Cairn Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Cairn. Here they are! All 100 of them:

But Evalin Ashryver held Aelin’s gaze, the softness turning hard and gleaming as fresh steel. It is the strength of this that matters, Aelin. Aelin’s fingers dug into her chest as she mouthed, The strength of this. Evalin nodded. Cairn’s hissed threats danced through the coffin, his knife scraping and scraping. Evalin’s face didn’t falter. You are my daughter. You were born of two mighty bloodlines. That strength flows through you. Lives in you. Evalin’s face blazed with the fierceness of the women who had come before them, all the way back to the Faerie Queen whose eyes they both bore. You do not yield.
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
Shepley walked out of his bedroom pulling a T-shirt over his head. His eyebrows pushed together. “Did they just leave?” “Yeah,” I said absently, rinsing my cereal bowl and dumping Abby’s leftover oatmeal in the sink. She’d barely touched it. “Well, what the hell? Mare didn’t even say goodbye.” “You knew she was going to class. Quit being a cry baby.” Shepley pointed to his chest. “I’m the cry baby? Do you remember last night?” “Shut up.” “That’s what I thought.” He sat on the couch and slipped on his sneakers. “Did you ask Abby about her birthday?” “She didn’t say much, except that she’s not into birthdays.” “So what are we doing?” “Throwing her a party.” Shepley nodded, waiting for me to explain. “I thought we’d surprise her. Invite some of our friends over and have America take her out for a while.” Shepley put on his white ball cap, pulling it down so low over his brows I couldn’t see his eyes. “She can manage that. Anything else?” “How do you feel about a puppy?” Shepley laughed once. “It’s not my birthday, bro.” I walked around the breakfast bar and leaned my hip against the stool. “I know, but she lives in the dorms. She can’t have a puppy.” “Keep it here? Seriously? What are we going to do with a dog?” “I found a Cairn Terrier online. It’s perfect.” “A what?” “Pidge is from Kansas. It’s the same kind of dog Dorothy had in the Wizard of Oz.” Shepley’s face was blank. “The Wizard of Oz.” “What? I liked the scarecrow when I was a little kid, shut the fuck up.” “It’s going to crap every where, Travis. It’ll bark and whine and … I don’t know.” “So does America … minus the crapping.” Shepley wasn’t amused. “I’ll take it out and clean up after it. I’ll keep it in my room. You won’t even know it’s here.” “You can’t keep it from barking.” “Think about it. You gotta admit it’ll win her over.” Shepley smiled. “Is that what this is all about? You’re trying to win over Abby?” My brows pulled together. “Quit it.” His smile widened. “You can get the damn dog…” I grinned with victory. “…if you admit you have feelings for Abby.” I frowned in defeat. “C’mon, man!” “Admit it,” Shepley said, crossing his arms. What a tool. He was actually going to make me say it. I looked to the floor, and everywhere else except Shepley’s smug ass smile. I fought it for a while, but the puppy was fucking brilliant. Abby would flip out (in a good way for once), and I could keep it at the apartment. She’d want to be there every day. “I like her,” I said through my teeth. Shepley held his hand to his ear. “What? I couldn’t quite hear you.” “You’re an asshole! Did you hear that?” Shepley crossed his arms. “Say it.” “I like her, okay?” “Not good enough.” “I have feelings for her. I care about her. A lot. I can’t stand it when she’s not around. Happy?” “For now,” he said, grabbing his backpack off the floor.
Jamie McGuire (Walking Disaster (Beautiful, #2))
I found a Cairn Terrier online. It’s perfect.” “A what?” “Pidge is from Kansas. It’s the same kind of dog Dorothy had in the Wizard of Oz.” Shepley’s face was blank. “The Wizard of Oz.” “What? I liked the scarecrow when I was a little kid, shut the fuck up.” “It’s going to crap every where, Travis. It’ll bark and whine and … I don’t know.” “So does America … minus the crapping.
Jamie McGuire (Walking Disaster (Beautiful, #2))
And she had married Whitethorn … so Terrasen could have a king. Perhaps had been spurred into action because she knew Lorcan had already betrayed her, that Maeve was coming … And Lorcan had not helped her. Whitethorn’s wife. His mate. Aelin had let them whip and chain her, had gone willingly with Maeve, so Elide didn’t enter Cairn’s clutches.
Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5))
Lorcan had been wrong. He had been so wrong. And he could not entirely regret it, not if Elide was safe, but … Aelin had refused to count. Cairn had unleashed his full strength on her with that whip, and she had refused to give them the satisfaction of counting. “Where
Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5))
If I spoke all I think on this point, if I gave my real opinion of some first-rate female characters in first-rate works, where should I be? Dead under a cairn of avenging stones in half an hour.
Charlotte Brontë (Shirley)
We are nothing in the grand scheme of things, and yet in that nothingness lies everything.
Darice Cairns (The Art of Finding Truth: One Man's Journey Through Love, Life, Grief and Joy)
She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn. Not more than a little pile of stones, really. I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance. She’ll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains.
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
How many millions there are who don't want to go to Hell, but they don't want to get off the road to Hell.
Alan Cairns
cairn
Vickie McKeehan (Last Chance Harbor (Pelican Pointe, #6))
May our afflictions be few, but may we learn not to squander them.
Scott Cairns (The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain)
Cairn groaned as unconsciousness gave way. By the time Cairn awoke, chained to that metal table, Rowan was ready. Cairn beheld who stood over him, the tool in Rowan’s tattooed hand, the others he had also laid out on that piece of velvet, and began thrashing. The iron chains held firm. Then Cairn beheld the frozen rage in Rowan’s eyes. Understood what he intended to do with that sharp, sharp knife. A dark stain spread across the front of Cairn’s pants. Rowan wrapped an ice-kissed wind around the tent, blocking out all sound, and began.
