Blend In Together Quotes

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That's the trouble with living things. Don't last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.
Neil Gaiman (The Ocean at the End of the Lane)
Sometimes life gets in your way. it gets all up in your damn way. But it doesn't get all up in your damn way because it wants you to just give up and let it take control. Life doesn't get all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all over and be carried along. Life wants you to fight it Learn how to make it your own. it wants you to grab and axe and hack through the wood. It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through concrete. It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you can reach through and grab it. Life wants you to grab all the organized, the alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to mix it all together, stir it up, blend it.
Colleen Hoover (Slammed (Slammed, #1))
Santa Claus has nothing to do with it," the latke said. "Christmas and Hanukah are completely different things." "But different things can often blend together," said the pine tree. "Let me tell you a funny story about pagan rituals.
Lemony Snicket (The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story)
Dignity and love do not blend well, nor do they continue long together.
Ovid
If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Short Stories)
Our love will blend together like turquoise is blue and green. There’s no depression or envy when both blur into one.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
George Eliot (Adam Bede)
With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty Holding the leash of blood So that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surf In aromatic loam, or in sea music Beautiful nude Equally beautiful your feet Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound Your ears, small shells Of the splendid American sea Your breasts of level plentitude Fulfilled by living light Your flying eyelids of wheat Revealing or enclosing The two deep countries of your eyes The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of Burnished gold Fine alabaster To sink into the two grapes of your feet Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises Flowering fire Open chandelier A swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materials Agate? Quartz? Wheat? Did your body come together? Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remained Astonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body Yet suffocate itself So much is clarity Taking its leave of you As if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.
Pablo Neruda
Moonlight and the murmur of pines blended together so that one could hardly tell which was light and which was sound.
L.M. Montgomery (The Blue Castle)
I love everything about you, Emma. I love the way I can recognize your footsteps in the hallway outside my room even when I didn't know you were coming. No one else walks or breathes or moves like you do. I love the way you gasp when you're asleep like your dreams have surprised you. I love the way when we stay together on the beach our shadows blend into one person. I love the way you can write on my skin with your fingers and I can understand it better than I could understand someone else shouting in my ear. I didn't want to love you like this. It's the worst idea in the world that I love you like this. But I can't stop. Believe me, I tried.
Cassandra Clare (Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices, #1))
This is fusion, when two people become one. They are so close and so well suited to each other that they blend together. They merge and can't live without each other after that.
Danielle Steel
He is nothing to look at, and yet I can’t stop looking at him. There is something beautiful in how his face is made, how all the tiny flaws blend together into something more perfect than perfection could ever be.
Elizabeth Scott (As I Wake)
Her brain is like a filing cabinet – everything neatly stored in categories. My brain is more like soup – everything all blended and mushed together.
Cat Clarke
That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together . . .
Neil Gaiman (The Ocean at the End of the Lane)
The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.
Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern)
The most attractive thing in the world is the combination of confidence and self-consciousness. Blended together in the proper amounts. Too much of either and all is lost.
Iain Reid (I'm Thinking of Ending Things)
I am, and always have been - first, last, and always - a child of America. You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand. I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House. You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down. Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too. The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms. We were not afforded that liberty. But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will “hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice. Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us. If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election. And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.
Casey McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue)
I met a girl in a U-Haul. A beautiful girl And I fell for her. I fell hard. Unfortunately, sometimes life gets in the way. Life definitely got in my way. It got all up in my damn way, Life blocked the door with a stack of wooden 2x4's nailed together and attached to a fifteen inch concrete wall behind a row of solid steel bars, bolted to a titanium frame that no matter how hard I shoved against it- It wouldn't budge. Sometimes life doesn't budge. It just gets all up in your damn way. It blocked my plans, my dreams, my desires, my wishes, my wants, my needs. It blocked out that beautiful girl That I fell so hard for. Life tries to tell you what's best for you What should be most important to you What should come in first Or second Or third. I tried so hard to keep it all organized, alphabetized, stacked in chronological order, everything in its perfect space, its perfect place. I thought that's what life wanted me to do. This is what life needed for me to do. Right? Keep it all in sequence? Sometimes, life gets in your way. It gets all up in your damn way. But it doesn't get all up in your damn way because it wants you to just give up and let it take control. Life doesn't get all up in your damn way because it just wants you to hand it all over and be carried along. Life wants you to fight it. It wants you to grab an axe and hack through the wood. It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through the concrete. It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you can reach through and grab it. Life wants you to grab all the organized, the alphabetized, the chronological, the sequenced. It wants you to mix it all together, stir it up, blend it. Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your little brother should be the only thing that comes first. Life doesn't want you to let it tell you that your career and your education should be the only thing that comes in second. And life definitely doesn't want me To just let it tell me that the girl I met, The beautiful, strong, amazing, resilient girl That I fell so hard for Should only come in third. Life knows. Life is trying to tell me That the girl I love, The girl I fell So hard for? There's room for her in first. I'm putting her first.
