“
That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.
”
”
Ray Bradbury
“
I’d rather fake my own fog, than fake a steamy love scene. Can I interest you in some mist? It’s homemade.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks (This isn't really my best book))
“
Sometimes, Gansey forgot how much he liked school and how good he was at it. But he couldn't forget it on mornings like this one—fall fog rising out of the fields and lifting in front of the mountains, the Pig running cool and loud, Ronan climbing out of the passenger seat and knocking knuckles on the roof with teeth flashing, dewy grass misting the black toes of his shoes, bag slung over his blazer, narrow-eyed Adam bumping fists as they met on the sidewalk, boys around them laughing and calling to one another, making space for the three of them because this had been a thing for so long: Gansey-Lynch-Parrish.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
“
At night the fog was thick and full of light, and sometimes voices.
”
”
Erin Bow (Plain Kate)
“
I have woken up…quite sloshed
from night-mingled rains
a little drugged, by mountain fogs
I have been kidnapped
for years....by a mere kiss.
”
”
Sanober Khan (A Thousand Flamingos)
“
Suddenly she felt strong and happy. She was not afraid of the darkness or the fog and she knew with a singing in her heart that she would never fear them again. No matter what mists might curl around her in the future, she knew her refuge. She started briskly up the street toward home and the blocks seemed very long. Far, far too long. She caught up her skirts to her knees and began to run lightly. But this time she was not running from fear. She was running because Rhett's arms were at the end of the street.
”
”
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
“
The mist starts to form as we stand close to one another. It is a distant fog that rises from the horizon, and I find that I grow fearful as it approaches. It slowly creeps in, enveloping the world around us, fencing us in as if to prevent escape. Like a rolling cloud, it blankets everything, closing, until there is nothing left but the two of us.
”
”
Nicholas Sparks
“
It doth not hurt", whispered a faint voice, "She will take you life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll wake and your heart and soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Coraline)
“
There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (The Code of the Woosters)
“
Hidden by diaphanous clouds of mist and fog floating gracefully over vales of heather and flowing runnels, she began to dance.
”
”
Lawren Leo (Love's Shadow: Nine Crooked Paths)
“
The night was white-blind with fog, and Kate staggered over every stone and stumbled in every puddle, but she pushed on as fast as she could.
”
”
Erin Bow (Plain Kate)
“
To the short-sighted, through the fog, God must be a monster.
”
”
Criss Jami (Healology)
“
I could be the ceaseless mist that fogs your colourless eyes when you're lost in your universes.
”
”
Moonie
“
I returned to the courtyard and saw that the sun had grown weaker. Beautiful and clear as it had been, the morning (as the day approached the completion of its first half) was becoming damp and misty. Heavy clouds moved from the north and were invading the top of the mountain, covering it with a light brume. It seemed to be fog, and perhaps fog was also rising from the ground, but at that altitude it was difficult to distinguish the mists that rose from below and those that come down from above. It was becoming hard to discern the bulk of the more distant buildings.
”
”
Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose)
“
There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.
”
”
Federico García Lorca
“
The mental mist of ambiguity and the fog of ambivalence hamper human existence.
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.
”
”
Olaf Stapledon (Star Maker)
“
November again. It’s more winter than autumn. That’s not mist. It’s fog. The sycamore seeds hit the glass in the wind like – no, not like anything else, like sycamore seeds hitting window glass. There’ve been a couple of windy nights. The leaves are stuck to the ground with the wet. The ones on the paving are yellow and rotting, wanwood, leafmeal. One is so stuck that when it eventually peels away, its leafshape left behind, shadow of a leaf, will last on the pavement till next spring. The furniture in the garden is rusting. They’ve forgotten to put it away for the winter. The trees are revealing their structures. There’s the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there’s a wide-open rose, still. Look at the colour of it.
”
”
Ali Smith (Autumn (Seasonal, #1))
“
She will take your life and all you are and all you care’st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She’ll take your joy. And one day you’ll awake and your heart and your soul will have gone. A husk you’ll be, a wisp you’ll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Coraline)
“
Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.
”
”
Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being)
“
Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two.
”
”
Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
“
And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.
”
”
Herman Melville
“
Something in the fog!" he screamed, and Billy shrank against me-whether because of the man's bloody nose or what he was saying, I don't know. "Something in the fog took John Lee! Something-" He staggered back against a display of lawn food stacked by the window and sat down there."Something in the fog took John Lee and I heard him screaming!
”
”
Stephen King (The Mist)
“
I looked back to see if she was looking back to see me look back. She didn’t. Suddenly a thick layer of mist covered her and I only saw a silhouette in black moving away from me. Slowly it turned into a shadow and then a dot. Strong wind blew the fog. She had gone from my life like the way she came.
”
”
Shahid Hussain Raja
“
Fogged, bogged gates of Brume, barrier to my home; Timeless, faceless watchers loom, but I am allowed to roam.
”
”
Christina Mercer (Arrow of the Mist (Arrow of the Mist, #1))
“
Had someone crept up to the cottage with the sunken thatched roof that night, had they peered through the slits in the shutters, they would have seen in the dimly lit interior a grey-bearded old man and an ashen-haired girl sitting by the fireplace. They would have noticed that the two of them were staring silently into the glowing, ruby coals. But no one could have seen it. For the cottage with the sunken, moss-grown thatched roof was well hidden among the fog and the mist, in a boundless swamp in the Pereplut Marshes where no one dared to venture.
”
”
Andrzej Sapkowski (The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher, #4))
“
Some pasts exist as a fog that rolls in and out of the present, formed not by air that condenses into mist but memories that condense into tiny doors that open to forgotten moments. Maybe you glance at a stranger on a crowded street who reminds you of a childhood friend or hear a song that was popular the first summer you fell in love, and in the space of that single beat of time you are flung backward to a who or when long past. And yet it is only for that one beat. Those tiny doors never remain open for long for most of us. They ensure our former times are kept as relics, and the dust upon them is wiped clean only occasionally
”
”
Billy Coffey (The Devil Walks in Mattingly)
“
Tiny, searing stabs. Wherever the droplets of mist touch my skin.
"Run!" I scream at the others. "Run!"
Finnick snaps awake instantly, rising to counter an enemy. But when he sees the wall of fog, he tosses a still-sleeping Mags onto his back and takes off. Peeta is on his feet but not as alert. I grab his arm and begin to propel him through the jungle after Finnick.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
“
That particular April day was strange and foggy, blurring spaces between the trees and blanketing all of Ellingham in a milky mist. Dottie decided that the weather lent itself to a mystery. Sherlock Holmes would be perfect.
”
”
Maureen Johnson (Truly Devious (Truly Devious, #1))
“
the quiet was more like a fog or a mist, creeping in slowly, from a distance, wrapping itself around certain sounds while revealing others: the sawing of a cicada, a snatch of music from a distant radio, the cackle of an owl.
”
”
Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry Tide)
“
And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor- as you will sometimes see it- glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts. For d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.
”
”
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, the Whale)
“
When the future is fogged and ahead lays opportunity but risk, it is better to tread a careful path through the uncertainty than to wait for the mist to clear, if it ever does.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Then, unbelievably, out of the mist came the miracle. First two points of mast, then sails, transparent and wraithlike in the fog, then, as Kit strained her eyes, the looming hull, the prow, and the curved tail of a fish. The Dolphin! Glory be to heaven! The most beautiful sight in the world! The Dolphin, moving down toward Wright’s Island on a steady breeze.
”
”
Elizabeth George Speare (The Witch of Blackbird Pond)
“
The view of the highway was so bad that you could not even see the next viaduct. Te moment it loomed out of the mist it disappeared again, as if the world created itself and was blotted out again.
”
”
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
“
She will take your life and all you are and all you care’st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She’ll take your joy. And one day you’ll awake and your heart and your soul will have gone. A husk you’ll be, a wisp you’ll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.’ ‘Hollow,’ whispered the third voice. ‘Hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow.’ ‘You
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Coraline)
“
NOVEMBER
Now chill & grey November
Come slowly o'er the plain,
Drearily the winter wind
Sings songs of future pain.
Wrapped closely in deep grey,
She scarcely will let pass
A little ray of sun
To cheer the sodden grass.
She scatters with her hand
The leaves dried up and brown,
The few that yet remain
From gay October's crown.
Her eyes and dark and sad,
Sad for the dying year,
And often in the mist
There falls a silent tear.
Beneath a cheerless sky
The trees are standing bare,
The fog has risen thick
And she is no more there.
”
”
Beatrice Crane
“
My kind has become the the centerpiece for horror stories and legends across the globe, and society has labeled the vampire as a monster, but the creature peering from beneath the fog misted top hat that night was a monster that would surpass the wildest imaginations of the most skilled story tellers. And he was a human being.
”
”
Wayne Barrett (Feather and Bone)
“
I am a Highlander,” Jamie said bleakly. He glanced once more at the far bank, where occasional glimpses of tartan showed through the mist, and then back. The shouting echoed from the fog. “And I am the sire of Americans.
”
”
Diana Gabaldon (A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Outlander, #6))
“
Midsummer Night was roasting hot. The shore, of red granite, glowed with the heat; the dark blood of the earth seemed to be rising from below. There was a sharp, unbearable smell of birds, of cod, of green decaying seaweed. Through the mist the huge ruddy sun loomed nearer and nearer. And in the sea, dark blood welled up to meet it - in bloated, rearing, huge white waves.
Night. The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade-white woolly fog. And all that you could see was that behind it something red was happening. ("The North")
”
”
Yevgeny Zamyatin (The Dragon: Fifteen Stories)
“
In the Queen’s dream she ran hazily through an emerald mist. Behind her trailed caricatures of elves. Their bodies were shadows, long and twisted. Just one of their strides covered two of hers. They were like harlequins, and their smiles gleamed white as they fired arrows that left bare trails in the Nixus. She looked over her shoulder just as an arrow sliced at her face and severed locks of her scarlet hair. Her bones made an unpleasant jolt as the Queen hit what felt like a wall. A great shadow towered over her, its face a porcelain white mask. Unlike the elves, however, the figure did not smile. Claws plucked her from the fog as if she were a child’s toy, and the shadow's mask flipped open, revealing a familiar face.
”
”
Simon (Plague Jack) Watts (Sins of a Sovereignty (Amernia Fallen, #1))
“
The moveless man moves along like the mist. The mist doesn’t hide, but all things are hidden in it—including the fog. Love is the only thing that moves the moveless man, and he hasn't the foggiest clue why his eyes get misty when he thinks of her.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
To add to the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came drifting inland. White, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered at the wreaths of sea-mist swept by.
”
”
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
“
It started to rain suddenly and ferociously as they pulled up in front of Rose’s house. A mist covered the truck. It was as if a fire hose had opened up on the dusty, dry earthen roads. The smell of moist earth and damp, pungent flowering trees gave off the last bit of heat from the former Carolina summer sun of a few minutes ago. Now cooled suddenly by the rainwater, an immediate fog to rose off the hot metal of the truck and the soil. It was impossible to see more than a few feet in the formidable rain and sudden fog.
Rose pulled Carmen to her and wrapped herself around her, one hand playing around through her T as she kissed her, one hand pushing gently at her pants.
”
”
Cassandra Barnes (Secret Love (Carmen & Rose: A Love to Remember #1))
“
I follow his eyes to the pane of glass separating us from reality and I wait for his lips to part; I wait to listen to him speak . And then I try to pay attention as his words bounce around in the haze of my head, fogging my senses, misting my eyes, clouding my concentration.
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
“
What can she do but shrink with terror? Soon she is only doll-size in dark doll’s costume. Quivering bones and feverish blood are the stuffings of this doll, its entrails tickled by fear’s funereal plume. It flies to a corner of the room and cringes within enormous shadows, sometimes dreaming there throughout the night—of carriage wheels rioting in a lavender mist or a pearly fog, of nacreous fires twitching beyond the margins of country roads, of cliffs and stars.
