Bridge Of Clay Quotes

There are hundreds of thoughts per every word spoken, and that's if they're spoken at all.

won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

There were reasons to leave, and reasons to stay, and all of it was the same.

We skip the moments like stones.

A murderer should probably do many things, but he should never, under any circumstances, come home.

It was a Sunday, an arsonist sunrise.

She laughed and he felt her breath, and he thought about that warmness, how people were warm like that, from inside to out; how it could hit you and disappear, then back again, and nothing was ever permanent--

I loved you already then.

He, as much as anyone, knows who and why and what we are: A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts.

Me, I'm known for bruises and levelheadedness, for height and muscle and blasphemy, and the occasional sentimentality.

All that remained was to get to camp, learn English better, find a job and a place to live. Then, most importantly, buy a bookshelf. And a piano.

There was rain like a ghost you could walk through. Almost dry when it hit the ground.

He was a wasteland in a suit; he was bent-postured, he was broken.

He was a great horse,” she went on, “and the perfect story—we wouldn’t love him so much if he’d lived.

When you wait you start feeling deserved.

As if sensing the oncoming theatre, the pigeons arrived from nowhere, and dug in close on the powerlines. They were perched on TV aerials, and, God forbid, on the trees. There was also a single crow, fat-feathered and plump, like a pigeon disguised in a trench coat.

...somewhere in his murkiest depths, he wasn't so much afraid of being left again as condemning someone else to second best.

He was caught somewhere, in the current--of destroying everything he had, to become all he needed to be

Writing is always difficult, but easier with something to say.

Each boy stood, slouched yet stiff, hands in pockets. If the dog had pockets, she'd have had her paws in them, too, for sure.

They were virtuosos of alliteration and didn’t know it.

Returning and being let in: Two very different things.

There was guilt for enjoying anything. Especially the joy of forgetting.

There was a kind of generosity to her, of heat and sweat and life.

He loved her more than Michelangelo.

A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts. We were born for relics like these.

We admit to almost everything, and the almost is all that counts.

Those kids, they would've loved this place, they would've walked and skipped and danced here, all legs and sunny hair. They'd have cartwheeled the lawn, shouting, "And don't go lookin' at our knickers, right?

He’d told them what Saturday night meant. The mattress, the plastic sheet. He told them of Matador in the fifth. He said he loved her from the very first time she’d talked to him, and it was his fault, it was all his fault. Clay melted, but didn’t break, because he deserved no tears or sympathy. ‘The night before she fell,’ he said, ‘we met there, we were naked there, and –’ He stopped because Catherine Novac – in a shift of gingerblondness – had stood and she’d walked towards him. She lifted him gently out of his chair and hugged him hard, so hard, and she patted his short flat hair, and it was so damn nice it hurt. She said, ‘You came to us, you came, you came.

He expected pages and pages of bright pictures of pancakes of every variety shown in plain stacks, or built into castles or bridges or igloos, or shaped like airplanes or rowboats or fire engines. And pitchers of syrup to choose from -- partridge berry syrup, thimbleberry syrup, huckleberry syrup, bosenberry syrup, and raspberry syrup. Then there would be cheese plates and cheeses a la carte. Creamy cheeses, crumbly cheeses, and peculiar little cheeses in peculiar little clay pots.

But now those thoughts weren't thoughts at all, they were clouds of landed punches, and every one fell true.

He was built like a very small supermarket: Compact; expensive if you crossed him.

She tried to reassemble herself, to resemble herself...

Carey liked the fact that Michelangelo had had his nose broken as a teenager, for being too much of a smart mouth; a reminder that he was human. A badge of imperfection.

She couldn’t ever see how broken he was, while the rest of us stood and watched them. She was in jeans, bare feet and T-shirt, and maybe that’s what finished us off. She looked just like a Dunbar boy. With that haircut she was one of us.

She didn’t overreact. It may have crossed her mind to march down to the woman responsible for sending this charity shitbox, but she didn’t. She swallowed the glint of anger. She packed it into her prim-and-proper voice, and like her son, moved on.

She was lost in pine and mountainside, her knuckles bony white.

Keeping your nose clean while an entire system broke down around you guaranteed only that you would survive longer, not that you would survive.

He would suffer before he’d belong, unable to show himself easily; a preference for greater hope—to find someone who would know him completely.

Achilles.

the moronic nature of fighting it--of killing yourself to survive.

Around six-thirty, Rory was across the street, leaning against a telegraph pole, smiling just for laughs; the world was filthy, and so was he. After a short search, he pulled a long strand of girls' hair from his mouth. Whoever she was, she was out there somewhere, she lay open-legged in Rory's head. A girl we'll never know, or see.