Colleen Hoover
A man who seeks only the light, while shirking his responsibilities, will never find illumination. And one who keep his eyes fixed upon the sun ends up blind..." "It doesn't matter what others think -because that's what they will think, in any case. So, relax. Let the universe move about. Discover the joy of surprising yourself." "The master says: “Make use of every blessing that God gave you today. A blessing cannot be saved. There is no bank where we can deposit blessings received, to use them when we see fit. If you do not use them, they will be irretrievably lost. God knows that we are creative artists when it comes to our lives. On one day, he gives us clay for sculpting, on another, brushes and canvas, or a pen. But we can never use clay on our canvas, nor pens in sculpture. Each day has its own miracle. Accept the blessings, work, and create your minor works of art today. Tomorrow you will receive others.” “You are together because a forest is always stronger than a solitary tree,” the master answered. "The forest conserves humidity, resists the hurricane and helps the soil to be fertile. But what makes a tree strong is its roots. And the roots of a plant cannot help another plant to grow. To be joined together in the same purpose is to allow each person to grow in his own fashion, and that is the path of those who wish to commune with God.” “If you must cry, cry like a child. You were once a child, and one of the first things you learned in life was to cry, because crying is a part of life. Never forget that you are free, and that to show your emotions is not shameful. Scream, sob loudly, make as much noise as you like. Because that is how children cry, and they know the fastest way to put their hearts at ease. Have you ever noticed how children stop crying? They stop because something distracts them. Something calls them to the next adventure. Children stop crying very quickly. And that's how it will be for you. But only if you can cry as children do.” “If you are traveling the road of your dreams, be committed to it. Do not leave an open door to be used as an excuse such as, 'Well, this isn't exactly what I wanted. ' Therein are contained the seeds of defeat. “Walk your path. Even if your steps have to be uncertain, even if you know that you could be doing it better. If you accept your possibilities in the present, there is no doubt that you will improve in the future. But if you deny that you have limitations, you will never be rid of them. “Confront your path with courage, and don't be afraid of the criticism of others. And, above all, don't allow yourself to become paralyzed by self-criticism. “God will be with you on your sleepless nights, and will dry your tears with His love. God is for the valiant.” "Certain things in life simply have to be experienced -and never explained. Love is such a thing." "There is a moment in every day when it is difficult to see clearly: evening time. Light and darkness blend, and nothing is completely clear nor completely dark." "But it's not important what we think, or what we do or what we believe in: each of us will die one day. Better to do as the old Yaqui Indians did: regard death as an advisor. Always ask: 'Since I'm going to die, what should I be doing now?'” "When we follow our dreams, we may give the impression to others that we are miserable and unhappy. But what others think is not important. What is important is the joy in our heart.” “There is a work of art each of us was destined to create. That is the central point of our life, and -no matter how we try to deceive ourselves -we know how important it is to our happiness. Usually, that work of art is covered by years of fears, guilt and indecision. But, if we decide to remove those things that do not belong, if we have no doubt as to our capability, we are capable of going forward with the mission that is our destiny. That is the only way to live with honor.
Paulo Coelho (Maktub)
But my experiences slowly flattened and blended together until it became obvious that there's a huge difference between not giving a fuck and not being able to give a fuck. Cognitively, you might know that different things are happening to you, but they don't feel different.
Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened)
I'm going to fall in love with him. I'm going to be head over heels and my stomach is going to hurt every time he walks into a room. I'm going to worry about him whenever he isn't there, and there are going to be times where I'll hate him. Because that's what love is. It's a kaleidoscope of emotions, all sorts of different colors blending together into one.
C.M. Stunich (Losing Me, Finding You (Triple M, #1))
Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
John Updike (Rabbit Redux (Rabbit Angstrom, #2))
We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid. Our life is composed, like the harmony of the world, of dischords as well as different tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked only some of them, what could he sing? He has got to know how to use all of them and blend them together. So too must we with good and ill, which are of one substance with our life.
Michel de Montaigne
Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
This scent had a freshness, but not the freshness of limes or pomegranates, not the freshness of myrrh or cinnamon bark or curly mint or birch or camphor or pine needles, not that of a May rain or a frosty wind or of well water... and at the same time it had warmth, but not as bergamot, cypress, or musk has, or jasmine or daffodils, not as rosewood has or iris... This scent was a blend of both, of evanescence and substance, not a blend, but a unity, although slight and frail as well, and yet solid and sustaining, like a piece of thin, shimmering silk... and yet again not like silk, but like pastry soaked in honey-sweet milk - and try as he would he couldn't fit those two together: milk and silk! This scent was inconceivable, indescribable, could not be categorized in any way - it really ought not to exist at all. And yet there it was as plain and splendid as day.
Patrick Süskind (Perfume The Story of a Murderer)
To become a true global citizen, one must abandon all notions of 'otherness' and instead embrace 'togetherness'. The world is no longer white, black, yellow and brown. Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another. Therefore, practical wisdom should be used to abandon any cultural, social, religious, tribal, and national beliefs of alterity altogether. This is the only way mankind will truly evolve. Segregation is a word of the past. Unity is the key to a peaceful future.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.
