Broken Vessels Quotes

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It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)
The only way to keep a broken vessel full is to keep it always under the tap.
Billy Sunday
Someone smashed a flutterfler and without even thinking she touched her Stone and used Wyrd to piece its broken body back together. She filled its empty vessels with dreams and it became the stuff it used for blood. It brushed her cheek with its wings, then flew off -- dancing in the hot air.
Robert Fanney
But alas, hearts are meant to be broken, aren’t they, bard?” “If they must break,” Jack said, “then they break and remake themselves into stronger vessels.
Rebecca Ross (A River Enchanted (Elements of Cadence, #1))
You're the most important thing in this universe. You; this vessel; the people of this planet; lovers, warriors, artists, leaders, dreams more numerous than stars. Each mind unique, each thought created for an instant and then broken apart to form new ones. You don't understand the unbearable beauty of being you.
Amie Kaufman (This Shattered World (Starbound, #2))
David was caught in a very uncomfortable position; however, he seemed to grasp a deep understanding of the unfolding drama in which he had been caught. He seemed to understand something that few of even the wisest men of his day understood. Something that in our day, when men are wiser still, even fewer understand. And what was that? God did not have - but wanted very much to have - men and women who would live in pain. God wanted a broken vessel.
Gene Edwards (A Tale of three Kings: A Study in Brokenness)
...he seemed to grasp a deep understanding of the unfolding drama in which he had been caught. He seemed to understand something that few of even the wisest men of his day understood...God wanted a broken vessel.
Gene Edwards (A Tale of three Kings: A Study in Brokenness)
When I've thought about him dying - which admittedly isn't that much - I always thought of it like you said, that all strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships think, or maybe we're grass - our roots are so interdependent that no one is dead as long as soneone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications... I like the strings, I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is...We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well- but not quite perfectly, you know? "Maybe, it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen-these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable...But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see each other, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never looking inside. But once the vessel cracks, the like can get in. The like can get out.
John Green (Paper Towns)
Miriam realizes she is a broken vessel, pieces of her scattered everywhere. She has been finding those pieces, in their many forms, and bringing them together so she can be whole again.
Myla Goldberg
We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses.
Andre Dubus (Broken Vessels: Essays)
I wonder from these thousand of "me's", which one am I? Listen to my cry, do not drown my voice I am completely filled with the thought of you. Don't lay broken glass on my path I will crush it into dust. I am nothing, just a mirror in the palm of your hand, reflecting your kindness, your sadness, your anger. If you were a blade of grass or a tiny flower I will pitch my tent in your shadow. Only your presence revives my withered heart. You are the candle that lights the whole world and I am an empty vessel for your light. Rumi - "Hidden Music
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi)
There's beauty in the imperfect too. you are a God who uses broken vessels. You are not afraid of human limitations or scars.
Jocelyn Green (Veiled in Smoke (The Windy City Saga, #1))
But you know what the Midrash says? God only works through broken vessels.
Jean Meltzer (The Matzah Ball)
The messages of a prophet...affect the decisions of kings. The decisions of kings determine not just the course of nations but also the life and death of individuals in those countries. If we become so enamored with our own little world that we disregard the nations, we are no better than those who focus on nations and ruthlessly disregard human life.
Mesu Andrews (Love in a Broken Vessel (Treasure of His Love))
In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after mending.
Michele Harper (The Beauty in Breaking)
I have been forgotten like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel. PSALM 31:12
Tessa Afshar (Land of Silence)
And his Soul mocked him and said, "Surely thou hast but little joy out of thy love. Thou art as one who in time of dearth pours water into a broken vessel. Thou givest away what thou hast, and nought is given to thee in return. ...
Oscar Wilde (The Fisherman and his Soul)
The broken pieces will make this vessel even better.
Connilyn Cossette (Shadow of the Storm (Out From Egypt, #2))
So many of us fail: we divorce our wives and husbands, we leave the roofs of our lovers, go once again into the lonely march, mustering our courage with work, friends, half pleasures which are not whole because they are not shared. Yet still I believe in love's possibility, in its presence on the earth; as I believe I can approach the altar on any morning of any day which may be the last and receive the touch that does not, for me, say: There is no death; but does say: In this instant I recognize, with you, that you must die. And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plates, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary; we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together, we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.
Andre Dubus (Broken Vessels: Essays)
Listen, Tenar. Heed me. You were the vessel of evil. The evil is poured out. It is done. It is buried in its own tomb. You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light. I found the lamp unlit; I won’t leave it on some desert island like a thing found and cast away. I’ll take you to Havnor and say to the princes of Earthsea, ‘Look! In the place of darkness I found the light, her spirit. By her an old evil was brought to nothing. By her I was brought out of the grave. By her the broken was made whole, and where there was hatred there will be peace.
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2))
Of Swelter's acreage, only a perch or two here and there might, if broken, prove vulnerable loam. That he bled profusely could prove little. There was blood in him to revitalize an anaemic army, with enough left over to cool the guns. Placed end to end, his blood vessels might have coiled up the Tower of Flints and half way down again like a Virginia creeper -- a vampire's home from home.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
We had all been broken in that moment - broken open by shock and grief and anger and fear. I didn't know how or when, but this opening could lead to healing. After all, only an empty vessel can be filled by grace; but to get there, we had to help each other rise while we shed the same tears. We had to get up and start again.
Michele Harper (The Beauty in Breaking)
That night, lying beside her, I remembered how when I was a child I would slip my cold feet between my mother’s thighs to warm them. How she’d shiver and whisper that she would always suffer to bring me comfort, that that was how you knew someone really loved you. I remembered the boots she’d broken in so that by the time I got them I could go on unbothered, without harm. Now, more than ever, I wished desperately for a way to transfer pain, wished I could prove to my mother just how much I loved her, that I could just crawl into her hospital cot and press my body close enough to absorb her burden. It seemed only fair that life should present such an opportunity to prove one’s filial piety. That the months my mother had been a vessel for me, her organs shifting and cramping together to make room for my existence, and the agony she’d endured upon my exit could be repaid by carrying this pain in her place. The rite of an only daughter. But I could do no more than lie nearby, ready to be her advocate, listening to the slow and steady beeping of machinery, the soft sounds of her breathing in and out.
Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart)
God’s idea of ministry training is a broken vessel. His idea of spiritual preparation is suffering, which includes rejection.
Frank Viola (God's Favorite Place on Earth)
Light enters a broken vessel more easily than an intact one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
There is beauty in the imperfect too. You are a God who uses broken vessels. You are not afraid of human limitations or scars.
Jocelyn Green (Veiled in Smoke (The Windy City Saga, #1))
I am a broken vessel housing the treasure of the gospel.