When it was over, they lay on their backs; there was a window on this, the top floor of the stairwell, and grubby light, and rising-falling chests. The air was heavy. Tons of it, heaping from their lungs. Henry gulped it good and hard, but his mouth showed true heart.

Clay - who was the quiet one, or the smiler - only turned, one last time, and stared across the sunlit district of statues, crosses, and gravestones. They looked like runners-up trophies. Every last one.

The town itself was a hard, distant storyland; you could see it from afar. There was all the straw-like landscape, and marathons of sky. Around it, a wilderness of low scrub and gum trees stood close by, and it was true, it was so damn true: the people sloped and slouched.

There were great big shrugs of breath of him...

and I held him, like love, in my arms.

You could see how hard he loved her. His heart was so obliterated, but he found the will to work it. He was tired, so tired, in the porch light. Just bits-and-pieces of a man.

There was the odd suburban thunderbolt, but they were mostly those people who'd found each other; they were golden and bright-lit and funny. Often they seemed in cahoots somehow, like jailbirds who wouldn't leave; they loved us, they liked us, and that was a pretty good trick.

The dilemma, of course, was the communism. A single great idea. A thousand limits and flaws. Growing up, Penelope never noticed. What child ever does? There was nothing to compare it to.

Sure, she loved horses, she enjoyed racing, but she abhorred the racing business; its wastage, its overbreeding. Its greedy girth of underbelly. It was something like a beautiful whore, and she’d seen it devoid of make-up.

Approaching the Williamsburg Bridge - not really certain of how he had managed to find himself there - he experienced an extraordinary moment of buoyancy, of grace. There was a lot more traffic now, but his shifting was smooth and the sturdy little car was adroit at changing lanes. He launched himself out over the East River. He could feel the bridge humming underneath his wheels and all around him could sense the engineering of it, the forces and tensions and rivets that were all conspiring to keep him aloft. To the south, he glimpsed the Manhattan Bridge, with its Parisian air, refined, elegant, its skirts hiked to reveal tapered steel legs, and, beyond, the Brooklyn Bridge, like a great ropy strand of muscle. In the other direction lay the Queensboro Bridge, like two great iron tsarinas linking hands to dance. And before him, the city that had sheltered him and swallowed him and made him a modest fortune loomed, gray and brown, festooned with swags and boas of some misty gray stuff, a compound of harbor fog and spring dew and its own steamy exhalations. Hope had been his enemy, a frailty that he must at all costs master, for so long now that it was a moment before he was willing to concede that he had let it back into his heart.

Trust the murderer to be unkillable at the one moment he was better off dead.

We lay like prisoners of war.

After a while she said she was hot,

you could set your watch to those hoofbeats, too, and your life to the hand of Tommy—as he led the mule fondly home, to the months and the girl to come.

The proof was all in the hands.

So much of the dying hurt us.

No plane. Planes are too fast. You can’t go south on a plane. You need to drive. Or take a train. You need to watch the dirt turn to clay. You need to look at all the junkyards full of rustin’ cars. You need to go over a few bridges. They say that evil spirits can’t follow you over running water, but that’s just humbug. You ever notice rivers in the North aren’t like rivers in the South? Rivers in the South are the color of chocolate, and they smell like marsh and moss. Up here they’re black, and they smell sweet, like pines. Like Christmas.

Andras went through the Sortie doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn’t care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs.

About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white ribbon of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where a solitary house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and leaning on the parapet was a young man. He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger marking the place. Slowly he repeated— As when a Gryphon through the wilderness With winged step, o'er hill and moory dale Pursues the Arimaspian. He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant sunburnt boyish face. 'Good evening to you,' he said gravely. 'It's a fine night for the road.' The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from the house.

She was right, you know, Abbey Hanley—she said beautiful—can’t you see it?” Up close she was light but visceral, she could keep you alive with her pleading; the pain in her good-green eyes. “Can’t you see I’ll never leave you, Clay? Can’t you see I’ll never leave?” Clay looked like he might fall then. Carey wrapped him tightly. She just held him and hugged him and whispered to him, and he felt all her bones within her. She smiled and cried and smiled. She said, “Go to The Surrounds. Go on Saturday night.” She kissed him on the neck there, and pressed the words all down. “I’ll never leave you, ever—” and that’s how I like to remember them:

Epigraph won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. —“won’t you celebrate with me,” Lucille Clifton