Ken Kesey
If the beginning of wisdom is in realizing that one knows nothing, then the beginning of understanding is in realizing that all things exist in accord with a single truth: Large things are made of smaller things. Drops of ink are shaped into letters, letters form words, words form sentences, and sentences combine to express thought. So it is with the growth of plants that spring from seeds, as well as with walls built from many stones. So it is with mankind, as the customs and traditions of our progenitors blend together to form the foundation for our own cities, history, and way of life. Be they dead stone, living flesh, or rolling sea; be they idle times or events of world-shattering proportion, market days or desperate battles, to this law, all things hold: Large things are made from small things. Significance is cumulative--but not always obvious. --Gaius Secondus
Jim Butcher (Academ's Fury (Codex Alera, #2))
Prayer, faith, and vision, plus real effort too. Blend them together for one potent brew. The magical spell to your dreams coming true.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year)
With these three qualities, it cannot be made the subject of description; and hence we blend them together and obtain The One.
Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)
Music is the metaphysical representation of our shredded hearts, all of our pain and anger, our love and joy, ground up and blended together. It saves people, and it destroys them. If it's anything in between, it's not really music at all, just noise.
C.M. Stunich (Get Bent (Hard Rock Roots, #2))
Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now.
Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children)
Like a lot of people with mental illness, I spend a lot of time fronting. It’s really important to me to not appear crazy, to fit in, to seem normal, to do the things “normal people” do, to blend in. As a defense mechanism, fronting makes a lot of sense, and you hone that mechanism after years of being crazy. Fronting is what allows you to hold down a job and maintain relationships with people, it’s the thing that sometimes keeps you from falling apart. It’s the thing that allows you to have a burst of tears in the shower or behind the front seat of your car and then coolly collect yourself and stroll into a social engagement… We are rewarded for hiding ourselves. We become the poster children for “productive” mentally ill people, because we are so organized and together. The fact that we can function, at great cost to ourselves, is used to beat up the people who cannot function. Because unlike the people who cannot front, or who fronted too hard and fell off the cliff, we are able to “keep it together,” whatever it takes.
S.E. Smith
7. Hence in the wise leader's plans, considerations of advantage and of disadvantage will be blended together.
Sun Tzu (The Art of War (Illustrated))
There were so many things Sebastian and I had to work out: we'd both been single for so long that blending our lives together wasn't going to be easy. I'd promised Sebastian we'd find a way. He deserved to be loved for everything he was. And for whatever crazy reason he had, he loved me, too.
Jane Harvey-Berrick (The Education of Caroline (The Education of..., #2))
I was acting like a child. Wanting his full attention. His declarations of love. I wanted to be his little princess, I guess. The one he worshiped and adored. Well, life's not like that. And after thinking it through, I actually wouldn't want it to be. We aren't put together in a marriage to stroke each other's ego. Marriage is a partnership. A blending of two lives working together. That's where the commitment comes in. It's a determination of the head - not the heart. No, I shouldn't say it that way. It still involves the heart. It still is based on love, but it's new kind of love. A mature love. One that doesn't ask, "What will you do for me?" but rather "What can I do for you?" or "What can we do for each other?
Janette Oke (The Tender Years (A Prairie Legacy, #1))
Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Here, also, the future was cried aloud by the wind through the rocks, so that all those who heard would shiver, and then the liquid spring song of the thrush would make all the beauty of moonlight and sunlight blend together, making it true, so true, that happiness must come again
Elyne Mitchell (Moon Filly)
True love can be overwhelming, and sometimes painful. It is a kaleidoscope of emotions, all sorts of different colours blending together into one. It's gravity so powerful - an unstoppable force. True love is a natural muse; you will puzzle over it, dream about it, and be lost in it. It consumes you wholeheartedly.
Angie karan
White can be attained by blending all the colors of the spectrum together, or through the substraction of ink and all other pigments. In short, it is "all colors" and "no color" at the same time.
Kenya Hara (White)
See now, for a good blade, one that will not betray the man in battle, rods of hard and soft iron must be heated and braided together. Then is the blade folded over and hammered flat again, and maybe yet again, many times for the finest blades... So the hard and soft iron are mingled without blending, before the blade is hammered up to its finished form and tempered, and ground to an edge that shall draw blood from the wind. So comes the pattern, like oil and water that mingle but do not mix. Yet it is the strength of the blade, for without the hard iron the blade would bend in battle, and without the soft iron it would break.
Rosemary Sutcliff (The Shining Company)
Homes should be an anchor, a safe harbor, a place of refuge, a place where families dwell together, a place where children are loved. In the home, parents should teach their children the great lessons of life. Home should be the center of one’s earthly experience, where love and mutual respect are appropriately blended.
L. Tom Perry
I've noticed people often complain about the monotony of life. How sometimes very day is just like the last and they all blend together. Do they know how lucky they are? But maybe that's the problem with a smooth pleasant routine, you begin taking it for granted.
Cheryl Diamond (Nowhere Girl: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood)
You've never heard a siren until you've heard one looking for you and you alone. Then you really hear it and know what it is and understand that the man who invented it was no man, but a fiend from hell who patched together sounds and blends of sounds in a way that could paralyze and sicken. . . . But when it is after you, it is the texture of the whole world. You will hear it until you die.