Alysa VanderWeerd
Whispers of a forgotten shore When I die, throw my ashes to the wind… Let it carry me along as my heart will lead my soul, to the places that took my breath away. Let it blow me about to return to those places.. That I swore were so magical I would return, But have not, Let those forgotten shores, forgotten places, Be reunited with my eyes, The splendour and the overwhelming feeling of sheer happiness, Etch into my soul as I pass through one heaven into the next Where I shall live for eternity Knowing I made a promise and kept it, I forgot nothing, I left nothing behind, My loved ones will greet me or follow me, My broken promises were fixed, And the screams in my ears of a conscience I couldn’t escape, Faded to whispers, Till one day I shall return to Earth in a new vessel, Reborn to live and suffer and wish this wish of mine all over again, Knowing the fulfillment of being forever free….
Michelle Geaney (Under These Rebel Skies)
This is survival. This is how the vessel protects the mind, how the mind protects the heart, how the heart goes on forgetting that its calling is to be undefended, that being broken is part of being whole.
Lily Brooks-Dalton (The Light Pirate)
One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner’s thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home. Silver and blue, blue and silver. Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner’s chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears. The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be. Werner’s body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed. “Ernst,” says the man beside him. “Ernst.” But there is no Ernst; the men in the cots do not reply; the American soldier at the door of the tent sleeps. Werner walks past him into the grass. The wind moves through his undershirt. He is a kite, a balloon. Once, he and Jutta built a little sailboat from scraps of wood and carried it to the river. Jutta painted the vessel in ecstatic purples and greens, and she set it on the water with great formality. But the boat sagged as soon as the current got hold of it. It floated downstream, out of reach, and the flat black water swallowed it. Jutta blinked at Werner with wet eyes, pulling at the battered loops of yarn in her sweater. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.” Did they? He hopes they did. He seems to remember a little boat—a more seaworthy one—gliding down a river. It sailed around a bend and left them behind. Didn’t it? The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light? Across the field, an American watches a boy leave the sick tent and move against the background of the trees. He sits up. He raises his hand. “Stop,” he calls. “Halt,” he calls. But Werner has crossed the edge of the field, where he steps on a trigger land mine set there by his own army three months before, and disappears in a fountain of earth.
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
Be broken and pride will have no vessel.
TemitOpe Ibrahim
Under the skin, broken blood vessels wallow like a pack of leeches.
Niklas Natt och Dag (The Wolf and the Watchman)
Wounded healers are GOD's Greatest weapons.
Mario Murillo (Vessels of Fire and Glory: Breaking Demonic Spells Over America to Release a Great Awakening)
The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals. IV
Willa Cather (The Song of the Lark)
the devil, the prince of the impious city, when he stirs up his own vessels against the city of God that sojourns in this world, is permitted to do her no harm. For without doubt the divine providence procures for her both consolation through prosperity, that she may not be broken by adversity, and trial through adversity, that she may not be corrupted by prosperity; and thus each is tempered by the other,
Augustine of Hippo (The Complete Works of Saint Augustine: The Confessions, On Grace and Free Will, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, Expositions on the Book Of Psalms, ... (50 Books With Active Table of Contents))
God does not look to find those who are the elites and those who are the most skilled. Rather He looks for the weak and insignificant who trust in Him. God uses broken pots and vessels, He uses imperfect people who trust in a perfect God. Thus all men will know that it is God who has manifested His power and glory through a brother or sister. It is realized then that it was not the work of men but the work of God.
Greg Gordon (Principles for the Gathering of Believers Under the Headship of Jesus Christ)
Still, the ground beneath me felt unsteady, as though at any moment it could shake and easily take me to the ground. I stumbled upon what Zen priest and author Susan Murphy calls the koan of the earth. How do we answer the riddle of our times? How do we sift through the shards of our broken culture, our fragmented psyches, and come once again into “our original undividedness and the freedom it bestows, right there in the suffocating fear itself.”90 This was the question at the heart of my despair, ripening in the vessel of my sorrow. What felt different this time was the interior experience of the grief and despair. It was not centered on personal losses—my history, wounds, losses, failures, and disappointments. It was arising from the greater pulse of the earth itself, winding its way through sidewalks and grocery lists, traffic snarls and utility bills. Somewhere in all the demands of modern life, the intimate link between earth and psyche was being reestablished or, more accurately, remembered. The conditioned fantasy of the segregated self was being dismantled, and I was being reunited, through the unexpected grace of fear, despair, and grief, with the body of the earth.
Francis Weller (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief)
He was a crusty old bastard, dressed like my uncle in ancient denim coveralls, espadrilles and beret. He had a leathery, tanned and windblown face, hollow cheeks, and the tiny broken blood vessels on nose and cheeks that everyone seemed to have from drinking so much of the local Bordeaux.
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
in my voyages, when I was a man and commanded other men, I have seen the heavens overcast, the sea rage and foam, the storm arise, and, like a monstrous bird, beating the two horizons with its wings. Then I felt that my vessel was a vain refuge, that trembled and shook before the tempest. Soon the fury of the waves and the sight of the sharp rocks announced the approach of death, and death then terrified me, and I used all my skill and intelligence as a man and a sailor to struggle against the wrath of God. But I did so because I was happy, because I had not courted death, because to be cast upon a bed of rocks and seaweed seemed terrible, because I was unwilling that I, a creature made for the service of God, should serve for food to the gulls and ravens. But now it is different; I have lost all that bound me to life, death smiles and invites me to repose; I die after my own manner, I die exhausted and broken-spirited, as I fall asleep when I have paced three thousand times round my cell.
Alexandre Dumas (The Count Of Monte Cristo)
The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now moulds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. But it is no hardship for the vessel to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together
Marcus Aurelius (Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius)
They (Corinthians) had to guard the prisoners in their vessels, and there were no means of refitting in such a desert place. They were more disposed to consider how they should get home than to fight. For they feared that the Athenians, deeming the peace, now that blows had been exchanged, to be already broken, would intercept their return. (Book 1 Chapter 52.2-3)
Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War: Bk. 1-2)
him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series. I am sorry there is not room to put in a few dozen instances of the delicate art of the forest, as practised by Natty Bumppo and some of the other Cooperian experts. Perhaps we may venture two or three samples. Cooper was a sailor — a naval officer; yet he gravely tells us how a vessel, driving towards a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a particular spot by her skipper because he knows of an undertow there which will hold her back against the gale and save her. For just pure woodcraft, or sailorcraft, or whatever it is, isn't that neat? For several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon-ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so; skips again a hundred feet or so — and so on, till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some "females" — as he always calls women — in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog, on purpose to give Bumppo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the
Mark Twain (Mark Twain: Collection of 51 Classic Works with analysis and historical background (Annotated and Illustrated) (Annotated Classics))
Between Roseville and Sacramento the land flattens and is crowded and we have reached, or returned to, cluttered America living close enough to each other to hear and recite the neighbors’ quarrels and exclamations of joy and grief, the only spaces those cleared of trees and reserved for sport: softball diamonds and golf courses. I am saddened by what we make: the buildings where they might as well hang a sign: THIS UGLY PLACE IS WHERE YOU WORK, the playing fields and parks, and the house to contain you. While somehow there is a trick at work and you have been removed not only from the land itself, but from its spirit; or, as Sharon says, the heart. After the open country and mountains, the earth looks punished, and it is hard to believe that its people have not been punished as well, for nothing more than the desire to love and to prove oneself worthy of that by going to work. West
Andre Dubus (Broken Vessels: Essays)
No one pours liquid into a cracked and broken vase which can hold nothing. Your heart is divided into as many pieces representing the cares you hold: each care is a broken piece; and do you think that God will pour his grace into such a useless vessel? Ask the wise man, who says: “The heart of a fool is like a broken vessel, and not all wisdom shall it hold.” [47]   God instills this devout and very sweet wisdom of which we speak into the hearts of the righteous, the golden vessels and cups from which he drinks our good desires, symbolized by the goblets from which King Solomon drank which were all gold. A golden vase cannot easily be broken, neither can the heart of the just be divided between different interests without urgent necessity. However, the hearts of unreflecting men are like the ill-baked clay vessels which David was given in the desert when persecuted by Absalom.[48] This clay vessel is broken because the man's exterior and worldly actions are not referred to God nor performed purely for his sake, but some are done to please men, others by the inspiration of the devil, others for pleasure or vainglory, so that his heart being divided, cannot retain the grace of devotion or the sweetness of the heavenly liquor.
