Fugitive Quotes

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

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Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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But I'm a wanted fugitive, like Cinder." Thorne continued. "They do realise I'm missing, don't they?" "Maybe they're grateful," Cinder muttered.
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Marissa Meyer (Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2))
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Kai neared his desk again, seeing that the fugitive's profile had been transferred to the screen. His frown deepened. Perhaps not dangerous, but young and inarguably good-looking. His prison photo showed him flippantly winking at the camera. Kai hated him immediately.
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Marissa Meyer (Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2))
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A laugh came from the cockpit and Thorne appeared in the doorway, strapping a gun holster around his waist. "You're asking the cyborg fugitive and the wild animal to be the welcoming committee? That's adorable.
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Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
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A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.
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Amal El-Mohtar (This Is How You Lose the Time War)
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Captain Carswell Thorne, is it?” "That’s right." "I’m afraid you won’t have claim to that title for long. I’m about to commandeer your Rampion for the queen." "I am sorry to hear about that." "Additionally, I assume you are aware that assisting a wanted fugitive, such as Linh Cinder, is a crime punishable by death on Luna. Your sentence is to be carried out immediately." "Efficiency. I respect that.
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Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
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He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.
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Martin Heidegger
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I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.
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Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
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That educated didn’t mean smart. He had a point. Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom.
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Octavia E. Butler (Kindred)
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Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
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John Milton (Areopagitica)
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Thorne "But I'm a wanted fugitive, like Cinder, they do realize I'm missing, don't they?" Cinder "Maybe they're grateful
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Marissa Meyer (Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2))
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The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending; or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn" (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist," nor "fugitive." In its fairy-tale -- or otherworld -- setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (Tolkien On Fairy-stories)
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Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.
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T.S. Eliot (The Family Reunion)
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He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged.
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Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)
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In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.
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Carlos Ruiz ZafΓ³n (The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1))
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Lunar. Cyborg. Fugitive. Outlaw. Outcast.
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Marissa Meyer (Scarlet (The Lunar Chronicles, #2))
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Death is fugitive; even when you're watching for it, the actual instant somehow slips between your fingers. You don't get that sudden drop of the head you see in movies. Instead you simply sit there, waiting for something to happen, and all at once you realize you've missed it.
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Jonathan Stroud (The Whispering Skull (Lockwood & Co., #2))
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This was a nightmare scenario for any bodyguard: stuck in the middle of a transparent tube, several miles underwater, with a murdering band of fugitives at one end and an enthralled but still highly skilled police officer at the other.
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Eoin Colfer (The Atlantis Complex (Artemis Fowl, #7))
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
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Optima dies...prima fugit (The best days are the first to flee)
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Virgil
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Yeah, good luck with that. Trying to get humans not to touch dangerous things was a full-time job.
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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They had parted as boys, and now life presented one of them with a fugitive and the other with a dying man. Both wondered whether this was due to the cards they'd been dealt or to the way they had played them.
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Carlos Ruiz ZafΓ³n (The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1))
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You're asking the cyborg fugitive and the wild animal to be the welcoming committee? That's adorable.
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Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
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There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me. I feel that they were calm and beautiful. It must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were.
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Franz Kafka
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My own eyes went to Jamie, who had come to join Fergus and Ian by the sideboard. Still here, thank God. Tall and graceful, the soft light making shadows in the folds of his shirt as he moved, a fugitive gleam from the long straight bridge of his nose, the auburn wave of his hair. Still mine. Thank God.
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Diana Gabaldon (Written in My Own Heart's Blood (Outlander, #8))
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Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weatherβ€”storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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Once you look past the hype, actors are nothing more than fugitives from reality who specialize in contradiction: we are both children and hardened adultsβ€”wide-eyed pupils and jaded working stiffs.
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Bruce Campbell (If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor)
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The captivating changes in the social space sealed by class transmigration may astound us. How clever class fugitives escape from their birth stigma or topical inheritance and how they blend slickly into a new chosen communal grouping may look impressive to most observers. Class migration always remains a challenge, but once the outgoers are at the end of the road, they can tell their life stories of adventure, bravery, or hardship with much self-esteem. How happy they are, and how good they feel when they can say with satisfaction that they have seen it all before closing brackets. (β€œSchengen”)
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Erik Pevernagie
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Any given momentβ€”no matter how casual, how ordinaryβ€”is poised, full of gaping life.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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It had been such a stupid question, I had forgotten not to have an expression.