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
Sand whispered behind him as Lorcan stepped up to his side. “I will go with you. I will help you get her back.” Gavriel rasped, “We’ll find her.” Aedion at last looked away from Lysandra at that. But he said nothing to his father—had said nothing to him at all since they’d landed on the beach. Elide took a limping step closer, her voice as raw as Gavriel’s. “Together. We’ll go together.” Lorcan gave the Lady of Perranth an assessing look that she made a point to ignore. His eyes flickered as he said to Rowan, “Fenrys is with her. He’ll know we’re coming for her—try to leave tracks if he can.” If Maeve didn’t have him on lockdown. But Fenrys had battled the blood oath every day since swearing it. And if he was all that now stood between Cairn and Aelin … Rowan didn’t let himself think about Cairn. About what Maeve had already had him do, or would do to her before the end. No—Fenrys would fight it. And Aelin would fight it. Aelin would never stop fighting. Rowan
Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5))
Where Insch was bald, Steel looked as if someone had sellotaped a Cairn terrier to her head. Rumour had it she was only forty-two, but she looked a lot older. Years of chain smoking had left her face looking like a holiday home for lines and wrinkles.
Stuart MacBride (Cold Granite (Logan McRae, #1))
My cairns were obvious, pretentious, rococo.
John Hodgman (Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches)
I turned and beheld seven rows of plasma screens, each bearing seven vivid scenes, each flickering, each pulsing with a light revealing distant terrors, conflagrations, sufferings - and all thereby brought so close, and all thereby kept far away.
Scott Cairns (Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected)
He gains the farthest reaches where the ache of our most ancient absence lay.
Scott Cairns (Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected)
I suppose it is because I have lived rather a restricted life myself that I have found so much enjoyment in remembering what I have learned in these last years about brave people and strange scenes. I have sat here day after day this winter, sleeping a good deal in my chair, hardly knowing if I was in London or the Gulf country, dreaming of the blazing sunshine, of poddy-dodging and black stockmen, of Cairns and of Green Island. Of a girl that I met forty years too late, and of her life in that small town that I shall never see again, that holds so much of my affection.
Nevil Shute
Don’t run away from me, Logan. I’m not sure why you’re scared every time I try and show you some kindness, but don’t reject me. It’s not easy for me either. I’m not a natural. I’ve forgotten how it feels to put down the barriers and let someone in.
Caroline Cairn (Forever and One Week (Spirits of Saoradh, #2))
How this woman had managed to get under his skin and claw her way inside was a mystery. He couldn’t leave her there though. His entire being was screaming at him to get her out.
Caroline Cairn (Forever and One Week (Spirits of Saoradh, #2))
This room is not well adapted as a cell, and Mr. Patrick Cairns occupies too large a portion of our carpet.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The more special you think you are, the more of an idiot you are and the more complicated your life will be. And that is all I have to say about that.
Darice Cairns (The Art of Finding Truth: One Man's Journey Through Love, Life, Grief and Joy)
His courage became infectious, coursing through her veins and urging her forward toward the cairn.
Vivienne Savage (Beauty and the Beast (Once Upon a Spell, #1))
Count, or we’ll begin again with each stroke you miss. You decide how long this goes on for. Unless you’d rather Elide Lochan receive these strokes.” No. Never. Never anyone else but her. Never. But as Cairn walked slowly, savoring each step, as he let that whip drag along the ground, her body betrayed her. Began shaking. She knew the pain. Knew what it’d feel like, what it’d sound like. Her dreams were still full of it. No doubt why Maeve had picked a whipping, why she’d done it to Rowan in Doranelle. Cairn halted. She felt him studying the tattoo on her back. Rowan’s loving words, written there in the Old Language. Cairn snorted. Then she felt him revel in how he’d destroy that tattoo. “Begin,” Maeve said. Cairn’s breath sucked in. And even bracing herself, even clamping down hard, there was nothing to prepare for the crack, the sting, the pain. She did not let herself cry out, only hissed through her teeth. A whip wielded by an overseer at Endovier was one thing. One wielded by a full-blooded Fae male … Blood slid down the back of her pants, her split skin screaming. But she knew how to pace herself. How to yield to the pain. How to take it. “What number was that, Aelin?” She would not. She would never count for that rutting bitch— “Start over, Cairn,” Maeve said. A breathy laugh. Then the crack and the pain and Aelin arched, the tendons in her neck near snapping as she panted through clenched teeth. The males holding her gripped her firm enough to bruise. Maeve and Cairn waited. Aelin refused to say the word. To start the count. She’d die before she did it. “Oh gods, oh gods,” Elide sobbed. “Start over,” Maeve merely ordered over the girl. So Cairn did. Again. Again. Again. They started over nine times before Aelin finally screamed. The blow had been right atop another one, tearing skin down to the bone. Again. Again. Again. Again. Cairn was panting. Aelin refused to speak. “Start over,” Maeve repeated. “Majesty,
Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5))
Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off anymore clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No specters haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids. Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do.
Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man (Discworld, #11; Death, #2))
Centuries of dire prophecy have taught us all to be, well, unconvinced. And there have been decades, entire scores of years when, to be frank, wholesale destruction didn’t sound so bad, considering. You remember, we were all disappointed. That the world never ended meant we had to get out of bed after all...
Scott Cairns (Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected)
Aelin let out a sob that cracked something in him. "I can't feel me — myself anymore. It's like she snuffed it out. Ripped me from it. She, and Cairn, and everything they did to me." She gulped down air, and Rowan wrapped her in his arms and pulled her onto his lap. "I am so tired," she wept. "I am so, so tired, Rowan.
