Coffin Moon Quotes

We love the night and its quiet; and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds.

Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Wow," Puck mused, standing beside me. "The River of Dreams." ... Moons, comets and constellations rippled on the surface, and other, stranger things floated upon the misty black waters. Petals and book pages, butterfly wings and silver medals. The hilt of a sword stuck out of the water at an odd angle, the silver blade tangled with ribbons and spiderwebs. A coffin bobbed to the surface, covered in dead lilies, before sinking into the depths once more. The debris of human imaginations, floating through the dark waters of dream and nightmare.

He coughs. Not a good sound. Too deep, too full of coffins. Why is mankind so fucking cruel? Why?

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest. In painted chambers loaded with tilebooks. They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak their will.

I open my arms wide and let the wind flow over me. I love the universe and the universe loves me. That’s the one-two punch right there, wanting to love and wanting to be loved. Everything else is pure idiocy—shiny fancy outfits, Geech-green Cadillacs, sixty-dollar haircuts, schlock radio, celebrity-rehab idiots, and most of all, the atomic vampires with their de-soul-inators, and flag-draped coffins. Goodbye to all that, I say. And goodbye to Mr. Asterhole and the Red Death of algebra and to the likes of Geech and Keeeevin. Goodbye to Mom’s rented tan and my sister’s chargecard boobs. Goodbye to Dad for the second and last time. Goodbye to black spells and jagged hangovers, divorces, and Fort Worth nightmares. To high school and Bob Lewis and once-upon-a-time Ricky. Goodbye to the future and the past and, most of all, to Aimee and Cassidy and all the other girls who came and went and came and went. Goodbye. Goodbye. I can’t feel you anymore. The night is almost too beautifully pure for my soul to contain. I walk with my arms spread open under the big fat moon. Heroic “weeds rise up from the cracks in the sidewalk, and the colored lights of the Hawaiian Breeze ignite the broken glass in the gutter. Goodbye, I say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now

I don’t care if I’m on the moon, the party is on the sun, and I am an albino, you should still invite me.

When Zhuangzi was about to die, his disciples expressed a desire to give him a sumptuous burial. Zhuangzi said, "I will have heaven and earth for my coffin and coffin shell, the sun and moon for my pair of jade discs, the stars and constellations for my pearls and beads, and the ten thousand things for my parting gifts. The furnishings for my funeral are already prepared - what is there to add?

Heaven and earth are my inner and outer coffins. The sun, moon, and stars are my drapery, and the whole creation my funeral procession. What more do I want?

All these past selves laid to waste, cut down by time and circumstance and choices made. He didn’t know who he was in this moment, what was left.

Two heads are twice as good as half as many.

Two or three minutes later the murdered man, the blanketed corpse, the lidless coffin, and the open grave were under no inspection but the moon’s. The stillness was complete again, too.

On the day of my death, when they carry my coffin, do not think that I will feel pain for this world. Do not cry and say: it is a great loss! When milk sours, the loss is greater. I shall not vanish when you see them lay me in the grave. Do the sun and moon vanish when they set? This seems like a death to you, but it is a birth. The grave seems like a prison to you, but the soul has been freed. What grain does not sprout when it is put into the ground? So why do you not believe in the grain of men?

Mollie watched the glistening white coffin sink into the ground until the long, haunting wails were replaced by the sound of earth clapping against the lid.

Two heads are twice as good as half many.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head a voice is repeating, I told you so, ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch, ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back, why aren't you feminine, why aren't you soft, why aren't you quiet, why aren't you dead? A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise a manhole cover with her head, she is trying to butt her way through a steel wall. Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics old-school, with a shovel in the dark of the moon. Plus that touch of Tombstone, of Gothic western undertaker, like maybe sometimes when the moon was full and Flowers & Sons stood empty and dark but for the vigil lights, Chan Flowers might up and straddle a coffin, ride it like a bronco.

They growled a response and went on digging. For some time there was no noise but the grating sound of the spades discharging their freight of mould and gravel. It was very monotonous. Finally a spade struck upon the coffin with a dull woody accent, and within another minute or two the men had hoisted it out on the ground. They pried off the lid with their shovels, got out the body and dumped it rudely on the ground. The moon drifted from behind the clouds and exposed the pallid face. The barrow was got ready and the corpse placed on it, covered with a blanket, and bound to its place with the rope. Potter took out a large spring-knife and cut off the dangling end of the rope and then said: “Now the cussed thing’s ready, Sawbones, and you’ll just out with another five, or here she stays.