Francisco De Osuna (Third Spiritual Alphabet)
Die alone in one of his old rooms and what's the last thing he thinks of before he kicks the bucket--Nickel. Nickel hunting him to his final moment--a vessel in his brain explodes or his heart flops in his chest--and then beyond, too. Perhaps Nickel was the very afterlife that awaited him, with a White House down the hill and an eternity of oatmeal and the infinite brotherhood of broken boys. He hadn't thought about going out like that in years--he'd packed it up in a box and put it in his basement, next to the boiler and the neglected fishing gear. With the rest of the stuff from the old days. He stopped embroidering that fantasy long ago.
Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys)
But even a vessel pulsates, beats and pumps in ecstasy and in rage! I wonder are the way we are because we are trying to protect ourselves from the “monsters” not realizing this fear that we are harboring inside us is turning us into goblins and ghouls ourselves? Not even a heart caged inside of ribs can be protected. Who can really be to blame for your broken heart? In-turn we find our own vices , our own ways to cope, ways that we petrify our bodies our lives in such a fashion so we can stop and notice the stars sparkling in the sky everything and everyone that embodies love YOUR LOVE… and every spec dancing in our own light, specs we failed to see because of our own faults.
QuietStormPoet
Kabbalistic literature is generally divided into three major streams. The first and most important one is the cosmological, mission-oriented one. Here we find a direct line between ourselves and the Master of the Universes, by way of His influence on all the intermediate worlds. Note the term, ‘Master of the Universes’ in the plural. In this view, there are mutual influences, going from the upper worlds to us, and from us to the upper worlds. All the commandments and all the proper intentions and all the prayers are ultimately aimed at mending those spheres, which were damaged at the time of the Creation. In the language of the Kabbalah, this means repairing those vessels which were broken.
Nathan Erez (The Kabbalistic Murder Code (Historical Crime Thriller #1))
I come back, always, to the metaphoric response of the Kabbalah—the mystical branch of Judaism that inspired Leonard Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah.” That, in the beginning, all of creation was a vessel filled with divine light. That it broke apart, and now the shards of holiness are strewn all around us. Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in so doing, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness, death gives way to rebirth, the soul descends to this riven world for the sake of learning how to ascend. And to realize that we all notice different shards; I might see a lump of coal, but you spot the gold glimmering beneath.
Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
May with its light behaving Stirs vessel, eye and limb, The singular and sad Are willing to recover, And to each swan-delighting river The careless picnics come In living white and red. Our dead, remote and hooded, In hollows rest, but we From their vague woods have broken, Forests where children meet And the white angel-vampires flit, Stand now with shaded eye, The dangerous apple taken. The real world lies before us, Brave motions of the young, Abundant wish for death, The pleasing, pleasured, haunted: A dying Master sinks tormented In his admirers’ ring, The unjust walk the earth. And love that makes impatient Tortoise and roe, that lays The blonde beside the dark, Urges upon our blood, Before the evil and the good How insufficient is Touch, endearment, look.
W.H. Auden
The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race. They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things — oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp — yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to. The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
These samurai swords were made from a special type of steel called tamahagane, which translates as “jewel steel,” made from the volcanic black sand of the Pacific (this consists mostly of an iron ore called magnetite, the original material for the needle of compasses). This steel is made in a huge clay vessel four feet tall, four feet wide, and twelve feet long called a tatara. The vessel is “fired”—hardened from molded clay into a ceramic—by lighting a fire inside it. Once fired, it is packed meticulously with layers of black sand and black charcoal, which are consumed in the ceramic furnace. The process takes about a week and requires constant attention from a team of four or five people, who make sure that the temperature of the fire is kept high enough by pumping air into the tatara using a manual bellows. At the end the tatara is broken open and the tamahagane steel is dug out of the ash and remnants of sand and charcoal. These lumps of discolored steel are very unprepossessing, but they have a whole range of carbon content, some of it very low and some of it high. The samurai innovation was to be able to distinguish high-carbon steel, which is hard but brittle, from low-carbon steel, which is tough but relatively soft. They did this purely by how it looked, how it felt in their hands, and how it sounded when struck. By separating the different types of steel, they could make sure that the low-carbon steel was used to make the center of the sword. This gave the sword an enormous toughness, almost a chewiness, meaning that the blades were unlikely to snap in combat. On the edge of the blades they welded the high-carbon steel, which was brittle but extremely hard and could therefore be made very sharp. By using the sharp high-carbon steel as a wrapper on top of the tough low-carbon steel they achieved what many thought impossible: a sword that could survive impact with other swords and armor while remaining sharp enough to slice a man’s head off. The best of both worlds.