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
(I debuted the Whole Health Cairn in a popular TEDx talk I gave in 2011 called “The Shocking Truth about Your Health.
Lissa Rankin (Mind Over Medicine)
I am a homescooler, but that does not mean I am a social outcast.
Cairn Carr
Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.
Cheryl Strayed (Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail)
The Norwegian word for “cairn,” varde, comes from the Old Norse word varði, which means “attentiveness” or “vigilance.” The English word “cairn” means “heap of rocks.
Torbjørn Ekelund (In Praise of Paths: Walking through Time and Nature)
Two great pains mark my grief trail like cairns: knowing that it was going to happen, and it happening. But unlike cairns, I can never navigate back the way I came.
Anne Marie Wells (Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems)
Scott and Terry created a political theatre in which a Hanovarian English monarch could appear on the stage of Edinburgh to act the part of a Stuart king.
Cairns Craig (The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence)
Cairn Stone This is the rock he lifted to lay upon a cairn in a high place. This rock, warmed by the near sun, felt right, somehow, in his hand. He decided to carry it down to his mother, who lay in bed, recovering. It is so easy to please a mother. Just to think of her for a moment, from a high place, and to carry that thought to her in the form of a stone.
Claudia Putnam (Wild Thing in Our Known World)
The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes)
The writer Warwick Cairns calculated that if you wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, you’d have to leave the child outside and unattended for 750,000 years.211
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
The Wampanoag, in ways which are not plain to me, in concert decided upon their own observance of father’s passing. They marked it in a most singular manner. As soon as father’s loss became known to them, each one, when traveling up or down the island, would fetch from the shore a smooth white stone such as can oft be found there. These they carried until they passed the place where father had taken farewell of them. There they deposited them. Within days, there was a cairn. In the weeks that followed, you could say, a monument, each stone of it placed with the care of an artisan. The last I saw, it had grown higher than a man, and still the Wampanoag came, one by one, placing a stone upon a stone.
Geraldine Brooks (Caleb's Crossing)
Where did you go?" "Around." "The weather was good?" "Yeah." "It didn't rain?" "Nope." "That's good." "Yeah." Talking like this is like throwing small, round stones __ nothing can be built from them, except perhaps the cairn of a lost conversation.
David Levithan (Are We There Yet?)
Ah,” I said. “Those are the cairns.” If you don’t know what a cairn is, I am here to tell you. A cairn is a small, artful pile of stones that you see around in nature from time to time. They are a kind of folk art. Often hikers will build them as messages to other hikers yet to come. A little cairn will stand there at a branch in the trail as if to say, “Go this way for beautiful hiking!” Or “Do not go this way because of bear nesting.” It’s not clear what, really, the cairns are trying to say. And also “bear nesting” is not a thing. The cairns are less helpful than they are spooky and quiet and never really on your side.
John Hodgman (Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches)
Scotland had no need of a 'resistant nationalism' precisely because it was an imperial nation engaged in projecting its national culture to the world. The historical problem of Scotland's 'absent nationalism' in the nineteenth century is a non-problem because far from lacking a nationalism, Scottish nationalism was vigorously engaged on imposing itself wherever Scots had achieved a determining or a significant role within the territory of the British Empire. Scottish nationalism did not need to assert itself within the British state because the 'world was its field', and its aim was to make Scotland the spiritual core of the imperial project.
Cairns Craig (The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence)
When we choose to wake up, it is a most uncomfortable journey—yet that is the only way, the only path, to changing our lives, relationships and our world for the better.
Darice Cairns
All three of the English types I have mentioned can, I think, be accounted for as the results of the presence of different cultures, existing side by side in the country, and who were the creation of the folk in ages distantly removed one from another. In a word, they represent specific " strata" of folk-imagination. The most diminutive of all are very probably to be associated with a New Stone Age conception of spirits which haunted burial-mounds and rude stone monuments. We find such tiny spirits haunting the great stone circles of Brittany. The "Small People," or diminutive fairies of Cornwall, says Hunt, are believed to be "the spirits of people who inhabited Cornwall many thousands of years ago. "The spriggans, of the same area, are a minute and hirsute family of fairies" found only about the cairns, cromlechs, barrows, or detached stones, with which it is unlucky to meddle." Of these, the tiny fairies of Shakespeare, Drayton, and the Elizabethans appear to me to be the later representatives. The latter are certainly not the creation of seventeenth-century poets, as has been stated, but of the aboriginal folk of Britain.
Lewis Spence (British Fairy Origins)
A lemon tree was nearly universal; other trees varied with climate - almond trees in Adelaide and Perth, plums and apples in Melbourne, choke vines and bananas in Sydney and Brisbane, a mango in Cairns, figs and loquats everywhere. For a few weeks, there was a gross overabundance of fruit and much trading ('I'll take some of your plums if you take some of my apples next month').
George Seddon
You have a poem called “Bad Theology.” What would you call a bad theology? I guess any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket. Can I explain this without sinning further? We’ll find out. The community in which I was raised did what they would call theology, but it was always a kind of cranky, brutal reduction of lush and beautiful complexities into the lowest common denominator, the dullest version. But when I went away to school and started reading more, I became increasingly dissatisfied with any theology that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements. I’m not saying this very eloquently, but I guess bad theology articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end.
Tony Leuzzi (Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in their Own Words (American Readers Series))
Dawkins mentioned two mechanisms: the theory of the ‘primeval soup’ and the Cairns-Smith theory. He discussed the latter in some detail. Since no one has computed, for either theory, the chances of the events occurring, Dawkins could not tell us what those chances are. The mechanisms of both theories, however, have every appearance of being very improbably – even to the point of being impossible.
