent him back where he belonged. He would call me Father, and stare when he was silenced. I should have known he would destroy me. Yes, yes, a man might laugh; it has been as pat as an old song. I withheld the sacrifice, and it bred my death. If there were really gods, they could not have done better.
”
”
Mary Renault (The King Must Die (Theseus, #1))
“
Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.
Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.
”
”
John Steinbeck (Cannery Row (Cannery Row, #1))
“
I wondered what service a horse god wanted, and pictured myself combing his forelock, or putting ambrosia before him in golden bowls. But he was also Poseidon Bluehair, who raises storms; and the great black Earth Bull whom, as I had heard, the Cretans fed with youths and girls.
”
”
Mary Renault (The King Must Die (Theseus, #1))
“
My children,” Lik-Rifa growled, her voice like a mountain slide, like a
summer storm fractured with lightning, rumbling into the distance. A tremor
passed through her, from snout to tail, and then her shape was shimmering,
twisting and coiling like mist, shifting and changing, contracting, shrinking, until
a woman stood before Ilska and her kin. She was tall, taller than any man, at
least as big as the bull troll Elvar had slain on Iskalt Island. Her body was lean
and striated, skin pale and raw and scabbed, weeping pus. Blood oozed from
wounds. She was clothed in a tunic of grey, red-woven at the neck and hem, a
belt studded with gold about her waist and a dark cloak billowing about her like
wings. Her hair, black as jet, streaked with silver, was pulled back tightly, braids
woven into it. She had a sharply beautiful face. Red coals glowed in her eyes.
“What has become of my world, my children, my warbands?” she said, her
voice hard as the north wind, a tremor shivering through it. She looked around at
the battle-plain, the shapes of the long-dead become part of the landscape. Her
red eyes flickered to Ilska.
”
”
John Gwynne (The Shadow of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga, #1))
“
Camped somewhere deep in an impenetrable crag of the immense Powder River Country during the late autumn of 1856, more than likely in the shadow of the sacred Black Hills, one imagines the thirty-five-year-old Red Cloud stepping from his tepee to listen to the bugle of a bull elk in its seasonal rut. Around him women haul water from a crystalline stream as cottonwood smoke rises from scores of cook fires and coils toward a sky the color of brushed aluminum. The wind sighs, and a smile creases his face as he observes a pack of mounted teenagers collect wagers in preparation for the Moccasin Game, or perhaps a rough round of Shinny. His gaze follows the grace and dexterity of one boy in particular, a slender sixteen-year-old with lupine eyes. The boy is Crazy Horse, and the war leader of the Bad Faces makes a mental not to keep tabs on this one.
”
”
Bob Drury (The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend)
“
We live in Knossos Palace, the House of the Ax, and we never leave it. But from what he says, it is pretty big. It is old too—a thousand years, he says, as if anyone could count so many. He says Poseidon lives underneath it, deep in a cave, in the form of a great black bull. No one has ever seen him, he lives too far down; but when he shakes the earth he bellows. Lukos—that’s the Captain—has heard it himself and says no sound on earth is half so dreadful. And his deeds in Crete have been like his voice. Two or three times, in former ages, he has had the house down to the very ground. So he is a god they have to pay heed to; and that is how the bull-dance began.
”
”
Mary Renault (The King Must Die (Theseus, #1))
“
A great crowd of people were standing all round the Stone Table and though the moon was shining many of them carried torches which burned with evil-looking red flames and black smoke. But such people! Ogres with monstrous teeth, and wolves, and bull-headed men; spirits of evil trees and poisonous plants; and other creatures whom I won't describe because if I did the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book--
”
”
C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1))
“
By the 1770s, the Teton Sioux had overrun the Arikara, or Ree, on the Missouri River and made it as far west as the Black Hills, where they quickly ousted the Kiowa and the Crows. Over the next hundred years the Sioux continued to expand their territory, eventually forcing the Crows to retreat all the way to the Bighorn River more than two hundred miles to the west, while also carrying on raids to the north and south against the Assiniboine, Shoshone, Pawnee, Gros Ventre, and Omaha.
”
”
Nathaniel Philbrick (The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn)
“
Thanksgiving
My guy buys brie, a baguette, and cherry tomatoes with his food stamps. I buy firewood and wine. We go up the canyon and light a fire in a stone fire pit and sit in soft folding chairs and talk for hours, let the penny-colored pit bull walk against the river current. And as we sit, the tall granite walls of the canyon slowly purple to black, and the sky goes out, and the flames we're sitting by get brighter and warmer, until we begin to dwindle, and we douse them, and we go.