Mark Miodownik (Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World)
To this day when I inhale a light scent of Wrangler—its sweet sharpness—or the stronger, darker scent of Musk, I return to those hours and it ceases to be just cologne that I take in but the very scent of age, of youth at its most beautiful peak. It bears the memory of possibility, of unknown forests, unchartered territories, and a heart light and skipping, hell-bent as the captain of any of the three ships, determined at all costs to prevail to the new world. Turning back was no option. Whatever the gales, whatever the emaciation, whatever the casualty to self, onward I kept my course. My heart felt the magnetism of its own compass guiding me on—its direction constant and sure. There was no other way through. I feel it again as once it had been, before it was broken-in; its strength and resolute ardency. The years of solitude were nothing compared to what lay ahead. In sailing for the horizon that part of my life had been sealed up, a gentle eddy, a trough of gentle waves diminishing further, receding away. Whatever loneliness and pain went with the years between the ages of 14 and 20, was closed, irretrievable—I was already cast in form and direction in a certain course. When I open the little bottle of eau de toilette five hundred different days unfold within me, conversations so strained, breaking slowly, so painstakingly, to a comfortable place. A place so warm and inviting after the years of silence and introspect, of hiding. A place in the sun that would burn me alive before I let it cast a shadow on me. Until that time I had not known, I had not been conscious of my loneliness. Yes, I had been taciturn in school, alone, I had set myself apart when others tried to engage. But though I was alone, I had not felt the pangs of loneliness. It had not burdened or tormented as such when I first felt the clear tang of its opposite in the form of another’s company. Of Regn’s company. We came, each in our own way, in our own need—listening, wanting, tentatively, as though we came upon each other from the side in spite of having seen each other head on for two years. It was a gradual advance, much again like a vessel waiting for its sails to catch wind, grasping hold of the ropes and learning much too quickly, all at once, how to move in a certain direction. There was no practicing. It was everything and all—for the first and last time. Everything had to be right, whether it was or not. The waters were beautiful, the work harder than anything in my life, but the very glimpse of any tempest of defeat was never in my line of vision. I’d never failed at anything. And though this may sound quite an exaggeration, I tell you earnestly, it is true. Everything to this point I’d ever set my mind to, I’d achieved. But this wasn’t about conquering some land, nor had any of my other desires ever been about proving something. It just had to be—I could not break, could not turn or retract once I’d committed myself to my course. You cannot force a clock to run backwards when it is made to persevere always, and ever, forward. Had I not been so young I’d never have had the courage to love her.
Wheston Chancellor Grove (Who Has Known Heights)
FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS NEVER! By the time the kidnapped turquoise-and-chrome car overturns--turns and turns and turns!--in a snow-drifted field north of Tydeman's Corners Legs Sadovsky will have driven eleven miles from Eddy's Smoke Shop on Fairfax Avenue, six wild miles with the Highway Patrol cop in pursuit bearing up swiftly when the highway is clear and the girls are hysterical with excitement squealing and clutching one another thrown from side to side as Legs grimaces sighting the bridge ahead, it's one of those old-fashioned nightmare bridges with a steep narrow ramp, narrow floor made of planks but there's no time for hesitation Legs isn't going to use the brakes, she's shrewd, reasoning too that the cop will have to slow down, the fucker'll be cautious thus she'll have several seconds advantage won't she?--several seconds can make quite a difference in a contest like this so the Buick's rushing up the ramp, onto the bridge, the front wheels strike and spin and seem at first to be lifting in decorous surprise Oh! oh but astonishingly the car holds, it's a heavy machine of power that seems almost intelligent until flying off the bridge hitting a patch of slick part-melted ice the car swerves, now the rear wheels appear to be lifting, there's a moment when all effort ceases, all gravity ceases, the Buick a vessel of screams as it lifts, floats, it's being flung into space how weightless! Maddy's eyes are open now, she'll remember all her life this Now, now how without consequence! as the car hits the earth again, yet rebounds as if still weightless, turning, spinning, a machine bearing flesh, bones, girls' breaths plunging and sliding and rolling and skittering like a giant hard-shelled insect on its back, now righting itself again, now again on its back, crunching hard, snow shooting through the broken windows and the roof collapsing inward as if crushed by a giant hand upside-down and the motor still gunning as if it's frantic to escape, they're buried in a cocoon of bluish white and there's a sound of whimpering, panting,sobbing, a dog's puppyish yipping and a strong smell of urine and Legs is crying breathlessly half in anger half in exultation, caught there behind the wheel unable to turn, to look around, to see, "Nobody's dead--right?" Nobody's dead.
Joyce Carol Oates (Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang)
Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. Withfinocchioin fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.
Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
He went below, Bonden holding him by the arm, confirmed the carpenter’s desperate report, gave orders for the wounded to be moved into the corvette, the prisoners to be secured, his papers brought, and sat there as the three vessels rocked on the gentle swell of slack water, watching the tired men carry their shipmates, their belongings, all the necessaries out of the Polychrest. ‘It is time to go, sir,’ said Parker, with Pullings and Rossall standing by him, ready to lift their captain over. ‘Go,’ said Jack. ‘I shall follow you.’ They hesitated, caught the earnestness of his tone and look, crossed and stood hovering on the rail of the corvette. Now the veering breeze blew off the land; the eastern sky was lightening; they were out of the Ras du Point, beyond the shoals; and the water in the offing was a fine deep blue. He stood up, walked as straight as he could to a ruined gun-port, made a feeble spring that just carried him to the Fanciulla, staggered, and turned to look at his ship. She did not sink for a good ten minutes, and by then the blood – what little he had left – had made a pool at his feet. She went very gently, with a sigh of air rushing through the hatches, and settled on the bottom, the tips of her broken masts showing a foot above the surface. ‘Come, brother,’ said Stephen in his ear, very like a dream. ‘Come below. You must come below – here is too much blood altogether. Below, below. Here, Bonden, carry him with me.
Patrick O'Brian (Post Captain (Aubrey & Maturin, #2))
Hold Everything Dear for John Berger as the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey as the rose buds a green room to breathe and blossoms like the wind as the thinning birches whisper their silver stories of the wind to the urgent in the trucks as the leaves of the hedge store the light that the moment thought it had lost as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a wren in the turning air as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark hold everything dear the calligraphy of birds across the morning the million hands of the axe, the soft hand of the earth one step ahead of time the broken teeth of tribes and their long place steppe-scattered and together clay's small, surviving handle, the near ghost of a jug carrying itself towards us through the soil the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking the map of the palm held in a knot but given as a torch hold everything dear the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them the justice of a grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days as it sinks to become what it loves memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed the words the bread the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door the yearning to begin again together animals keen inside the parliament of the world the people in the room the people in the street the people hold everything dear 19th May 2005 Gareth Evans
John Berger (Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (Vintage International))
When I've thought about him dying - which admittedly isn't that much - I always thought of it like you said, that all strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships think, or maybe we're grass - our roots are so interdependent that no one is dead as long as soneone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications... I like the strings, I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is...We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well- but not quite perfectly, you know? "Maybe, it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen-these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable...But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it's only in that time that we can see each other, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never looking inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.
John Green (Paper Towns)
He cannot will his entry into and exit from the activity on a daily basis. There is not, as there is for most workers, a brief interval of exemption at the end of the day when he is permitted to enact a wholly different set of gestures; the timing of his eventual exit will by determined not by his own will but by the end of the war, whether that comes in days, months, or years, and there is of course a very high probability that even when the war ends he will never exit from it. Although in all forms of work the worker mixes himself with and eventually becomes inseparable from the materials of his labor (an inseparability that has only its most immediate sign the residues which coat his body, the coal beneath the skin of his arm, the spray of grain in his hair, the ink on his fingers), the boy in war is, to an extent, found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor: he will learn to perceive himself as he will be perceived by others, as indistinguishable from the men of his unit, regiment, division, and above all national group (all of whom will share the same name: he is German) as he is also inextricably bound up with the qualities and conditions – berry laden or snow laden - of the ground over which he walks or runs or crawls and with which he craves and courts identification, as in the camouflage postures he adopts, now running bent over parallel with the ground it is his work to mime, now arching forward conforming the curve of his back to the curve of a companion boulder, now standing as upright and still and narrow as the slender tree behind which he hides; he is the elms and the mud, he is the one hundred and sixth, he is a small piece of German terrain broken off and floating dangerously through the woods of France. He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. He is dark blue like the sea. He is light grey like the air through which he flies. He is sodden in the green shadows of earth. He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable.