”
”
Thomas Ligotti (Songs of a Dead Dreamer)
“
I turned my head and saw the big lamps, and I knew it was Violet Atwater. When I turned back around Mack had slowed because of the fog. Through the mist I couldn’t see Greyson Manor any longer. Violet almost caught up to us in her big Packard and then she was enveloped in the fog as well. It was the change in the air I noticed first. Fresh and clean, with something sweet like honeysuckle or jasmine drifting on the evening breeze. Mack smelled it too, because he sniffed and glanced over at me.
”
”
Bobby Underwood (City of Angels)
“
The wind roared like thunder, and blew with such force that it was with difficulty that even strong men kept their feet, or clung with grim clasp to the iron stanchions. It was found necessary to clear the entire pier from the mass of onlookers, or else the fatalities of the night would have increased manifold. To add to the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came drifting inland. White, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist swept by.
”
”
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
“
Outside, shadows drew their dark capes around the trees as masses of lake and sea mist rose and floated closer, like ghosts come to ply the tender flesh of the living.
”
”
Alistair Cross (The Black Wasp (The Vampires of Crimson Cove, #3))
“
Even when the mist fogs up our sight still there is a way out.
”
”
Victor Bello Accioly
“
Oceans,
emotions,
ships, ships,
and other relationships,
keep us going
through the fog
and wandering mist.
What is it
that I missed?
”
”
Paulo Leminski (Toda Poesia)
“
Oxford, England Haiku
City shrouded in fog
and within the blinding mist
we found each other.
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
My Dearest,
I miss you, my darling, as I always do, but today is especially hard because the ocean has been singing to me, and the song is that of our life together. I can almost feel you beside me as I write this letter, and I can smell the scent of wildflowers that always reminds me of you. But at this moment, these things give me no pleasure. Your visits have been coming less often, and I feel sometimes as if the greatest part of who I am is slowly slipping away.
I am trying, though. At night when I am alone, I call for you, and whenever my ache seems to be the greatest, you still seem to find a way to return to me. Last night, in my dreams, I saw you on the pier near Wrightsville Beach. The wind was blowing through your hair, and your eyes held the fading sunlight. I am struck as I see you leaning against the rail. You are beautiful, I think as I see you, a vision that I can never find in anyone else. I slowly begin to walk toward you, and when you finally turn to me, I notice that others have been watching you as well. “Do you know her?” they ask me in jealous whispers, and as you smile at me, I simply answer with the truth. “Better than my own heart.”
I stop when I reach you and take you in my arms. I long for this moment more than any other. It is what I live for, and when you return my embrace, I give myself over to this moment, at peace once again.
I raise my hand and gently touch your cheek and you tilt your head and close your eyes. My hands are hard and your skin is soft, and I wonder for a moment if you’ll pull back, but of course you don’t. You never have, and it is at times like this that I know what my purpose is in life.
I am here to love you, to hold you in my arms, to protect you. I am here to learn from you and to receive your love in return. I am here because there is no other place to be.
But then, as always, the mist starts to form as we stand close to one another. It is a distant fog that rises from the horizon, and I find that I grow fearful as it approaches. It slowly creeps in, enveloping the world around us, fencing us in as if to prevent escape. Like a rolling cloud, it blankets everything, closing, until there is nothing left but the two of us.
I feel my throat begin to close and my eyes well up with tears because I know it is time for you to go. The look you give me at that moment haunts me. I feel your sadness and my own loneliness, and the ache in my heart that had been silent for only a short time grows stronger as you release me. And then you spread your arms and step back into the fog because it is your place and not mine. I long to go with you, but your only response is to shake your head because we both know that is impossible.
And I watch with breaking heart as you slowly fade away. I find myself straining to remember everything about this moment, everything about you. But soon, always too soon, your image vanishes and the fog rolls back to its faraway place and I am alone on the pier and I do not care what others think as I bow my head and cry and cry and cry.
”
”
Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)
“
They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York - they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the others will get into some terrible trouble before he is seen again, and before anyone can help him. It is the spirit of the people, the eyes which endlessly watch them, eyes which never meet their eyes. Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner. They spend more of themselves, each day, than they can possibly afford, they are living beyond their means; they drop into bed each evening, exhausted, into an exhausting sleep. And no one can help them. The people who live here know how to do it - so it seems, anyway - but they cannot teach the secret. The secret can be learned only by watching, by emulating the models, by dangerous trial and possibly mortal error.
”
”
James Baldwin (Just Above My Head)
“
Deeply exciting, though, cliché was, as a concept. It was truth misted by overexpression, wasn't it, like a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen. Something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves. Cliché was true, obviously, which was why it had become cliché in the first place; so true that cliché actually protected you from its own truth by being what it was, nothing but cliché.
”
”
Ali Smith (The Accidental)
“
In the wee small hours, California Highway One north of Half Moon Bay is about as desolate as it gets. The narrow, twisting road was etched from sheer cliff faces that towered above me on the right and dropped away a hundred feet to the Pacific Ocean on my left.
A soggy wool blanket of San Francisco's famous fog hung a few feet above the roadway, obscuring the stars and dribbling tiny spots of mist on my windshield. My headlights bored through the gap between road and fog, drilling an endless tunnel through the darkness.
So far as I could tell, there were only two other cars on the entire planet that night—actually, one car and a produce truck. They'd flashed by, one after the other, heading south just past Moss Beach. Their headlights glared in my eyes and made the road seem even narrower, but half an hour later, I was wishing for more signs of life just to help keep my drooping eyelids from slamming shut altogether. It was the wrong thing to wish for.
She appeared suddenly out of the fog on the opposite side of the road. Only, she wasn't in a car. This gal was smack dab in the middle of the southbound lane and running for all she was worth. She wore a white dress and no coat, and that was about all I had time to take in before she was gone and I was alone in the endless tunnel again.
”
”
H.P. Oliver (Goodnight, San Francisco)
“
The roiling, restless fog is like chaos before a storm, swirling streaks resembling wintry clouds. Serpents lurking there can spread its pestilence, and evil spirits can havoc wreak, sending pain and woe to the world of men, and the storms of wind and sand that plague the border wastes. Common souls meeting it fall dead. Great men observe it and despair. Are we returning to the primal state that preceded form itself — to undivided Heaven and earth?
”
”
Luo Guanzhong (Three Kingdoms (4-Volume Boxed Set))
“
Miles vanished beneath the wheels of the Winnebago. Shadow began to imagine that he was staying still while the American landscape moved past them at a steady sixty-seven miles per hour. A wintry mist fogged the edges of things.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
“
Thank you, Coraline,” said the other mother coldly, and her voice did not just come from her mouth. It came from the mist, and the fog, and the house, and the sky. She said, “You know that I love you.”
And, despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Coraline)
“
It is done, lifemate.Come home to me. Savannah's voice was low and compelling, soft, seductive, not in the least concerned with his insistence that she see that he was a killer. That he would always be a killer. This is where you belong.Not alone, never alone. Can't you feel me reaching for you? Feel me,Gregori. Feel me reaching for you.Needing you.
He could feel it, in his mind, in his heart.Her voice touched him in some secret, deep place he kept locked away even from himself. She was everything beautiful in the world,and,God help him them both,he could not bring himself to give her up.
I need you,Gregori. The whisper came again. This time there was a new urgency in it.She swamped him with her desire,with rising heat and sudden fear that he would leave her alone. Gregori? Answer me. Don't leave me. I couldn't bear it if you did.
There is no chance of such a thing, ma petite. I am coming home. It was the only home he had ever known, the only sanctuary he had ever had: Savannah. She whispered to him, soft and sensuous, a dream of his for so long that she was a part of his soul. She whispered to him of unconditional, total acceptance. He launched himself skyward, his body dissolving into the mist, to become part of the moving fog he had manufactured.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
“
Trust and respect.
Necessary elements to finding a way through.
But sometimes we can't.
And when we can't--
when the mist is so thick that we can't even see our own hands--
no less the other person's heart--
sometimes we must be still.
I must be still.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
…eerie in a way it is nowhere else in the world, the flats receding and the low hills rising as if they are just fields of mist and walls of fog, illusions of shapes and dimensions, reflections of reflections, and those reflections only reflections of a dream.
”
”
Dean Koontz (The Husband)
“
When I describe for my far-away friends the Northwest’s subtle shades of weather — from gloaming skies of ‘high-gray’ to ‘low-gray’ with violet streaks like the water’s delicate aura — they wonder if my brain and body have, indeed, become water-logged. Yet still, I find myself praising the solace and privacy of fine, silver drizzle, the comforting cloaks of salt, mold, moss, and fog, the secretive shelter of cedar and clouds.
Whether it’s in the Florida Keys, along the rocky Maine coast, within the Gulf of Mexico’s warm curves, on the brave Outer Banks; or, for those who nestle near inland seas, such as the brine-steeped Great Salk Lake or the Midwest’s Great Lakes — water is alive and in relationship with those of us who are blessed with such a world-shaping, yet abiding, intimate ally.
Every day I am moved by the double life of water — her power and her humility. But most of all, I am grateful for the partnership of this great body of inland sea. Living by water, I am never alone. Just as water has sculpted soil and canyon, it also molds my own living space, and every story I tell.
…Living by water restores my sense of balance and natural rhythm — the ebb and flow of high tides and low tides, so like the rise and fall of everyday life. Wind, water, waves are not simply a backdrop to my life, they are steady companions. And that is the grace, the gift of inviting nature to live inside my home. Like a Chambered Nautilus I spin out my days, drifting and dreaming, nurtured by marine mists, like another bright shell on the beach, balancing on the back of a greater body.
”
”
Brenda Peterson (Singing to the Sound: Visions of Nature, Animals, and Spirit)
“
Kirby experienced movement in his bowels. A strange and eerie chanting reached his ears. He swigged another intake of rum and trembled. Above the chanting, he heard the creaking of the trees. Manifesting through the mist, he perceived around a dozen black, hooded figures, swinging from the trees, nooses tightened around their necks. The redness of the fog illuminated their female faces, their sockets eyeless and their long, purple tongues protruding from the gaping mouths. The scavenging crows converged on the corpses, feeding on the rotten carcases.
”
”
Anthony Hulse (Abyss of Sinners)
“
So often the night comes and we think ourselves one with it. All darkness. All memory. Tonight, I am not ghost / shadow / dream. I am arrow / medea / sword. I am mist & fog; light passes through me & all around me. I am porous & become the light. I am the light. I am the light—
”
”
Venetta Octavia (Prelude to Light)
“
The fog turned a strange yellow, then orange, then black. The gilded winged statue Victory at Buckingham Palace retreated into mist. St. Paul's was a hazy outline, ghostlike in the gloom. La Traviata at the Sadler's Wells theatre was terminated midway because the audience could no longer see the singers on stage. Pedestrians noticed how everything below the waist disappeared. Knees, shoes, dogs became indistinguishable. The Great Smog was days and nights of people and things passing out of sight and existence. It seemed a fitting time for a mother to evaporate.
”
”
Kyo Maclear (Stray Love)
“
She liked fog. In the city, she’d always found it cozy, filling the spaces between known objects and making the world feel closer and smaller. It was like a veil over a familiar face. Now she had no notion what might lie behind the gray. Maybe wonders and dangers yet unimagined; maybe nothing at all. She imagined the world didn’t exist, that the fog congealed as she walked into it and created everything on the fly—a logical blocky barn, the fanciful fingers of trees. The mists imagined objects into being as she passed. What a wonder, to walk into the unseen unknown. Nothing was set in stone.
”
”
Rachel Hartman (Tess of the Road (Tess of the Road, #1))
“
In the small hours of a cold February dawn, Justin and I walked to the Pacific, high cliffs eroding over the ocean, crashed and crashed by lapping salty waves. Their spray misted us in day’s young purple air, exhilarating. Walking the Golden Gate Bridge, our world receding, pale gold sunrise lit thin fog, morning coloring us like a faded fairy tale.
”
”
Aspen Matis (Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir)
“
February Soup by Stewart Stafford
The February fog,
Turns all into blobs,
Orange street lights,
To Valentine's Night.
