Dusky Quotes

Twilight fell: The sky turned to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars.

Something in me vibrates to a dusky, dreamy smell of dying moons and shadows.

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.

The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.

Tell me about Raffe." Nothing. "okay. Let's practice fighting," I said in an enthusiastic voice as if I'm talking to a little kid. "I could use more lessons." Nothing. "Right. Well, I guess I have nothing better to do now than to decorate the teddy bear with ribbons and bows. What do you think of dusky pink?" The room wavers, then morphs.

I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck. To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.

She Was A Phantom of Delight She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament: Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay. I saw her upon nearer view, A Spirit, yet a Woman too! Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin liberty; A countenance in which did meet Sweet records, promises as sweet; A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food, For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. And now I see with eye serene The very pulse of the machine; A being breathing thoughtful breath, A traveller between life and death: The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; A perfect Woman, nobly plann'd To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light.

As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me.

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

A great ring of pure & endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart And breaks apart the dusky clouds of night. The end of all is hinted in the start. When we are born we bear the seeds of blight; Around us life & death are torn apart, Yet a great ring of pure and endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart. It lights the world to my delight. Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark & dart. A grain of sand holds power & might. Infinity is present in each part, And a great ring of pure and endless light Dazzles the darkness in my heart.

How dearly, indeed, I loved my pit, my dusky room, the area of my desk with its piles of books! How I enjoyed introspection, shrouded myself in cogitation; with what rapture did I listen for the rustling of frail insects in the thickets of my nerves!

The dusky and faintly sweet smell of her perfume came to Therese again, a smell suggestive of dark green silk, that was hers alone, like the smell of a special flower.

Full moon calls thee-- Shai-hulud shall thou see; Red the night, dusky sky, Bloody death didst thou die. We pray to a moon: she is round-- Luck with us will then abound, What we seek for shall be found In the land of solid ground.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.

...when evening fell and the grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she stretched her arms out to the silent river that had known her sorrow and her joy. And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms, and had laid her weary head upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pain.

Mircea leaned over to refill my wineglass, and a section of his bare chest showed under the robe, along with a hint of dusky nipple. It's a good thing I'm too stuffed to move, I thought hazily. I would so have jumped that.

The Tower. He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names. The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: There I will sing all their names!

Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know.

The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: "If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery.

She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and torturous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope.

In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky, silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the beatings of that most tender and generous heart.

She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament: Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

To be far from the madding crowd is to be mad indeed.

Tonight - I am alone in the night, a homeless and sleepless nun! Tonight I hold all the keys to this the only capital city and lack of sleep guides me on my path. You are so lovely, my dusky Kremlin! Tonight I put my lips to the breast of the whole round and warring earth. Now I feel hair - like fur - standing on end: the stifling winds blow straight into my soul. Tonight I feel compassion for everyone, those who are pitied, along with those who are kissed.

Mothers are inscrutable beings to their sons, always. ("The Higgler")

This is my favourite time of day, the afternoon barely ended, the evening not yet begun; the languid hours of sunshine stretch out ahead of us before fading into dusky twilight.

Her smile, though, no, it was her laugh, a dusky, deep cascading laughter that caught the joy, implied and mocked the sorrow in every joy.

Trevor cupped his hands around it, felt Zach's heartbeat throbbing between his palms. The skin of the shaft was textured, slightly rippled beneath the surface. The head was as smooth as satin, as rose petals. Trevor rubbed his thumb across it, squeezed gently, heard Zack suck air in through his teeth and moan as he let it out. He could see blood suffusing the tissue just beneath the translucent skin, a deep dusky rose delicately purpled at the edges, crowned with a single dewy pearl of come. It was as intimate, as raw as holding someone's heart in his hands.

Courage~ What makes the flag on the mast to wave? What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage! What makes the sphinx the seventh wonder? Courage! What makes the dawn come up like thunder? Courage! What makes the Hottentot so hot? What puts the "ape" in apricot?~Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz

Her eyes were wide-set and there was thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was too tall to be cute. She wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the cigarette she was poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches long. She didn't look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use sometime.

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual fife upon another: each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.

whatever tongue we speak the old ghost asserts itself in dusky echoes

The flowers have come, and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you.