Elaine Scarry (The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World)
Load the sailboat with bottles of white wine, olive oil, fishing rods, and yeasty, dark-crusted bread. Work your way carefully out of the narrow channels of the Cabras port on the western shore of Sardinia. Set sail for the open seas. Navigate carefully around the archipelago of small boats fishing for sea bass, bream, squid. Steer clear of the lines of mussel nets swooping in long black arcs off the coastline. When you spot the crumbling stone tower, turn the boat north and nuzzle it gently into the electric blue-green waters along ancient Tharros. Drop anchor. Strip down to your bathing suit. Load into the transport boat and head for shore. After a swim, make for the highest point on the peninsula, the one with the view of land and sea and history that will make your knees buckle. Stay focused. You're not here to admire the sun-baked ruins of one of Sardinia's oldest civilizations, a five-thousand-year-old settlement that wears the footprints of its inhabitants- Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans- like the layers of a cake. You're here to pick herbs growing wildly among the ancient tombs and temples, under shards of broken vases once holding humans' earliest attempts at inebriation. Taste this! Like peppermint, but spicy. And this! A version of wild lemon thyme, perfect with seafood. Pluck a handful of finocchio marino,sea fennel, a bright burst of anise with an undertow of salt. With finocchio in fist, reboard the transport vessel and navigate toward the closest buoy. Grab the bright orange plastic, roll it over, and scrape off the thicket of mussels growing beneath. Repeat with the other buoys until you have enough mussels to fill a pot. In the belly of the boat, bring the dish together: Scrub the mussels. Bring a pot of seawater to a raucous boil and drop in the spaghetti- cento grammi a testa. While the pasta cooks, blanch a few handfuls of the wild fennel to take away some of the sting. Remove the mussels from their shells and combine with sliced garlic, a glass of seawater, and a deluge of peppery local olive oil in a pan. Take the pasta constantly, checking for doneness. (Don't you dare overcook it!) When only the faintest resistance remains in the middle, drain and add to the pan of mussels. Move the pasta fast and frequently with a pair of tongs, emulsifying the water and mussel juice with the oil. Keep stirring and drizzling in oil until a glistening sheen forms on the surface of the pasta. This is called la mantecatura, the key to all great seafood pastas, so take the time to do it right.
Matt Goulding (Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy's Food Culture (Roads & Kingdoms Presents))
DEONTOLOGY AND CONCEQUENTIALISM, A NOVEL APPROACH: Consequentialism and Deontology (Deontological Ethics) are two contrasting categories of Normative Ethics, the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental principles that determine the morality of human actions (or non-actions). Their supposed difference is that while Consequentialism determines if an action is morally right or wrong by examining its consequences, Deontology focuses on the action itself, regardless of its consequences. To the hypothetical question “Should I do this man a little injustice, if by this I could save the whole humanity from torture and demise?”, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a pure deontologist (absolutist) answers: “Fiat justitia, pereat mundus” (Do justice even if the whole world would perish). Superficially, it seems that a decent deontologist don’t care about consequences whatsoever. His/her one and only duty is to invariably obey to pre-existing, universal moral rules without exceptions: “do not kill”, “do not lie”, “do not use another human as a means to an end”, and so on. At this point I would like to present my thesis on this subject. The central idea here is that deontological ethics only appears to be indifferent to the consequences of an action. In fact, it is only these very consequences that determine what our moral rules and ethical duties should be. For example, the moral law “do not kill”, has its origin to the dire consequences that the killing of another human being brings about; for the victim (death), the perpetrator (often imprisonment or death) and for the whole humanity (collapse of society and civilization). Let us discuss the well-worn thought experiment of the mad axeman asking a mother where their young children are, so he can kill them. We suppose that the mother knows with 100% certainty that she can mislead him by lying and she can save her children from certain death (once again: supposing that she surely knows that she can save her children ONLY by lying, not by telling the truth or by avoiding to answer). In this thought experiment the hard deontologist would insist that it is immoral to lie, even if that would lead to horrible consequences. But, I assert that this deontological inflexibility is not only inhuman and unethical, it is also outrightly hypocritical. Because if the mother knows that their children are going to be killed if she tells the truth (or does not answer) and they are going to be saved if she tells a harmless lie, then by telling the truth she disobeys the moral law “do not kill/do not cause the death of an innocent”, which is much worse than the moral rule “do not lie”. The fact that she does not kill her children with her own hands is completely irrelevant. She could have saved them without harming another human, yet she chose not to. So the absolutist deontologist chooses actively to disobey a much more important moral law, only because she is not the immediate cause, but a cause via a medium (the crazy axeman in this particular thought experiment). So here are the two important conclusions: Firstly, Deontology in normative ethics is in reality a “masked consequentialism”, because the origin of a moral law is to be found in its consequences e.g. stealing is generally morally wrong, because by stealing, someone is deprived of his property that may be crucial for his survival or prosperity. Thus, the Deontology–Consequentialism dichotomy is a false one. And secondly, the fact that we are not the immediate “vessel” by which a moral rule is broken, but we nevertheless create or sustain a “chain of events” that will almost certainly lead to the breaking of a moral law, does surely not absolve us and does not give us the right to choose the worst outcome. Mister Immanuel Kant would avoid doing an innocent man an injustice, yet he would choose to lead billions of innocent people to agonizing death.
Giannis Delimitsos (NOVEL PHILOSOPHY: New ideas about Ethics, Epistemology, Science and the sweet Life)
hand. I was charged with organizing the messages: descriptions of the creatures, descriptions of their space vessels, descriptions of their conveyances, of their weapons, of their movements. Positions of our soldiers, of our allies’ soldiers. Troop movements. New arrivals of space vessels. Reports of casualties. Dear God, the casualties. And their descriptions. Charred piles of ash; bloodless carcases; crumpled, broken bodies; crushed jelly; roasted, dead meat. All…in these hands.
Stephanie Osborn (The Bunker)
Like that cracked and broken pot, we humans are flawed. We have been damaged by pain, persecution, and disappointment. Yet God sees the value in each of us and continues to use us as His messengers, witnesses, and examples. The glue of His love patches our wounds so we can keep serving as His vessels, His treasures in fragile clay jars. Despite our flaws, we are worthy to share His love.
Gary Chapman (Love is a Verb Devotional: 365 Daily Inspirations to Bring Love Alive)
A broken vessel cannot hold anything within itself, therefore only something supernatural can hold itself within a broken vessel.