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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The gods are fugitive guests of literature.
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Roberto Calasso
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Like other ghosts, she whispers; not for me to join her, but so that, when I'm close enough, she can push me back into the world.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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You don't need to know what you're escaping from to become a fugitive.
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Bella Pollen (Midnight Cactus)
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All I wanted to do was watch media and not exist. I said, You know I don’t like fun.
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.
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Franz Kafka
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The only true voyage of discovery . . . would be not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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Pretending to be 'normal' is a lot harder than you think.
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Sue Grafton (F is for Fugitive (Kinsey Millhone, #6))
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Some stones are so heavy only silence helps you carry them!
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men. Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression. Let integrity and uprightness distinguish all thine acts. Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be an ornament to the countenance of truth, a crown to the brow of fidelity, a pillar of the temple of righteousness, a breath of life to the body of mankind, an ensign of the hosts of justice, a luminary above the horizon of virtue, a dew to the soil of the human heart, an ark on the ocean of knowledge, a sun in the heaven of bounty, a gem on the diadem of wisdom, a shining light in the firmament of thy generation, a fruit upon the tree of humility.
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BahΓ‘'u'llΓ‘h
β€œ
But sometimes the world disrobes, slips its dress off a shoulder, stops time for a beat. If we look up at that moment, it's not due to any ability of ours to pierce the darkness, it's the world's brief bestowal. The catastrophe of grace.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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I'm naive enough to think that love is always good no matter how long ago, no matter the circumstances.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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The reality that I had known no longer existed. The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
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Marcel Proust (Du cΓ΄tΓ© de chez Swann (Γ€ la recherche du temps perdu, #1))
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Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.
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Sue Grafton (F is for Fugitive (Kinsey Millhone, #6))
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I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.
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Guy de Maupassant (The House of Madame Tellier and Other Stories (32 stories))
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...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
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Howard Zinn
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You wonderful girl. I’ve missed you so much.” β€œWell, now that we’re both unemployed fugitives, think of how much time we’ll have to hang out!
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Kiersten White (Endlessly (Paranormalcy, #3))
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Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
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G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
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People are not always very tolerant of the tears which they themselves have provoked.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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you are many years late; how happy I am to see you
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Anna Akhmatova
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I’m a known fugitive who likes to set people on fire. Come away with me so we can have hot sex while the entire city is trying to shoot me in the head. If I get bored, I’ll barbecue you for my amusement. Sure, let me get my shoes.
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Ilona Andrews (Burn for Me (Hidden Legacy, #1))
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A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
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George Santayana
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I define myself by helping others. This is what I do. Those people who want me to abandon my husband are asking me to put myself first and to judge him. The poor man has been judged unfairly by others. Why would I abandon him in his greatest need?
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Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker (The Fugitive's Doctor)
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If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.
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Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)
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We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope or sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself... That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.
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Stanley Kunitz
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There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.
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Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past: Volume III - The Captive, The Fugitive, & Time Regained)
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Humans touch stuff all the time, I wish they wouldn’t.
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams
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Carlos Ruiz ZafΓ³n (The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1))
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Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was greater than any theft of my goods or money.
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James Lee Burke
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Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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Under fire, trying to get a fugitive out of Honduras: β€œTheir pilot hopped out of the cockpit to allow them entry room. Pack sent Keto [Belgian Malinois K-9] up first. Then he dragged Triandos up. The prisoner’s head pinged off every step on the way up. His head struck the bulkhead as Pack flung his bulk into the cabin. β€˜I know there’s a protocol,’ Pack thought, β€˜but whoever wrote it was never in this situation.
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John M. Vermillion (Pack's Posse (Simon Pack, #8))
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Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal. Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.
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Alan Bradley (A Red Herring Without Mustard (Flavia de Luce #3))
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Pin-Lee had promised, "Don't worry, I'll preserve your right to wander off like an asshole anytime you like." (I said, "It takes one to know one.")
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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I know a β€œfuck off” when I hear one. So I fucked off.
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.
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Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
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Sometimes being fooled by love is worth the price. At least you know you're alive and capable of feeling, even if all you end up with is chest pain.