Yet on the dusky veranda she had seemed like a force of nature that had somehow sought out the landscape of his longing and moulded itself to each contour.

Twilight, the only time of the day when the light and dark meet and become one. The bright powerful light of the day, calmly surrenders before the engulfing duskiness of the night. And the dense whelming darkness of the night yields before the surreal dawning saffron of the morning. The only two moments of the day that absolve the difference between ‘dark and light’. (Page 71)

He had to hold his body very still, very still, like some vessel about to slosh over from too much motion. Gradually he managed to get control of his breathing. His excited heart beat more steadily; the pounding of the waves inside him subsided slowly. And suddenly solitude fell across his heart like a dusky reflection. He closed his eyes. The dark doors within him opened, and he entered. The next performance in the theatre of his soul was beginning.

At this slower pace the journey took a couple of days, and I fought off a few minor threats along the way --griffins, carnivorous plants, giant serpents, hostile centaurs, that sort of thing, purely routine --and I was beginning to get bored when at last the dusky towers of Castle Roogna hove into view.

Humph,' he said, with a disagreeable air, 'the universe does its work very quietly.' (“The Bogey Man”)

He asked with a stiff smile 'What is love?' For me,' said Orianda, fumbling for a definition, 'for me it is a compound of anticipation and gratitude. When either of these two ingredients is absent love is dead.

If it had been a heart attack, the newspaper might have used the word massive, as if a mountain range had opened inside her, but instead it used the word suddenly, a light coming on in an empty room. The telephone fell from my shoulder, a black parrot repeating something happened, something awful a sunday, dusky. If it had been terminal, we could have cradled her as she grew smaller, wiped her mouth, said good-bye. But it was sudden, how overnight we could be orphaned & the world became a bell we'd crawl inside & the ringing all we'd eat.

Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold, and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet.

If he was not exactly a Spartan, he was, you might say, spartanatical. Things happened to you; they were good,or they were bad - and that was the truth about everything.

I feel like you and the past have been chasing me down ever since you walked into that shop, Salem.” She didn’t answer me but I noticed a little pink work its way into her dusky cheeks. “What are you going to do if I decide to let you catch me?

What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets....

As a rule, I try to avoid popping that dusky cherry. I cannot be the first black girl a white man dates. I cannot endure the nervous renditions of backpacker rap, the conspicuous effort to be colloquial, or the smugness of pink men in kente cloth.

Your real secret hiding place is not a dark cave, it is not a dusky forest, it is not a desolate house in the middle of nowhere but your real secret hiding place is always your own mind! Every person ultimately hides himself over there, in his own mind!

We, too, are shadow and light. We are not supposed to know this, or be all these different facets of humanity, bright and dark. We are raised to be bright and shiny, but there is meaning in the acceptance of our dusky and dappled side, and also in defiance.

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate." —Robert Taylor on Barbara Stanwyck, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson

The rapid nightfall of mid-December had quite beset the little village as they approached it on soft feet over a first thin fall of powdery snow. Little was visible but squares of a dusky orange-red on either side of the street, where the firelight or lamplight of each cottage overflowed through the casements into the dark world without. Most of the low latticed windows were innocent of blinds, and to the lookers-in from outside, the inmates, gathered round the tea-table, absorbed in handiwork, or talking with laughter and gesture, had each that happy grace which is the last thing the skilled actor shall capture--the natural grace which goes with perfect unconsciousness of observation. Moving at will from one theatre to another, the two spectators, so far from home themselves, had something of wistfulness in their eyes as they watched a cat being stroked, a sleepy child picked up and huddled off to bed, or a tired man stretch and knock out his pipe on the end of a smouldering log.

The poor wretch, she had given up so much and could yet smile at her trouble. He himself had never surrendered to anything in life - that was what life demanded of you - surrender. For reward it gave you love, this swarthy, skin-deep love that exacted remorseless penalties.

Cynthia was originally from Sierra Leone, and I loved the way those two dusky words rolled off her tongue. As we drove along I found myself fascinated with the deep “Oooooohhs” and “Aaaahhhhss” that made up her conversational speech patterns

The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.