TemitOpe Ibrahim
It is our Lord's wisdom, that His kirk should ever hang by a thread; and yet the thread breaketh not, being hanged upon Him who is the sure Nail in David's house (Isa. xxii. 23), upon whom all the vessels, great and small, do hang; and the Nail (God be thanked) neither crooketh nor can be broken. Jesus,
Samuel Rutherford (Letters of Samuel Rutherford)
According to Paul, our shame is God’s vessel for glory (1 Cor. 4:9). Ruth’s
Paul E. Miller (A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships)
The only way you will find that plan is to be broken before Him. A transformation must take place in your heart so that God can shape you and mold you into the vessel He has designed for His plan. God’s plans are always better than ours!
Mandy Fender (Beautifully Broken: Giving God the Broken Pieces)
I am a steadfastly 20th-century guy. I've always been pathologically au courant. Even today I can tell you the length of Justin Bieber's hair. But it has now reduced society to such a trivial, crippled form, that it is beyond my notice. I look at things like Twitter and Facebook, and "reality TV" – which is one of the great frauds of our time, an oxymoron like "giant shrimp" – and I look at it all, and I say, these people do not really know what the good life is. I look at the parched lives that so many people live, the desperation that underlies their every action, and I say, this has all been brought about by the electronic media. And I do not envy them. I do not wish to partake of it, and I am steadfastly in the 20th century. I do not own a handheld device. Mine is an old dial-up laptop computer, which I barely can use – barely. I still write on a manual typewriter. Not even an electronic typewriter, but a manual. My books keep coming out. I have over 100 books published now, and I've reached as close to posterity as a poor broken vessel such as I am entitled to reach.
Harlan Ellison
In the beginning, according to Rabbi Isaac Luria, God contracted himself—zimzum. The divine essence withdrew into itself to make room for a finite world. Evil became possible: those genetic defects that dog cellular life, those clashing forces that erupt in natural catastrophes, and those sins human minds invent and human hands perform. The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels (qelippot) imprisoned them. This is our bleak In fact, God is hidden, exiled, in the sparks of divine light the shells entrap. So evil can exist, can continue to live: The spark of goodness within things, the Gnostic-like spark that even the most evil tendency encloses, lends evil its being. “The sparks scatter everywhere,” Martin Buber said. “They cling to material things as in sealed-up wells, they crouch in substances as in caves that have been bricked up, they inhale darkness and breathe out fear; they flutter about in the movements of the world, searching for where they can lodge to be set free.
Annie Dillard (For the Time Being: Essays (PEN Literary Award Winner))
All beauty calls you to me, and you seem” All beauty calls you to me, and you seem, Past twice a thousand miles of shifting sea, To reach me. You are as the wind I breathe Here on the ship's sun-smitten topmost deck, With only light between the heavens and me. I feel your spirit and I close my eyes, Knowing the bright hair blowing in the sun, The eager whisper and the searching eyes. Listen, I love you. Do not turn your face Nor touch me. Only stand and watch awhile The blue unbroken circle of the sea. Look far away and let me ease my heart Of words that beat in it with broken wing. Look far away, and if I say too much, Forget that I am speaking. Only watch, How like a gull that sparkling sinks to rest, The foam-crest drifts along a happy wave Toward the bright verge, the boundary of the world. I am so weak a thing, praise me for this, That in some strange way I was strong enough To keep my love unuttered and to stand Altho' I longed to kneel to you that night You looked at me with ever-calling eyes. Was I not calm? And if you guessed my love You thought it something delicate and free, Soft as the sound of fir-trees in the wind, Fleeting as phosphorescent stars in foam. Yet in my heart there was a beating storm Bending my thoughts before it, and I strove To say too little lest I say too much, And from my eyes to drive love's happy shame. Yet when I heard your name the first far time It seemed like other names to me, and I Was all unconscious, as a dreaming river That nears at last its long predestined sea; And when you spoke to me, I did not know That to my life's high altar came its priest. But now I know between my God and me You stand forever, nearer God than I, And in your hands with faith and utter joy I would that I could lay my woman's soul. Oh, my love To whom I cannot come with any gift Of body or of soul, I pass and go. But sometimes when you hear blown back to you My wistful, far-off singing touched with tears, Know that I sang for you alone to hear, And that I wondered if the wind would bring To him who tuned my heart its distant song. So might a woman who in loneliness Had borne a child, dreaming of days to come, Wonder if it would please its father's eyes. But long before I ever heard your name, Always the undertone's unchanging note In all my singing had prefigured you, Foretold you as a spark foretells a flame. Yet I was free as an untethered cloud In the great space between the sky and sea, And might have blown before the wind of joy Like a bright banner woven by the sun. I did not know the longing in the night-- You who have waked me cannot give me sleep. All things in all the world can rest, but I, Even the smooth brief respite of a wave When it gives up its broken crown of foam, Even that little rest I may not have. And yet all quiet loves of friends, all joy In all the piercing beauty of the world I would give up--go blind forevermore, Rather than have God blot from out my soul Remembrance of your voice that said my name. For us no starlight stilled the April fields, No birds awoke in darkling trees for us, Yet where we walked the city's street that night Felt in our feet the singing fire of spring, And in our path we left a trail of light Soft as the phosphorescence of the sea When night submerges in the vessel's wake A heaven of unborn evanescent stars.
Sara Teasdale (Rivers to the Sea)
The experiences of men who walked with God in olden times agree to teach that the Lord cannot fully bless a man until He has first conquered him. The degree of blessing enjoyed by any man will correspond exactly with the completeness of God’s victory over him. This is a badly neglected tenet of the Christian’s creed, not understood by many in this self-assured age, but it is nevertheless of living importance to us all. This spiritual principle is well illustrated in the book of Genesis. Jacob was the wily old heel-catcher whose very strength was to him a near-fatal weakness. For two-thirds of his total life he had carried in his nature something hard and unconquered. Not his glorious vision in the wilderness nor his long bitter discipline in Haran had broken his harmful strength. He stood at the ford of Jabbok at the time of the going down of the sun, a shrewd, intelligent old master of applied psychology learned the hard way. The picture he presented was not a pretty one. He was a vessel marred in the making. His hope lay in his own defeat. This he did not know at the setting of the day, but had learned before the rising of the sun. All night he resisted God until in kindness God touched the hollow of his thigh and won the victory over him. It was only after he had gone down to humiliating defeat that he began to feel the joy of release from his own evil strength, the delight of God’s conquest over him. Then he cried aloud for the blessing and refused to let go till it came. It had been a long fight, but for God (and for reasons known only to Him) Jacob had been worth the effort. Now he became another man, the stubborn and self-willed rebel was turned into a meek and dignified friend of God. He had prevailed indeed, but through weakness, not through strength.
A.W. Tozer (God's Pursuit of Man: Tozer's Profound Prequel to The Pursuit of God)
the concept of wabi sabi30—or the ability to find beauty in imperfection. If a vase is accidentally broken, for example, they don’t throw the pieces away or try to patch it up to hide the accident. Instead, they take golden glue and painstakingly reassemble the vessel, so its unique flaws make the piece more beautiful.