”
”
Rebecca Lindenberg (The Logan Notebooks (Mountain West Poetry Series))
“
Down in the earth court a man was standing, naked down from the neck; broad-bodied, thick-legged, thatched with black hair on chest and groin and shins, a-straddle before the sacred Labrys. His trunk glistened with the chrism a shaking old man and woman smeared on him with half-palsied hands. From the neck down he was man, and base; above the neck he was beast, and noble. Calm and lordly, long-horned and curly-browed, the splendid bull-mask of Daidalos gazed out through the sorry huddle with its grave crystal eyes.
”
”
Mary Renault (The King Must Die (Theseus, #1))
“
From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick on wood on the nearest structures, shading further in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from the center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but worse the sky instead--relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin.
”
”
Emma Bull (Bone Dance)
“
I don’t want a new band. I want to be a normal person.”
Carla’s dark eyes were very wide. “Oh,” she said.
“Hey,” Eddie smiled limply, “it’s not like you to miss a straight line.”
“Too easy,” Carla said with a shrug. Then she shook her head and made her black hair fly, and seemed to shake off her sorrow as well. “Give it time. You don’t remember how awful it is being normal.”
“Not as awful as being in InKline Plain.”
“Oh worse,” said Carla solemnly. “They make you sit at a desk all day and eat vending machine donuts, and your butt gets humongous.”
“Now that,” Eddie said, “is a job I can handle.”
“If you work hard, you get promoted to brownies.
”
”
Emma Bull (War for the Oaks)
“
If Marlboro Man was wrong, I didn’t want to be right.
Where would all of this lead? At times I asked myself and wondered. Despite having put my plans for Chicago on hold, despite my knowledge that trying to go one day without seeing Marlboro Man was futile, despite how desperately in love I knew I was, I still at times thought this might all just be a temporary glitch in my plans, a wild hair I needed to work out of my system before getting on with the rest of my life. Like I was at Romance Camp for a long, hot summer, playing the part of the cowgirl.
The time was drawing near, however, when Marlboro Man would take the bull by the horns and answer that question for me, once and for all.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.
”
”
Al Ries (The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR)
“
You mean to go out alone into this forest at night!" whispered Naomi, aghast. "Think of the lions!"
"I am thinking of them; but I'm thinking of some fat, greasy, black sultan too. I'd rather take a chance with the lion—he'd be sporting at least."
"It's all so horrible! Oh, why did I ever leave Hollywood!"
"D'you know it's a funny thing, Naomi, that a woman has to fear her own kind more than she does the beasts of the jungle. It sort o' makes one wonder if there isn't something wrong somewhere—it's hard to believe that a divine intelligence would create something in His own image that was more brutal and cruel and corrupt than anything else that He created. It kind of explains why some of the ancients worshipped snakes and bulls and birds. I guess they had more sense than we have.
”
”
Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and the Lion Man (Tarzan, #17))
“
it’s one of the great sunrises in all literature. Mark Twain: from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled-up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!
”
”
Ursula K. Le Guin (Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story)
“
A farmer had a vicious bull that took after anybody who tried to cross the field. One day a neighbor climbed the fence and was soon running for his life. This man was fast, though, and he got to a tree with the bull close behind. There was no time to climb the tree, so he led the bull in a chase around the tree. He finally was able to grab the bull by the tail. The bull was now at a disadvantage. He couldn’t catch the man and he couldn’t shake him from his tail. The more they ran the madder the bull got. He pawed up the earth and bellowed until you could hear him miles away. Finally, he broke into a dead run, the man still hanging onto his tail. "The neighbor, now dragging along behind, shouted at the bull, 'Darn you, who commenced this fuss?' "That’s our situation here,” summarized Lincoln. “It's our duty to settle this fuss at the earliest possible moment, no matter who commenced it”.
”
”
Rriiver Nyile (Abraham Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln Facts, Jokes and Quotes ( President's Day) (Black History Kids Series Book 3))
“
She wasn’t sure when she realized that she wasn’t alone. She’d heard a louder murmur from the crowd outside, but she hadn’t connected it with the door opening. She looked over her shoulder and saw Tate standing against the back wall. He was wearing one of those Armani suits that looked so splendid on his lithe build, and he had his trenchcoat over one arm. He was leaning back, glaring at the ceremony. Something was different about him, but Cecily couldn’t think what. It wasn’t the vivid bruise high up on his cheek where Matt had hit him. But it was something…Then it dawned on her. His hair was cut short, like her own. He glared at her.
Cecily wasn’t going to cower in her seat and let him think she was afraid to face him. Mindful of the solemnity of the occasion, she got up and joined Tate by the door.
“So you actually came. Bruises and all,” she whispered with a faintly mocking smile, eyeing the very prominent green-and-yellow patch on his jaw that Matt Holden had put there.
He looked down at her from turbulent black eyes. He didn’t reply for a minute while he studied her, taking in the differences in her appearance, too. His eyes narrowed on her short hair. She thought his eyelids flinched, but it might have been the light.