When the wind strays,
Fog's mantle is grey,
Laying misty bouquets,
On barren, muddied days.
The daffodils of March,
Can cheer up Plutarch,
Adorned in Kelly green,
No sign of foggy screens.
© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
There’s long spells — three days, years — when you can’t see a thing, know where you are only by the speaker sounding overhead like a bell buoy clanging in the fog. When I can see, the guys are usually moving around as unconcerned as though they didn’t notice so much as a mist in the air. I believe the fog affects their memory some way it doesn’t affect mine.
”
”
Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
“
Every morning a great wall of fog descends upon the city of San Francisco. It begins far out at sea. It forms over the Farallons, covering the sea lions on their rocks, and then it sweeps onto Ocean Beach, filling the long green bowl of Golden Gate Park. The fog obscures the early morning joggers and the lone practitioners of tai chi. It mists up the windows of the Glass Pavilion. It creeps over the entire city, over the monuments and movie theaters, over the Panhandle dope dens and the flophouses in the Tenderloin. The fog covers the pastel Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights and shrouds the rainbow-colored houses in the Haight. It walks up and down the twisting streets of Chinatown; it boards the cable cars, making their clanging bells sound like buoys; it climbs to the top of Coit Tower until you can’t see it anymore; it moves in on the Mission, where the mariachi players are still asleep; and it bothers the tourists. The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
“
A furtive light knifed through the fog to reveal a singular mirage: the marching cavalry appeared suspended between earth and sky. Libbie Custer shivered with a presentiment of tragedy. “The future of the heroic band seemed revealed, and already there seemed a premonition in the supernatural translation as their forms were reflected from the opaque mist of the early dawn.
”
”
Peter Cozzens (The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West)
“
Nobody in Faha could remember when it started. Rain there on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a dripping, and an out-and-out downpour. It came the fine day, the bright day, and the day promised dry. It came at any time of the day and night, and in all seasons, regardless of calendar and forecast, until in Faha your clothes were rain and your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace. It came off the grey vastness of an Atlantic that threw itself against the land like a lover once spurned and resolved not to be so again. It came accompanied by seagulls and smells of salt and seaweed. It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgment, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes—why not?—on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them.
”
”
Niall Williams (This is Happiness)
“
There’s a taint in the fog tonight,” he announced. The Mouser said dryly, “I already smell dead fish, burnt fat, horse dung, tickly lint, Lankhmar sausage gone stale, cheap temple incense burnt by the ten-pound cake, rancid oil, moldy grain, slaves’ barracks, embalmers’ tanks crowded to the black brim, and the stink of a cathedral full of unwashed carters and trulls celebrating orgiastic rites—and now you tell me of a taint!
”
”
Fritz Leiber (Swords in the Mist (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #3))
“
...Would you like to know the view I have out of my window, since you love snow? So here you are: the broad whiteness of the Moldau, and along that whiteness, little black silhouettes of people cross from one shore to the other, like musical notes. For example, the figure of some boy is dragging behind him a D-sharp: a sledge. Across the river there are snowy roofs in a distant, lightweight sky...
I walked around the cathedral along a slippery path between snowdrifts. The snow was light, dry: grab a handful, throw it up, and it disperses in the air like dust, as if flying back up. The sky darkened. In it appeared a thin golden moon: half of a broken halo. I walked along the edge of the fortress wall. Old Prague lay below in the thickening mist. The snowy roofs clustered together, cumbrous and dim. The houses seemed to have been piled anyhow, in a moment of terrible and fantastic carelessness. In this frozen storm of outlines, in this snowy semi-darkness, the streetlamps and windows were burning with a warm and sweet lustre, like well-licked punch lollipops. In just one place you could also see a little scarlet light, a drop of pomegranate juice. And in the fog of crooked walls and smoky corners I divined an ancient ghetto, mystical ruins, the alley of Alchemists...
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Letters to Vera)
“
Paris was dark and damp and cold and quiet. Cafés and restaurants had warm lights burning behind closed doors and fogged windows. The streets were wet and lined with small parked cars. The cars were all misted over with nighttime dew. We walked together south and west and crossed the Seine at the Pont de la Concorde. Turned west again along the Quai d’Orsay. The river was dark and sluggish. Nothing was moving on it. The streets were empty. Nobody was out and about.
”
”
Lee Child (The Enemy (Jack Reacher, #8))
“
Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog, becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on. At first, the day is bright enough, the sky is clear, the sunlight warms your shoulders. But soon, you notice a haze beginning to gather around you, and the air feels not quite so warm.
After a while, the sun is a dim lightbulb behind a heavy cloth. The horizon has vanished into a gray mist, and you feel a thick dampness in your lungs as you stand, cold and wet, in the afternoon dark.
”
”
Elyn R. Saks (The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness)
“
THE MIST
They fell asleep and dreamed a fog.
They had words but not meaning.
And with the mist, there came a fear.
The mist grew thicker.
A whispered voice from the Great Beyond.
Love will heal the people.
It washed away the scent of shame.
No one said, “It should not be so.”
There was silence.
What is it? A strange feeling.
Foreign at first but now familiar.
We do not have to hide.
The crystal light extends out.
Pulsing with aliveness.
The memory of pain passes.
What were we so afraid of?
”
”
Donna Goddard (Love's Longing)
“
Suddenly she felt strong and happy. She was not afraid of the darkness or the fog and she knew with a singing in her heart that she would never fear them again. No matter what mists might curl around her in the future, she knew her refuge. She started briskly up the street toward home and the blocks seemed very long. Far, far too long. She caught up her skirts to her knees and began to run lightly. But this time she was not running from fear. She was running because Rhett’s arms were at the end of the street.
”
”
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
“
cold and the damp, it was the fog, which the animals hated more than anything else. The mist would come up from the River Dee, mix with the pollution from the Birkenhead shipyards and just settle on the land, not shifting for weeks on end. While food and heating bills were higher, the number of visitors would be little more than a trickle. The animals didn’t like that either. Whatever the detractors might think, they enjoyed their company, particularly the regulars, who would bring them treats. The occasions when we had what Granny called
”
”
June Mottershead (Our Zoo)
“
Thank you, Coraline," said the other mother coldly, and her voice did not just come from her mouth. It came from the mist, and the fog, and the house, and the sky.
She said, "You know that I love you."
And, despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true: the other mother loved her.
But she loved Coraline as [...] a dragon loves its gold.
In the other mother's button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.
"I don't want your love," said Coraline. "I don't want anything from you.
”
”
Neil Gaiman (Coraline)
“
The really strange thing about this is that it was one of the Fog Facts.
That is, it was not a secret. It was known. But it was not known. That is, if you asked a knowledgeable journalist, or political analyst, or a historian, they knew about it. If you yourself went and checked the record, you could find it out. But if you asked the man in the street if President Scott, who loved to have his picture taken among the troops and driving armored vehicles and aboard naval vessels, if you asked if Scott had found a way to evade service in Vietnam, they wouldn't have a clue, and, unless they were anti-Scott already, they wouldn't believe it.
In the information age there is so much information that sorting and focus and giving the appropriate weight to anything have become incredibly difficult. Then some fact, or event, or factoid mysteriously captures the world's attention and there's a media frenzy. Like Clinton and Lewinsky. Like O. J. Simpson. And everybody in the world knows everything about it. On the flip side are the Fog Facts, important things that nobody seems able to focus on any more than the can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known.
”
”
Larry Beinhart (The Librarian)
“
It was the mist which made everything strange, spread across the land, a seven-foot-thick blanket, stretched almost uniformly over the flat bottom of the valley, and the gentle slopes leading down into it. As silent as the mist, Codrin’s army moved out of the forest. An observer high above the ground would see rows of floating heads, arranged in a matrix, the distance between them almost regular. Having helmets of many different colors, the heads offered a striking contrast to the white-gray monotony of the mist. An army of floating heads. Unaware of their weird appearance from above, the heads continued their journey down, toward Lenard’s army.
To an observer on the ground, nothing could be seen until it was too late. Lenard’s sleeping soldiers woke up when the ground trembled to the rhythm of more than a thousand horses trampling everything in their way. They woke up, and they died. Some of them died while they slept. When the last cry died away, and the fog finally lifted, the surviving men surrendered. At the end of the clash, which became known as the Battle of the Mist, Codrin found that he had lost only fifteen men. Lenard had lost half of his army, his son and his life.
”
”
Florian Armas (Respectant (Chronicle of the Seer 4))
“
The sound of another slap strikes my ears. Her scream shatters inside my head. The shadow turns and speaks with a menacing growl, ‘You failed her, Alec.’ I can't take any more. I push my face into the mist, fight against its pull, refusing to submit. I feel the vapour crawl into my mouth, my nose. Creep down past my throat into my lungs. I cough hard to force a breath and then harder still. I try to rid my body of the foreign spirit. I lift my head. The suffocating fog gradually retreating as my breathing becomes easier. The mural changes before my eyes. The old canvas brushed away, and a new one began.
”
”
Paul Blake (A Young Man's Game)
“
A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (V.)
“
Ayla got up and went outside the tent. A mist hovered close to the ground and the air felt cold and damp on her bare skin. She could hear the roar of the waterfall in the distance, but the vapor thickened into a dense fog near the back end of the lake, a long narrow body of greenish water, so cloudy it was nearly opaque. No fish lived in such a place, she was sure, just as no vegetation grew along the edge; it was too new for life, too raw. There was only water and stone, and a quality of time before time, of ancient beginnings before life began. Ayla shivered and felt a stark taste of Her terrible loneliness before the Great Mother Earth gave birth to all living things.
”
”
Jean M. Auel (The Plains of Passage (Earth's Children, #4))
“
You may not recognize the name Steven Schussler, CEO of Schussler Creative Inc., but you are probably familiar with his very popular theme restaurant Rainforest Café. Steve is one of the scrappiest people I know, with countless scrappy stories. He is open and honest about his wins and losses. This story about how he launched Rainforest Café is one of my favorites: Steve first envisioned a tropical-themed family restaurant back in the 1980s, but unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade anyone else to buy into the idea at the time. Not willing to give up easily, he decided to get scrappy and be “all in.” To sell his vision, he transformed his own split-level suburban home into a living, mist-enshrouded rain forest to convince potential investors that the concept was viable. Yes, you read that correctly—he converted his own house into a jungle dwelling complete with rock outcroppings, waterfalls, rivers, and layers of fog and mist that rose from the ground. The jungle included a life-size replica of an elephant near the front door, forty tropical birds in cages, and a live baby baboon named Charlie. Steve shared the following details: Every room, every closet, every hallway of my house was set up as a three-dimensional vignette: an attempt to present my idea of what a rain forest restaurant would look like in actual operation. . . . [I]t took me three years and almost $400,000 to get the house developed to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to potential investors. . . . [S]everal of my neighbors weren’t exactly thrilled to be living near a jungle habitat. . . . On one occasion, Steve received a visit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. They wanted to search the premises for drugs, presuming he may have had an illegal drug lab in his home because of his huge residential electric bill. I imagine they were astonished when they discovered the tropical rain forest filled with jungle creatures. Steve’s plan was beautiful, creative, fun, and scrappy, but the results weren’t coming as quickly as he would have liked. It took all of his resources, and he was running out of time and money to make something happen. (It’s important to note that your scrappy efforts may not generate results immediately.) I asked Steve if he ever thought about quitting, how tight was the money really, and if there was a time factor, and he said, “Yes to all three! Of course I thought about quitting. I was running out of money and time.” Ultimately, Steve’s plan succeeded. After many visits and more than two years later, gaming executive and venture capitalist Lyle Berman bought into the concept and raised the funds necessary to get the Rainforest Café up and running. The Rainforest Café chain became one of the most successful themed restaurants ever created, and continues that way under Landry’s Restaurants and Tilman Fertitta’s leadership. Today, Steve creates restaurant concepts in fantastic warehouses far from his residential neighborhood!