Elliott Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel)
Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin. Anyone who has seen the martins and swallows in September, assembling on the telephone wires, twittering, making short flights singly and in groups over the open, stubbly fields, returning to form longer and even longer lines above the yellowing verges of the lanes-the hundreds of individual birds merging and blending, in a mounting excitement, into swarms, and these swarms coming loosely and untidily together to create a great, unorganized flock, thick at the centre and ragged at the edges, which breaks and re-forms continually like clouds or waves-until that moment when the greater part (but not all) of them know that the time has come: they are off, and have begun once more that great southward flight which many will not survive; anyone seeing this has seen at the work the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will: has seen at work the angel which drove the First Crusade into Antioch and drives the lemmings into the sea.
Richard Adams (Watership Down (Watership Down, #1))
He was dignity distorted, bravery become knavery, sanctimoniousness masking sin. He was a mirror, jeering at the subject it reflected. Yet so muted were the jeers, so delicate the inaccuracies of delineation, that they evaded detection. True and false were blended together. The false was merely an extended shadow of the true.
Jim Thompson (Swell-Looking Babe (Mulholland Classic))
I think decentralized finance and traditional banking are going to experience a kind of hybridization within the next few decades; a blending together that results in something greater than the sum of its parts.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home.
Lauren Elkin (Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London)
Was he willing to blend into the life of another human being for the rest of his days, and have hers blend into his? That, of course, was the Bible’s bottom line on marriage: one flesh. Not separate entities, not two autonomous beings merely coming together at dinnertime or brushing past one another in the hallway, holding on to their singleness, guarding against invasion. One flesh!" (p. 207).
Jan Karon (A Light in the Window (Mitford Years, #2))
the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together . . 
Neil Gaiman (The Ocean at the End of the Lane)
even as he took her hand and kissed it, he fell into sleep. Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3))
The sky would be clear, colorless, mist blending together the air and the ocean, the waves whispering against the rocks.
Kendall Kulper (Salt & Storm (Salt & Storm, #1))
Everything got blended together. A sensation like pain--only worse, because it wasn't a pain in your body; the pain was in your mind and your mind was you. You were pain itself.
Justin Cronin (The Passage (The Passage, #1))
For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean, a small German hare.
Vladimir Nabokov (Strong Opinions)
The soft wool blend of his sweater felt itchy compared to his skin. Even though we’d been together all night, I couldn’t get over the feel of him, his taste, that potent, delicious smell of his neck. I was higher than a fan at a Bob Marley concert.
Ophelia London (Definitely, Maybe in Love (Definitely Maybe, #1))
As much as the left fashions themselves as being progressive, they’re not. In reality, today’s leftist movement is made in much the same way as a sausage—it’s a blend of fascist, communist, and socialist ideologies from twentieth-century Europe, with a pinch of Nazism, all ground together, yet retaining the flavor of its various parts.
Michael Savage (Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions)
Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.
Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion)
Music is most magical when everyone can lose the burden of self and be put back together as a part of something bigger, or other. I think of it as egos blending, singer into musician into listener. Something like that feels right to me. Anyway, it’s something worth aiming for.
Jeff Tweedy (Let's Go (So We Can Get Back): A Memoir of Recording and Discording with Wilco, Etc.)
I don't think I could ever live with either a man or a woman for a long time. Male and female are attractive to my mind, but when it comes to the sexual act I am afraid. In every situation I need a lot of stimulation before I am conquered by the forces of passion and lust. But confusion, before and after, is the dominant factor. I dreamed many times about a mature man with experience who would have the vigour of a boy but an adult's polished methods. Strangely enough, I also dreamed about women of my mother's age who were ideal lovers. These dreams came superimposed on one another. Sometimes the masculine element was dominant, sometimes the feminine one. At other times I wasn't sure. I saw a female body with male organs or a male body with female ones. These pictures, blended together in my mind, occasionally brought pleasure but more often pain.
Adam Thirlwell (Politics)
There are two powerful fuels, two forces; motivation and inspiration. To be motivated you need to know what your motives are. Over time - and to sustain you through it - your motivation must become an inner energy; a 'motor' driving you forward, passionately, purposefully, wisely and compassionately... come what may, every day. Inspiration is an outer - worldly - energy that you breathe and draw in. It may come from many places, faces, spaces and stages - right across the ages. It is where nature, spirit, science, mind and time meet, dance, play and speak. It keeps you outward facing and life embracing. But you must be open-minded and open-hearted to first let it in and then let it out again. Together - blended, combined and re-entwined - motivation and inspiration bring connectivity, productivity, creativity and boundless possibilities that is not just 'self' serving but enriching to all humanity and societies...just as it should be.
Rasheed Ogunlaru
You think your heart disappears once you give it to someone you love, but it doesn't. You end up with two - yours and his - together. And then, they slowly blend into one. A stronger and more solid one. That's what love is.
Hajin Yoo
In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making. Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture. And they had been right all along. The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation)
Denial is the secret sauce in this town,” he said. “It’s the flavor that holds all the other ingredients together. Here’s what I tell the newly elected: the truth is gonna get out—it always does—but it’s gonna blend in with all the lies.” The Senator twirled a hand in the air. “You have to deny each lie and every truth with the same vinegar. Let those websites and blowhards who bitch about cover-ups confuse the public for you.
Hugh Howey (First Shift: Legacy (Shift, #1))
Walking it mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home.
Lauren Elkin (Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London)
When you're finally up at the moon looking back on earth,all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can't we live together like decent people?
