Blood Compact Quotes

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.

So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet.

No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.

Sometimes during the night I'd look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no family, no nothing, just myself the stupid son of plans all of them compacted of eventual darkness. God how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life - and to think that negative little paper-shuffling prissies should write condescending obituaries about a man who told the truth, nay who drew breath in pain to tell a tale like that! ... No remedy but in my mind I raise a fist to High Heaven promising that I shall bull whip the first bastard who makes fun of human hopelessness anyway - I know it's ridiculous to pray to my father that hunk of dung in a grave yet I pray to him anyway, what else shall I do? sneer? shuffle paper on a desk and burp rationality? Ah thank God for all the Rationalists the worms and vermin got. Thank God for all the hate mongering political pamphleteers with no left or right to yell about in the Grave of Space. I say that we shall all be reborn with the Only One, and that's what makes me go on, and my mother too. She has her rosary in the bus, don't deny her that, that's her way of stating the fact. If there can't be love among men let there be love at least between men and God. Human courage is an opiate but opiates are human too. If God is an opiate so am I. Thefore eat me. Eat the night, the long desolate American between Sanford and Shlamford and Blamford and Crapford, eat the hematodes that hang parasitically from dreary southern trees, eat the blood in the ground, the dead Indians, the dead pioneers, the dead Fords and Pontiacs, the dead Mississippis, the dead arms of forlorn hopelessness washing underneath - Who are men, that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking 'What is there to laugh about in that?' 'How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?' 'Who makes fun of misery?' There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didn't ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who also didn't ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads - Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness, forever?

Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn’t thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master.

No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.

From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one; then she unswivels a pink stick and dots her cheeks and blends them, changing her shape, performing the only magic left to her. Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paper doll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. She is not bored, she has no other interests.

Talk not to me of compacts; as ’tween men And lions no firm concord can exist, 310 Nor wolves and lambs in harmony unite, But ceaseless enmity between them dwells: So not in friendly terms, nor compact firm, Can thou and I unite, till one of us Glut with his blood the mail-clad warrior Mars.

Loss – what does he know about it, I ask you? He’s barely out of nappies for Christ’s sake. I’d say the closest he’s ever come to loss was his virginity, and even at that I can’t be sure he’s old enough. No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half

What he did there was, if one were to make a story of it to someone, absolutely nothing. It was fall, and in the mountains the early-autumn sun has a power of its own; mornings it lifted him up and bore him to some tree high up on the slopes, from beneath which one looked into the far distance, for in spite of his heavy hiking boots he was really not conscious of walking. In the same self-forgetful way he changed his location several times during the day and read a little in a few books he had with him. Nor was he really thinking, although he felt his mind more deeply agitated than usual, for his thoughts did not shake themselves up as they usually do, so that a new idea is always landing on top of the pyramid of the earlier ones while the ones at the bottom are becoming more and more compacted until finally they fuse with flesh, blood, skull case, and the tendons supporting the muscles, but his insights came like a jet into a full vessel, in endless overflowing and renewal, or they passed in an everlasting progression like clouds through the sky in which nothing changes, not the blue depths and not the soundless swimming of those mother-of-pearl fish. It could happen that an animal came out of the woods, observed Ulrich, and slowly bounded away without anything changing; that a cow grazed nearby, or a person went past, without any more happening than a beat of the pulse, twin to all the others of the stream of life that softly pounds without end against the walls of the understanding.

The French Crown was brought into the pogroms later in the summer by the alarming “discovery” of a secret covenant between the Jews, the Muslims, and the lepers. The compact first came to light at the end of June, during a solar eclipse in Anjou and Touraine. For a period of four hours on the twenty-sixth, the afternoon sun appeared swollen and horribly engorged, as if bursting with blood; then, during the night, hideous black spots dimpled the moon, as if the craters on its acned face had turned inside out. Certain that the world was coming to end, the next morning the populace attacked the Jews. During the rampage, a copy of the secret covenant was discovered inside a casket in the home of a Jew named Bananias. Written in Hebrew and adorned with a gold seal weighing the equivalent of nineteen florins, the document was decorated with a carving of a Jew—though the figure could have been a Muslim—defecating into the face of the crucified Christ. On

My Legion–’ Magnus’s face creased with rising anger ‘–was backed into a corner. My Thousand Sons died because of your treachery, because of the venom you whispered in Horus’s ears to start this insanity. He calls it his rebellion, but we both know the first heart to turn traitor was the one beating in your chest.’ Lorgar laughed again, the sound one of unfeigned delight. ‘See? The blame always lies with one of us unworthy souls. Never with you for making the wrong compacts with the gods that you deny are even real!’ The parchments on Lorgar’s armour flapped in the sudden wind of Magnus’s ire. The Word Bearer stood unfazed, his serene smile boiling his brother’s blood. The sorcerer’s skin quivered, beetles writhing beneath it as witch-lightning danced across his coppery flesh. Magnus moved, his body forming from the air itself, shaped out of the poison behind reality’s veil. Anger drove him into true incarnation. ‘That is enough, Lorgar.’ Lorgar nodded. ‘It is. I’ve no desire to trade insults. We’ve all made mistakes, it’s how we deal with the aftermath that matters.