His eyes went back to the ceremony. He didn’t say another word. He didn’t really need to. He’d cut his hair. In his culture-the one that part of him still belonged to-cutting the hair was a sign of grief.
She could feel the way it was hurting him to know that the people he loved most in the world had lied to him. She wanted to tell him that the pain would ease day by day, that it was better to know the truth than go through life living a lie. She wanted to tell him that having a foot in two cultures wasn’t the end of the world. But he stood there like a painted stone statue, his jaw so tense that the muscles in it were noticeable. He refused to acknowledge her presence at all.
“Congratulations on your engagement, by the way,” she said without a trace of bitterness in her tone. “I’m very happy for you.”
His eyes met hers evenly. “That isn’t what you told the press,” he said in a cold undertone. “I’m amazed that you’d go to such lengths to get back at me.”
“What lengths?” she asked.
“Planting that story in the tabloids,” he returned. “I could hate you for that.”
The teenage sex slave story, she guessed. She glared back at him. “And I could hate you, for believing I would do something so underhanded,” she returned.
He scowled down at her. The anger he felt was almost tangible. She’d sold him out in every way possible and now she’d embarrassed him publicly, again, first by confessing to the media that she’d been his teenage lover-a load of bull if ever there was one. Then she’d compounded it by adding that he was marrying Audrey at Christmas. He wondered how she could be so vindictive. Audrey was sticking to him like glue and she’d told everyone about the wedding. Not that many people hadn’t read it already in the papers. He felt sick all over. He wouldn’t have Audrey at any price. Not that he was about to confess that to Cecily now, after she’d sold him out.
He started to speak, but he thought better of it, and turned his angry eyes back toward the couple at the altar.
After a minute, Cecily turned and went back to her seat. She didn’t look at him again.
”
”
Diana Palmer (Paper Rose (Hutton & Co. #2))
“
In the nineteen sixties and early seventies students wore buttons and headbands demanding equal rights for women, blacks, Native Americans and all oppressed minorities, an end to the war in Vietnam, the salvation of the rain forests and the planet in general. [...] College students boycotted class, taught in, rioted everywhere, dodged the draft, fled to Canada or Scandinavia. High school students came to school fresh from images of war on television news, men blown to bits in rice paddies, helicopters hovering, tentative soldiers of the Viet Cong blasted out of their tunnels, their hands behind their heads, lucky for the moment they weren’t blasted back in again, images of anger back home, marches, demonstrations, hell no we won’t go, sit-ins, teachins, students falling before the guns of the National Guard, blacks recoiling from Bull Connor’s dogs, burn baby burn, black is beautiful, trust no one over thirty, I have a dream and, at the end of it all, your President is not a crook.
[...]Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.
”
”
Frank McCourt ('Tis)
“
One day a young man stood at the foot of Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia, sugar town, 1882. Folded into his vest, a letter of reference. He had an idea that involved a railroad ticket and the millions of dead buffalo out west. If he could get those bones into railroad cars and ship them to Philadelphia, they could be heated in a sealed vessel at 700 degrees Celsius, which was 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, not easy to imagine. The super-heating would drive off the organic matter in the bones, leaving activated carbon, composed of tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and carbon. Bone charcoal. Bone black. Ivory black. Animal charcoal. Abaiser. Pigment black 9. Bone char. Carbo animalis. Buffalo black. This substance could be used to refine crude raw sugar processed from sugarcane, slave sugar, although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now. Bone char worked better than bull’s blood or egg whites or any other substance to bleach the sugar white. And the bones! The bones were everywhere, he’d heard, littering the ground, so thick that a farmer couldn’t plow without stacking them beside the fields. He went into
”
”
Louise Erdrich (The Mighty Red)
“
we have much to learn from the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 1960s. In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Dr. King launched a “fill the jails” campaign to desegregate downtown department stores and schools in Birmingham. But few local blacks were coming forward. Black adults were afraid of losing their jobs, local black preachers were reluctant to accept the leadership of an “Outsider,” and city police commissioner Bull Connor had everyone intimidated. Facing a major defeat, King was persuaded by his aide, James Bevel, to allow any child old enough to belong to a church to march. So on D-day, May 2, before the eyes of the whole nation, thousands of schoolchildren, many of them first graders, joined the movement and were beaten, fire-hosed, attacked by police dogs, and herded off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. The result was what has been called the “Children’s Miracle.” Inspired and shamed into action, thousands of adults rushed to join the movement. All over the country rallies were called to express outrage against Bull Connor’s brutality. Locally, the power structure was forced to desegregate lunch counters and dressing rooms in downtown stores, hire blacks to work downtown, and begin desegregating the schools. Nationally, the Kennedy administration, which had been trying not to alienate white Dixiecrat voters, was forced to begin drafting civil rights legislation as the only way to forestall more Birminghams. The next year as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer, activists created Freedom Schools because the existing school system (like ours today) had been organized to produce subjects, not citizens. People in the community, both children and adults, needed to be empowered to exercise their civil and voting rights. A mental revolution was needed. To bring it about, reading, writing, and speaking skills were taught through discussions of black history, the power structure, and building a movement. Everyone took this revolutionary civics course, then chose from more academic subjects such as algebra and chemistry. All over Mississippi, in church basements and parish halls, on shady lawns and in abandoned buildings, volunteer teachers empowered thousands of children and adults through this community curriculum. The Freedom Schools of 1964 demonstrated that when Education involves young people in making community changes that matter to them, when it gives meaning to their lives in the present instead of preparing them only to make a living in the future, young people begin to believe in themselves and to dream of the future.