Frank Borman
Victor watched them working together flawlessly, something his brothers had done from the time most of them were young. That ability to seamlessly blend their talents had allowed them to survive the insanity they'd grown up in. The gifts each of them had always astonished him.
Christine Feehan (Bound Together (Sea Haven/Sisters of the Heart, #6))
When one was an immortal, the freshness of life had a way of dying even more quickly than one’s body had. As the centruies blended together, it was easy to forget the human side of oneself. To remember why humanity needed saving. It was hard to remember how to laugh. Then again, laguther and Valerius were virtual strangers. Until Tabitha, he’d never really shared a laugh with anyone.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Seize the Night (Dark-Hunter #6))
Every element of the circus blends together in a wonderful coalescence. Acts that have been training in separate countries on separate continents now perform in adjacent tents, each part melding seamlessly into a whole. Each costume, each gesture, each sign on each tent is more perfect than the last.
Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
The piece of you that loves a part of me tries its best to hold onto the rest, but my heart is a thousand-piece puzzle of a faraway galaxy, deep purple, colors blending together and impossible to place.
Kris Kidd (Down for Whatever)
So, here’s the thing,” she tells them. “All of that stuff is true. All the other worlds that human beings believe in, via group myths or spiritual visitations or even imaginations if they’re vivid enough, they exist. Imagining a world creates it, if it isn’t already there. That’s the great secret of existence: it’s supersensitive to thought. Decisions, wishes, lies—that’s all you need to create a new universe. Every human being on this planet spins off thousands between birth and death, although there’s something about the way our minds work that keeps us from noticing. In every moment, we’re constantly moving in multiple dimensions—we think we’re sitting still, but we’re actually falling from one universe to the next to the next, so fast that it all blends together, like… like animation. Except there’s a lot more than just images flipping past.
N.K. Jemisin (The City We Became (Great Cities, #1))
We do not all blend together. We are not ruined, helpless, a burden. We are not the elderly. We are not old people. Now, still, we're unique. Distinct. Regardless of what we've produced or what happen to our bodies. We each have our own memories and experiences, even if they've been lost and forgotten. They, we, all of us can finally rest.
Iain Reid (We Spread)
Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That’s the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than for trophies or accolades. But it takes young men or women of extraordinary character as well as extraordinary physical ability to pull it off.
Daniel James Brown (The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics)
all things exist in accord with a single truth: Large things are made of smaller things. Drops of ink are shaped into letters, letters form words, words form sentences, and sentences combine to express thought. So it is with the growth of plants that spring from seeds, as well as with walls built of many stones. So it is with mankind, as the customs and traditions of our progenitors blend together to form the foundation for our own cities, history, and way of life.
Jim Butcher (Academ's Fury (Codex Alera, #2))
“So, he’s pouting, right? That’s why he missed the ceremony,” I say over the instruments. “He’s been away from his home for some time. He had things to do. To prepare for your night together.” Gossamer’s furred wings buzz into action, lifting her off my shoulder. “Sure.” I smother a smile. “We both know he didn’t come because he would’ve been bored to tears. There’s too much orderliness for his liking.” She giggles in agreement—a tinkling sound that blends with the music.
A.G. Howard (Ensnared (Splintered, #3))
Ah, the people. My countrymen, my fellow citizens, my brothers. Mind you, some of them are all right, when you get to know them. But a lot of them aren’t; and here’s a funny thing, because when you mix them together, the ones that are all right and the ones that aren’t, as often as not the resulting blend is far worse than the sum of its parts. Greedier, more cowardly, more stupid.
K.J. Parker (How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It (The Siege, #2))
His hair, at first glance, appears merely dark, but upon closer inspection is actually many strands of chestnut brown, gold, and black. He wears it long, for a guy, not because doing so is “in,” but because he’s too busy with his many interests to remember to get it cut regularly. His eyes seem dark at first glance, as well, but are actually a kaleidoscope of russets and mahoganies, flecked here and there with ruby and gold, like twin lakes during an Indian summer, into which you feel as if you could dive and swim forever. Nose: aquiline. Mouth: imminently kissable. Neck: aromatic—an intoxicating blend of Tide from his shirt collar, Gillette shaving foam, and Ivory soap, which together spell: my boyfriend. B– Better. I would have liked more description on what exactly about his mouth you find so imminently kissable. —C. Martinez
Meg Cabot (Princess on the Brink (The Princess Diaries, #8))
The ability to feel mixed emotions is a sign of maturity. If people can blend contradictory emotions together, such as happiness with guilt, or anger with love, it shows that they can encompass life’s emotional complexity. Experienced together, opposing feelings tame each other. Once people develop the ability to feel different emotions at the same time, the world ripens into something richer and deeper. Instead of having a single, intense, one-dimensional emotional reaction, they can experience several different feelings that reflect the nuances of the situation.