”
”
Terri L. Sjodin (Scrappy: A Little Book About Choosing to Play Big)
“
So the more manly you are, the less you say?” “Right.” Simon nodded. Past him she could see the humid fog lowering over the East River, shrouding the waterfront in feathery gray mist. The water itself was the color of lead, churned to a whipped cream consistency by the steady wind. “That’s why when major badasses greet each other in movies, they don’t say anything, they just nod. The nod means, ‘I am a badass, and I recognize that you, too, are a badass,’ but they don’t say anything because they’re Wolverine and Magneto and it would mess up their vibe to explain.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jace, from the backseat. “Good,” Clary said, and was rewarded by the smallest of smiles from Simon as he turned the van onto the Manhattan Bridge, heading toward Brooklyn and home.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
The treetops swayed high above the mists along the edge of the forest known as Wynne Holt. Five boys, all in their twelfth year, lay on their stomachs peering through the grasses of the headland near The Point. They watched as the cloaked Creature, the Ge-sceaft, wandered through the shifting fog that intermittently smothered the field ahead of them. Its shadow faded and resurfaced as it roamed through the grasses; and at times, eerie noises-- almost like singing-- drifted to the edge of the cliff from where they watched. Angus, the oldest and brawniest of the lads, began telling tales that terrified and delighted the others. “It has horns, it does. That’s why it wears the hood so far over its face. The horns aren’t at the back; they’re near the front, and it uses them to tear up its food like an animal uses claws and fangs.” “What does it eat?” The other boys turned
”
”
Chautona Havig (Shadows & Secrets (Annals of Wynnewood, #1))
“
We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.
- A Fog in Santone (1898-1901)
”
”
O. Henry (Short Stories)
“
An hour after they’d left the clearing, a heavy layer of fog filled the valley like a moist blanket. The trees grew into amorphous shapes, mountains gone.
Ash stopped dead in his tracks. He stared into the forest with wide eyes. “Whoa! D’you see that?!”
Vale jerked to a stop. “What? Where?!”
“There in the trees.” He pointed into the forest to where the rainy undergrowth grew thick with a hazy veil of grey-white mist. “The haze.”
“What about it?”
“Looks like game lag. But like… real lag. Real life lag.” Ash grinned at her, his brown eyes sparkling. “Like the forest is supposed to be there, but it’s not totally loaded by the computer yet.”
“That’s going to be trouble.”
“Why?”
Vale nodded to where Ash knew the mountaintops should be, but were no longer visible, caught in an otherworldly lag. “It means we can’t see the mountains.”
“So?”
“So we can’t see where we are going anymore.”
Ash frowned. “Er… yeah.”
“C’mon. Let’s keep walking.
”
”
Danika Stone (Switchback)
“
There are Californians who waiver in their allegiance to the climate of California. Sometimes the climate of San Francisco has made me cross. Sometimes I have thought that the winds in summer were too cold, that the fogs in summer were too thick. But whenever I have crossed the continent—when I have emerged from New York at ninety-five degrees, and entered Chicago at one hundred degrees—when I have been breathing the dust of alkali deserts and the fiery air of sagebrush plains—these are the times when I have always been buoyed up by the anticipation of inhaling the salt air of San Francisco Bay.
If ever a summer wanderer is glad to get back to his native land, it is I, returning to my native fog. Like the prodigal youth who returned to his home and filled himself with husks, so I always yearn in summer to return to mine, and fill myself up with fog. Not a thin, insignificant mist, but a fog—a thick fog—one of those rich pea-soup August fogs that blow in from the Pacific Ocean over San Francisco.
When I leave the heated capitals of other lands and get back to California uncooked, I always offer up a thank-offering to Santa Niebla, Our Lady of the Fogs. Out near the Presidio, where Don Joaquin de Arillaga, the old comandante, revisits the glimpses of the moon, clad in rusty armor, with his Spanish spindle-shanks thrust into tall leathern boots—there some day I shall erect a chapel to Santa Niebla. And I have vowed to her as an ex-voto a silver fog-horn, which horn will be wound by the winds of the broad Pacific, and will ceaselessly sound through the centuries the litany of Our Lady of the Fogs.
Every Californian has good reason to be loyal to his native land. If even the Swiss villagers, born in the high Alps, long to return to their birthplace, how much more does the exiled Californian yearn to return to the land which bore him. There are other, richer, and more populous lands, but to the Californian born, California is the only place in which to live. And to the returning Californian, particularly if he be native-born, the love of his birthplace is only intensified by visits to other lands.
Why do men so love their native soil? It is perhaps a phase of human love for the mother. For we are compact of the soil. Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—out of earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone. Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, lover their mountain birth-place? Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return? And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—back to the soil which gave us birth—and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.
”
”
Jerome Hart (Argonaut Letters)
“
A moment out of time .lights whirling and spinning in a cotton candy universe .down a bottomless funnel roundly sectioned like a goat' s horn .a cornucopia that rose up cuculiform smooth and slick as a worm belly .endless nights that pealed ebony funeral bells .out of fog .out of weightlessness .suddenly total cellular knowledge .memory running backward .gibbering spastic blindness .a soundless owl of frenzy trapped in a cave of prisms .sand endlessly draining down .billows of forever .edges of the world as they splintered .foam rising drowning from inside .the smell of rust .rough green corners that burn .memory the gibbering spastic blind memory .seven rushing vacuums of nothing .yellow .pinpoints cast in amber straining and elongating running like live wax .chill fevers .overhead the odour of stop .this is the stopover before hell or heaven .this is limbo .trapped and doomed alone in a mist-eaten nowhere .a soundless screaming a soundless whirring a soundless spinning spinning spinning .spinning .spinning .spinning .spinning
”
”
Harlan Ellison (I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream)
“
About this time I had a dream which both frightened and
encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was
making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog
was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny
light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything
depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the
feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back,
and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same
moment I was conscious, in spite of my terror, that I must keep my
little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers.
When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a "specter of the
Brocken," my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being
by the little light I was carrying. I knew, too, that this little light was my
consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the
sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small
and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a
light, my only light.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)
“
He broke off because of an ugly little sucking sound that ended in a tiny plop. In the hazy glow from the nobles’ quarter they saw a horridly supernatural sight: the Mouser’s bloody dagger poised above Gis’s punctured eye socket, supported only by a coiling white tentacle of the fog which had masked their attackers and which had now grown still more dense, as if it had sucked supreme nutriment—as indeed it had—from its dead servitors in their dying. Eldritch dreads woke in the Mouser and Fafhrd: dreads of the lightning that slays from the storm-cloud, of the giant sea-serpent that strikes from the sea, of the shadows that coalesce in the forest to suffocate the mighty man lost, of the black smoke-snake that comes questing from the wizard’s fire to strangle. All around them was a faint clattering of steel against cobble: other fog-tentacles were lifting the four dropped swords and Gis’s knife, while yet others were groping at that dead cutthroat’s belt for his undrawn weapons. It was as if some great ghost squid from the depths of the Inner Sea were arming itself for combat.
”
”
Fritz Leiber (Swords in the Mist (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #3))
“
horizontal division between clearness and opacity, but were imbedded in an elastic body of a monotonous pallor throughout. There was no perceptible motion in the air, not a visible drop of water fell upon a leaf of the beeches, birches, and firs composing the wood on either side. The trees stood in an attitude of intentness, as if they waited longingly for a wind to come and rock them. A startling quiet overhung all surrounding things—so completely, that the crunching of the waggon-wheels was as a great noise, and small rustles, which had never obtained a hearing except by night, were distinctly individualized. Joseph Poorgrass looked round upon his sad burden as it loomed faintly through the flowering laurustinus, then at the unfathomable gloom amid the high trees on each hand, indistinct, shadowless, and spectre-like in their monochrome of grey. He felt anything but cheerful, and wished he had the company even of a child or dog. Stopping the horse, he listened. Not a footstep or wheel was audible anywhere around, and the dead silence was broken only by a heavy particle falling from a tree through the evergreens and alighting with a smart rap upon the coffin of poor Fanny. The fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the overbrimming leaves. The hollow echo of its fall reminded the waggoner painfully of the grim Leveller. Then hard by came down another drop, then two or three. Presently there was a continual tapping of these heavy drops upon the dead leaves, the road, and the travellers. The nearer boughs were beaded with the mist to the greyness of aged men, and the rusty-red leaves of the beeches were
”
”
Thomas Hardy (Thomas Hardy Six Pack – Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and Elegy ... (Illustrated) (Six Pack Classics Book 5))
“
Rhysand opened his mouth, but then the silhouettes of two tall, powerful bodies appeared on the other side of the front door's fogged glass. One of them banged on it with a fist.
'Hurry up, you lazy ass,' a deep male voice drawled from the antechamber beyond. Exhaustion drugged me so heavily that I didn't particularly care that there were wings peeking over thier two shadowy forms.
Rhys didn't so much as blink toward the door. 'Two things, Feyre darling.'
The pounding continued, followed by the second male murmuring to his companion, 'If you're going to pick a fight with him, do it after breakfast.' That voice- like shadows given form, dark and smooth and... cold.
'I wasn't the one who hauled me out of bed just now to fly down here,' the first one said. Then added, 'Busybody.'
I could have sworn a smile tugged on Rhys's lips as he went on, 'One, no one- no one- but Mor and I are able to winnow directly inside this house. it is warded, shielded, and then warded some more. Only those I wish- and you wish- may enter. You are safe here; and safe anywhere in this city, for that matter. Velaris's walls are well protected and have not been breached in five thousand years. No one with ill intent enters this city unless I allow it. So go where you wish, do what you wish, and see who you wish. Those two in the antechamber,' he added, eyes sparkling, 'might not be on that list of people you should bother knowing, if they keep banging on the door like children.'
Another pound, emphasised by the first male voice saying, 'You know we can hear you, prick.'
'Secondly,' Rhys went on, 'in regard to the two bastards at my door, it's up to you whether you want to meet them now, or head upstairs like a wise person, take a nap since you're still looking a little peaky, and then change into city-appropriate clothing while I beat the hell out of one of them for talking to his High Lord like that.'
There was such light in his eyes. It made him look... younger, somehow. More mortal. So at odds with the icy rage I'd seen earlier when I'd awoken...
Awoken on that couch, and then decided I wasn't returning home.
Decided that, perhaps, the Spring Court might not be my home.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2))
“
If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (V.)
“
The centre of the conception of wisdom in the Bible is the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author, or rather, chief editor, is sometimes called Koheleth, the teacher or preacher. Koheleth transforms the conservatism of popular wisdom into a program of continuous mental energy. Those who have unconsciously identified a religious attitude either with illusion or with mental indolence are not safe guides to this book, although their tradition is a long one. Some editor with a “you’d better watch out” attitude seems to have tacked a few verses on the end suggesting that God trusts only the anti-intellectual, but the main author’s courage and honesty are not to be defused in this way. He is “disillusioned” only in the sense that he has realized that an illusion is a self-constructed prison. He is not a weary pessimist tired of life: he is a vigorous realist determined to smash his way through every locked door of repression in his mind. Being tired of life is in fact the only mental handicap for which he has no remedy to suggest. Like other wise men, he is a collector of proverbs, but he applies to all of them his touchstone and key word, translated in the AV [the Authorized Version] as “vanity.” This word (hebel) has a metaphorical kernel of fog, mist, or vapour, a metaphor that recurs in the New Testament (James 4:14). It this acquires a derived sense of “emptiness,” the root meaning of the Vulgate’s vanitas. To put Koheleth’s central intuition into the form of its essential paradox: all things are full of emptiness.
We should not apply a ready-made disapproving moral ambience to this word “vanity,” much less associate it with conceit. It is a conception more like the shunyata or “void” of Buddhist though: the world as everything within nothingness. As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them. We may feel that saint is a “better” man than a sinner, and that all of our religious and moral standards would crumble into dust if we did not think so; but the saint himself is most unlikely to take such a view. Similarly Koheleth went through a stage in which he saw that wisdom was “better” than folly, then a stage in which he saw that there was really no difference between them as death lies in wait for both and finally realized that both views were equally “vanity”. As soon as we renounce the expectation of reward, in however, refined a guise, for virtue or wisdom, we relax and our real energies begin to flow into the soul. Even the great elegy at the end over the failing bodily powers of old age ceases to become “pessimistic” when we see it as part of the detachment with which the wise man sees his life in the context of vanity.
