Etched In Frost Quotes

Mr. Lindell's English classes are meant to make you think I guess about yourself and people and everything. Some of the kids say it's pretty weird but they're more honest in English than they are anywhere else and they say more about what they feel...Everything that's said in English etches itself clearly and sharply in my mind like letters carved neatly into deep frost. But I never let them see how eagerly I listen.

That night the first frost of autumn struck Tucker's Grove. It crept up from the ground, snaring the fragile roots of plants. It emerged from the air, etching its signature on window-panes. A portent. The year was nearing its end. Things would die soon.

Memories were movable, he was discovering. They weren’t etched in stone like some monolith testimony to the eons, as he’d once imagined.

There is a change in the air. Early morning, when I open the back door, it billows into the kitchen, crisp, cold, and fresh as mint. It makes white clouds of my breath. Winter has decorated ordinary life. Some days everything sparkles, glamorising the lids of bins and the tarmac patchwork of the pavements. Frost etches mysterious patterns on the roof of our car, and the puddles that collect in the gutter are crisp with ice.

I picked the Hermetic lamp off my bedside table. The bulb was made of frosted glass and shaped like a cabbage rose. I turned it over. On the underside of the brass base were etched the swirling lines of a Hermetic diagram. It was a simple one: just four interlocking sigils, those abstract designs whose angles and curves invoke the power of the four elements. With the lamp's light directed down at my lap, I couldn't make out all the lines-- but I could feel the soft, pulsing buzz of the working's four elemental hearts as they invoked earth, air, fire, and water in a careful harmony to catch sunlight all day and release it again when the lamp was swirled on at night.

Night had fallen, and I was in the kitchen making a yummy peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I heard the doorbell. I jumped and my heart gave a little kick. This was so a horror-movie scene--bad weather, and a girl cut off from the outside world. Only killers didn’t usually ring the doorbell. Still, I opened a drawer and took out the meat cleaver Mom used for cutting chicken. The doorbell rang again and kept ringing. “All right already,” I muttered as I hurried down the hallway. I hesitated when I saw a large shadowy form behind the etched-glass window of the door. I’d turned on the porch light, and whoever was there blocked most of it. “Ashleigh!” The figure banged on the door and I nearly dropped the cleaver. Josh. My beating heart should have returned to a normal speed, but it didn’t. I wasn’t ready to face him yet. I jerked open the door. “What?” Covered in frost and snow, he edged past me. “Geez, it’s cold out there.” “And you just brought the cold inside.” I shut the door. “What are you doing here?” “My dad called and--what the hell is that?” He pointed to the cleaver. I angled my chin. “I was in the middle of cutting my peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” “With a meat cleaver?” “It’s quick and makes a perfectly straight cut.” He grinned. “Yeah, right. You’ve obviously watched too many movies. Who’d you think I was? Freddy Krueger?” “What are you doing here?” I repeated, not in the mood for his sarcasm or teasing. Plus I was feeling a little silly holding my weapon of choice.

Under the sanctuary are the catacombs where the dead wait for resurrection. The living do not venture there. The caverns here underneath the Sanctuary are illuminated only by dim shafts of light from the sanctuary. The walls are etched with flowers of frost, but at least I am out of the wind. Dark bays line the hall in front of me, a vast rabbit warren, each hold filled to the brim with the scent of the past.

Listen I've saved these words till last. We go unnoticed, because that is better for everyone. We are of no further use. The rest of the world has pushed us aside, untouchable. By not seeing us, they mean to deny us. But we live on. They can't stamp out that stubborn flame. Life is the law we live by. We are a tenacious army. We dwell forever in the coldest season. We find refuge in the city, in her eternal transformation. The city tolerates us. The city asks nothing of us. The city is indifferent. The city is our best enemy. We are ageless. Perhaps we were young once; but even then, we had seen more. Look at our eyes. We were born forewarned. Even we have our dreams, our memories. We cling to them as to a stray dog. Sometimes the memory of that stray is all we have left. We stand our ground. We are the proud. When we've had no choice, we've taken fate into our own hands. You think you can avoid us, but the reality is different. Our reality is our beauty. You are not aware of this, but we are your hidden strength. Do not seek to destroy us, for you will only destroy yourself. On the window of my last, cold room, the winter has etched frost flowers, touched by a breath of warmth. That is the breath of the photographer, who knows that I exist. Who brings me to light. - Text by Remco Campert, translated by Stacey Knecht

Orion's Question and the Breath of Frost' . . Tonight, the horizon folds into itself, an old envelope sealed with frost. The earth leans ever so slightly, tilting its tired shoulder toward the sun as if apologizing for the distance. Above, Cassiopeia sprawls, half-reclining, her jeweled wrists dripping with the cold light of stars that have died a thousand times since we first gave them names. Her gaze cuts through the dark, dismissive and haunted all at once—what does she know that I do not? I stood beneath the canopy of brittle air, the breath of a wind too faint to matter pressing against my ear. The stillness of the season lodged itself deep, threading through marrow and thought alike. A single crow flew low across the yard, its wings shearing the quiet, and I realized this silence was not still, not empty. It swelled, pressed, expanded—an ache without center, scattering itself like seeds into the pit of me. For a moment, I thought I heard it—a hum, soft and glacial, as if the world itself were breathing from a great, aching hollow. I looked up and imagined Orion not as hunter but witness, the burning points of his form arranged into questions I could never answer. When I turned back toward the house, frost had etched a secret on the windowpane, its meaning almost within reach but blurred, as though by a single trembling hand.

Orion's Question and the Breath of Frost' . . Tonight, the horizon folds into itself, an old envelope sealed with frost. The earth leans ever so slightly, tilting its tired shoulder toward the sun as if apologizing for the distance. Above, Cassiopeia sprawls, half-reclining, her jeweled wrists dripping with the cold light of stars that have died a thousand times since we first gave them names. Her gaze cuts through the dark, dismissive and haunted all at once... What does she know that I do not!? I stood beneath the canopy of brittle air, the breath of a wind too muffled to matter pressing against my ear. The quietude of the season lodged itself deep, threading through marrow and thought alike. Somewhere distant, the faint call of an owl spilled across the night, shearing the imperturbable, and I realized this lull was not still, not empty. It swelled, pressed, expanded... an ache without center, scattering itself like seeds into the pit of me. For a moment, I thought I heard it... a hum, soft and glacial, as if the world itself were breathing from a great, aching hollow. I looked up and imagined Orion not as hunter but witness, the burning points of his form arranged into questions I could never answer. When I turned back toward the house, frost had etched a secret on the windowpane, its meaning almost within reach but blurred, as though by a single trembling hand.

It’s easy to be blind to the things we don’t want to see, even when they’re right in front of us.

Despite the scant offerings of eatables and drinkables, it was, as General Washington promised, a proper winter ball inside a little tavern turned military storehouse on the green, its windows etched with frost.

FROM THE AIR there seems to be a system: recognizable designs, networks on the desert floor. Crosshatches of ridge and fissure. Lines that fan out from the source. The shadow of the airplane slips across basin and range. Frost forms between the plane’s double windows, each geometric crystal an argument for the stillborn beauty of pure math. Eventually the cut of a road appears, as deep as a fossil in shale. Unbound by destination, a road simply for the sake of moving, however slowly, through miles of nothing. Through the system. The first grid is the strangest, the geometry of better living etched onto the desert floor: identical houses of a planned community pleated around the nucleus of a swimming pool. One and then another, until the desert is paved under streets and scattered with countless pools like a deck of blue cards.