Lindsay C. Gibson (Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents)
Chicago. It’s insane and violent and corrupt and vital and artistic and noble and cruel and wonderful. It’s full of greed and hope and hate and desire and excitement and pain and happiness. The air sings with screams and laughter, with sirens, with angry shouts, with gunshots, with music. It’s an impossible city, at war with itself, every horrible and wonderful thing blending together to create something terrifying and lovely and utterly unique. I
Jim Butcher (Ghost Story (The Dresden Files, #13))
I believe that everything that happens in life happens for a reason. I also believe that the God that lives inside me - to call it something - is in charge of giving me everything I am going to ever need. All of my joys and pains have made me who I am. They are the yin and yang of my existence, this inseparable duality of life that blends together and makes us the people we are destined to become. I have known love and loss, joy and sadness, friendship and betrayal. I have known a sense of success I never imagined possible; I have had to withstand the attacks and accusations of my detractors; and yes, I have also had failures. Today I know that every step has taught me something and helped me grow and become a better and stronger person - a more complete human being.
Ricky Martin (Me)
The model provided by biblical parables is strongly influential in the following story, from Scivias I, 2, 32, in which Hildegard develops her motif of the ‘pearl’ as a symbol for humanity: The same lord who lost his sheep but so gloriously restored it to its life, also owned a costly pearl. The same happened again: the pearl was lost, and it fell into the ugly dirt. But he did not leave it lying in the dirt. He lifted it out carefully, and he cleaned it of the mud into which it had fallen, like gold purified in the furnace. He restored it to its former beauty till it gleamed even brighter than before. The probable sources of this story reveal something of Hildegard’s methods as a maker of new narratives. The basic message is the same as that of the parable of the Lost Sheep (Matthew 18:12–14), but she draws on other New Testament passages such as the parable of the Costly Pearl for which a merchant sold everything he had (Matthew 13:45–6). There is perhaps also an echo of the command not to ‘cast your pearls before swine’ (Matthew 7:6), since if they lie in the mud they are useless. Taken together these echoes of Hildegard’s biblical reading blend into a new motif which she can add to the storehouse of her memory and bring out for use when appropriate.18
Hildegard of Bingen (Selected Writings)
Every thing was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend; and though there had been sometimes much of suffering to her- though her motives had been often misunderstood, her feelings disregarded, and her comprehension under-valued; though she had known the pains of tyranny, of ridicule, and neglect, yet almost every recurrence of either had led to something consolatory... and the whole was now so blended together, so harmonised by distance, that every former affliction had its charm.
Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)
Despite its pacific demeanor, tolerance is an internally unharmonious term, blending together goodness, capaciousness, and conciliation with discomfort, judgment, and aversion. Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist. It involves managing the presence of the undesirable, the tasteless, the faulty—even the revolting, repugnant, or vile. In this activity of management, tolerance does not offer resolution or transcendence, but only a strategy for coping.
Wendy Brown (Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire)
You know how this wine is blended? Different types of Pharisee have been harvested, trodden, and fermented together to produce its subtle flavour. Types that were most antagonistic to one another on earth. Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theatre. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its litany. How they hated each other up there where the sun shone!
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
She saw it in her mind's eye like a movie playing, the haunting memories from her childhood she couldn't seem to shake blending together into one raw, aching image. Her mother lying in a darkened room for days, her face swollen with tears. The inevitable ashtray overrun with ashes, the acrid scent of pot smoke in the air. The bed or couch or futon may have been different from year to year as Evie moved them around from apartment to commune to funky cottage, but her mother was always the same. Falling hard for some man, immersing herself in romantic fantasies that were crushed when the guy left. And the guy always left. Her mother's inability to get a grasp on reality had too often left Mischa to care for her younger sister, to care for her mother, from too young an age. She remembered shaking Evie awake, trying to get her to eat. To get up and take a shower, take her and Raine to school. No kid should have to do that. No kid should have to witness the way Evie had allowed herself to be ravaged by love. No woman should allow that to happen.
Eve Berlin (Temptation's Edge (Edge, #3))
Though she was ungifted, she could clearly feel the power of the magic the sword now possessed. It was power unlike anything she ever imagined. It churned the way the storm had. It held more power than the storm had. It was fury and rage and love and life all folded together over and over, blending them into the finest layers of something new, something remarkable. This was now a weapon unlike any other, more than any other.
Terry Goodkind (The First Confessor (The Legend of Magda Searus, #1))
There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.' Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. (I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. Incidentally, when they look at their scrapbooks they will be able to re-read themselves saying things like, 'The bombing of Kosovo is driving the Serbs into the arms of Milosevic.
Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left)
And every day there is music. One dark voice will start a phrase, half-sung, and like a question. And after a moment another voice will join in, soon the whole gang will be singing. The voices are dark in the golden glare, the music intricately blended, both somber and joyful. The music will swell until at last it seems that the sound does not come from the twelve men on the gang, but from the earth itself, or the wide sky. It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright. Then slowly the music will sink down until at last there remains one lonely voice, then a great hoarse breath, the sun, the sound of the picks in the silence. And what kind of gang is this that can make such music? Just twelve mortal men, seven of them black and five of them white boys from this country. Just twelve mortal men who are together.
Carson McCullers (The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories)
This is the oldest form of religious worship, when magic and religion were inseparable, where myth was communicated through a colorful and often wild blending of costume, song, and dance. This type of yearning for freedom and self-expression is our first and earliest glimmer of the spirit of rock and roll, a primeval and communal method to transmit a truth, to celebrate, to mourn, to sacrifice something to the gods. And to do it together.