He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly. That was his most perfect idea of heaven's happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine

I could not help staring back, for they made quite a contrast: Kate's pale skin and elegant purple suit, Nadira's dusky skin and exotic fiery sari. "Do we clash?" Nadira said dryly. "We certainly do," said Kate. "Would you like me to move?" "Don't trouble yourself.

The elasticity of our dreams can take us to unspoken worlds, but our innate horror of the unknown is what weighs us down. Fight it. Travel to the isolated coils of smoldering dust trapped in our dusky sky or explore the unseen timeless vibration of dancing particles that fashions existence. Whatever choice you make can change your life forever. The same applies to a story. Words are the atoms of a tale, and together they compose a universe.

Blood is thicker than water, I know, but it's unnatural stuff to drink so much of. (“The Wife Of Ted Wickham”)

[On Du Bois] Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears — prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Très gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was listed as “Colonel” on the Channel boat, because his name bore the addition “Col.” on his passport.

It’s dusk, dearest. (In passing, isn’t ‘dusk’ a lovely word? I like it better than twilight. It sounds so velvety and shadowy and—and—dusky.) In daylight I belong to the world; in the night to sleep and eternity. But in the dusk I’m free from both and belong only to myself—and you. — L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Windy Poplars (Oxford City Press, 2012)(via luthienne)

This afternoon I walked through the city, making for a café where I was to meet Raphael. It was about half-past two on a day that had never really got light. It began to snow. The low clouds made a grey ceiling for the city; the snow muffled the noise of the cars until it became almost rhythmical; a steady, shushing noise, like the sound of tides beating endlessly on marble walls. I closed my eyes. I felt calm. There was a park. I entered it and followed a path through an avenue of tall, ancient trees with wide, dusky, grassy spaces on either side of them. The pale snow sifted down through bare winter branches. The lights of the cars on the distant road sparkled through the trees: red, yellow, white. It was very quiet. Though it was not yet twilight the streetlights shed a faint light. People were walking up and down on the path. An old man passed me. He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realised I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated a moment too long and he disappeared into the crowd. A woman passed me with two children. One of the children had a wooden recorder in his hands. I knew them too. They are depicted in the twenty-seventh southern hall: a statue of two children laughing, one of them holding a flute. I came out of the park. The city streets rose up around me. There was a hotel with a courtyard with metal tables and chairs for people to sit in more clement weather. Today they were snow-strewn and forlorn. A lattice of wire was strung across the courtyard. Paper lanterns were hanging from the wires, spheres of vivid orange that blew and trembled in the snow and the thin wind; the sea-grey clouds raced across the sky and the orange lanterns shivered against them. The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.

Then, at a meeting, Petal Bear. Thin, moist, hot. Winked at him. . . . Grey eyes close together, curly hair the color of oak. The fluorescent light made her as pale as candle wax. Her eyelids gleamed with some dusky unguent. A metallic thread in her rose sweater. These faint sparks cast a shimmer on her like a spill of light. She smiled, the pearl-tinted lips wet with cider. . . . As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment.

The tall white lillies were reeling in the moonlight, and the air was charged with perfume, as with a presence. Mrs. Morel gasped slightly in fear. She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen; but it only appeared dusky. The she drank a deep draught of the scent. It almost made her dizzy.

Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence.

To analyze or assess a person's failings or deficiencies,' he declared to himself, 'is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in diverse ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being.

There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey. To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

They walked in silence through the little streets of Chinatown. Women from all over the world smiled at them from open windows, stood on the doorsteps inviting them in. Some of the rooms were exposed to the street. Only a curtain concealed the beds. One could see couples embracing. There were Syrian women wearing their native costume, Arabian women with jewelry covering their half-naked bodies, Japanese and Chinese women beckoning slyly, big African women squatting in circles, chatting together. One house was filled with French whores wearing short pink chemises and knitting and sewing as if they were at home. They always hailed the passers-by with promises of specialities. The houses were small, dimly lit, dusty, foggy with smoke, filled with dusky voices, the murmurs of drunkards, of lovemaking. The Chinese adorned the setting and made it more confused with screens and curtains, lanterns, burning incense, Buddhas of gold. It was a maze of jewels, paper flowers, silk hangings, and rugs, with women as varied as the designs and colors, inviting men who passed by to sleep with them.