We enjoy the poetics but also know we can’t always live off our feelings. We’ve long intuited that a long-distance marathon like ours must be run on more than romance. We delight in each other enough that when we don’t, we still push each other to push through the pain barrier. To try to make it to the next level. Ali calls this “the work of love,” and maybe some days that’s shorthand for me being hard work. But she’s right: love is work. Good work. We may let the scaffolds fall, but we have built our wall. Ali gets fidgety when I get too serious. As I am now. Struggling to express how every day that we give to each other adds both weight and … weightlessness. Gravity and grace. Am I more desperate for our marriage to make it than Ali, who is never as desperate as her husband? I have the most to learn from this relationship, and one of the profoundest lessons it has taught me is in raising children. I’d had that blood-brother compact with my childhood friend Guggi to never grow up, but as Ali and I had kids, I slowly understood that you can’t have a child and remain a child. I really don’t like goodbyes, but sometimes you have to say goodbye.

Us in speech therapists office, Brandy says, “It helps to know you’re not anymore responsible for how you look than a car is,” Brandy says. “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. You’re teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product,” Brandy says. Sometimes your best way to deal with shirt, she says, is to not hold yourself as such precious little prize. “My point being,” Brandy says, “is you can’t escape the world, and you’re not responsible for how you look, if you look beauticious or butt ugly. You’re not responsible for how you feel or what you say or how you act or anything you do. It’s all out of your hands,” Brandy says. The same way a compact disk isn’t responsible for what’s recorded on it, that’s how we are. You’re about as free to act as a programmed computer. You’re about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill. “There isn’t any real you in you,” she says. ”Even your physical body, all your cells will be replaced within eight years.” Skin, bone, blood, and organs transplant from person to person. Even what’s inside you already, the colonies of microbes and bugs that eat your food for you, without them you’d die. Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited. “Relax,” Brandy says, “Whatever you’re thinking, a million other folks are thinking. Whatever you do, they’re doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort.

The typewriter is neat and compact and sturdy and blue, just the right machine to pound out a missive of love. When you strike the keys it’s a sound that hasn’t been heard in the qorld world for thirty years (we are so far away from a time when typewriters won world wars). When you strike the keys they make a sound like a pistol shot, a sound so definite and sure you feel like a genius, or an orayor orator, or a beat poet. When you strike the keys you just want to keep on fucking writing. You have to wrestle with the thing, like I am doing now, steer it like an old manual car, keep the words together and right and on the page, but the blood and muscle of a typewriter, it is a beautiful thing.

The muscles of Sue’s legs tensed, and the saddle lurched. One of the little girls screamed. And then the Tyrannosaur came down from the leap that had carried her over the besieged Wardens. Sue landed with one clawed foot on the street, and the other came down squarely on the Caddy’s hood, like a falcon descending upon a rabbit. There was an enormous sound of shrieking metal and breaking glass, and the saddle lurched wildly again. I leaned over to see what had happened. The car’s hood and engine block had been compacted into a two-foot-thick section of twisted metal. Even as I looked, Sue leaned over the car in a curiously birdlike movement, opened her enormous jaws, and ripped the roof off. Inside was Li Xian, dressed in a black shirt and trousers. The ghoul’s forehead had a nasty gash in it, and green-black blood had sheeted over one side of his face. His eyes were blank and a little vague, and I figured he’d clipped his head on the steering wheel or window when Sue brought his sliding car to an abrupt halt. Li Xian shook his head and then started to scramble out of the car. Sue roared again, and the sound must have terrified Li Xian, because all of his limbs jerked in spasm and he fell on his face to the street. Sue leaned down again, her jaws gaping, but the ghoul rolled under the car to get away from them. So Sue kicked the car, and sent it tumbling end over end three or four times down the street. The ghoul let out a scream and stared up at Sue in naked terror, covering his head with his arms. Sue ate him. Snap. Gulp. No more ghoul. “What’s with that?” Butters screamed, his voice high and frightened. “Just covering his head with his arms? Didn’t he see the lawyer in the movie?” “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them,” I replied, turning Sue around. “Hang on!” I rode the dinosaur into the stream of zombies following in the Wardens’ wake and let her go to town. Sue chomped and stomped and smacked zombies fifty feet through the air with swinging blows of her snout. Her tail batted one particularly vile-looking zombie into the brick wall of the nearest building, and the zombie hit so hard and so squishily that it just stuck to the wall like a refrigerator magnet, arms and legs spread in a sprawl.