Steven Kotler (Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work)
God did not have—but wanted very much to have—men and women who would live in pain. God wanted a broken vessel.
Gene Edwards (A Tale of Three Kings)
In practicing the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi, one repairs broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, silver, or platinum. The choice to highlight the breaks with precious metals not only acknowledges them, but also pays tribute to the vessel that has been torn apart by the mutability of life. The previously broken object is considered more beautiful for its imperfections. In life, too, even greater brilliance can be found after the mending.
Michele Harper (The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir)
When the electromagnetic flow of Sophia's intention approached specific types of metaloids, fermions, subatomic particles, and ions, this contact formed creatures similar to cyborgs; insectoid creatures, called Qlifot (fragments of broken vessels) in the Lurian Kabbalah, or the Archons in Gnosticism.
Laurence Galian (Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!)
kintsukuroi, or the “golden repair” of something treasured or important that has become cracked or broken. When applied to the repair of ancient and valuable pieces of pottery, the practice becomes kintsugi, or “golden joinery.” The key to this imaginative art appears when the glue used to fill the cracks and join the broken pieces becomes blended with actual gold. After the repairs have been made, the broken vessel becomes more valuable than ever. Metaphorically, kintsugi suggests that
Michael Meade (Awakening the Soul)
Gospel comfort may be known by the vessel it is poured into, which is a broken heart.
William Gurnall (The Christian in Complete Armour - The Ultimate Book on Spiritual Warfare)
Evil is a thirsty entity that needs a human vessel to survive. It will take refuge in a hateful heart, a failing relationship or a broken family. Never invite it in. Even in the name of revenge. - T. Styles
T. Styles (Race's Rage (Pretty Kings #4))
Emotion is a complex thing, the different strands entwine themselves so deeply with one another. Regret, sorrow, heartbreak, these dark, twisted threads can bind so thoroughly with the glimmering golden threads of love, joy, and hope. They tie themselves to one another so thoroughly, so completely, that a person cannot tell where one emotion ends and another begins. The result is that you are left feeling numb, unable to comprehend the intricacies of this tapestry of emotion. Tears of pure sorrow leaking from your eyes even as your lips smile in joy. It is then that we become the two face, as our heart is split asunder so does our expressions, so does our mind. Leaving us feeling like a broken vessel, hollow and empty, the bubbling, complex emotions no longer able to be contained within our frail, flawed bodies.
Ariel L Hodge
Emotion is a complex thing, the different strands entwine themselves so deeply with one another. Regret, sorrow, heartbreak, these dark, twisted threads can bind so thoroughly with the glimmering golden threads of love, joy, and hope. They tie themselves to one another so thoroughly, so completely, that a person cannot tell where one emotion ends and another begins. The result is that you are left feeling numb, unable to comprehend the intricacies of this tapestry of emotion. Tears of pure sorrow leaking from your eyes even as your lips smile in joy. It is then that we become the two face, as our heart is split asunder so does our expressions, so does our mind. Leaving us feeling like a broken vessel, hollow and empty, the bubbling, complex emotions no longer able to be contained within our frail, flawed bodies.
Ariel L. Hodge
So much was lost - names, faces, ages, ethnic identities - that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered. This is not quite as harrowing or hopeless as it might sound I liken it to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken vessels using gold. The scars of the object are not concealed, but highlighted and embraced, thus giving them their own dignity and power. The brokenness and its subsequent repair are a recognized part of the story of the journey of the vessel, not to be obscured, and change, transition, and transformation are seen as important as honoring the original structure and its traditional meaning and beauty.
Michael W. Twitty (The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South)
All beauty calls you to me, and you seem, Past twice a thousand miles of shifting sea, To reach me. You are as the wind I breathe Here on the ship's sun-smitten topmost deck, With only light between the heavens and me. I feel your spirit and I close my eyes, Knowing the bright hair blowing in the sun, The eager whisper and the searching eyes. Listen, I love you. Do not turn your face Nor touch me. Only stand and watch awhile The blue unbroken circle of sea. Look far away and let me ease my heart Of words that beat in it with broken wing. Look far away, and if I say too much, Forget that I am speaking. Only watch, How like a gull that sparking sinks to rest, The foam-crest drifts along a happy wave Toward the bright verge, the boundary of the world. I am so weak a thing, praise me for this, That in some strange way I was strong enough To keep my love unuttered and to stand Altho' I longed to kneel to you that night You looked at me with ever-calling eyes. Was I not calm? And if you guessed my love You thought it something delicate and free, Soft as the sound of fir-trees in the wind, Fleeting as phosphorescent stars in foam. Yet in my heart there was a beating storm Bending my thoughts before it, and I strove To say too little lest I say too much, And from my eyes to drive love’s happy shame. Yet when I heard your name the first far time It seemed like other names to me, and I Was all unconscious, as a dreaming river That nears at last its long predestined sea; And when you spoke to me, I did not know That to my life’s high altar came its priest. But now I know between my God and me You stand forever, nearer God than I, And in your hands with faith and utter joy I would that I could lay my woman’s soul. Oh, my love To whom I cannot come with any gift Of body or of soul, I pass and go. But sometimes when you hear blown back to you My wistful, far-off singing touched with tears, Know that I sang for you alone to hear, And that I wondered if the wind would bring To him who tuned my heart its distant song. So might a woman who in loneliness Had borne a child, dreaming of days to come, Wonder if it would please its father’s eyes. But long before I ever heard your name, Always the undertone’s unchanging note In all my singing had prefigured you, Foretold you as a spark foretells a flame. Yet I was free as an untethered cloud In the great space between the sky and sea, And might have blown before the wind of joy Like a bright banner woven by the sun. I did not know the longing in the night– You who have waked me cannot give me sleep. All things in all the world can rest, but I, Even the smooth brief respite of a wave When it gives up its broken crown of foam, Even that little rest I may not have. And yet all quiet loves of friends, all joy In all the piercing beauty of the world I would give up– go blind forevermore, Rather than have God blot from out my soul Remembrance of your voice that said my name. For us no starlight stilled the April fields, No birds awoke in darking trees for us, Yet where we walked the city’s street that night Felt in our feet the singing fire of spring, And in our path we left a trail of light Soft as the phosphorescence of the sea When night submerges in the vessel’s wake A heaven of unborn evanescent stars.
Sara Teasdale (The Collected Poems)
God did not have - but wanted very much to have - men and women who would live in pain. God wanted a broken vessel.
Gene Edwards (A Tale of three Kings: A Study in Brokenness)
Of course, I could see the self-centeredness of others more clearly than my own. Pride does this.
Ken Barnes (BROKEN VESSELS: God's GLORY through FLAWED Humanity)
There is too much territory to be taken for the Lord to fight over turf. There are too many battles to fight with the Enemy of our souls to fight with our friends. We can battle with righteous indignation and miss the higher law of love where we prefer others over ourselves.