Close above him the window was a square of palest aquamarine in the dusky gold of the lamplit wall, and on the dark roof-ridge of the officers' mess opposite was a sleeping pigeon, so clearly and exquisitely outlined against the morning sky that it seemed to Marcus as though he could make out the tip of every fluffed-out feather.

Then he would leave for the underworld, where I could never go, for gods are the opposite of death. I tried to imagine those dusky hills and gray meadows, the shades moving slow and white among them. Some walked hand in hand with those they had loved in life; some waited, secure that one day their beloved would come. And for those who had not loved, whose lives had been filled with pain and horror, there was the black river Lethe, where one might drink and forget. Some consolation.

The path is a ribbon of moonlight across a dusky sea. The wind sings a song that beckons us To that great and mighty tree. We are the Greenowls of Ambala, clad in raiments of moss, Sprigged with lichens and grasses Then gilded with silvery frost. Fair and square we play- for a sporting lot we are. We ride the boisterous Balefire gusts And we reach for every star.

Do you think you love that fellow?" "I don't know." She closed her eyes, but the tears overflowed nevertheless. "All I know is that he opened a door into a whole new world I never even knew existed. I've stepped through that door, and I cant return. (...) Its like being blind from birth and then one day suddenly being able to see. And not just see, but to witness the sun rising in all her glory across the azure sky. The dusky lavenders and blues lightening to pinks and reds, spreading across the horizon until the entire earth is lit. Until one has to blink and fall to ones knees in awe at the light. (...) Even if one were to be made blind again in the next instant, one would ever after remember and know what was missed. What could be.

There are men who love to gaze with the mind at things that can never be seen, feel at least the throb of a beauty that will never be known and hear over immense, bleak reaches the echo of that which is no celestial music but only their heart's vain cries.

At first you saw only a mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor, covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned. The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils, and were fixed upon the throned King with a look of beast-like hate. Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror inspired by the appalling effigy.

When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires. ("The Basilisk")

There were kind lies. You still look beautiful. I love you. I forgive you. There were frightened lies. Someone else must have taken it. Of course I am Anglican. I never saw that baby before. There were predatory lies. Buy this tonic if you want your child to recover. I will look after you. Your secret is safe with me. Half-lies, and the tense little silences where a truth should have been. Lies like knives, lies like poultices. The tiger's stripe, and the fawn's dusky dapple. And everywhere, everywhere, the lies that people told themselves. Dreams like cut flowers, with no nourishing root. Will-o'-the-wisp lights to make them feel less alone in the dark. Hollow resolutions and empty excuses.

It’s very true; there are many more iron pots certainly than porcelain. But you may depend on it that every one bears some mark; even the hardest iron pots have a little bruise, a little hole somewhere. I flatter myself that I’m rather stout, but if I must tell you the truth I’ve been shockingly chipped and cracked. I do very well for service yet, because I’ve been cleverly mended; and I try to remain in the cupboard—the quiet, dusky cupboard where there’s an odour of stale spices—as much as I can. But when I’ve to come out and into a strong light—then, my dear, I’m a horror!

The sound of my voice brought the life back to her limbs, and the colour to her face. She advanced, on her side, still without speaking. Slowly, as if acting under some influence independent of her own will, she came nearer and nearer to me; the warm dusky colour flushing her cheeks, the light of reviving intelligence brightening every instant in her eyes. I forgot the object that had brought me into her presence; I forgot the vile suspicion that rested on my good name; I forgot every consideration, past, present, and future, which I was bound to remember. I saw nothing but the woman I loved coming nearer and nearer to me. She trembled; she stood irresolute. I could resist it no longer--I caught her in my arms, and covered her face with kisses.

And you wait. You wait for the one thing that will change your life, make it more than it is— something wonderful, exceptional, stones awakening, depths opening to you. In the dusky bookstalls old books glimmer gold and brown. You think of lands you journeyed through, of paintings and a dress once worn by a woman you never found again. And suddenly you know: that was enough. You rise and there appears before you in all its longings and hesitations the shape of what you lived.

THE CAT Come, superb cat, to my amorous heart; Hold back the talons of your paws, Let me gaze into your beautiful eyes Of metal and agate. When my fingers leisurely caress you, Your head and your elastic back, And when my hand tingles with the pleasure Of feeling your electric body, In spirit I see my woman. Her gaze Like your own, amiable beast, Profound and cold, cuts and cleaves like a dart, And, from her head down to her feet, A subtle air, a dangerous perfume Floats about her dusky body.