Doubtless the founders of our government, the majority of them at least, regarded the confederation of the colonies as an experiment. Each colony considered itself a separate government; that the confederation was for mutual protection against a foreign foe, and the prevention of strife and war among themselves. If there had been a desire on the part of any single State to withdraw from the compact at any time while the number of States was limited to the original thirteen, I do not suppose there would have been any to contest the right, no matter how much the determination might have been regretted. The problem changed on the ratification of the Constitution by all the colonies; it changed still more when amendments were added; and if the right of any one State to withdraw continued to exist at all after the ratification of the Constitution, it certainly ceased on the formation of new States, at least so far as the new States themselves were concerned. It was never possessed at all by Florida or the States west of the Mississippi, all of which were purchased by the treasury of the entire nation. Texas and the territory brought into the Union in consequence of annexation, were purchased with both blood and treasure; and Texas, with a domain greater than that of any European state except Russia, was permitted to retain as state property all the public lands within its borders. It would have been ingratitude and injustice of the most flagrant sort for this State to withdraw from the Union after all that had been spent and done to introduce her; yet, if separation had actually occurred, Texas must necessarily have gone with the South, both on account of her institutions and her geographical position. Secession was illogical as well as impracticable; it was revolution.

an instant, a simple swatch of light, then movement: the blond-haired executioner. She stood in a doorway just beyond the street corner, hiding, waiting, arms raised and weapon trained. The reflection in the car window saved Dewey from what would have been, in five feet or so, a warm bullet in the back of the head. Dewey stopped just before the corner, feet away from where the blond assassin lurked. He looked behind him, down the block he’d just run down, and saw a Laundromat. He dropped back and entered the Laundromat. He ran through the store, pushing his way past piles of laundry and women folding articles, to the back room, where a man sat, smoking a cigarette in front of a pile of papers. “Lo siento,” murmured Dewey as he charged through the office toward an alley entrance, gun in hand. The sirens became louder, multiple vehicles joining in the distance. Out the door and across the alley and through a dented steel door. Inside, stacks of bread loaves, other boxes of food, the smell of meat. He moved through the storage room and entered the back of a bodega. Colt .45 cocked in front of him, he passed a middle-aged woman who fainted as she saw the weapon in his hand. Catching the eye of the man at the cash register, Dewey held a finger to his lips. There, at the side of the entrance, her back to the store, stood the blond assassin. Suddenly another customer, an elderly woman, screamed as she saw Dewey with gun. The blonde turned abruptly, leveling what he now saw was an HK UMP compact machine gun with a six-inch suppressor on the end. A full auto hail of bullets crashed through the windows as she swept the weapon east-west. The elderly woman’s screams ended abruptly as a bullet ripped through her head and killed her. The assassin’s bullets shattered the storefront’s glass, but Dewey was already down and partially hidden by a chest freezer, which shielded him from the slugs. As soon as the blonde’s gun swept past him, Dewey had a clear sight. He fired twice, two quick shots into the assassin’s neck and chest, flinging her backward onto the brick sidewalk in a shower of blood and glass. Dewey ran

Anyone unaccustomed to the rather peculiar points of bull terrier beauty would have thought him a strange if not downright ugly dog, with the maked, down-faced arc of his profile, his deep-chested, stocky body and whip -tapered tail. But the true lover of an ancient and honorable breed would have recognized the blood and bone of this elderly and rather battered body; world have known that in his prime this had been a magnificent specimen of compact sinew and muscle, bred to fight and endure, and would have loved him for his curious mixture of waked, unyielding fighter yet devoted and docile family pet, and above all for the irrepressible air of sly merriment which gleamed in his little slant eyes.

Before he left White Harbor a compact was drawn up and signed, by the terms of which Lord Manderly’s youngest daughter would be wed to the prince’s brother Joffrey once the war was over.

All day long, her small compact body, sweating through one hospital gown after another, had been racked with coughing fits and spasms. Her long black hair, tied into a tight braid, had lashed the pillows like a whip. Her platelet count plummeted, her blood gases revealed she had entered into metabolic acidosis, her breathing became so faint that a mechanical ventilator had to be wheeled in; her major organs began to shut down like dominoes falling in a row. Lungs, liver, central nervous system; when her kidneys failed, Slater had had to immediately put her on dialysis.