We take what comes: there is no choice in the matter, hence no point in saying “we should take what comes.” We soon realize by doing so that there is a cyclical rhythm in nature. But, like other wheels, this is a machine to be understood and used by man. If it is true that the sun, the seasons, the waters, and human life itself go in cycles, the inference is that “there is a time for all things,” something different to be done at each stage of the cycle. The statement “There is nothing new under the sun” applies to wisdom but not to experience , to theory but not to practice. Only when we realize that nothing is new can we live with an intensity in which everything becomes new.
”
”
Northrop Frye (The Great Code: The Bible and Literature)
“
Summer Dew: a light rain that barely touched you. Sea Mist: a soft rain that emerged from the air like fog. Heartbeat: an even rain, steady as your heart. Cloudburst: a downpour that soaked you to the skin. Icefall: a hard rain that struck like hail. Thunder Break: when the sky was alive with storms.
”
”
Cerrie Burnell (Harper and the Scarlet Umbrella)
“
Then came the first hint of fog, all silver and gold, and then more and more, turning grey and blue. Fog like that was beautiful, and it was dangerous, for you could get lost in it easily.
”
”
Chiara Kilian (The First Tale of the Tinners' Rabbits)
“
Set thee sail to faintest ballad sung;
as cascading waves echo risen yester-’s dawn.
Forging forth in fog’s tomorrows hung;
through bygone shadow bearing sorrow’s spawn.
Yet seen, flowing hither, 'til sprung;
as far-flung passages unto its current drawn.
Cast adrift amidst the whisp’ring sea;
ere oar’s wake greets break of day’s incline.
Neither isle to see nor fabulous tree;
or sparrow’s flight, o’er sabulous shoreline.
Hast not shelter or promis'd joy alee;
ne'er yore star lights meet last ray’s shine.
Lofty elysian orbs hearken eons spent;
dead-reckon thy course ‒ by each glint amend.
Faded blooms first wither to reorient;
fated plumes doom verse whither 'twas penned.
Oft gone awry 'fore new insights lent;
through pallid night 'tis writ journey’s end.
A mist veiled rose rouses vivid prose;
all rhymes return astern to treasure therein.
Crows alit in rows, hidden suns arose;
‘tis sublimely writ once upon a tale's begin.
Whist muse's woes fill night's repose;
wherein the voyager’s destiny abides in time.
”
”
Monte Souder
“
embuer /ɑ̃bɥe/ I. vtr 1. (couvrir de buée) to mist up, to fog up (US) • une vitre embuée | misted-up ou fogged-up (US) window 2. (voiler) to mist • yeux embués de larmes | eyes misty with tears II. vpr [vitre, écran] to mist up, to fog up (US); [regard, yeux] to mist over
”
”
Synapse Développement (Oxford Hachette French - English Dictionary)
“
We can’t do anything about it,” said the giant toadstool. “The mist and clouds and coolness are always with us. If they weren’t, we’d all die. That’s depressing. And what’s even more depressing is that we don’t particularly like perpetual mist and clouds and fog.” Jon-Tom struggled desperately for a reply, feeling victory slipping from his grasp. “It’s not the fact that it’s cloudy and damp all the time that matters. What matters is your outlook on the fact.” “What do you mean, our outlook?” asked a newcomer, an interested slime mold. “Our outlook is glum and miserable and pointless.” “Only if you think of it that way,” Jon-Tom informed it. “Sure, you can think of yourselves as hopeless. But why not view your situation in a positive light? It’s just a matter of redirecting your outlook on life. Instead of regarding your natural state as depressing, think of the constancy of climate and terrain as stabilizing, reassuring. In mental health, attitude is everything.
”
”
Alan Dean Foster (The Day of the Dissonance (The Spellsinger Adventures Book 3))
“
There were clouds in the sky and far off toward the open water at the distant end of the bay was a hint of fog. Frank eyed the mist doubtfully. It would take some time to make a close search of the caves on the north shore, and if fog came up, a hunt would be difficult.
”
”
Franklin W. Dixon (What Happened at Midnight (Hardy Boys, #10))
“
Eyes, she had been told, are windows to the soul.
Were his windows just misted over? Was Grandpa actually inside, standing behind the clouded glass, knocking back at her, calling out to her, from behind the fogged up frames?
Or, instead of a window, was he underwater, trapped beneath a frozen lake, desperately trying to break through the layers of ice?
Was he struggling, reaching out to her - her - a distant murky shadow from the surface out above?
Was he gasping for air? Was he shouting for help?
Scratching, clawing, banging from behind those misted windows...from where no one could hear him scream?
Was Grandpa already broken?
Had he already...drowned?
Alexis shivered.
No. I refuse to believe that. You're still in there and we are going to pull you back out.
”
”
Daryl Kho (Mist Bound: How to Glue Back Grandpa)
“
The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o'clock in the morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage to the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first night's work on the "Wainwright Morning Despatch.
”
”
Booth Tarkington (Beasley's Christmas Party)
“
raids. “The secret transmitters, in particular, should marshal witnesses who must give horrifying accounts of the destruction they have seen with their own eyes.” This effort, he instructed, should also include transmissions warning listeners that fog and mist would not protect them from aerial attack; bad weather merely confused the aim of German bombers and made it more likely that bombs would fall on unintended targets. Goebbels warned the heads of his foreign and domestic press departments to prepare for a drive by the British to use atrocity stories about the bombing deaths of old men and pregnant women to arouse the world’s conscience. His press chiefs were to be ready to counter these claims at once, using pictures of children killed in a May 10, 1940, air raid on Freiburg, Germany. What he did not
”
”
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
“
The skin of Herbert’s chest and arms and head turned opaque as a nearly colorless essence, smoke or mist or fog, rose off his body.
”
”
Craig Davidson (Rust and Bone: Stories)
“
A backlit mist bathed the Cascade foothills in silver as Justin and I pledged our love before a justice of the peace. Standing in the same lush mountains where we’d first met, we exchanged rings, grinning on a stone stage in a fog-flowered forest clearing.
”
”
Aspen Matis (Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir)
“
In pale blue fog, a far, white sailboat
Through mist and sea, sails all alone
What lures him to distant countries?
What drives him out, so far from home?
The waves are mad, the wind is whistling
Mast, creaking, moans without cease
Alas, not happiness it’s seeking
And not from happiness it flees
Beneath, the azure current flows
Above, the golden sunlight streaks
But restlessly, it prays for storms
As if in storms it may find peace
”
”
Mikhail Lermontov
“
I would bathe myself in strangeness
These comforts heaped upon me, smother me
I burn, I scald so for the new,
New friends, new faces, places!
Oh to be out of this,
This that is all I wanted
save the new
And you,
Love, you the much, the more desired
Do I not loathe all walls, streets, stones,
All mire, mist, all fog,
All ways of traffic?
You, I wold have flow over me like water,
Oh, but far out of this!
Grass, and low fields, and hills, and sun,
Oh, sun enough!
Out, and alone, among some alien people!
”
”
Ezra Pound
“
Gloom everywhere. Gloom up the Potomac; where it rolls among meadows no longer green, and by splendid country seats. Gloom down the Potomac where it washes the sides of huge war-ships. Gloom on the marshes, the fields, and the heights. Gloom settling steadily down over the sumptuous habitations of the rich, and creeping through the cellars of the poor. Gloom arresting the steps of chance-office seekers, and bewildering the heads of grave and reverend Senators; for with fog, and drizzle, and a sleety driving mist the night has come at least two hours before its time.
”
”
Namwali Serpell (Stranger Faces (Undelivered Lectures))
“
Outside the window, the fog is so thick now that it’s all I can see—the blue of the sky, the black green of the trees, all vanish into the gray. I could walk into that mist and just be gone too, I thought.
”
”
Lisa Unger (The Sleep Tight Motel)
“
They would not leave this place. Would have nothing left anyway. They would dissolve, mist to float into the fog around them.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Kingdom of Ash (Throne of Glass, #7))
“
All the windows were fogged over now. Neither Walt nor Lem tried to clear the misted glass. Unable to see out of the car, confined to its humid and claustrophobic interior, they seemed to be cut off from the real world, adrift in time and space, a condition that was oddly conducive to the consid eration of the wondrous and outrageous acts of creation that genetic engineering made possible.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Watchers)
“
The steam from the train curled around them, all-encompassing like the mist of early morning fog.
Edward gripped both of Beryl’s hands in his. “I’ll write.”
The promise fell heavy between them and rang dull. Edward knew his words wouldn’t make up for his absence. He wished for another way in which he could make the money they needed, but there simply was none. His gut wrenched, and guilt rose in his throat, choking him with uncertainty.
”
”
Jenny Knipfer (In a Grove of Maples (Sheltering Trees #1))
“
Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.
If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me,
something unnerving, as if I have no features,
I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth,
I am like a water bear talking to them,
or an amniotic traveler,
a vitreous floater on their own eyeball,
human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them
And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool,
so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of
mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses,
no floral tribute, no goddess, no grown-up
woman, no acknowledgment
of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the
gray matter of spirit talking,
the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard—
granite, ash, chalk, dust.
”
”
Sharon Olds (Arias)
“
The two men stepped out into a cold, white mist, in which all sound seemed to be muffled, as is the curious paradox of fogs. In actual fact the silence was due to the slowing down of the traffic.
”
”
E.C.R. Lorac (Bats in the Belfry)
“
I am a bird and what flows in my bones is swamp water. And my Mama and Papa, no longer are they dead. No, they are voices that rise out of the swamp mud, mist floating between the palmetto leaves, spirits whispering in the fog during twilight hours. They fill me.
I don’t have no mirrors to look at myself so that I know the truth. I don’t have no dollars clinging to my pockets to tell me what is and what isn’t. I just have these voices, and these fields, and my loa. So for now, that is why I stay. Not because I am dumb. Not because I can’t be nothing else but a field flea, as Uncle calls us.
Hear me now. I know things even other mambos do not know. My Haitian mama, she too was a mambo, she married a Seminole, Papa. He taught her all the Indian ways. And they taught me. So, I know it all.
”
”
Connie May Fowler (Sugar Cage)
“
If it is not night, if there is no fog around, if there is no obstacle in front of you, endless horizon will appear! This is exactly what wisdom does: It turns the night in the mind into the day, disperses the mists, and completely removes all obstacles in front of your mind!
”
”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“
Life is a pilgrimage and a struggle. All we have of time is a moment; the universe is in constant flux; our bodies are fragile; our senses grasp so little; our souls are a mist; the future is a fog; and fame is fleeting.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius
“
The fog pictures grow charming. There is an idea in them now. People are detached little decorations etched upon a mist. The cat has eaten up the monstrous clock and people have rid themselves of their routine, which was to tumble and scurry among its cogs and levers. They are done with life, with buying and selling and with the perpetual errand. And they have become a swarm of little ornaments. Men and women denuded of the city. Their outlines posture quaintly in the mist. Their little faces say, "The clock is gone. There is nothing any more to make us alive. So we have become our unconnected selves.
”
”
Ben Hecht (A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago)
“
Fog lifts in the valley, rising as mist through the bare-limbed trees. Far below lies the deeping combe with our village in the heart of it.My whole world for nearly a decade has been contained in that place—and now the village of Duns looks so small. I hold up my hand, form a circle with my fingers. The distant village, wreathed in mist, seems a child’s plaything that I can hold in my own hand.
”
”
Ned Hayes (Sinful Folk)
“
Ensign Ezri Tigan pushed her long dark hair from her eyes and peered through the slightly fogged viewport of the medical transport pod. Inside, bathed in billows of inert nitrogen and the purple mist of Trill ocean water, the glistening brown, sluglike shape of a symbiont, the life-form that was the driving force behind Trill civilization, the shining ideal for which all Trill children were raised to aspire to serve, pulsated slowly. Ezri screwed up her face. “Ewww. That’s so gross.