Golden bars make no less a prison than a coffin on a hill. And in caged reformation, one wanders aimless still. The rafters now a recollection of sacred suppression. How the morning dawn strikes mourning confession. Now Death yields a harvest of the living masses. We walk toward its path no earthly power surpasses.

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.

Let the smoky Käll sustain himself on Mars, and Yuko lay rue on Beethoven’s grave. Let the lord of the manor of Rochdale clap his coffin into a canoe and disport himself on the waters. Let Zsa-Zsa sleep on a pillow of haddock in Maria’s cello case. Let Mrs Wessen live to see her thousandth moon. Let Ysobel unknit her forehead. Let not poor Virginie weep. Let all and no things come to pass, for how will I pass these days?

We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow. She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair. They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.

Telegrams for the astronauts poured in by the thousands. One, however, stood out from the rest. It came not from a world leader or celebrity or other luminary, but from an anonymous stranger. It had traveled over whites-only lunch counters in the South, through jungles in Vietnam where young men fell, over the coffins of two of America’s great civil rights leaders. It had blown across the streets bloodied by protesters and police, past a segregationist presidential campaign, into radios playing songs of alienation and revolt. It had made its way through ten million American souls who didn’t have enough to eat, alongside generations that no longer trusted each other, into a White House where a no-longer-loved president slept. It read: THANKS. YOU SAVED 1968.

He’d watched the old man live his life “by the signs.” Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, or a life about to end. Boyd was fourteen when he heard the corpse bird in the woods behind the barn. His grandfather had been sick for months but recently rallied, gaining enough strength to leave his bed and take short walks around the farm. The old man had heard the owl as well, and it was a sound of reckoning to him as final as the thump of dirt clods on his coffin. It’s come to fetch me, the old man had said, and Boyd hadn’t the slightest doubt it was true. Three nights the bird called from the woods behind the barn. Boyd had been in his grandfather’s room those nights, had been there when his grandfather let go of his life and followed the corpse bird into the darkness.

She rubbed the skin off your headstone of a sternum and painted a sad picture of herself in your eyes. We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow. She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair. They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed ‘infinite riches’ in what would have been to motorists ‘a little room’. The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it ‘annihilates space’. It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from travelling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

Sorrow walked in my clothes before I did. Flocks of shadows followed me. One night I looked at the stars I thought were gods until they disappeared. Some say I smashed my father’s idols and walked away. Or walked towards a desert of barren promises. Or promises that are hummingbirds hovering for a moment then drifting away. Even now, walking towards that mountain, sometimes I will watch my shadow sitting beneath a plane tree, casting dice, ignoring my steps. Some of you made me a founder but it was only that shadow. Some of you made me your father, but it was yourselves you were describing. You plant a tree, you dig a well, and it brings life, that’s all. Everything else is the heart’s mirage. Except what begins inside you. Except Sarah. When she stepped inside my dream the curtains shivered, whole mountains entered the room. It always seemed a question of which love to honor. The land I loved fills with fire. Who should we listen to? It’s true, He offered the world and I offered only myself. But I thought His words were coffins. I was frantic for any scrap of shade. Now everything is shade. Your old newspapers are taken up by the wind like pairs of broken wings. Each window, each door is a wound. One track erases another track. One bomb. One rock, one rubber bullet. What can I tell you? Where have you left your own morning of promises? You remember Isaac, maybe Ishmael, but not the love that led me there. Not Sarah. Just to hear the sound of her eyelids opening, or her plants pushing the air aside as they reach for the sun, twilight filling her fingers like fruit. This afternoon a flock of doves settled on my porch. Their silence took the shape of all I ever wanted to say. Today, the miracle you want aches inside the trees. Why believe anything except what is unbelievable? I never thought of it as a trial, not any of it. Now the leaves turn into messages that are simply impossible to read. The roots turn into roads as they break through the surface. How can I even know what I mean? Beneath the hem of night the rain falls asleep on the grass. We have to turn into each other. One heart inside the other’s heart. One love. One word. Inside us, our shadows will walk into water, the water will walk into the sky. Blind. Faithful. Inside us the music turns into a flock of birds. Theirs is a song whose promise we must believe the way the moon believes the earth, the fire believes the wood, that is, for no reason, for no reason at all.