My Childhood Home I See Again by Abraham Lincoln My childhood home I see again, And sadden with the view; And still, as memory crowds my brain, There's pleasure in it too. O Memory! thou midway world 'Twixt earth and paradise, Where things decayed and loved ones lost In dreamy shadows rise, And, freed from all that's earthly vile, Seem hallowed, pure, and bright, Like scenes in some enchanted isle All bathed in liquid light. As dusky mountains please the eye When twilight chases day; As bugle-notes that, passing by, In distance die away; As leaving some grand waterfall, We, lingering, list its roar-- So memory will hallow all We've known, but know no more. Near twenty years have passed away Since here I bid farewell To woods and fields, and scenes of play, And playmates loved so well. Where many were, but few remain Of old familiar things; But seeing them, to mind again The lost and absent brings. The friends I left that parting day, How changed, as time has sped! Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray, And half of all are dead. I hear the loved survivors tell How nought from death could save, Till every sound appears a knell, And every spot a grave. I range the fields with pensive tread, And pace the hollow rooms, And feel (companion of the dead) I'm living in the tombs.

Inferno: Canto XIII Not yet had Nessus reached the other side, When we had put ourselves within a wood, That was not marked by any path whatever. Not foliage green, but of a dusky colour, Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled, Not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison. Such tangled thickets have not, nor so dense, Those savage wild beasts, that in hatred hold 'Twixt Cecina and Corneto the tilled places. There do the hideous Harpies make their nests, Who chased the Trojans from the Strophades, With sad announcement of impending doom; Broad wings have they, and necks and faces human, And feet with claws, and their great bellies fledged; They make laments upon the wondrous trees.

I realised I never wanted to leave her side, and I never wanted her to have to struggle to be released from her sadness. I could never suggest she required release; for she did not require release. It was a true thing, this sadness of hers; a true thing about the world, about life, about herself. I just wanted Daphne. I wanted who she was, how she was, only her, all of her, always. And I knew I would be forever treading the long path towards that shrouded chamber of dusky luminance I glimpsed in her flickering sort of half-smiles.

Is it wrong of me to propose a ceasefire agreement between humans and whales and dolphins, I know it is in actuality a one sided massacre, but so was Bosnia and there the ceasefire is holding, so would it be nice to have a declaration backing a ceasefire between us mammals?

The small eyes, buried in epicanthic folds, shifted. A low, reverberating voice rumbled from the flesh and blood warrior. ‘Trull Sengar. Is this… is this mortality?’ The Tiste Edur drew a step closer. ‘You don’t remember? How it feels to be alive?’ ‘I-I… yes.’ A sudden look of wonder in that heavy, broadly featured face. ‘Yes.’ Another deep breath, then a gust that was nearly savage in its exultation. The strange gaze fixed on Quick Ben once more. ‘Wizard, is this illusion? Dream? A journey of my spirit?’ ‘I don’t think so. I mean, I think it’s real enough.’ ‘Then… this realm. It is Tellann.’ ‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’ Trull Sengar was suddenly on his knees, and Quick Ben saw tears streaming down the Tiste Edur’s lean, dusky face. The burly, muscled warrior before them, still wearing the rotted remnants of fur, slowly looked round at the withered landscape of open tundra. ‘Tellann,’ he whispered. ‘Tellann.

Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity, and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen, rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend.

The young, thought Sharma, have this ability to suffer much in the time of grief, unlike the old who have seen enough sorrow and know it shall not stay forever. The young hardly know grief is like a thunderstorm. It comes whispering softly at first, a distant hum, a halo of vehemence in the sky, and then there is a sudden, violent, and copious outpouring; that drenches everything that comes in its way. It darkens the sky and turns every inch of green terrain dusky grey. But they don’t realize its ferocity will become less with the lapse of time, and the sun will shine bright and warm, and wash the land golden, and no one would be able to tell there had been a storm. They scarcely understand this essential unfolding of grief isn’t meant to last forever, and eventually, it shall come to pass.