Lee Spetner
You do not yield. Aelin slammed her hand into the lid. Cairn paused. Aelin pounded her fist into the iron again. Again. You do not yield. Again. You do not yield. Again. Again. Until she was alive with it, until her blood was raining onto her face, washing away the tears, until every pound of her fist into the iron was a battle cry. You do not yield. It rose in her, burning and roaring, and she gave herself wholly to it. Over and over, she pounded against the lid. Over and over, that song of fire and darkness flared through her, out of her, into the world. You do not yield And when she awoke chained on the altar, she beheld what she had done to the iron coffin. The top of the lid had been warped. A great hump now protruded, the metal stretched thin. As if it had come so very close to breaking entirely.
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
Andrew Cairns has written, quite literally, a bewitching novel, one that speaks to an underbelly which lies dormant in us all. The Witch's List bridges our world of convention, with that of a fabulous Twlilight Zone, what may be true reality -- a realm of magic and ultimate possibility. I recommend this book because, behind the smokescreen of simplicity, there lies a masked bedrock of extraordinary power.
Tahir Shah
England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales might have been partners in an imperial project that required the projection of 'English Literature' as one of the defining elements of cultural superiority that justified the continuous extension of Empire throughout the nineteenth century, but they were also engaged in an internal struggle over the origins and the dynamics of that literature, and about the role of their national literatures within the consolidating discipline of English.
Cairns Craig (The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence)
The attempt to separate Lowland from Highland Scotland ignores the extent to which Lowland Scots are the descendants of Highlanders, and how many Lowland Scots, like Nan Shepherd, made the country's mountains the focus of their spiritual aspirations. 'Highlandism' is not simply the ersatz adoption of a stereotypical version of Scottish culture which is entirely unconnected with the reality of modern Scottish life: the Highlands are both the geographical and the historical backdrop with which 'Lowland' Scottish culture interacts.
Cairns Craig (The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture and Independence)
It would never wholly leave her, the vertigo of this moment; it would be with her for the rest of her life, and it would always be mingled inextricably with the dim toolshed—shiny metal sawteeth, the smells of dust and gasoline—and three dead Englishmen beneath a cairn of snow with icicles glittering in their hair. Amnesia: ice floes, violent distances, the body turned to stone. The horror of all bodies. "Come on," said Hely, with a toss of his head. "Let's get out of here." "I'm coming," said Harriet. Her heart was pounding, and she felt breathless—not with the breathlessness of fear, but with something very close to rage,
Donna Tartt (The Little Friend)
[C]onsider what mere Time will do in such cases; how if a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead. What an enormous camera obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship and all that lies in the human Heart, is there to encourage it. And in the darkness, in the entire ignorance; without date or document, no book, no Arundel-marble; only here and there some dumb monumental cairn. Why, in thirty or forty years, were there no books, any great man would grow mythic, the contemporaries who had seen him, being once all dead. And in three hundred years, and in three thousand years—!
Thomas Carlyle (On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History)
Or awa’ upon Islay, in January, the wind was honed to a cutting edge across the queer flatness of Loch Gorm and the strand and fields ’round. The roe deer had taken shelter in good time and the brown trout had sought deeper waters. An auld ram alone huddled against the wind, that had swept clear the skies even of eagle, windcuffer, and goose. The scent of saltwater rode the wind over the freshwater loch, and the dry field-grasses rattled, and there was the memory of peat upon the air: a whisky wind in Islay. The River Leòig was forced back upon itself as the wind whipped the loch to whitecaps; only the cairn and the Standing Stones stood unyielding in the blast as of old.
G.M.W. Wemyss
Though I could guess which doorknob was for Wendell's kingdom, I could not resist trying the loveliest first: the tiny turquoise sea. Hardly daring to breathe, I turned the doorknob, and the door swung open with a gentle sigh. Salt wind spilled into the faerie's house. Before me stretched a dry, rocky coastline punctuated by groves of yellowish trees. The turquoise sea was endless and far too bright, broken only by an ellipsis of rugged islands. Just beyond the door was a spindly olive tree and a cairn of white pebbles. Largely to see if I could, I reached through and took one--- the sun beat down upon my arm, a most curious sensation, while the rest of me felt only the cozier warmth of the faerie's alpine home. I closed the door. "Greece," I murmured. "I think. It looks to be situated either in the mortal world or a place of overlap, like Poe's door. I had no idea the nexus led there--- they have no stories of tree fauns in Greece. Perhaps they do not use it much?
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde’s Map of the Otherlands (Emily Wilde, #2))
Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance. Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.
Robert Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination)
Future visitors from outer space, who mount archaeological digs of our planet, will surely find ways to distinguish designed machines such as planes and microphones, from evolved machines such as bat wings and ears. It is an interesting exercise to think about how they will make the distinction. They may face some tricky judgements in the messy overlap between natural evolution and human design. If the alien scientists can study living specimens, not just archaeological relics, what will they make of fragile, highly strung racehorses and greyhounds, or snuffling bulldogs who can scarcely breathe and can't be born without Caesarian assistance, of blear-eyed Pekinese baby surrogates, of walking udders such as Friesian cows, walking rashers such as Landrace pigs, or walking woolly jumpers such as Merino sheep? Molecular machines - nanotechnology - crafted for human benefit on the same scale as the bacterial flagellar motor, may pose the alien scientists even harder problems... Given that the illusion of design conjured by Darwinian natural selection is so breathtakingly powerful, how do we, in practice, distinguish its products from deliberately designed artefacts?... [Graham] Cairns-Smith was writing in a different context, but his point works here too. An arch is irreducible in the sense that if you remove part of it, the whole collapses. Yet it is possible to build it gradually by means of scaffolding[, which after] the subsequent removal of the scaffolding... no longer appears in the visible picture...
Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution)
In the earliest strand of the conquest narratives, Joshua's violence was associated with an ancient Canaanite custom called the "ban" (herem). Before a battle, a military leader would strike a deal with his god: if this deity undertook to give him the city, the commander promised to "devote" (HRM) all valuable loot to his temple and offer the conquered people to him in a human sacrifice. Joshua had made such a pact with Yahweh before attacking Jericho, and Yahweh responded by delivering the town to Israel in a specular miracle, causing its famous walls to collapse when the priests blew their rams' horns. Before allowing his troops to storm the city, Joshua explained the terms of the ban and stipulated that no one in the city should be spared, since everybody and everything in the town had been "devoted" to Yahweh. Accordingly, the Israelites "enforced the ban on everything in the town, men, and women, young and old, even the oxen and sheep and donkeys, massacring them all." But the ban had been violated when one of the soldiers kept booty for himself, and consequently the Israelites failed to take the town of Ai the following day. After the culprit had been found and executed, the Israelites attached Ai again, this time successfully, setting fire to the city so that it became a sacrificial pyre and slaughtering anybody who tried to escape: "The number of those who fell that day, men and women together, were twelve thousand all (the) people of Ai." Finally Joshua hanged the king from a tree, built a monumental cairn over his body, and reduced the city to "a ruin for ever more, a desolate place, even today.
Karen Armstrong (Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence)
Lesson one: Pack light unless you want to hump the eight around the mountains all day and night. By the time we reached Snowdonia National Park on Friday night it was dark, and with one young teacher as our escort, we all headed up into the mist. And in true Welsh fashion, it soon started to rain. When we reached where we were going to camp, by the edge of a small lake halfway up, it was past midnight and raining hard. We were all tired (from dragging the ridiculously overweight packs), and we put up the tents as quickly as we could. They were the old-style A-frame pegged tents, not known for their robustness in a Welsh winter gale, and sure enough by 3:00 A.M. the inevitable happened. Pop. One of the A-frame pegs supporting the apex of my tent broke, and half the tent sagged down onto us. Hmm, I thought. But both Watty and I were just too tired to get out and repair the first break, and instead we blindly hoped it would somehow just sort itself out. Lesson two: Tents don’t repair themselves, however tired you are, however much you wish they just would. Inevitably, the next peg broke, and before we knew it we were lying in a wet puddle of canvas, drenched to the skin, shivering, and truly miserable. The final key lesson learned that night was that when it comes to camping, a stitch in time saves nine; and time spent preparing a good camp is never wasted. The next day, we reached the top of Snowdon, wet, cold but exhilarated. My best memory was of lighting a pipe that I had borrowed off my grandfather, and smoking it with Watty, in a gale, behind the summit cairn, with the teacher joining in as well. It is part of what I learned from a young age to love about the mountains: They are great levelers. For me to be able to smoke a pipe with a teacher was priceless in my book, and was a firm indicator that mountains, and the bonds you create with people in the wild, are great things to seek in life. (Even better was the fact that the tobacco was homemade by Watty, and soaked in apple juice for aroma. This same apple juice was later brewed into cider by us, and it subsequently sent Chipper, one of the guys in our house, blind for twenty-four hours. Oops.) If people ask me today what I love about climbing mountains, the real answer isn’t adrenaline or personal achievement. Mountains are all about experiencing a shared bond that is hard to find in normal life. I love the fact that mountains make everyone’s clothes and hair go messy; I love the fact that they demand that you give of yourself, that they make you fight and struggle. They also induce people to loosen up, to belly laugh at silly things, and to be able to sit and be content staring at a sunset or a log fire. That sort of camaraderie creates wonderful bonds between people, and where there are bonds I have found that there is almost always strength.
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
click here.
Matt Cairns (Cold Blooded)
of blood on the bull bars. She dropped to all fours and
Matt Cairns (Cold Blooded)
IN THE DARK OF GAUNTLGRYM’S THRONE ROOM, A SHIFTING STONE STOLE THE quiet. Then came a grunt, and more sounds of rocks sliding against each other. A black-bearded dwarf crawled from under the pile, then reached back and grabbed at something he had left behind, grunting with exertion as he tried to extricate it. “Durned thing’s stuck,” he muttered, and with a great tug, he pulled free a most curious helmet, one set with a long and oft-bloodied spike. His effort sent him flying over backward to crash against the stones of the nearest cairn, where he lay on his back as the dust settled. “Durn it,” he cursed, seeing the trouble he had caused, and he rolled to his feet and began replacing the dislodged stones. “Don’t mean to be desecratin’ yer tomb …” The words caught in his throat, and the rocks fell from his hands. There in the disturbed tomb before him was a curious helm, with a single curving horn, the other having long before been broken away. The dwarf fell to his knees and dug the helm free, and saw too the face of the dead dwarf interred within. “Me king,” Thibbledorf Pwent breathed. Nay, not breathed, for creatures in the state of Thibbledorf Pwent did not draw breath. He fell back to his bum, staring in shock, his mouth wide in a silent scream. If he’d had a mirror, or a reflection that would actually show up in a mirror, Thibbledorf Pwent might have noticed his newest weapon: canine fangs.
R.A. Salvatore (Charon's Claw (Neverwinter, #3; The Legend of Drizzt, #25))
cairn. She recognized a few outlines, of dump trucks and backhoes
David Wellington (Frostbite (Cheyenne Clark, #1))
By some miracle the cairn remained untouched by the flames, solid as the day I’d built it, a tiny oasis amid the burn scar. I removed the cap rock. I placed the bone inside. I felt the enormity of his loss once more. The pain of it never does fade entirely, never will—no doubt it disfigured me in ways that will endure for what remains of my life—but at last I found a place to put it where it wouldn’t eat me alive. My devotion to his memory led me there, the place I venerate above all others on earth, my little voodoo shrine to the lost and the damned, as wild and remote as the country of grief itself.