Wedding Night The day I've died, my pall is moving on - But do not think my heart is still on earth! Don't weep and pity me: "Oh woe, how awful!" You fall in devil's snare - woe, that is awful! Don't cry "Woe, parted!" at my burial - For me this is the time of joyful meeting! Don't say "Farewell!" when I'm put in the grave - A curtin is it for eternal bliss. You saw "descending" - now look at the rising! Is setting dangerous for sun and moon? To you it looks like setting, but it's rising; The coffin seems a jail, yet it means freedom. Which seed fell in the earth that did not grow there? Why do you doubt the fate of human seed? What bucket came not filled from out the cistern? Why should the Yusaf "Soul" then fear this well? Close here your mouth and open it on that side. So that your hymns may sound in Where-no-place

They had entombed her in darkness and iron. She slept, for they had forced her to—had wafted curling, sweet smoke through the cleverly hidden airholes in the slab of iron above. Around. Beneath. A coffin built by an ancient queen to trap the sun inside. Draped with iron, encased in it, she slept. Dreamed. Drifted through seas, through darkness, through fire. A princess of nothing. Nameless. The princess sang to the darkness, to the flame. And they sang back. There was no beginning or end or middle. Only the song, and the sea, and the iron sarcophagus that had become her bower. Until they were gone. Until blinding light flooded the slumbering, warm dark. Until the wind swept in, crisp and scented with rain. She could not feel it on her face. Not with the death-mask still chained to it. Her eyes cracked open. The light burned away all shape and color after so long in the dim depths. But a face appeared before her—above her. Peering over the lid that had been hauled aside. Dark, flowing hair. Moon-pale skin. Lips as red as blood. The ancient queen’s mouth parted in a smile. Teeth as white as bone. “You’re awake. Good.” Lovely and cold, it was a voice that could devour the stars. From somewhere, from the blinding light, rough and scar-flecked hands reached into the coffin. Grasped the chains binding her. The queen’s huntsman; the queen’s blade. He hauled the princess upright, her body a distant, aching thing. She did not want to slide back into this body. Struggled against it, clawing for the flame and the darkness that now ebbed away from her like a morning tide. But the huntsman yanked her closer to that cruel, beautiful face watching with a spider’s smile. And he held her still as that ancient queen purred, “Let’s begin.

Dead people can’t hurt you. They’ve left the big world and now reside only in the little world of your mind, where you’re God and you can pull their strings and make them come to life if you want, or set them in a corner until the next time you need that little something they bring. You can edit out the bad stuff and keep just those shining moments. It doesn’t always work that way and sometimes a piece of the bad will pop up and stick a needle in your brain. But that’s okay, because sometimes you need that.

He walks to the corner of the building, the pistol low at his leg. That pregnant moment before violence begins.

People just feel the need to jaw at you sometimes, feel big.

Duane Minor’s the problem. He remains the last damnable logjam in Varley’s plan. He’s heard mutterings here and there over the past year, year and a half, from a half dozen sources: Someone’s looking for you. Two people—young guy and a dark-haired girl. Guy’s got that thousand-yard stare on him. The thralls get that look sometimes, but this one’s different.

Everything hurts, always. Sorry, vengeance, even joy. Everything’s got teeth.

But one drink’s a road that twists

I will proceed to point out — and not blindly or simply at random — the sort of objects, that, without reluctance, most men and women would agree to call by this name. As I enumerate things of this kind, the reader will, I believe, find little to quarrel with in my feeling that they have something — though it is not easy to say what — in common between them all. But whatever this evasive essence of the poetical element may be, it is from this, from this floating and fluctuating quality, shared by so many things, that the written art of poetry draws its selected material. Loaves of bread . . . honey in the honeycomb . . . summer hay-stacks and spring withy-beds . . . the flames of candles . . . the flight of birds . . . the darting of shoals of fish . . . the shadows of clouds . . . the rising and sinking of the sun . . . old buildings, old rituals, old mythologies . . . the annual procession of the seasons . . . weeds and shells at the ocean’s edge, wet pebbles and the thin black windrow . . . rain on roofs . . . thunder on horizons . . . murmuring of brooks, sweetness of grass . . . sadness of stirred leaves . . . the deep symbolic meaning of such objects as a plough, a sword, a grindstone, a windmill, a boat, a cradle, a coffin . . . the friendliness of wind-tossed smoke, arising from hearth or chimney . . . the forlornness of swaying reed-tops above lonely saltmarshes . . . the warmth of sun-scented leaf-mould, the udders of cattle, the horns of goats, the spouting of whales . . . frost marks in ditch-mud . . . vapour-circles round misty moons . . . rivers and highways that carry old legends, old memories, old tragic transactions into the unborn future — all these things, and the emanations proceeding from these things, possess some mysterious quality in common; and it would seem that this quality cannot be named by any other name than that of the poetical element in life.