”
”
Grace Lee Boggs (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)
“
Could I have something to drink?" Jake asked. His voice came out sounding furry and nasal. Both his mouth and the tissues in his abused nose were swelling up. He looked like someone who has gotten the worst of it in a nasty street-fight.
"Oh, yes," Tick-Tock replied judiciously. "You could. I'd say you certainly could. We have lots to drink, don't we, Copperhead?"
"Ar," said a tall, bespectacled man in a white silk shirt and a pair of black silk trousers. He looked like a college professor in a turn of the century Punch cartoon. "No shortage of po-ter-bulls here."
The Tick-Tock Man, once more seated at ease in his throne-like chair, looked humorously at Jake. "We have wine, beer, ale, and, of course, good old water. Sometimes that's all a body wants, isn't it? Cool, clear, sparkling water. How does that sound, cully?"
Jake's throat, which was also swollen and as dry as sandpaper, prickled painfully. "Sounds good," he whispered.
"It's woke my thirsty up, I know that," Tick-Tock said. His lips spread in a smile. His green eyes sparkled. "Bring me a dipper of water, Tilly--I'll be damned if I know what's happened to my manners."
Tilly stepped through the hatchway on the far side of the room--it was opposite the one through which Jake and Gasher had entered. Jake watched her go and licked his swollen lips.
”
”
Stephen King (The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower, #3))
“
That’s where the shouts and yells of the twenty houses round about crash and rebound, even the cries of the concierges’ little birds, rotting away as they pipe for the spring they will never see in their cages beside the privies, which are all clustered together out at the dark end with their ill-fitting, banging doors. A hundred male and female drunks inhabit those bricks and feed the echoes with their boasting quarrels and muddled, eruptive oaths, especially after lunch on a Saturday. That’s the intense moment in family life. Shouts of defiance as the drink pours down. Papa is brandishing a chair, a sight worth seeing, like an axe, and Mama a log like a sabre! Heaven help the weak! It’s the kid who suffers. Anyone unable to defend himself or fight back – children, dogs and cats – is flattened against the wall. After the third glass of wine, the black kind, the worst, it’s the dog’s turn, Papa stamps on his paw. That’ll teach him to be hungry at the same time as people. It’s good for a laugh when he crawls under the bed, whimpering for all he’s worth. That’s the signal. Nothing arouses a drunken woman so much as an animal in pain, and bulls aren’t always handy. The argument starts up again, vindictive, compulsive, delirious, the wife takes the lead, hurling shrill calls to battle at the male. Then comes the mêlée, the smash-up. The uproar descends on the court, the echo swirls through the half-darkness. The children yap with horror. They’ve found out what Mama and Papa have in them! Their yells draw down parental thunders.
”
”
Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)
“
There are halibut as big as doors in the ocean down below the town, flapskimming on the murky ocean floor with vast skates and rays and purple crabs and black cod large as logs, and sea lions slashing through the whip-forests of bull kelp and eelgrass and sugar wrack, and seals in the rockweed and giant perennial kelp and iridescent kelp and iridescent fish and luminous shrimp too small to see with the naked eye but billions of which feed the gray whales which slide hugely slowly by like rubbery zeppelins twice a year, north in spring and south in fall.
Salmonberries, thimbleberries, black raspberries, gooseberries, bearberries, snowberries, salal berries, elderberries, blackberries along the road and by the seasonal salt marshes north and south.
The ground squirrels burrow along the dirt banks of the back roads, their warren of mysterious holes, the thick scatter of fine brown soil before their doorsteps, the flash of silver-gray on their back fur as they rocket into the bushes; the bucks and does and fawns in the road in the morning, their springy step as they slip away from the gardens they have been eating; the bobcat seen once, at dusk, its haunches jacked up like a teenager's hot-rodding car; the rumor of cougar in the hills; the coyotes who use the old fire road in the hills; the tiny mice and bats one sometimes finds long dead and leathery like ancient brown paper; the little frenetic testy chittering skittering cheeky testy chickaree squirrels in the spruces and pines - Douglas squirrels, they are, their very name remembering that young gentleman botanist who wandered near these hills centuries ago.