Peter Bebergal (Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll)
To daughter Scotty Oct. 20, 1936 p. 313 Don't be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together. Let me preach again for a moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (A Life in Letters)
The next thing about the air in the library is that no other place smells anything like it. If you close your eyes and try to pick out what it is that you’re sniffing you’re only going to get confused, because all the smells have blended together and turned themselves into a different one. As soon as I got into the library I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I got a whiff of the leather on all the old books, a smell that got real strong if you picked one of them up and stuck your nose real close to it when you turned the pages. Then there was the smell of the cloth that covered the brand-new books, the books that made a splitting sound when you opened them. Then I could sniff the paper, that soft, powdery, drowsy smell that comes off the pages in little puffs when you’re reading something or looking at some pictures, a kind of hypnotizing smell.
Christopher Paul Curtis (Bud, Not Buddy)
...this, he thinks, is the true curve of the world—now I glimpse it: all things are blended under the surface like the mass of us were blended in the water, it’s the separateness of skin and rock and mind that is the great illusion. We are not discrete; we are not solid. People and things and even cities are meant to flow together, they are meant to connect, and this is why we’re always full of longing, the way I long for the girl, and the girl longs for truth, and the truth longs for volume, and volume longs for people to hear it, and people long for—what?—for everything, air, home, violence, chaos, beauty, hope, flight, sight, each other. Always, whether to stroke or maim, each other, above all.
Carolina De Robertis (Perla)
One of the most popular illustrations we use in Love and Respect Conferences compares women and men to pink and blue. The audience responds immediately when I talk about how she sees through pink sunglasses and hears with pink hearing aids, while he sees through blue sunglasses and hears with blue hearing aids. In other words, women and men are very different. Yet, when blue blends with pink, it becomes purple, God’s color—the color of royalty. The way for pink and blue to blend is spelled out in Ephesians 5:33: “[Every husband] must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband” (NIV). Living out Ephesians 5:33 is the key to blending together as one to reflect the very image of God.
Emerson Eggerichs (The Language of Love & Respect: Cracking the Communication Code with Your Mate)
Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?
Paul C.W. Davies (About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution)
FOR THE CAKE: Beat together eight soup spoons butter with one cup sugar until fluffy. Mix in two eggs and three soup spoons juice from an orange. In a small bowl, blend one and two-thirds cups flour, a teaspoon baking powder, and half a teaspoon salt. Add dry to wet mixture along with one cup buttermilk. Blend well. Stir in one cup raisins, half a cup chopped walnuts, and one soup spoon finely grated orange peel. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan and bake forty-five to fifty minutes. Cool before icing.   FOR THE ICING: Stir two soup spoons juice of orange and two cups powdered sugar together until the sugar dissolves completely and the icing is smooth. The icing should be thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. If it is too thick, add more liquid; if too thin, add a little sugar.
Jodi Daynard (The Midwife's Revolt (Midwife, #1))
Human colour is the colour I'm truly interested in, the colour of your humanity. May the size of your heart and the depth of your soul be your currency. welcome aboard my Good Ship. Let us sail to the colourful island of misex identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboad. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of rum, let's toast to the minorities who are the majority. There's no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now. I drink to our sameness and to our unique differences. This is the twenty-first century and we share this, we live here, in the future. It is a beautiful morning, it is first light on the time of being other, so get out from that shade and feel the warmth of being outside. You tick: Other.
Salena Godden
Francie nodded shyly. The girl brought an eraser close to the mesh. Francie poked a finger through to touch the vari-colored felt layers blended together by a film of powdered chalk. As she was about to touch this soft beautifulness, the little girl snatched it away and spat full in Francie’s face. Francie closed her eyes tightly to keep the hurt bitter tears from spilling out. The other girl stood there curiously, waiting for the tears. When none came, she taunted: “Why don’t you bust out crying, you dockle? Want I should spit in your face again?” Francie turned and went down into the cellar and sat in the dark a long time waiting until the waves of hurt stopped breaking over her. It was the first of many disillusionments that were to come as her capacity to feel things grew. She never liked blackboard erasers after that.
Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
The openness from the baths lingered. Laurent, whose tangle of overthinking usually only disappeared at the moment of climax, had his defences down in the quiet. Damen could hear his soft exhalations of breath; once or twice, a sound passed his lips that he didn’t seem to be aware of. Time unslid the knot of any last ribbon of tension, letting it slip, letting him go further and further into his own pleasure. Their bodies tangled together, touches blending and blurring. Damen gave himself over to the feeling of Laurent in his arms. It was an age before he put his hand between Laurent’s legs, and felt his legs part. When he finally slid inside, it felt like time had stopped in the small, intimate space between them, after a sweet forever of deep kisses, of opening Laurent up with oiled fingers. He didn’t move but stayed where he was, in breathless silence. Everything felt connected, open. Their movements were more like nudges than thrusts, their bodies pushing together without the long, sliding separation of withdrawal. He could feel Laurent drawing closer and closer to his climax, not, as it was sometimes, like he was pushing past the gnarl of his own barriers, but hotly, inevitably. The thrust were longer now, Damen’s body moving to seek out its own gratification. He heard a choked off sound as Laurent dissolved under him, and Damen was lost to the feel of it, the hot, liquid pleasure of fucking, the closeness, near as a heartbeat. His own body pulsed and flared, an interval of flooding pleasure, and it almost didn’t seem to end but to transform into the sweet, heavy feel of his limbs entangled with Laurent’s, pleasure still between them, the throbs of it ebbing. For
C.S. Pacat (The Summer Palace (Captive Prince, #3.5; Captive Prince Short Stories, #2))
I gave it up and walked down to the Sphynx. After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was MEMORY—RETROSPECTION—wrought into visible, tangible form. All who know what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanished—albeit only a trifling score of years gone by—will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before History was born—before Tradition had being—things that were, and forms that moved, in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know of—and passed one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes.
Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad)
So,” John said, “I’ll meet you at your place at eight, and we can walk over together?” “What? For what?” “The vigil.” “I’m not going to that.” I tried to ignore his surprise, his dogged faith. “Of course you are.” “I don’t know this person.” John continued to stand there, arms hanging down. The knife skidded so much I lost my grip and had to pick it up again. “It could’ve been you,” he said finally. “No,” I said, chopping bluntly, breaking more than slicing the lettuce, “it couldn’t. I’ve worked my whole life so that it couldn’t be me.” White flash of a face. Where did they go, those boys, after they left us behind? “Last night,” John began. He paused, still looking wounded. “You were so happy.” I gathered the lettuce into a bin and held it against my stomach like a barrier. “If it had been me, it would’ve been your fault.” John reeled as though I’d struck him. “You’re a coward,” he said. “You’ve worked your whole life because you’re a coward.” “What do you know? What do you know about anything?” His family moved for him. The hormones. The surgery he was allowed to accept or reject. I waved my arm around the kitchen, at the stunned cooks watching us. “Nobody has to know about you! You can blend in whenever you want!” “You honestly believe that? You think my life’s been easy?” “Yes, I think it’s been fucking easy!” I screamed. “They don’t know! I didn’t know! I wish I still didn’t know!” I tried to shove past him. He touched my back. I remembered Humphrey Bogart’s hand, I remembered dancing, I remembered the gown twirling, I remembered the boy who complimented my ass, I remembered being told I was beautiful. I remembered the woman staring back at me in the Métro windows, her wink. I tried to pull away. John embraced me with my arms pinned to my sides, the lettuce bin between us, its raw, wet smell pushed toward our faces. In full view of the entire kitchen, he kissed me. A kiss that made me think of the woefully few people I had kissed in my life. A kiss that reminded me I had never been loved. A kiss that said I could not be John unless I risked being Dana.   My
Kim Fu (For Today I Am a Boy)
English Gingerbread Cake Serves: 12 to 16 Baking Time: 50 to 60 minutes Kyle Cathie, editor for the British version of The Cake Bible (and now a publisher), informed me in no uncertain terms that a book could not be called a cake "bible" in England if it did not contain the beloved gingerbread cake. When I went to England to retest all the cakes using British flour and ingredients, I developed this gingerbread recipe. Now that I have tasted it, I quite agree with Kyle. It is a moist spicy cake with an intriguing blend of buttery, lemony, wheaty, and treacly flavors. Cut into squares and decorated with pumpkin faces, it makes a delightful "treat" for Halloween. Batter Volume Ounce Gram unsalted butter (65° to 75°F/19° to 23°C) 8 tablespoons (1 stick) 4 113 golden syrup or light corn syrup 1¼ cups (10 fluid ounces) 15 425 dark brown sugar, preferably Muscovado ¼ cup, firmly packed 2 60 orange marmalade 1 heaping tablespoon 1.5 40 2 large eggs, at room temperature ¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons (3 fluid ounces) 3.5 100 milk 2/3 cup (5.3 fluid ounces) 5.6 160 cake flour (or bleached all-purpose flour) 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons (or 1 cup), sifted into the cup and leveled off 4 115 whole wheat flour 1 cup minus 1 tablespoon (lightly spooned into the cup) 4 115 baking powder 1½ teaspoons . . cinnamon 1 teaspoon . . ground ginger 1 teaspoon . . baking soda ½ teaspoon . . salt pinch . . Special Equipment One 8 by 2-inch square cake pan or 9 by 2-inch round pan (see Note), wrapped with a cake strip, bottom coated with shortening, topped with a parchment square (or round), then coated with baking spray with flour Preheat the Oven Twenty minutes or more before baking, set an oven rack in the lower third of the oven and preheat the oven to 325°F/160°C. Mix the Liquid Ingredients In a small heavy saucepan, stir together the butter, golden syrup, sugar, and marmalade over medium-low heat until melted and uniform in color. Set aside uncovered until just barely warm, about 10 minutes. Whisk in the eggs and milk. Make the Batter In a large bowl, whisk together the cake flour, whole wheat flour, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, baking soda, and salt. Add the butter mixture, stirring with a large silicone spatula or spoon just until smooth and the consistency of thick soup. Using the silicone spatula, scrape the batter into the prepared pan. Bake the Cake Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, or until a wire cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean and the cake springs back when pressed lightly in the center. The cake should start to shrink from the sides of the pan only after removal from the oven. Cool the Cake Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes. While the cake is cooling, make the syrup.
Rose Levy Beranbaum (Rose's Heavenly Cakes)