”
”
Marco Palmieri (The Lives Of Dax (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine))
“
Qadir waded out of the water next, the chestnut mare calm under his touch, and Silus raised a disgusted eyebrow.
‘There’s no justice. Not only the best horseman I’ve met in this whole bloody country, but his bloody manhood’s still dragging in the water.’
The Hamian shook his head and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘If you want to be truly scared, take a look at that. Why do you think I was swimming so quickly?’
Both the officers looked past him, to see the impressive shape of Arminius as he waded out of the river. Silus shook his head slowly. ‘Gods below …’
The German smiled complacently as he walked past them, and Silus pointed out into the fog still wreathing the riverbank. ‘Get your sword out, bugger off into the mist and get that thing covered up.
”
”
Anthony Riches (Fortress of Spears (Empire, #3))
“
I feel like I’m walking around in a fog. Orafoura doesn’t call me Mr. Mist for nothing.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (99 Cents For Some Nonsense)
“
There was a light fog in the air, softening the goal and leaving a damp trace upon the skin. The moon was still rising in the sky, shimmering behind mist, and I could just make out the weak glow of the lantern in the middle of the Park. Out in the Borough, a clock struck ten, very faint.
”
”
Antonia Hodgson (The Devil in the Marshalsea)
“
He was overwhelmed by the love he felt for her; tears filled his eyes and the ache in his throat ran deep into his chest. He ran down the hill to the river, through the light rain until th pain faded like fog mist. He stood and watched the rainy dawn, and he knew he would find her again.
”
”
Leslie Marmon Silko
“
He was overwheled by the love he felt for her; tears filled his eyes and the ache in his throat ran deep into his chest. He ran down the hill to the river, through the light rain until the pain faded like fog mist. He stood and watched the rainy dawn, and he knew he would find her again.
”
”
Leslie Marmon Silko
“
You wouldn’t believe Morocco between Casablanca and Fez. The valleys are just splendid with green grass and flowers. The verdant land is singing the praises of its Maker, and so shall we in fullness when Jesus brings in the big springtime of His new world. This old world is such a mess when you get to know it: so much hatred in it, so much revenge, so much greed, and an almost endless supply of human foolishness. It makes it a mystery that we mortals cling to it with such strong fingers when we are really holding on to winter’s fog, mist, damp, rot, and mud. Lord, give me a longer view. Help me to see springtime in Your return.
”
”
C. John Miller (The Heart of a Servant Leader: Letters from Jack Miller)
“
In our ascent we were often among the clouds hovering about the mountain, and for a while would be enveloped in fog and mist, or even rain, until we mounted above them into clear sunlight again.
”
”
Helen Josephine Sanborn (A Winter in Central America and Mexico)
“
Also, the Bible does not explicitly say that it was only due to the water’s recession (which all sides agree is indeed a factor) as to why mountaintops were seen. The text says “the tops of the mountains were seen” (Genesis 8:5). This involves two things: water level (1) and visibility (2). This second factor that is often overlooked is the conditions that may affect visibility. The warmer ocean water (which is expected from the Flood with continental shifting, rising basalts from the mantle, and possibly some nuclear decay would surely generate heat and volcanism) gives off vapors and mists that form low-lying fog and clouds. Hence, visibility would likely be rather low. Genesis 8:5 may well be discussing the state of visibility and atmospheric condition regarding clouds and fog from the heated ocean just as much at it discusses water level.
”
”
Ken Ham (A Flood of Evidence: 40 Reasons Noah and the Ark Still Matter)
“
Marks,” he said on a rough breath, “I was afraid of this. Somehow I knew…” Breaking off, he lifted his head and looked down at her. She squinted through the mist that had accumulated on her lenses. “My spectacles … I’ve lost them again.” “No, you haven’t. There’s steam on the lenses.” As the fogged spectacles cleared, Marks shoved at him. She struggled to her feet, frantically swatting away his efforts to help. They stared at each other. It was hard to say which one of them was more appalled. But judging from her expression, it was probably Marks. “This never happened,” she snapped. “If you have the gall ever to mention it, I’ll deny it to my last breath.” She gave her skirts a few agitated whacks to remove the bits of leaves and grass, and shot Leo a fierce warning glance. “I’m going to the house now. And don’t follow me!
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Married By Morning (The Hathaways, #4))
“
They were teaching the horse to work cattle, and Graver showed her son how to ride in concert with the animal, not against it. She saw that was the way a person must move through the world, while across the hills, the evening fog drifted like an exhaled breath and the peepers began their rhythmic chirring music as the night horses pulled the dark curtain across the sky until they slept and awakened once more, rising like dreamers out of the mist to claim the world again.
”
”
Jonis Agee (The Bones of Paradise)
“
Think, my love. Visualize what I put in your head. Trust me as you have never trusted me before. Allow me to give you this gift. There was no hesitation on her part. With complete faith in him, Raven gave herself into his keeping, reaching eagerly for the vision. The slight discomfort, the strange disorientation as her physical body dissolved, did not faze her. Feathers shimmered, sprouted. Beside her, Jacques stepped back, allowing the smaller female owl to hop onto a tall stone angel before his own large frame compressed, reshaped. Together they launched themselves into the night and soared high to join the other four powerful birds circling above them. One of the males broke formation, circled the female, and dipped close to cover her body with one wide wingspan. Playfully she dropped low to slide away. The other males walled her in, curbing her antics as she learned the joys of free flying. The male owls stayed in close formation, the female in the center, circling above the forest, climbing high into the mist. For a space of time they dipped and swirled, clearly playing, soaring high, plunging toward earth, pulling up to fly through trees and over the heavy blanket of fog. After some time they settled into a leisurely flight, once more with the males protectively surrounding the female. Mikhail felt the night remove every vestige of tension and dissipate it to the four corners of the earth. He would take Raven far away from the village, give her plenty of time to learn Carpathian ways. She represented the future of their race, his future. She was his life, his joy, his reason for existing. She was his hold on all that was good in the world. He intended to see that her life was filled with nothing but happiness. Mikhail dropped lower to cover her feathered body with his, touching her mind, feeling her joy. Raven responded by filling his mind with love and warmth and a child’s wondrous laughter at the new sights and sounds and smells she was experiencing. She raced him across the sky, her laughter echoing in all their minds. She was their hope for the future.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Prince (Carpathians, #1))
“
Midgard, realm of the humans; the elf kingdom of Alfheim; Vanaheim, the Vanir gods’ domain; Jotunheim, land of the giants; Niflheim, the world of ice, fog and mist; Helheim, realm of the dishonourable dead; Nidavellir, the gloomy world of the dwarves; and Muspellheim, home of the fire giants.
”
”
Rick Riordan (9 From the Nine Worlds: Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard)
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He took the form of mist. In the heavy fog it was unnoticeable, and he could easily seep beneath her unsecured window. He watched her as she sank onto the bed. Her face was pale, her eyes haunted. She swept her mane of hair back, touching his mark as if it ached. It took her a few minutes to kick off her shoes, as if the task was too great.
Mikhail waited until she had flung herself facedown, fully clothed on the bed. You will sleep. He gave the order forcefully, expected her compliance as he slipped inside the room.
Mikhail. His name echoed in his head, soft, drowsy, with a hint of amusement. Somehow I knew you would just have to have your way. She didn’t fight it, but went under willingly, a smile curving her soft mouth.
Mikhail undressed her and slid her slender body beneath the covers. He safeguarded the door, a powerful spell guaranteed to keep even the strongest of his own people out, let alone pathetic mortal assassins. He secured the windows and provided the same guards at every possible entry point. Very gently he brushed his lips across her forehead, and then reached down to touch his brand on her neck before leaving her.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Prince (Dark, #1))
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In the summer of 1968, as Rob and Laurie Williams were nearing the end of their cross-country car ride to California—they were still, after all, an automobile family—their seventeen-year-old son looked out the window to behold something he had never seen before, and it terrified him. A gray mist was tumbling down the hills and across the San Francisco Bay, and it was coming directly for his parents and him. It was only fog, but to his inexperienced eyes, Robin was certain it was poison gas. “It scared the piss out of me,” he said later.
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Dave Itzkoff (Robin)
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"Is that you, lad?" he ventured.
"Is that you, dad?"
"Yes," said Ptaclusp."
"It's me, dad."
"I'm glad it's you, son."
"Can you see anything?"
"No. It's all mist and fog."
"Thank the gods for that, I thought it was me."
"It is you, isn't it? You said."
"Yes, dad.
”
”
Terry Pratchett
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Holding each other, the rain cooling their bodies, they laughed like children. “I expected steam this time,” Jacques said, crushing her to him.
“Can you do that?” Shea fit the back of her head into the niche of his sternum. One hand idly slid over the heavy muscles of his chest.
“Make us so hot we turn the rain to steam?” He grinned boyishly down at her, for the first time so carefree that he forgot for a moment the torment he had suffered. She made him invincible. She made him vulnerable. Most of all, she made him alive.
“No, really— what they did, those others. They were like fog or mist. Can you really do that?” Shea persisted. “I mean, you said you could, but I thought maybe you were delusional.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Delusional?” Jacques flashed a cocky grin, held out his arm, and watched as fur rippled along the length of it, as the fingers curved and extended into claws. He had to make a grab for Shea as she scrambled away from him, her eyes enormous. Jacques was careful not to hurt her with his strength.
“Stop laughing at me, you brute. That’s not exactly normal.” A slow smile was beginning to curve her soft mouth. She couldn’t help but be happy for the innocent joy he found in each piece of information that came to him, each new memory of his gifts.
“It is normal for us, love. We can shape-shift whenever we like.”
She made a face. “You mean all those hideous stories are true? Rats and bats and slimy worm things?”
“Now, why would I want to be a slimy worm thing?” He was openly laughing. The sound startled him; he couldn’t remember laughing aloud.
“Very funny, Jacques. I’m so glad you find this amusing.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
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He took the cup to the sink. There, in the mirror staring back, was a circular bandage in the middle of his forehead. He touched it, gently. The fog cleared. The Haystack and the fan and the mist. The needle. Vertigo smacked him. He held onto the sink. It got worse. He sank to his knees and crawled to the bed while the memories settled. It was strange how his mind was like water and the memories swirled like grains of sand. There was something he was supposed to remember but it was so hard. Summer camp? FBI? Damn, he couldn’t remember it now. He had journeyed through the needle to some… dream. Foreverland. It was torture to get there.
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Tony Bertauski (The Annihilation of Foreverland (Foreverland, #1))
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A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn’t taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindleshaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.
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”
Anonymous
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Think, my love. Visualize what I put in your head. Trust me as you have never trusted me before. Allow me to give you this gift.
There was no hesitation on her part. With complete faith in him, Raven gave herself into his keeping, reaching eagerly for the vision. The slight discomfort, the strange disorientation as her physical body dissolved, did not faze her. Feathers shimmered, sprouted.
Beside her, Jacques stepped back, allowing the smaller female owl to hop onto a tall stone angel before his own large frame compressed, reshaped. Together they launched themselves into the night and soared high to join the other four powerful birds circling above them.
One of the males broke formation, circled the female, and dipped close to cover her body with one wide wingspan. Playfully she dropped low to slide away. The other males walled her in, curbing her antics as she learned the joys of free flying. The male owls stayed in close formation, the female in the center, circling above the forest, climbing high into the mist. For a space of time they dipped and swirled, clearly playing, soaring high, plunging toward earth, pulling up to fly through trees and over the heavy blanket of fog.
After some time they settled into a leisurely flight, once more with the males protectively surrounding the female. Mikhail felt the night remove every vestige of tension and dissipate it to the four corners of the earth. He would take Raven far away from the village, give her plenty of time to learn Carpathian ways. She represented the future of their race, his future. She was his life, his joy, his reason for existing. She was his hold on all that was good in the world. He intended to see that her life was filled with nothing but happiness.
Mikhail dropped lower to cover her feathered body with his, touching her mind, feeling her joy. Raven responded by filling his mind with love and warmth and a child’s wondrous laughter at the new sights and sounds and smells she was experiencing. She raced him across the sky, her laughter echoing in all their minds. She was their hope for the future.