Ken Barnes (BROKEN VESSELS: God's GLORY through FLAWED Humanity)
sat in my office, cleaning out my desk. The ministry center was eerily silent. After seventeen years of working with a mission organization, the only sound I heard was my wife and me packing our personal effects. No goodbyes or fanfares. As I put every piece from my desk into the packing box, I thought of all our hopes and dreams, which now
Ken Barnes (BROKEN VESSELS: God's GLORY through FLAWED Humanity)
sat in my office, cleaning out my desk. The ministry center was eerily silent. After seventeen years of working with a mission organization, the only sound I heard was my wife and me packing our personal effects. No goodbyes or fanfares. As I put every piece from my desk into the packing box, I thought of all our hopes and dreams, which now seemed shattered.
Ken Barnes (BROKEN VESSELS: God's GLORY through FLAWED Humanity)
All of us are broken. We come from broken families with broken hearts, and we grieve broken dreams. We are broken up with and have breakdowns. We barely break even or are flat broke. Our bones break, and our spirits break. Our houses get broken into, and our skin breaks out. We are broken vessels with a broken compass and no clear direction. We wonder when we will have a breakthrough. Jesus knows brokenness. He understands each brand of brokenness, and he knows our brokenness does not have to be the end of our stories or define us. Life does not end during seasons of brokenness, but it changes us. We can find refuge in the One who broke himself so we can be healed. The benefits of having suffered deliver a superior understanding of the benefits of the cross.
Darci J. Steiner (Beauty Beyond the Thorns: Discovering Gifts in Suffering)
This ideal of purity is nothing but chauvinistic control. Control meant to keep women from truly experiencing all the pleasures life has to offer. That in their discovery, they will uncover their own independence.
Winter Rose (The Broken Vessel (The Chronicles of Luna Moon, #2))
Your burden, my child, is a colossal one to bear. For the worlds, your heart will make the ultimate sacrifice. For the balance, you will lose what you hold most dear. My
Winter Rose (The Broken Vessel (The Chronicles of Luna Moon, #2))
my friend.” Isaiah slid his arm around Hosea’s waist, and they leaned
Mesu Andrews (Love In A Broken Vessel (Treasure Of His Love))
We have the right to allow people around us to go to hell. But can we honestly love others and not share with them the most important, wonderful, life changing, lifesaving truth about salvation through Jesus Christ? God has committed to us the message of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:19). We have the most urgent, vital message in the world, one by which God miraculously transforms hearts and lives. What a privilege that He uses broken vessels like you and me!
David Fiorazo (The Cost of Our Silence: Consequences of Christians Taking the Path of Least Resistance)
If you’re ever tempted to avoid the unattractive path God has planned, turn to Jesus on the Cross. See Him as a reminder that priceless treasures are in broken vessels.
Chris Tiegreen (The One Year Walk with God Devotional: Wisdom from the Bible to Renew Your Mind)
He wept gray tears in his anguish. All the crossings he traversed across have dissipated into nothing. His psyche is a vessel of brittleness. Throughout his tear-filled eyes, the crow's feather swirls; finding himself lost in a labyrinth, searching for a way to free himself from his scars. Through his misdeeds, he creates more mysteries and mazes. Each piece of bread that he steps upon is covered with thorns, needles; barbed wire, hooks; and every sharp point from his own mistakes, making him feel the consequences of his own indulging indulgence. For him, the only truths he can uncover are those that reside inside of him, and the Demon inside him does not want him to uncover them. By looking into his own mirror, he can see his nemesis before his eyes, the affliction that keeps him from the true meaning of his existence: himself and the subconscious he is governed by. The battle is between him and himself. From within, the rabbit is perishing, he is trying to figure out how to escape. When the Almighty has switched off the illumination of his radiance in the rabbit's life, there’s no paradise when Hades keeps on existing. Revelation misled him into believing he could be redeemed as he is unwell in discomfort, so he must resolve this conflict alone to find his healing. In retrospect, the previous entryway has been sealed. Through this journey of our missteps; restoration can be attained. Rehabilitating ourselves requires dismantling the demons within us to reach redemption. We must frolic like this rabbit lost in our own personal awareness, for we are all enmeshed in the maze of our own consciousness.
Upon The Broken Hands, The Rabbit Looks Through The Mirror Poem by D.L. Lewis
I'd adapted my own regimen of upkeep, trying to keep myself seventeen forever: at first begrudgingly, then with increasing panic as the years began to carve lines into my face, loosen my skin. It started with a weekly manicure... Add to that a monthly waxing appointment-- eyebrows, upper lip, underarms, bikini line, legs... When I was twenty-eight, I conceded to Botox... The lasers, I think, began at thirty, zapping the broken blood vessels around my nose, tightening the falling cheeks. The makeup went from a quick swipe of mascara to a full face of foundation, concealer, eyeliner... My air-dried hair was subjected to a weekly blowout, then a twice weekly one, which was when I finally understood the point of shower caps. They never did get me to spray-tan, though. I remain proud of that.
Rachel Kapelke-Dale (The Ballerinas)
I put a little plant once in a pot and filled the vessel with rich mould, and the plant grew and at last broke the pot into a hundred pieces, and I found within a dense mat of fibres; the root had eaten up and displaced all the soil and swelled till it rent the vessel. It has been so with my love of you. It got planted, how I know not, in my heart, and it has thrown its roots through the whole chamber, and devoured all the substance, and woven a net of fibres in and out and up and down, and has swelled and is thrusting against the walls, till there is scarce love there any more but horrible, biting, wearing pain. I cannot kill the plant and pluck it out, or it will leave a great void. I must let it grow till it has broken up the vessel. It grows and makes root, but will not flower. There has been scarce leaf, certainly no blossom, to my love. It is all downward, inward, clogging, bursting tangle of fibre.
Sabine Baring-Gould (Mehalah: A story of the salt marshes (The Landmark library))
Meanwhile the sight of the red glove emerging from under the dirty snow convinced the squire that the greatest deception of youth is optimism of any kind, a persistent faith in the idea that something will change or improve, or that there is progress in everything. So now the vessel had broken inside him, full of the despair he had always carried within him like hemlock. The squire looked around him and saw suffering, death, and decay, which were widespread as dirt.
Olga Tokarczuk (Primeval and Other Times)
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This is survival. This is how the vessel protects the mind, how the mind protects the heart, how the heart goes on forgetting that its calling is to be undefended, tha being broken is part of being whole.
Lily Brooks-Dalton (The Light Pirate)
Partnering with God to restore the fallen world implies working together with Him to repair the damaged world. We are but mere vessels in His grand design, to bring hope and healing to all mankind. With every step we take, with every choice we make, we have the power to bring light to the darkest of days. For in our hands lies the potential to create, a world that's full of beauty, love, and grace. So let us join hands with the Creator above, and work tirelessly to spread compassion and love. For it is only through our partnership with God, that we can truly heal this broken world.
Dr. Lucas D. Shallua
I am a broken vessel, Lord— rubble where a soul should be,
Jill Alexander Essbaum (Heaven)