The herons in marshes and sinks and creeks and streams and on the beach sometimes at dusk; and the cormorants and pelicans and sea scoters and murres (poor things so often dead young on the beach after the late-spring fledging) and jays and crows and quorking haunted ravens (moaning Poe! Poe! at dusk) especially over the wooded hills, and the goldfinches mobbing thistles in the meadowed hills, and sometimes a falcon rocketing by like a gleeful murderous dream, and osprey of all sizes all along the Mink like an osprey police lineup, and the herring gulls and Caspian terns and arctic terns, and the varied thrushes in wet corners of thickets, and the ruffed grouse in the spruce by the road, and the quail sometimes, and red-tailed hawks floating floating floating; from below they look like kites soaring brownly against the piercing blue sky, which itself is a vast creature bluer by the month as summer deepens into crispy cold fall.
”
”
Brian Doyle (Mink River: A Novel)
“
The coffee made by the six-year-old drip filter machine in the break room was as black as tar. The DI who made it every morning had the tolerance of a bull and the neck of one too. His name was James Graham, and Jamie had seen him take a cup of coffee out of the jug when it was made by someone else, and then add a spoon full of instant coffee to it. More than once. When that happened, he did nothing but complain about how weak it was. It just so happened that Graham bought good coffee as well as making it strong, so it was easier — and tastier — for everyone to just let him make a pot, half fill a cup, and then top it up with water and milk until it was the right shade. That morning Jamie didn’t add any water, and took a russet-brown cup back to her desk. She sat down and Roper eyed her, flicking through the files from the shelter. She’d laid it all out for him and he’d regaled her with the particulars of the conversation he’d had with Mary. She was
”
”
Morgan Greene (Bare Skin (DS Jamie Johansson, #1))
“
Now, sometimes, at night, when I think back, I feel like I'm looking at an old black-and-white movie of myself. Why it should be black-and-white I don't know, but it is.
”
”
Jake La Motta (Raging Bull: My Story)
“
1. Asithanga Bhairava Brahmi Swan Dark Blue 2. Ruru Bhairava Maheswari Bull Shining White 3. Chanda Bhairava Koumaari Peacock Golden 4. Kurothana Bhairava Vaishnavi Eagle Black 5. Unnmatha Bhairava Vaarahi Horse Gold 6. Kabaala Bhairava Indraani Elephant Pink 7. Bheeshaana Bhairava Chamundi Lion Red 8. Sarva Shatru Samhara Bhairava Chandiga Dog White
”
”
Sorna Sri Vembu Sidhar (Bhairava - The God of Protection: An Expedient to Lord Bairavar's Blessings)
“
The descent was unsteady. Virgil’s foot hesitated before every rung, but ultimately landed—quivering—where it belonged. With each step he gripped the ladder tighter and tighter until his knuckles ached. Down, down, down. Was the bottom of the well full of water? Was Gulliver drowning, struggling to breathe? So deep and black was the well that Virgil couldn’t see anything, not even when he was six rungs down, and for a moment he thought that maybe he’d descended for nothing; maybe the Bull hadn’t thrown Gulliver inside after all, and he’d just imagined the whole thing.
”
”
Erin Entrada Kelly (Hello, Universe)
“
Mail’, from the Old Norse ‘mal’, meant ‘tribute’ or ‘rent’ – which was sometimes paid in meal or grain – while ‘black’ was the common collective noun for cows, bulls and oxen, which were usually black. ‘Grassmail’ was money paid to a landowner for grazing rights; ‘blackmail’ paid for the protection and recovery of cattle.
”
”
Graham Robb (The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England)
“
Shielding his eyes he looked down at the foot of the wall and at last he managed to see her, lying still. For a moment he hesitated, then quite slowly he climbed back down the same rungs, until he was standing beside her. She was dead; her face was turned away, her black hair drawn across her cheek as if to protect her
from the rain.
They seemed to hesitate before firing again; someone shouted an order, and still no one fired. Finally they shot him, two or three shots. He stood glaring around him like a blinded bull in the arena. As he fell, Leamas saw a small car smashed between great lorries, and the children waving cheerfully through the window.
”
”
John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3))
“
Shielding his eyes he looked down at the foot of the wall and at last he managed to see her, lying still. For a moment he hesitated, then quite slowly he climbed back down the same rungs, until he was standing beside her. She was dead; her face was turned away, her black hair drawn across her cheek as if to protect her from the rain.
They seemed to hesitate before firing again; someone shouted an order, and still no one fired. Finally they shot him, two or three shots. He stood glaring around him like a blinded bull in the arena. As he fell, Leamas saw a small car smashed between great lorries, and the children waving cheerfully through the window.