Philip Connors (All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found)
I had Cairne composed after my fourth tour, mind you. It was all legitimate; none of that business on the black market. As if the peacekeepers wouldn’t find out.” His co-pilot said nothing, and it occurred to Hyken that maybe he was being rude. Here I am blabbering about my biological riches when this one has none of his own. So he said, “How many children do you want?
David Kristoph (Siege of Praetar (Tales of a Dying Star, #1))
It's not that he hated the wooden cube. It's what was inside it that he didn't like.
Caroline Cairn (Forever Hers (Spirits of Saoradh, #1))
In the light, he looked like a fallen angel asked to return to Hell.
Caroline Cairn (Forever Hers (Spirits of Saoradh, #1))
I don't put bad people in the Void, Blayne. Only the guilty ones.
Caroline Cairn (Forever Hers (Spirits of Saoradh, #1))
Glen Cairn
G.A. Henty (In Freedom's Cause : a Story of Wallace and Bruce)
Steve and I would go our separate ways. He would leave Lakefield on Croc One and go directly to rendezvous with Philippe Cousteau for the filming of Ocean’s Deadliest. We tried to figure out how we could all be together for the shoot, but there just wasn’t enough room on the boat. Still, Steve came to me one morning while I was dressing Robert. “Why don’t you stay for two more days?” he said. “We could change your flight out. It would be worth it.” When I first met Steve, I made a deal with myself. Whenever Steve suggested a trip, activity, or project, I would go for it. I found it all too easy to come up with an excuse not to do something. “Oh, gee, Steve, I don’t feel like climbing that mountain, or fording that river,” I could have said. “I’m a bit tired, and it’s a bit cold, or it’s a bit hot and I’m a bit warm.” There always could be some reason. Instead I decided to be game for whatever Steve proposed. Inevitably, I found myself on the best adventures of my life. For some reason, this time I didn’t say yes. I fell silent. I thought about how it would work and the logistics of it all. A thousand concerns flitted through my mind. While I was mulling it over, I realized Steve had already walked off. It was the first time I hadn’t said, “Yeah, great, let’s go for it.” And I didn’t really know why. Steve drove us to the airstrip at the ranger station. One of the young rangers there immediately began to bend his ear about a wildlife issue. I took Robert off to pee on a bush before we had to get on the plane. It was just a tiny little prop plane and there would be no restroom until we got to Cairns. When we came back, all the general talk meant that there wasn’t much time left for us to say good-bye. Bindi pressed a note into Steve’s hand and said, “Don’t read this until we’re gone.” I gave Steve a big hug and a kiss. Then I kissed him again. I wanted to warn him to be careful about diving. It was my same old fear and discomfort with all his underwater adventures. A few days earlier, as Steve stepped off a dinghy, his boot had gotten tangled in a rope. “Watch out for that rope,” I said. He shot me a look that said, I’ve just caught forty-nine crocodiles in three weeks, and you’re thinking I’m going to fall over a rope? I laughed sheepishly. It seemed absurd to caution Steve about being careful. Steve was his usual enthusiastic self as we climbed into the plane. We knew we would see each other in less than two weeks. I would head back to the zoo, get some work done, and leave for Tasmania. Steve would do his filming trip. Then we would all be together again. We had arrived at a remarkable place in our relationship. Our trip to Lakefield had been one of the most special months of my entire life. The kids had a great time. We were all in the same place together, not only physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We were all there.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
Steve drove us to the airstrip at the ranger station. One of the young rangers there immediately began to bend his ear about a wildlife issue. I took Robert off to pee on a bush before we had to get on the plane. It was just a tiny little prop plane and there would be no restroom until we got to Cairns. When we came back, all the general talk meant that there wasn’t much time left for us to say good-bye. Bindi pressed a note into Steve’s hand and said, “Don’t read this until we’re gone.” I gave Steve a big hug and a kiss. Then I kissed him again. I wanted to warn him to be careful about diving. It was my same old fear and discomfort with all his underwater adventures. A few days earlier, as Steve stepped off a dinghy, his boot had gotten tangled in a rope. “Watch out for that rope,” I said. He shot me a look that said, I’ve just caught forty-nine crocodiles in three weeks, and you’re thinking I’m going to fall over a rope? I laughed sheepishly. It seemed absurd to caution Steve about being careful. Steve was his usual enthusiastic self as we climbed into the plane. We knew we would see each other in less than two weeks. I would head back to the zoo, get some work done, and leave for Tasmania. Steve would do his filming trip. Then we would all be together again. We had arrived at a remarkable place in our relationship. Our trip to Lakefield had been one of the most special months of my entire life. The kids had a great time. We were all in the same place together, not only physically, but emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We were all there. The pilot fired up the plane. Robert had a seat belt on and couldn’t see out the window. I couldn’t lift him up without unbuckling him, so he wasn’t able to see his daddy waving good-bye. But Bindi had a clear view of Steve, who had parked his Ute just outside the gable markers and was standing on top of it, legs wide apart, a big smile on his face, waving his hands over his head. I could see Bindi’s note in one of his hands. He had read it and was acknowledging it to Bindi. She waved frantically out the window. As the plane picked up speed, we swept past him and then we were into the sky.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