But how…how am I a dragon? How are you a starman?” “I don’t think of myself as a starman, exactly,” he said soberly, though I sensed he wanted to smile. His hand released mine, the bridge broken; he moved to hang the lantern on a shiny new hook dug into the wall behind us. “I was born here, on earth. Not even far from here, in fact. Just over in Devon. My parents died young, when I was only five. Hastings is my great-uncle and he took me in, and I’ve lived here ever since. But I’ve always known what I am, as far back as I can remember. I’ve always been able to do the things I do. The stars have always spoken to me.” “And you…speak back to them?” “Yes,” he said simply. “But not to people.” “No. Just to Hastings, and to you.” A shiver took me; I crossed my arms over my chest. “What do the stars say?” “All manner of things. Amazing things. Secret things. Things great and small, things profound and insignificant. They told me that, throughout time, there’ve been only a scattering of people like me, folk of both flesh and star. That even the whisper of their magic in my blood could annihilate me if I didn’t learn to control it. That I’d crisp to ash without control. Or, worse, crisp someone else.” His smile broke through. “And they told me about you. That you were born and would come to me when the time was right.” “Did you summon me here?” The muted echo of my voice rebounded against the firefly walls: here-here-here. “To Iverson, I mean?” …mean-mean-mean… He didn’t answer at first. He looked at his feet, then walked to the edge of the embankment and squatted down, raking his fingers through the bright water near the toes of his boots. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” he said softly to the water. “Both infinite and finite, human and not. I’m of comet and clay and the sparks of sun across the ocean waves.” He sighed. “I know what it’s like to doubt yourself, to comprehend that you’re so unique you’re forced to wonder about…everything. But, yes, I called you to Iverson.

The same mode of symbolising the justification by works had evidently been in use in Babylon itself; and, therefore, there was great force in the Divine handwriting on the wall, when the doom of Belshazzar went forth: "Tekel," "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting." In the Parsee system, which has largely borrowed from Chaldea, the principle of weighing the good deeds over against the bad deeds is fully developed. "For three days after dissolution," says Vaux, in his Nineveh and Persepolis, giving an account of Parsee doctrines in regard to the dead, "the soul is supposed to flit round its tenement of clay, in hopes of reunion; on the fourth, the Angel Seroch appears, and conducts it to the bridge of Chinevad. On this structure, which they assert connects heaven and earth, sits the Angel of Justice, to weigh the actions of mortals; when the good deeds prevail, the soul is met on the bridge by a dazzling figure, which says, "I am thy good angel; I was pure originally, but thy good deeds have rendered me purer;' and passing his hand over the neck of the blessed soul, leads it to Paradise. If iniquities preponderate, the soul is met by a hideous spectre, which howls out, 'I am thy evil genius; I was impure from the first, but thy misdeeds have made me fouler; through the we shall remain miserable until the resurrection;' the sinning soul is then dragged away to hell, where Ahriman sits to taunt it with its crimes." Such is the doctrine of Parseeism.

Talin looked up at Clay. "Do you know what they are muttering about?" He shook his head. "They're mated." Oddly enough, Talin understood. Different rules applied to couples, especially couples as profoundly in sync as Lucas and Sascha. Their connection was a near visible line of pure emotion, one that made her hurt with envy. "Tally." Clay tugged at her ponytail. She glanced up, knowing that unlike the alpha pair, she and Clay remained divided. In her mind, she saw them on opposite ends of a glass bridge. Able to see the abyss that awaited if they didn't make it to each other, but unable to take the steps that would close the gap forever. "Sit down," she said, angry at him for being so possessive, at herself for being too scared to trust in his promise to never leave her again.

First, most good ideas came from people who were bridging “structural holes,” which is to say people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department. Second, bridging these structural holes was valuable even when other variables, such as rank and age (both of which correlate for higher degrees of social connection), were controlled for.

Kaiser was new to shipwork. He began life running a photographer’s shop in New York, moved into the gravel business, and ended up in California running a multi-million dollar construction company that built the Hoover Dam and the Bay Bridge. He had a reputation for tackling the impossible. When the shipbuilding programme started his initial involvement was the construction of four of the new yards on the west coast, but he then began to produce the ships as well. At his Permanente Metals Yards No. 1 and No. 2 at Richmond, on the northern edge of San Francisco Bay, the young Kaiser manager, Clay Bedford, set out literally to mass-produce ships.

We are satellites, we are made from blood and clay—we are the children of Gods, we are the builders of bridges and the destroyers of empires. We are ordinary miracles, the original sinners and the collectors of paradoxes. We are each grain of sand in an hourglass and the invisible lines that connect the constellations and make them what they are. We are finite and endless, immortal and temporary. We are—you are—I am.

Clay trudged to the rear of the midway and the sanctuary of his trailer. He contemplated the warnings that littered his road to perdition: a call for a U-turn when he got puffed up with false pride. A sharp curve in the road had tried to turn him away from his sinful pursuit of the almighty dollar. He’d crossed that blighted bridge going a hundred miles an hour and had stood helpless as the grotesque outstretched arms of salvation struggled in vain to pull him back.