”
”
John Le Carré (The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (George Smiley, #3))
“
Custer, dressed in an almost comical black velvet uniform of his own design that featured gaudy coils of gold lace, galloped to the head of the First Michigan and assumed command. Well ahead of his troops, with his sword raised, he turned toward his men and shouted, “Come on, you Wolverines!” With Custer in the lead, the Michiganders started out at a trot but were soon galloping, “every man yelling like a demon.” When Custer’s and Stuart’s forces collided on what is now called East Cavalry Field, the sound reminded one of the participants of the thunderous crash of a giant falling tree. “Many of
”
”
Nathaniel Philbrick (The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn)
“
From the size of the candlestick body, we can gauge the strength of the price direction. The longer the candlestick’s body, the stronger is the price momentum. Long Body indicates heavy trading in the ongoing direction, that is, the session has witnessed strong buying or selling as the case may be. In other words, long body implies heavy commitment by buyers in the case of white candle and by sellers in the case of black candle. That is, a long white candle signifies that the trading session was dominated by bulls and a long black candle signifies that the trading session was dominated by bears. Small body implies that very little buying and selling happened during the session; neither bulls nor bears could move the price as they liked during the session and prices closed at or near to the open. Candlestick with no shadow implies a strong trend in a single direction because all the price changes were upward in the case of white candle and downward in the case of black candle without facing rejection at any point of time during the session.
”
”
Arulpandi P (DON'T TRADE BEFORE LEARNING THESE 14 CANDLESTICK PATTERNS: These 14 most reliable candlestick patterns provide to traders more than 85% of trade opportunities emanating from candlesticks trading.)
“
Globy Dick @GlobyDick OK flat-earther RT 0 L 5 Dennster @true_earth_matters Read a book RT 0 L 43 Globy Dick @GlobyDick After you, mate. Maybe you should start with Copernicus RT 0 L4 Sally Jenkinson @saljenk07342 STFU Terg RT 0 L 21 Sadie @sadie93ozumvjfs Hahahahaha! Copernicus was another white guy RT 0 L 32 Globy Dick @GlobyDick Out of interest, are you black or white yourself? RT 0 L8 Sadie blocked Globy Dick replying to Dennster Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire What makes you think ‘globularism’ is an imperialist project? That’s ahistorical bull RT 1 L 23 Dennster @true_earth_matters Are you serious? Have you ever heard of Christopher Columbus? RT 2 L 54 Trent Meyer @meyer_the_fire What does Columbus have to do with anything? RT 0 L 6 Dennster @true_earth_matters Do you Tergs know nothing? He only invented the idea that the earth was round
”
”
Simon Edge (The End of the World is Flat)
“
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)
“
Cade bursts through the back door, stalking straight into the kitchen, looking like some sort of avenging cowboy, angry and wearing black, the sun shining in from behind him. “Why are the boys in the bunkhouse talkin’ about you getting rag-dolled by a fuckin’ bull last night?
”
”
Elsie Silver (Flawless (Chestnut Springs, #1))
“
Her momma finds her stray hair still left in the bathroom sink.
Where she combed out her ratty do for what seemed like forever. Staring at herself in the mirror and pulling and teasing and shaping all that her stingy god would give her and nothing ever more. She’d contemplate her face there. Her flat wide nose and dark eyes and the combinations. She’d test her looks to see how she looked when she kissed. She'd extend her tongue as far out of her mouth as she could to check out how long it was and if she had anything extra special to offer. And what she'd have to do to serve it up.
Momma grabs a kleenex and cleans around the deep rust stains in the sink. Does she throw away the old dry hairs crumbled in her hand under the tissue or keep such sad memories. Does she store them in a drawer or is she just being silly. Should she cherish this precious angel manna or try and just fucking get over it. Not give into it. Could she even possibly throw them away into the garbage without bawling uncontrollably. Can she possibly change the urge over from utter despair. When she sees her child getting brutally raped and hammered into, her baby's baby fingers digging into the rocks and dirt she can pass by daily. A dilapidated pit that crumbles in the middle of all their continuing lives and remains standing out of sheer old bull-headed promise and well organized planning. The forefathers of this neighborhood didn't count on the incredibly heavy weight of the public’s filthy laziness.
My poor baby. My poor baby.
She has to seek help. This nameless faceless mother. She can’t deal with this all alone. She can’t quit these imaginings from her old yellowed eyes and ears and off her cleaning washing working fingertips and the very constant edges of her smaller brain. The sickness that slipped thick repetitive blobs of useless male sperm and thin streams of rust washed metal stripping toxins bleeding down her daughter’s black throat may or may not be only one in a great number of difficult dreams and attempts but she just can’t find a polite perspective anymore.
She can’t live like this any longer. She should have offered her child more than a dirty smudged mirror in a peeling and running bathroom when she got home from a dirty hot school every damn day. Where were the cops? And the doctors who were supposed to save her? And the fucking psychiatrists who could have done some trepanning into that evil dog's motherfucking bursting crack head before he was let out on the streets with his glass dick and his screaming pussy hunting cock.