I left the icebox cold of Oregon for the tropical heat of Cairns in early January 1992. As I got off the plane to catch my connecting flight to Brisbane, I found it almost difficult to breathe, it was so hot and muggy. My mind was working in funny ways. It’s just too hot here, I thought. I could never live here. Then I caught myself. Hang on a minute. What was that? Why would that even be an option, living here? I’m just coming over to see this guy. But that Cairns moment was the first time I actually thought about leaving my Oregon life behind to join Steve in his Australian one. On my final approach to Brisbane, I had an excited feeling again, a sense of coming home. It seemed like I was the only passenger eager to get off the plane. Everyone else was moving as though they were underwater. I stepped out into the airport. There was Steve, back in his khakis. It was nice to see him in those familiar shorts again, after having to bundle up in Oregon against the cold. We embraced, and I had the sense that we were one person. Apart, we weren’t whole, but together, we were okay again.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
Then a hand gripping his hair, yanking back his head as a dagger settled along his throat. As Rowan's face, calm with lethal wrath, appeared in his vision. "Where is Aelin." There was pure panic, too-pure panic as Whitethorn saw the blood, the scattered blades, and the shirt. "Where is Aelin." What had he done, what had he done- Pain sliced Lorcan's neck, warm blood dribbled down his throat, his chest. Rowan hissed, "Where is my wife?" Lorcan swayed where he knelt. Wife. Wife. "Oh, gods," Elide sobbed as she overheard, the words carrying the sound of Lorcan's own fractured heart. "Oh, gods..." And for the first time in centuries, Lorcan wept. Rowan dug the dagger into Lorcan's neck, even as tears slid down Lorcan's face. What that woman had done... Aelin had known. That Lorcan had betrayed her and summoned Maeve here. That she had been living on borrowed time. And she had married Whitethorn ... so Terrasen could have a king. Perhaps had been spurred into action because she knew Lorcan had already betrayed her, that Maeve was coming... And Lorcan had not helped her. Whitethorn's wife. His mate. Aelin had let them whip her and chain her, had gone willingly with Maeve, so Elide didn't enter Cairn's clutches. And it had been just as much a sacrifice for Elide as it had been a gift to him.
Sarah J. Maas (Empire of Storms (Throne of Glass, #5))
Rowan surveyed the tools Cairn had laid out, the ones in the drawer. carefully, thoughtfully, he selected one. A thin, razor-sharp knife. A healer's tool, meant for sleek incisions and scraping out rot. Cairn groaned as unconsciousness gave way. By the time Cairn awoke, chained to that metal table, Rowan was ready. Cairn beheld who stood over him, the tool in Rowan's tattooed hand, the others he had also laid out on the piece of velvet, and began thrashing. The iron chains held firm. Then Cairn beheld the frozen rage in Rowan's eyes. Understood what he intended to do with that sharp, sharp knife. A dark stain spread across the front of Cairn's pants. Rowan wrapped an ice-kissed wind around the tent, blocking all sound, and began.
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
Who is the person under the thinker? that is the real you!
Darice Cairns
The cairns are always there to help them find their way back.
Karsten Knight (This Eternity of Masks and Shadows)
Anyone who thought I was crazy for talking to a dog hadn’t met my cairn terrier. He had a way of communicating that was almost human.
Traci Andrighetti (Limoncello Yellow (Franki Amato, #1))
The heart’s metanoia, on the other hand, turns without regret, turns not so much away, as toward, as if the slow pilgrim has been surprised to find that sin is not so bad as it is a waste of time.
Scott Cairns (Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (Paraclete Poetry))
Regardless of our situations, we are inevitably partaking of something or other at every moment. The catch is that we will either partake of what is , or we will partake of the absence of what is. We partake either of life (all that has true being by way of its connection to God) or of death (all that has opted to sever that connection).
Scott Cairns (The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain)
Sin is not so bad as it is a waste of time.
Scott Cairns (Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (Paraclete Poetry))
The countryside around us changed again. Now we were driving through forest. Sørland forests with mountain crags here and there among the trees, hills covered with spruce and oaks, aspen and birch, sporadic dark moorland, sudden meadows, flatland with densely growing pine trees. When I was a boy I used to imagine the sea rising and filling the forest so that the hilltops became islets you could sail between and on which you could bathe. Of all my childhood fantasies this was the one that captivated me most; the thought that you could swim over bus shelters and roofs, perhaps dive down and glide through a door, up a staircase, into a living room. Or just through a forest, with its slopes, cliffs, cairns, and ancient trees. At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream. It was hypnotic. Not the mention the cellar we found in an unfinished house filled with shiny, black water we sailed on in two styrofoam boxes, when we were around five years old. Hypnotic. The same applied to winter when we skated along frozen streams in which grass, sticks, twigs, and small plants stood upright in the translucent ice beneath us. What had been the great attraction? And what had happened to it? Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past. Trees and streetlamps, houses and outhouses, but also people and animals. If someone was waiting for a bus they would be sliced through the middle, their top half falling like a felled tree, leaving feet and waist standing and the wound bleeding.
Karl Ove Knausgaard (Min kamp 1 (Min kamp, #1))
The questions cairn Stones pile slowly inside Until silence. Static is the enemy of decision
Tommy Pico (IRL)
He was a swine whose only god was gold.
Robert E. Howard (The Cairn on the Headland)
Our memories and the stories we tell ourselves are what we ponder on as we slow down or approach our final years.
Darice Cairns (The Art of Finding Truth: One Man's Journey Through Love, Life, Grief and Joy)
You will know that this life is not just about you but about all the people who have touched your life.
Darice Cairns (The Art of Finding Truth: One Man's Journey Through Love, Life, Grief and Joy)
Fate can rip you out of the driver’s seat when it comes to how you live your life.
Darice Cairns (The Art of Finding Truth: One Man's Journey Through Love, Life, Grief and Joy)
Being healthy is as much about how you think as how you act.