”
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Christine Feehan (Dark Prince (Dark, #1))
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Janner propped himself on one elbow and rubbed his eyes. In the faint light he could see Tink asleep with his head on Podo’s leg and Leeli curled up beside Nia with her backpack cuddled to her chest the way she used to hold Nugget. Janner crept from the tent. The clearing was soft with dewy mist. Chunks of rubble rose out of the fog like gravestones, but the effect wasn’t unpleasant. He had been awake for many sunrises before, but never so close to the cliffs that he could watch the fiery ball lift itself from the sea. He walked through wet grass and sat with his feet dangling over the cliff. The Dark Sea of Darkness wasn’t dark at all at this hour. Feathery clouds at the edge of the world glowed orange and savage yellow. Birds wheeled in the bright air far below. Janner thought of his life only weeks ago, in the dregs of summer, when hay needed baling, the hogpig needed feeding, the garden needed weeding, and life was boring. So much had happened to the Janner he used to be. His life had been in danger countless times. More tears had been shed in these last weeks than in his whole life before.
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Andrew Peterson (North! or Be Eaten)
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You see we are in London after all, and poor Sidmouth left afar. I am almost inclined to say ‘poor us’ instead of ‘poor Sidmouth.’ But I dare say I shall soon be able to see in my dungeon, and begin to be amused with the spiders. Half my soul, in the meantime, seems to have stayed behind on the seashore, which I love more than ever now that I cannot walk on it in the body. London is wrapped up like a mummy, in a yellow mist, so closely that I have had scarcely a glimpse of its countenance since we came. Well, I am trying to like it all very much, and I dare say that in time I may change my taste and my senses — and succeed. We are in a house large enough to hold us, for four months, at the end of which time, if the experiment of our being able to live in London succeed, I believe that papa’s intention is to take an unfurnished house and have his furniture from Ledbury. You may wonder at me, but I wish that were settled so, and now. I am satisfied with London, although I cannot enjoy it. We are not likely, in the case of leaving it, to return to Devonshire, and I should look with weary eyes to another strangership and pilgrimage even among green fields that know not these fogs.
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
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I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.*
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Robert A. Johnson (Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche)
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I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.* Jung had gone through a highly refined enculturating process, from his childhood in a rigid Swiss Protestant home to the severe discipline of his medical training.
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Robert A. Johnson (Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche)
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They climbed through the fog, trusting their guide, whose sheepdog ran ahead of them, unearthing a hedgehog among the crags. As they got higher, ‘the ground appeared to brighten’. A flash of light illuminated the turf and, all of a sudden, the moon was out. Wordsworth looked down. They were above the mist, which now resembled a sea with the peaks of the surrounding mountains emerging like the backs of whales. In the distance, they saw the mist dipping and swirling into the real sea. And somewhere between the mountains and the sea, they spotted ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’, A deep and gloomy breathing-place thro’ which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice. ‘In that breach’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, ‘Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’, Nature had lodged ‘The soul, the imagination of the whole’.37 This idea of the imagination filling a gap, emerging from an abyss of emptiness, and indeed of homelessness, is at the core of Wordsworth’s vocation. His poetry, the work of his imagination, filled the void of the losses – of parents, of home, of political ideals, and later of friends, siblings and children – that afflicted him.
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Jonathan Bate (Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World)
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every sermon, full of Christ, that we preach, rolls away some of the mists and fogs from the surface of the planet; at any rate, morally and spiritually, if not naturally.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon (The Art of Illustration)
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He felt her open to him, her mind and heart and soul, softly feminine, exquisitely woman, all his. Her pleasure matched his own beat for beat, shudder for shudder. He had to hold her to keep himself on his feet, and they collapsed together into the soaked vegetation.
Holding each other, the rain cooling their bodies, they laughed like children. “I expected steam this time,” Jacques said, crushing her to him.
“Can you do that?” Shea fit the back of her head into the niche of his sternum. One hand idly slid over the heavy muscles of his chest.
“Make us so hot we turn the rain to steam?” He grinned boyishly down at her, for the first time so carefree that he forgot for a moment the torment he had suffered. She made him invincible. She made him vulnerable. Most of all, she made him alive.
“No, really--what they did, those others. They were like fog or mist. Can you really do that?” Shea persisted. “I mean, you said you could, but I thought maybe you were delusional.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Delusional?” Jacques flashed a cocky grin, held out his arm, and watched as fur rippled along the length of it, as the fingers curved and extended into claws. He had to make a grab for Shea as she scrambled away from him, her eyes enormous. Jacques was careful not to hurt her with his strength.
“Stop laughing at me, you brute. That’s not exactly normal.” A slow smile was beginning to curve her soft mouth. She couldn’t help but be happy for the innocent joy he found in each piece of information that came to him, each new memory of his gifts.
“It is normal for us, love. We can shape-shift whenever we like.”
She made a face. “You mean all those hideous stories are true? Rats and bats and slimy worm things?”
“Now, why would I want to be a slimy worm thing?” He was openly laughing. The sound startled him; he couldn’t remember laughing aloud.
“Very funny, Jacques. I’m so glad you find this amusing. Those people actually formed themselves out of fog, like something in a movie.” She gave a punch to his arm for emphasis. “Explain it.”
“Shape-shifting is easy once you are strong. When I said we run with the wolf, I meant it literally. We run with the pack. We can fly with the owl and become the air.
”
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Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
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They were like fog or mist. Can you really do that?” Shea persisted. “I mean, you said you could, but I thought maybe you were delusional.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Delusional?” Jacques flashed a cocky grin, held out his arm, and watched as fur rippled along the length of it, as the fingers curved and extended into claws. He had to make a grab for Shea as she scrambled away from him, her eyes enormous. Jacques was careful not to hurt her with his strength.
“Stop laughing at me, you brute. That’s not exactly normal.
”
”
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
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To their right, a strange fog glowed eerily, streamed through the rain and wound through the trees. It moved forward at knee level coming straight toward them now.
Shea felt her heart in her throat. She touched Jacques’ back for reassurance. He stopped, seemingly relaxed, his muscles coiled and ready, like a panther awaiting its moment. She could feel it in him, his readiness, so still and confident.
As the fog grew closer, only several yards away now, the moisture began to stack itself higher and higher, the droplets connecting and forming the shape of a man. Shea wanted to scream with fear, but she stayed very still, afraid of distracting Jacques.
Byron’s form shimmered for a moment. She could actually see the tree behind the mist, and then he was solid, standing with the curious elegance of the Carpathian male. He lifted his eyes from the ground to meet Jacques’ icy-black gaze. “We have been friends for centuries, Jacques. I cannot remember a time in my life that we did not run together. It is strange and sad to me that you can look at me and not know me.”
Shea, behind Jacques, stirred uncomfortably. Byron’s sorrow appeared more than he could bear. She wanted to reach out to him, make an attempt to ease his obvious suffering. Do not! The command was sharp in her mind, clear and in a tone that brooked no argument. Jacques remained motionless, as if carved from stone. Byron’s words did not appear to move him in any way.
Byron shrugged, his face twisted with pain. “When we thought you were dead, we searched for your body. Months, years even. You were never out of our thoughts. You were my family, Jacques, my friend. It was hard to learn to be completely solitary. Gregori and Mikhail and even Aidan survived the centuries because, as alone as they had to be, they had a bond, an anchor to keep them strong through the bleak centuries. You were mine. Once you were gone, my struggle became immense.
”
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Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
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The name “California” came from a sixteenth-century romance novel that was popular in Spain. In the novel, California was a land where Amazonian warriors lived—all women, no men, with beautiful, strong bodies. When the Spanish explorers arrived in the real California, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, they didn’t think the place looked like much: no particularly valuable natural resources—none, at least, that they were interested in. Only trees and mountains, mist and fog—nothing to write home about. They stuck around anyway.
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Rachel Khong (Goodbye, Vitamin)
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IN BERLIN ON SATURDAY MORNING, Joseph Goebbels focused his regular propaganda meeting on how best to take advantage of what he believed must certainly be a rising sense of dread among England’s civilian population. “The important thing now,” he told the gathering, “is to intensify as far as possible the mood of panic which is undoubtedly slowly gaining ground in Britain.” Germany’s secret transmitters and foreign-language service were to continue describing the “frightful effects” of air raids. “The secret transmitters, in particular, should marshal witnesses who must give horrifying accounts of the destruction they have seen with their own eyes.” This effort, he instructed, should also include transmissions warning listeners that fog and mist would not protect them from aerial attack; bad weather merely confused the aim of German bombers and made it more likely that bombs would fall on unintended targets.
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Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
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He gave the illusion of being a gentleman, so friendly, yet he had not released her or moved even an inch to allow her to get by him. He inhaled, dragged her scent into his lungs. Suddenly his entire demeanor changed. His body stiffened. His fingers dug into her arm. White teeth gleamed a predator’s flash of warning. “Why did you not answer me when I spoke to you?” His words were low and menacing. The suave stranger was frightening.
“Let go of me.” She kept her voice even, her mind working at top speed, looking for a way out. He seemed to hold all the cards, but…
“Tell me who you are,” he demanded.
“Let go of me now.” She lowered her voice, pitched it to a soft, hypnotic melody. “You want to let me go.”
The stranger shook his head, his eyes narrowing, recognizing the hint of compulsion in her voice. He inhaled a second time, drinking in her fragrance. At once his face seemed to go still. “I recognize that scent. Jacques. He is dead these seven years, yet his blood runs in your veins.” His voice crawled with deadly threat.
For a moment she was frozen with fear. Was this the betrayer Jacques had spoken of? Shea swung her head sideways to remove his fingers from her chin. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Let go of me now!”
Byron let out his breath in a low, venomous hiss. “If you wish to see another night, you will tell me what you have done with him.”
“You’re hurting me.” He was drawing closer, leaning toward her neck, bending her backward like a bow as she tried to elude him. His breath was hot on her throat, and Shea gasped as she felt needle-sharp teeth pierce her skin. With a low cry she jerked sideways, her heart pounding.
Without warning he caught at the neckline of her shirt to examine the bruises at her throat. She could feel his puzzlement, his confusion. Shea took advantage of his momentarily distraction. As hard as she was able, she brought up her knee and screamed for all she was worth. Byron looked so shocked, she nearly laughed. He had been absolutely certain she wouldn’t want attention drawn to her. His hiss, a deadly promise of retaliation, was the last thing she heard before he melted away.
And he literally melted away. Shea never saw him move. One moment he was there, his body trapping hers against the wall, and then he was gone. A fine mist was mixing with the layers of fog covering the ground to about knee level.
”
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Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
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Tell me what you are so reluctant to reveal.” The black velvet voice never hardened or increased in volume.
Byron stood silent for a long moment, then steadily met the direct, penetrating stare. “Jacques’ blood runs in her veins. I would know his scent anywhere.”
Mikhail did not blink, his body utterly still. “Jacques is dead.”
Byron shook his head. “I am not mistaken. It is Jacques.”
The black eyes swept over Byron once, then Mikhail lifted his face, drinking in the night. He sent a powerful call along a familiar path and met emptiness, blankness, a void. “He is dead, Byron,” he repeated softly, a clear warning to end the subject.
Byron stood his ground, militarily erect. “I am not mistaken.”
Mikhail studied him for a time. “Are you saying Jacques misused this woman? Perhaps turned a human?” There was a low hiss accompanying the question. At once the power in Mikhail flowed from him to fill the air and surround them both.
“She is Carpathian, no vampires. And she visited the local clinic’s blood bank. I do not know her connection to Jacques, but there is one.” Byron was adamant.
“In any case, Byron, we can do no other than find this mystery woman and protect her until such time as she is given a true lifemate. I will tell Raven I am going with you. I do not wish her to hear of Jacques.” That was spoken in the softest of tones, all the more menacing, an absolute edict.