Dogs don't need help. They need to be put down.
”
”
Peter Sotos (Tick)
“
As to Orphism, it soon blended with the worship of the god Dionysus, who originated in Thrace, and who was worshipped there in the form of a bull. Dionysus was quickly accepted in seventh-century Greece, because he was exactly what the Greeks needed to complete their pantheon of gods; under the name Bacchus he became the god of wine, and his symbol was sometimes an enormous phallus. Frazer speaks of Thracian rites involving wild dances, thrilling music and tipsy excess, and notes that such goings-on were foreign to the clear rational nature of the Greeks. But the religion still spread like wildfire throughout Greece, especially among women—indicating, perhaps, a revolt against civilisation. It became a religion of orgies; women worked themselves into a frenzy and rushed about the hills, tearing to pieces any living creature they found. Euripides’ play The Bacchae tells how King Pentheus, who opposed the religion of Bacchus, was torn to pieces by a crowd of women, which included his mother and sisters, all in ‘Bacchic frenzy.’ In their ecstasy the worshippers of Bacchus became animals, and behaved like animals, killing living creatures and eating them raw.
The profound significance of all this was recognised by the philosopher Nietzsche, who declared himself a disciple of the god Dionysus. He spoke of the ‘blissful ecstasy that rises from the innermost depths of man,’ dissolving his sense of personality: in short, the sexual or magical ecstasy. He saw Dionysus as a fundamental principle of human existence; man’s need to throw off his personality, to burst the dream-bubble that surrounds him and to experience total, ecstatic affirmation of everything. In this sense, Dionysus is fundamentally the god, or patron saint, of magic. The spirit of Dionysus pervades all magic, especially the black magic of the later witch cults, with their orgiastic witch’s sabbaths so like the orgies of Dionysus’s female worshippers, even to the use of goats, the animal sacred to Dionysus. (Is it not also significant that Dionysus is a horned god, like the Christian devil?) The ‘scent of truth’ that made Ouspensky prefer books on magic to the ‘hard facts’ of daily journalism is the scent of Dionysian freedom, man’s sudden absurd glimpse of his godlike potentialities. It is also true that the spirit of Dionysus, pushed to new extremes through frustration and egomania, permeates the work of De Sade. As Philip Vellacot remarks of Dionysus in his introduction to The Bacchae: ‘But, though in the first half of the play there is some room for sympathy with Dionysus, this sympathy steadily diminishes until at the end of the play, his inhuman cruelty inspires nothing but horror.’ But this misses the point about Dionysus—that sympathy is hardly an emotion he would appreciate. He descends like a storm wind, scattering all human emotion.
”
”
Colin Wilson (The Occult)
“
One day a young man stood at the foot of Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia, sugar town, 1882. Folded into his vest, a letter of reference. He had an idea that involved a railroad ticket and the millions of dead buffalo out west. If he could get those bones into railroad cars and ship them to Philadelphia, they could be heated in a sealed vessel at 700 degrees Celsius, which was 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, not easy to imagine. The super-heating would drive off the organic matter in the bones, leaving activated carbon, composed of tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and carbon. Bone charcoal. Bone black. Ivory black. Animal charcoal. Abaiser. Pigment black 9. Bone char. Carbo animalis. Buffalo black. This substance could be used to refine crude raw sugar processed from sugarcane, slave sugar, although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now. Bone char worked better than bull’s blood or egg whites or any other substance to bleach the sugar white. And the bones! The bones were everywhere, he’d heard, littering the ground, so thick that a farmer couldn’t plow without stacking them beside the fields. He went into business. The bones were picked up by human
”
”
Louise Erdrich (The Mighty Red)
“
Shuttlesworth was Birmingham’s Martin Luther King Jr., with less education and more rage. His organization, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, had been founded when the state banned the NAACP, and now it was doing what the Montgomery Improvement Association had tried and failed to do in recent years: it was putting relentless pressure on city officials to end segregation. Shuttlesworth was an inspiring leader for Birmingham’s Black residents and an infuriating antagonist to the city’s commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor. From 1957 through the end of 1962, seventeen bombs had exploded in Black churches and at the homes of civil rights leaders in Birmingham, with no arrests. In
”
”
Jonathan Eig (King: A Life)
“
Our job is to systematically sift price data to find trends and act on them and not let the latest news flashes sway our market opinions.46
”
”
Michael W. Covel (Trend Following: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear, and Black Swan Markets (Wiley Trading))
“
These classic Donchian trading rules were first published over
75 years ago: General Guides Beware of acting immediately on
”
”
Michael W. Covel (Trend Following: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear, and Black Swan Markets (Wiley Trading))
“
distance and found no smoke. We drank our coffee and ate fresh venison killed by Short Bull, and then we straddled our horses and led off to the north. “Yonder’s Black Butte”—Stacy pointed southeast—“and north of it lies Spanish Point, and there’s a trail crosses the Big Horns yonder to the head of Soldier Crick. It’s a fair way…there’s game an’ water.” How many times had I heard that? So it was that men learned of the western lands, even as the Indians such as Uruwishi learned of a country where they had never ridden. Such things were filed away,
”
”
Louis L'Amour (Bendigo Shafter)
“
What, not even a driver?” asked Wren, focusing on the black, electric locomotive at the front of the train, a blunt, windowless thing, charging along like a bull. “The engine is the driver. A Popjoy Mark Twelve Stalker, controlled by a Resurrected human brain.