Margaret peered at her reflecion, moving the compact in a circle so she could see her entire face. She though she looked transparent as a baby crayfish in the Little Heart River. Maragret had never been a vain woman, one to consult each mirror she passed or smooth her hair as she caught her reflection in a storefront window. She simply wanted to make sure she was still there, still flesh and sweet blood and silver hair. There were days she was so light she couldn’t be sure. She felt herself floating beneath the covers, held down by sweat and three star quilts.

The Trail-Makers NORTH and west along the coast among the misty islands, Sullen in the grip of night and smiling in the day: Nunivak and Akutan, with Nome against the highlands, On we drove with plated prow agleam with frozen spray. Loud we sang adventuring and lustily we jested; Quarreled, fought, and then forgot the taunt, the blow, the jeers; Named a friend and clasped a hand—a compact sealed, attested; Shared tobacco, yarns, and drink, and planned surpassing years. Then—the snow that locked the trail where famine's shadow followed Out across the blinding white and through the stabbing cold, Past tents along the tundra over faces blotched and hollowed; Toothless mouths that babbled foolish songs of hidden gold. Wisdom, lacking sinews for the toil, gave over trying; Fools, with thews of iron, blundered on and won the fight; Weaklings drifted homeward; else they tarried—worse than dying— With the painted lips and wastrels on the edges of the night. Berries of the saskatoon were ripening and falling; Flowers decked the barren with its timber scant and low; All along the river-trail were many voices calling, And e'en the whimpering Malemutes they heard—and whined to go. Eyelids seared with fire and ice and frosted parka-edges; Firelight like a spray of blood on faces lean and brown; Shifting shadows of the pines across our loaded sledges, And far behind the fading trail, the lights and lures of town. So we played the bitter game nor asked for praise or pity: Wind and wolf they found the bones that blazed out lonely trails.... Where a dozen shacks were set, to-day there blooms a city; Now where once was empty blue, there pass a thousand sails. Scarce a peak that does not mark the grave of those who perished Nameless, lost to lips of men who followed, gleaning fame From the soundless triumph of adventurers who cherished Naught above the glory of a chance to play the game. Half the toil—and we had won to wealth in other station; Rusted out as useless ere our worth was tried and known. But the Hand that made us caught us up and hewed a nation From the frozen fastness that so long was His alone. . . . . . . Loud we sang adventuring and lustily we jested; Quarreled, fought, and then forgot the taunt, the blow, the jeers; Sinned and slaved and vanished—we, the giant-men who wrested Truth from out a dream wherein we planned surpassing years.

And, as the storm of water thrashed the very pinnacles that toppled into mist, he had seen the ribs of cliff laid bare and bleeding—as it were the laceration of a living land that he looked on. Then, ‘Corne et tonnerre!’ he had seemed to cry to himself, ‘the very world is torn by some inhuman power, and flows to the sea in rivers of purple!’ and he heard the bells of the ocean receding innumerably, choke at their moorings, muffled and congested with the floating scum of carnage that no wind might ruffle and only God’s fire cleanse. Now, in a moment, he saw that what he had taken for land was in truth a great cliff built up of human bodies—a vast reserve of human force accumulated by, and for the use of, a single dominant will. And this cliff was washed by the waves of an ocean of blood, to which its life contributed in a thousand spouting rivulets. And it was compact of limitless pain; and the cry of torture never ceased within it. And suddenly the dreamer—as in the way of dreams—felt himself to be a constituent agony of that he gazed upon—a pulp of suffering self-contained, yet partaking of the wretchedness of all.

No one, no one really knows loss until it’s someone you love. The deep-down kind of love that holds on to your bones and digs itself right in under your fingernails, as hard to budge as the years of compacted earth. And when it’s gone … it’s as if it’s been ripped from you. Raw and exposed, you stand dripping blood all over the good feckin’ carpet. Half-human, half-dead, one foot already in the grave.

I am Jack of Shadows!” he cried out. “Lord of Shadow Guard! I am Shadowjack, the thief who walks in silence and in shadows! I was beheaded in Igles and rose again from the Dung Pits of Glyve. I drank the blood of a vampire and ate a stone. I am the breaker of the Compact. I am he who forged a name in the Red Book of Ells. I am the prisoner in the jewel. I duped the Lord of High Dudgeon once, and I will return for vengeance upon him. I am the enemy of my enemies. Come take me, filth, if you love the Lord of Bats or despise me, for I have named myself Jack of Shadows!