But all of a sudden the scene changed; it was the memory, no longer of old impressions but of an old desire, only recently reawakened by the Fortuny gown in blue and gold, that spread before me another spring, a spring not leafy at all but on the contrary suddenly stripped of its trees and flowers by the name that I had just murmured to myself: “Venice”; a decanted springtime, which is reduced to its own essence and expresses the lengthening, the warming, the gradual unfolding of its days in the progressive fermentation, no longer, now, of an impure soil, but of a blue and virginal water, springlike without bud or blossom, which could answer the call of May only by the gleaming facets fashioned and polished by May, harmonising exactly with it in the radiant, unalterable nakedness of its dusky sapphire. Likewise, too, no more than the seasons to its flowerless creeks, do modern times bring any change to the Gothic city; I knew it, even if I could not imagine it, or rather, imagining it, this was what I longed for with the same desire which long ago, when I was a boy, in the very ardour of departure, had broken and robbed me of the strength to make the journey: to find myself face to face with my Venetian imaginings, to observe how that divided sea enclosed in its meanderings, like the sinuosities of the ocean stream, and urbane and refined civilization, but one that, isolated by their azure girdle, had evolved independently, had had its own schools of painting and architecture, to admire that fabulous garden of fruits and birds in coloured stone, flowering in the midst of the sea which kept it refreshed, lapped the base of the columns with its tide, and, like a somber azure gaze watching in the shadows, kept patches of light perpetually flickering on the bold relief of the capitals.

THUNDERCLAN LEADER FIRESTAR—ginger tom with a flame-coloured pelt DEPUTY GREYSTRIPE—long-haired grey tom MEDICINE CAT CINDERPELT—dark grey she-cat APPRENTICE, LEAFPAW WARRIORS (toms, and she-cats without kits)   MOUSEFUR—small dusky brown she-cat APPRENTICE, SPIDERPAW   DUSTPELT—dark brown tabby tom APPRENTICE, SQUIRRELPAW   SANDSTORM—pale ginger she-cat APPRENTICE, SORRELPAW   CLOUDTAIL—long-haired white tom   BRACKENFUR—golden brown tabby tom APPRENTICE, WHITEPAW   THORNCLAW—golden brown tabby tom APPRENTICE, SHREWPAW   BRIGHTHEART—white she-cat with ginger patches   BRAMBLECLAW—dark brown tabby tom with amber eyes   ASHFUR—pale grey (with darker flecks) tom, dark blue eyes   RAINWHISKER—dark grey tom with blue eyes   SOOTFUR—lighter grey tom with amber eyes APPRENTICES (more than six moons old, in training to become warriors)   SORRELPAW—tortoiseshell and white shecat with amber eyes   SQUIRRELPAW—dark ginger she-cat with green eyes   LEAFPAW—light brown tabby she-cat with amber eyes and white paws   SPIDERPAW—long-limbed black tom with brown underbelly and amber eyes   SHREWPAW—small dark brown tom with amber eyes   WHITEPAW—white she-cat with green eyes QUEENS (she-cats expecting or nursing kits)   GOLDENFLOWER—pale ginger coat, the oldest nursery queen

In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about…. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either.

They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. He says, this silence of More's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, holds a concord. A shrivelled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts. Someone - probably not Cristophe - has put on his desk a shining silver pot of cornflowers. The dusky blueness at the base of the crinkled petals reminds him of this morning's light; a late dawn for July, a sullen sky.

described approached so nigh as to receive some interruption from the warders, he dashed his dusky green turban from his head, showed that his beard and eyebrows were shaved like those of a professed buffoon, and that the expression of his fantastic and writhen features, as well as of his little black eyes, which glittered like jet, was that of a crazed imagination. "Dance, marabout," cried the soldiers, acquainted with the manners of these wandering enthusiasts, "dance, or we will scourge thee with our bow-strings till thou spin as never top did under schoolboy's lash." Thus shouted the reckless warders, as much delighted at having a subject to tease as a child when he catches a butterfly, or a schoolboy upon discovering a bird's nest. The marabout, as if happy to do their behests, bounded from the earth, and spun his giddy round before them with singular agility, which, when contrasted with his slight and wasted figure, and