”
”
Philip Reeve (A Darkling Plain (The Hungry City Chronicles, #4))
“
Some former Bush officials, however, believed that the Justice Department's failure to pursue the New Black Panther Party case resulted from top Obama administration officials' ideological belief that civil rights laws only apply to protect members of minority groups from discrimination by whites. Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler denied any such motives. She asserted that "the department makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved". But an anonymous Justice Department official told the Washington Post that "the Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor [a white police commissioner] were hitting people like John Lewis [a black civil rights activist], not the other way around". The Post concluded that the New Black Panther Party case "tapped into deep divisions within the Justice Department that persist today over whether the agency should focus on protecting historically oppressed minorities or enforce laws without regard to race".
The Office of Professional Responsibility's report on the case found that several former and current DOJ attorneys told investigators under oath that some lawyers in the Civil Rights Division don't believe that the DOJ should bring cases involving white victims of racial discrimination. The report also found that Voting Section lawyers believed that their boss, appointed by President Obama, wanted them to bring only cases protecting members of American minority groups. She phrased this as having the section pursue only "traditional" civil rights enforcement cases. Her employees understood that by "traditional" she meant only cases involving minority victims.
”
”
David E. Bernstein (Lawless: The Obama Administration's Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law)
“
Paul Mulvaney made the point: “One thing to bear in mind is that we have made no changes to our trend following strategy since 2005. So in a way we take the ancient Spartan view that everything that needed to be said about long-term trend following has already been said.” He continued: “In recent years our research has focused on execution algorithms—but those are of minor importance versus the strategic trend following philosophy.” Here is Mulvaney’s philosophy in performance data format:
”
”
Michael W. Covel (Trend Following: How to Make a Fortune in Bull, Bear, and Black Swan Markets (Wiley Trading))
“
That was how he managed to convince them to allow his wife to be a part of the ritual and to allow him to watch while his wife got fucked by a “bull with a large black cock,” which was how he described it while seated in Cynthia’s living room.
”
”
S.S. Barry (The African Mating Ritual)
“
A dog couldn’t be evil. Dogs were eager to please their masters, and that could be turned either way. Evil came from the black heart of the man that had trained his pit bull to eat human flesh. The dog was neutral.
”
”
S.M. Reine (Magic after Dark)
“
Thank god for Vegas. Seriously.
A lobotomy wasn’t as effective as a weekend three hours of Red Bull away (from LA, not Pismo) where I wore the thinnest pinned stilettos, gambled like a sweaty degenerate mobster in black loafers, drank like Amy Winehouse and Charles Bukowski’s baby, and snorted throat-dripping lines of coke in a Hard Rock Hotel bathroom with four new best friends. I’d giddily rub off any one of those from the to-do list I wrote in eyeliner on my hotel bathroom mirror.
”
”
Christy Heron (Unrequited - One Girl, Thirteen Boyfriends, and Vodka.)
“
Black satin sheets cover the bed
”
”
D. Camille (The Bull (The Black Land #2))
“
When Jordan took the court for the first time wearing his special red-and-black shoes, the NBA fined the Bulls $1,000 for violating the league’s uniform dress code. Nike cleverly seized on the fine as a publicity opportunity, producing a television commercial that showed Jordan bouncing a ball as a voice said: “On September 15, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On October 18, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can’t keep you from wearing them. Air Jordans from Nike.
”
”
Aaron Frisch (The Story of Nike)
“
This severely crew-cutted, Mr Rambo, Die-Hard Terminator type, wore neither helmet nor goggles. He was also shirtless under his black, armoured vest and had two belts of oversized bullets slung over his shoulders and crossing at his chest. He obviously being one of a mind that size was indeed important, looking the butch business as he cradled an almightily impressive BFG in his bared, muscle-bound arms. The outer edge of the right one’s bicep having three stripes tattooed upon in… No, honestly. The huge weapon he held looked as if it’d been specifically designed for bringing down either crack addicted bull elephants, smack riddled rhinos in dire need, or heroin dependant hippos desperate for a fix.
”
”
Ian Atkinson (ROT & BYRNE: Life's a Bastard Then you Die, Part 2)