Jonathan Cairns (The Plant Based Runner: A Personal Guide to Running, Healthy Eating, and Discovering a New You)
Choose your city carefully and live there for several months first before buying a house and setting up a business.
Darice Cairns (The Art of Finding Truth: One Man's Journey Through Love, Life, Grief and Joy)
When you have strong beliefs, there is little room to accept new ideas or any other version of “what could be.” These individuals become a vessel full of opinions.
Darice Cairns (The Art of Finding Truth: One Man's Journey Through Love, Life, Grief and Joy)
surely a cairn like this one must have been significant. I wondered what sort of man – or woman, perhaps? – had lain here, leaving no more than an echo of their bones, so much more fragile than the enduring rocks that sheltered them.
Diana Gabaldon (An Echo in the Bone (Outlander, #7))
This famous life and death struggle of two races is commemorated by a multitude of cairns and pillars which strew the great battle plain in Sligo — a plain which bears the name (in Irish) of “the Plain of the Towers of the Fomorians.” The De Danann were now the undisputed masters of the land. So goes the honored legend.
Seumas MacManus (The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland)
Recreation And when we had invented death, had severed every soul from life we made of these our bodies sepulchers. And as we wandered dying, dim among the dying multitudes, He acquiesced to be interred in us. So when He had ascended thus into our persons and the grave He broke the limits, opening the grip, He shaped of every sepulcher a womb.
Scott Cairns
she sipped tea and surrendered her afternoon to reading about the flora of Cairn Ocland. She wanted something to discuss with the man of her dreams and giggled when she realized how preposterous she sounded.
Vivienne Savage (Beauty and the Beast (Once Upon a Spell, #1))
Concentration wrinkled her brow. “Push yourself,” he encouraged. He’d watched her practice daily in the cairn for weeks, but he knew she was capable of more. Lacking a teacher, he served as her faithful coach instead. “I’m trying.” “To hell with trying, lass. Do it.” The clouds exploded, almost blinding Alistair. Sizzling streaks of light fell from the sky, plunging into the forest below. A tree ignited and flames billowed on the wind. Anastasia collapsed, but Alistair was there to catch her in his huge claws. Despite
Vivienne Savage (Beauty and the Beast (Once Upon a Spell, #1))
Her body emanated heat, a reminder of where they made contact. The women of Cairn Ocland wore nothing beneath their dresses, but Ana had donned something thin and made from cotton. What he wouldn’t do to touch her there as a human without a barrier between them, breathing
Vivienne Savage (Beauty and the Beast (Once Upon a Spell, #1))
In May of 1861, Brigham and his entourage stopped at Mountain Meadows and stopped at the rock cairn that had been built there by U.S. soldiers as a monument to the victims. Atop the peak of the cairn stood a heavy wooden cross engraved with “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” Young regarded it for a moment, then read the inscription aloud with a slight change: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I have repaid.” He gave a Danite signal by raising his right arm, fist to the sky. His men understood. A horseman lassoed the cross and pulled it down, dragging it until it splintered to pieces. The others set to work and five minutes later not a single stone was left of the memorial.
David Fitzgerald (The Mormons (The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion, #1))
I’m not on my own,” Sorcha said. “I’m with the most powerful werewolf of Cairn Ocland.” Her blue eyes twinkled with delight when her gaze turned to Conall, melting the icy wall he’d wanted to build between them ever since the huntsman had joined their group. At no point had she ever smiled at Ferghus like that, and in those moments, Conall knew she never would.
Vivienne Savage (Red and the Wolf (Once Upon a Spell, #2))
HIKER GLOSSERY AT- Appalachian Trail - The most populated and most difficult terrain of the three longest trails in the USA Aqua Blazing- Canoeing instead of hiking a section of the trail in the Shenandoahs. Bear Cables- A system to easily hang up food bags. Bear bagging- Hanging food up high in a tree. Bivy Sack- A lightweight waterproof shelter that has bad condensation Blow Down- A fallen tree or limb blocking the trail Blue Blazer- A hiker that takes short cut trails or more scenic trails that lead back to the main trail Bushwhack- To hike where there is no trail /to clear a trail with a machete. CDT- The Continental Divide Trail - The most secluded and least populated of the three longest US trails. Cowboy Camping- to sleep on the ground with no shelter Cairn- Pile of rocks to depict where the trail is located when above treeline Day Hiker- Usually a novice who is out for the day or several days. DEET- A heavy duty bug spray. Drop Box- Food or gear sent by mail. Five Fingers - Shoes with toes. Flip-Flopper- A thru-hiker who hikes one way, then skips ahead to hike the opposite direction Gators- A piece of gear worn around the ankle to keep dirt from entering shoes Giardia- Parasites that cause diarrhea from drinking unclean water.
Emily Harper (Sheltered)
My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.
China Miéville (This Census-Taker)
As they were heading back through the centre of the park again, Sentaro felt a tugging sensation at his back. He turned around and saw the stone cairn at the charnel house. Four thousand souls. Four thousand people who never went home. He felt their eyes boring down on him from above.
Durian Sukegawa (Sweet Bean Paste)
On the Zuni Acoma Trail through El Malpais there were cairns to follow, but no real trail tread. Some of the cairns had been in place for 700 years.
Mary E. Davison (Old Lady on the Trail: Triple Crown at 76)
War’s took my cariad far from me Bones resting ’neath cairn stones ’crost the sea Eyes ne’r more rest upon Preidyn’s green shores Held safe in cool shadow ’neath Dragons’ wings the soul of my cariad soars Rest in shadow Cariad, sweet Rest in shadow ’Neath their harbor we’ll meet
Carole Cummings (Sonata Form)