Beneath the words was a darker promise. If Mikhail ever found Jacques alive, unable or unwilling to answer the call, swift and deadly retribution would follow. And if the woman was a part of it…Byron sighed and looked up at the sky as Mikhail dissolved into the fog. Wisps of clouds were beginning to move across the stars, and the land stirred restlessly, disturbed by an unseen danger.
Mikhail emerged from the mist already shape-shifting, his powerful body taking flight as he did so. Byron had never mastered the speed Mikhail had and was forced to change on the stone column before launching himself skyward.
”
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Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
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I am in your debt, Gregori, that you have aided me this day," he said formally.
"You did not need my aid. I only made things easier. Your safeguards for the child would have bought you the necessary time even without the fog. And you had enough strength to survive the sunlight in your disembodied state even without me. You owe me nothing, Aidan. I have been lucky in my life to have a few men I could call friend. You are one." Gregori sounded as if he were already far away.
"Come to my home, Gregori," Aidan insisted. "Stay for a while. It might help to ease you."
Gregori shook his head. "I cannot. You know I cannot. I need the wild places, the high reaches, where I can feel freedom. It is my way. I have found a place many miles from here. I will build there to await my lifemate. Remember your promise to me."
Aidan nodded. He felt Alexandria moving in his mind, offering closeness, comfort.
"See to the child, Aidan, and your woman. Even from this distance, I sense her anxiety for you, for the boy. And she needs to feed. Her hunger beats at me. Do not waste your time worrying about me. I have taken care of myself for centuries." Already his solid form was wavering, shimmering, dissolving into droplets of mist. His voice came back, disembodied, strangely hollow, yet still beautiful. "That was quite a feat you performed today, and in broad daylight. Few can do what you did. You have learned much."
Aidan watched him disappear, the mist streaming into the surrounding forest until it, too, was gone. Gregori's acknowledgement of his achievement made him proud. He felt like a child receiving praise from a revered parent. And since it was from masterful Gregori, who chose to live alone and befriend but few, he felt especially honored.
”
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Christine Feehan (Dark Gold (Dark, #3))
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There was nothing but mist to his left and behind him, but to his right, he made out two or three large, bulky shapes, standing upright. Making his way slowly across the lumpy ground, he found that they were stones. Remnants of one of those prehistoric sites that littered the ground in northern Britain. Only three of the big stones were still standing, but he could see a few more, fallen or pushed over, lying like bodies in the darkening fog. He paused to vomit, holding on to one of the stones. Christ, his head was like to split! And he had a terrible buzzing in his ears
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Diana Gabaldon (A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows (Outlander, #8.5))
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I mounted the stairs to my pavilion and sank onto Hlidskjalf, the magic throne from which I can peer into the Nine Worlds. The seat cradled my posterior with its ermine-lined softness. I took a few deep breaths to focus my concentration, then turned to the worlds beyond.
I usually begin with a cursory look-see of my own realm, Asgard, then circle through the remaining eight: Midgard, realm of the humans; the elf kingdom of Alfheim; Vanaheim, the Vanir gods’ domain; Jotunheim, land of the giants; Niflheim, the world of ice, fog, and mist; Helheim, realm of the dishonorable dead; Nidavellir, the gloomy world of the dwarves; and Muspellheim, home of the fire giants.
This time, I didn’t make it past Asgard. Because goats.
Specifically, Thor’s goats, Marvin and Otis. They were on the Bifrost, the radioactive Rainbow Bridge that connects Asgard to Midgard, wearing footy pajamas. But there was no sign of Thor, which was odd. He usually kept Marvin and Otis close. He killed and ate them every day, and they came back to life the next morning.
More disturbing was Heimdall, guardian of the Bifrost. He was hopping around on all fours like a deranged lunatic. “So here’s what I want you guys to do,” he said to Otis and Marvin between hops. “Cavort. Frolic. Frisk about. Okay?”
I parted the clouds. “Heimdall! What the Helheim is going on down there?”
“Oh, hey, Odin!” Heimdall’s helium-squeaky voice set my teeth on edge. He waved his phablet at me. “I’m making a cute baby goat video as my Snapchat story. Cute baby goat videos are huge in Midgard. Huge!” He spread his hands out wide to demonstrate.
“I’m not a baby!” Marvin snapped.
“I’m cute?” Otis wondered.
“Put that phablet away and return to your duties at once!”
According to prophecy, giants will one day storm across the Bifrost, a signal that Ragnarok is upon us. Heimdall’s job is to sound the alarm on his horn, Gjallar—a job he would not be able to perform if he were making Snapchat stories.
“Can I finish my cute baby goat video first?” Heimdall pleaded.
“No.”
“Aw.” He turned to Otis and Marvin. “I guess that’s a wrap, guys.”
“Finally,” Marvin said. “I’m going for a graze.” He hopped off the bridge and plummeted to almost certain death and next-day resurrection. Otis sighed something about the grass being greener on the other side, then jumped after him.
“Heimdall,” I said tightly, “need I remind you what could happen if even one jotun snuck into Asgard?”
Heimdall hung his head. “Apologetic face emoji.”
I sighed. “Yes, all right.
”
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Rick Riordan (9 From the Nine Worlds)
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In your imagination, you look into the very Face or Truth of God; and God wipes away all tears, and there shall be no more crying. All the mist and fog of the human mind dissolves in the sunshine of God's Love.
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Joseph Murphy (Believe In Yourself)
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He who aims to forecast fog, will have mist.
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Logan
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I used to think grief was grey and spacious and insubstantial, like a damp fog that surrounds you on every side, one that you can't get away from because it colours the air, and you breathe it in and out, and it has its own earthy smell that seeps into your ores. I thought of grief as a fleeting thing like fog, like a damp that eventually disperses. One day the greyness is slightly lighter; after a few weeks the damp no longer collects on your skin, the musty smell diminishes, somewhere in the distance a pale sun flashes from between tatters of mist, and the grief dissolves into melancholy and then memory.
Never, not for a moment, did I think that grief could be as hard as a dagger, sharp and unrelenting. That it could strike again and again, always unexpected, hard, straight between my ribs, bright lights in my eyes, black and violet and pain so big that I gasp and stagger. I forget the dagger sometimes for a few moments, perhaps an hour, and that's the very worst--the stroke of the blade takes me by surprise, still just as hard, cruel, painful.
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Johanna Sinisalo (Enkelten verta)
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The eagle of the Alps is sometimes beaten down by the tempest into the narrow defiles of the mountains. Storm clouds shut in this mighty bird of the forest, their dark masses separating her from the sunny heights where she has made her home. Her efforts to escape seem fruitless. She dashes to and fro, beating the air with her strong wings, and waking the mountain echoes with her cries. At length, with a note of triumph, she darts upward, and, piercing the clouds, is once more in the clear sunlight, with the darkness and tempest far beneath. So we may be surrounded with difficulties, discouragement, and darkness. Falsehood, calamity, injustice, shut us in. There are clouds that we cannot dispel. We battle with circumstances in vain. There is one, and but one, way of escape. The mists and fogs cling to the earth; beyond the clouds God’s light is shining. Into the sunlight of His presence we may rise on the wings of faith.—Education, p. 118.
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Ellen Gould White (The Book of Job E. G. White Notes 4Q 2016)
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Plodding along what barely passed for a trail, I had an eerie feeling. There was still snow on the ground but the air had become warmer, causing a mist to form. We trudged under large trees to a place that I finally recognized. The thick forest ended as we continued, walking across an open field up the side of a hill. Once again our trail entered the woods, however now there were only low bushes, which surrounded the limestone quarry. I hadn’t really noticed but the snow was getting deeper, and now almost obliterated the worn pathway. The young man told me that I was close to my destination and that he would turn back now. I think he felt it would be better if we were not seen together, since the locals loved to gossip and seeing me with a single young man would certainly cause them to talk. Swinging his lantern as a farewell gesture, he disappeared into what had now become a heavy fog. I really felt uneasy now that the fog had settled in. There I stood, knowing that I still had to walk through the rock cut and past some trees before I could get back onto the paved road. There wasn’t anything I could do except continue on!
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Hank Bracker
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bonfire, the field was dark, little tendrils of fog drifting through the crowd. I could only dimly make out the shadow of the pavilion behind the fire, and the girls crowding in front of it looked like scribbles on a page. I could not even see the trees on the far edge of the pitch that led into Oakeshott Woods, although I knew they were there. I breathed out and my breath misted in front of me.
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Robin Stevens (Jolly Foul Play (Murder Most Unladylike, #4))
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She slid out of the felze and went to stand beside Falco as he moved the boat through the water. Fog swirled around the gondola.
“Don’t expose yourself to the elements on my account,” Falco said with a crooked smile. “I don’t mind playing gondolier for you.”
“Is it difficult?” Cass asked. “To steer the boat?” Though she’d ridden in a boat almost every single day since her birth, she had never paid any attention to the mechanics of it.
“It’s not so bad,” he said. The wind blew a shock of dark hair into his eyes and Cass had the sudden urge to reach out and rearrange it. “Takes a little strength. Want to try?”
Cass was surprised to hear herself saying yes. She secured the cloak tightly around her waist and pushed her hair back from her face. The boat wobbled as she stepped onto the tiny platform beside Falco, and she gasped.
“You have to move with the rhythm of the water,” he explained.
The platform was tiny, really only enough space for one person, so Falco had to press his body against Cass’s back. His forearms fit neatly across her hip bones; she could feel his soft hair brushing against her cheek. He exhaled, a warm breath that tickled her neck and sent a shiver through her. She stiffened and nearly lost her balance. Falco tightened his grip on her momentarily until she regained her footing. His body radiated heat through her cloak.
Falco gave her the oar and put his hands on her waist to steady her. Cass awkwardly thrust the oar through the murky water and the boat skewed off at a funny angle. She felt herself wobbling, but Falco moved one hand from her waist to the oar and helped her guide it through the water. Cass began to relax her body against Falco’s.
She laughed, in spite of the mist and the night and their destination. Steering the boat was fun, and she was doing something that probably no other woman in all of Venice had ever done. After a few minutes, she got the hang of steering and the long wooden gondola started to move swiftly through the water. Falco offered to take over, but she persisted, despite the aching in her arms and shoulders.
“I’m impressed,” Falco said. “You’re a natural.”
Cass was grateful that he was standing behind her, so he couldn’t see her smile. She didn’t want him to know how much the comment pleased her.
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Fiona Paul (Venom (Secrets of the Eternal Rose, #1))
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Wisps of white mist trailed across Thunderbolt's tremendous wings as the three runaways broke through the low-hanging fog that separated the city from the sky. As they settled into a smooth glide above the clouds, Ember turned her face into the wind and took a long, deep breath of the sweet, fresh, wild open air.
It tasted like freedom.
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A.J. Sky (Firestorm (StormBreathers, #1))
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[Skill unlocked: Weakening Fog You release a cloud of mist that saps the strength of any living creature it comes in contact with. Agility, Strength, and Toughness are affected. Effects are cumulative, and upon multiple applications, targets may faint or lose control of their body. Cooldown: 30 seconds Effects dissipate over
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Lars Machmüller (Master of the Hoard (Dragon Core Chronicles #1))
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[Skill unlocked: Weakening Fog You release a cloud of mist that saps the strength of any living creature it comes in contact with. Agility, Strength, and Toughness are affected. Effects are cumulative, and upon multiple applications, targets may faint or lose control of their body. Cooldown: 30 seconds Effects dissipate over time, but linger for up to 24 hours.]
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Lars Machmüller (Master of the Hoard (Dragon Core Chronicles #1))
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THE NINE WORLDS ASGARD—the home of the Aesir VANAHEIM—the home of the Vanir ALFHEIM—the home of the light elves MIDGARD—the home of humans JOTUNHEIM—the home of the giants NIDAVELLIR—the home of the dwarves NIFLHEIM—the world of ice, fog, and mist MUSPELLHEIM—the home of the fire giants and demons HELHEIM—the home of Hel and the dishonorable dead RUNES (IN ORDER OF MENTION) FEHU—the rune of Frey OTHALA—inheritance
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Rick Riordan (The Hammer of Thor (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, #2))