Oh, for shame! You who are educated by a Christian government in the art of war; the practice of whose profession makes you natural enemies of the savages, so called by you. Yes, you, who call yourselves the great civilization; you who have knelt upon Plymouth Rock, covenanting with God to make this land the home of the free and the brave. Ah, then you rise from your bended knees and seizing the welcoming hands of those who are the owners of this land, which you are not, your carbines rise upon the bleak shore, and your so-called civilization sweeps inland from the ocean wave; but, oh, my God! leaving its pathway marked by crimson lines of blood; and strewed by the bones of two races, the inheritor and the invader; and I am crying out to you for justice,—yes, pleading for the far-off plains of the West, for the dusky mourner, whose tears of love are pleading for her husband, or for their children, who are sent far away from them.

Home" It would take forever to get there but I would know it anywhere: My white horse grazing in my blossomy field. Its soft nostrils. The petals falling from the trees into the stream. The festival would be about to begin in the dusky village in the distance. The doe frozen at the edge of the grove: She leaps. She vanishes. My face— She has taken it. And my name— (Although the plaintive lark in the tall grass continues to say and to say it.) Yes. This is the place. Where my shining treasure has been waiting. Where my shadow washes itself in my fountain. A few graves among the roses. Some moss on those. An ancient bell in a steeple down the road making no sound at all as the monk pulls and pulls on the rope.

It was clear and frosty. A dark, starlit heaven looked down on the black roofs and the dirty, dusky streets. Only by looking up at the sky could Pierre distance himself from the disgusting squalor of all earthly things as compared with the heights to which his soul had now been taken. As he drove into the Arbat a vast firmament of darkness and stars opened out before Pierre's eyes. And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre's eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre's newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of revery. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. Black fantastic shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.

Artichokes Until you had been the last ones sitting in the cafe on the corner and she has kissed the dark rum from the rim of your glass and schooled you in the art of eating artichokes until then, you are not yet a woman. Until you put soft leaf to lip touch tongue to flesh, bite the lobe, swallow the juice she says will purify you until you open it up, sigh at the color, see it’s very middle and learn what fingers are best at until you reach further still into that thick, hot heart life has not yet started. Before you had been promised. Before she is a liar. Before you are dismantled, fixed and broke again you are not yet a lover. Remember on the right night and under the right light any idea can seem like a good one and love love is mostly ill-advised but always brave. The most important thing to do is not to worry. The lines on your face will never stop the sun from coming up. Your tears cannot affect the weather. There are wars going on. The one in your body is the only one you can be sure of losing or winning, then losing again. You drink more water than rum these days, don’t you? But you drink to her memory, don’t you? And you only take artichokes in salad. Never whole. Not in a cafe on a dusky street at midnight. Not with her. Never with her, or anyone like her.

The track led into a sort of tunnel made of forest. They left daylight behind, a thousand leaves hemming them into dusky shade. As she traipsed behind Jack's torn blue jacket, he squinted into the foliage, hearkening to every cracking twig or bird-chirrup. After what seemed an age, they came out into blessed sunshine again. They were in a clearing, their ears filled with a thundering wind, the air itself trembling. A few paces further they came upon the source: above them, a waterfall tumbled from a clifftop as high as a church steeple. The water fell in milky blue strands, shooting spray in the air that danced in rainbows of gold, pink and blue. At their feet was a deep and inviting lagoon. It fair took her breath away. Jack crouched to look at the pool's edge, where a mud bank was scrabbled with marks. "We should go back," he said. "Something drinks here." She didn't care. She was spellbound. "Look, a cave!" Across the lagoon stood a dark entrance hung with pretty mosses, like a fairy grotto. "Just one peep," she whispered, for there was something powerful and secret about the place. "Then we can go back." But Jack was still peering at the tracks around the water's edge. "Whatever drinks here, it's not here now. I dare you, Jack. A quick look around the cave and then we'll be on our way." She had a notion, from some story or other, that caves were places where treasure was hidden; she reckoned pirates might have left jewels and plunder behind long ago. "It's the end of the rainbow," she laughed. "Let's find our crock of gold.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things— the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

OLIVER DAVENANT did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat. As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. “Don’t!” he had once cried to her in loud agony. In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left this message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart. If this passion is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver’s life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comic papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor’s pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereals and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Brontë.