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Sue Grafton (F is for Fugitive (Kinsey Millhone, #6))
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It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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There was a big huge deal about it, and Security was all β€œbut what if it takes over the station’s systems and kills everybody” and Pin-Lee told them β€œif it wanted to do that it would have done it by now,” which in hindsight was probably not the best response.
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?
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James Hollis (Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives)
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When you are alone - at sea, in the polar dark - an absence can keep you alive. The one you love maintains your mind. But when she's merely across the city, this is an absence that eats you to the bone.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her.?Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
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Thomas Paine (Common Sense)
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I am going to have to stop scaring the shit out of myself.
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Martha Wells (Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries, #6))
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Something is beginning in order to end: adventure does not let itself be drawn out; it only makes sense when dead. I am drawn, irrevocably, towards this death which is perhaps mine as well. Each instant appears only as part of a sequence. I cling to each instant with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable -- and yet I would not raise a finger to stop it from being annihilated. This last moment I am spending -- in Berlin, in London -- in the arms of a woman casually met two days ago -- moment I love passionately, woman I may adore -- all is going to end, I know it. Soon I shall leave for another country. I shall never rediscover either this woman or this night. I grasp at each second, trying to suck it dry: nothing happens which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever in myself, nothing, neither the fugitive tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noises of the street, nor the false dawn of early morning: and even so the minute passes and I do not hold it back, I like to see it pass.
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Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
β€œ
I hate nature. I really do. Nature is composed entirely of sticks, dirt, fall-down places, biting and stinging things, and savageries too numerous to list. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. Man has been building cities since the year oughty-ought, just to get away from this stuff.
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Sue Grafton (F is for Fugitive (Kinsey Millhone, #6))
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Running away was not like it was in stories. People did not try and stop you. They did not give chase. The thing people didn't understand was that you had to decide what you were running away from. Most of the time it wasn't mothers or fathers or monsters or villains; most of the time you were running away from that little voice inside your head, the one telling you to stay where you are, that everything will turn out all right.
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Robert Dinsdale (The Toymakers)
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Do we really mean it when we say β€˜in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part or do we add a silent clause, β€˜unless you shame me or disappoint me?’ What is the cost of unconditional love and how capable are we of giving that?
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Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker (The Fugitive's Doctor)
β€œ
I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been - if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened - the means of communication between souls.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
β€œ
In Michaela's favourite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge. I fell in love amid the clattering of spoons....
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
β€œ
It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.
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William Faulkner (Light in August)
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If, in all that you wish to do, you begin by asking yourself: am I certain that I would wish to do this an infinite number of times? This should be for you the most solid centre of gravity . . . My doctrine says, the task is to live your life in such a way that you must wish to live it again - for you will anyway! If striving gives you the highest feeling, then strive! If rest gives you the highest feeling, then rest! If fitting in, following and obeying give you the highest feeling, then obey! Only make sure you come to know what gives you the highest feeling, and then spare no means. Eternity is at stake! This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it. It has neither hell nor threats. But anyone who does not believe merely lives a fugitive life in the consciousness of it.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
β€œ
From Good Friday in AD 33 through the following Sabbath day, the apostles were whimpering, broken fugitives. After Resurrection Sunday, they were lions who revolutionized the world. What caused this astonishing change? After watching Jesus undeniably die, the apostles saw, touched, and ate with the risen Lord, not once, but many times for over forty days. The fact of the Resurrection demonstrated to them (and demonstrates to us) that Jesus is God; and if he is God, his teaching is true. Only the realization of that could have been worth more to the apostles than their lives.
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James Allen Moseley (Biographies of Jesus' Apostles: Ambassadors in Chains)
β€œ
After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's PensΓ©es in an advertisement for soap.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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The spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth and light….It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the large, it’s the other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)
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The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flΓ’neur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are or are not - to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.
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Charles Baudelaire (The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Arts and Letters))
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From the sound of pattering raindrops I recaptured the scent of the lilacs at Combray; from the shifting of the sun's rays on the balcony the pigeons in the Champs-ElysΓ©es; from the muffling of sounds in the heat of the morning hours, the cool taste of cherries; the longing for Brittany or Venice from the noise of the wind and the return of Easter. Summer was at hand, the days were long, the weather was warm. It was the season when, early in the morning, pupils and teachers repair to the public gardens to prepare for the final examinations under the trees, seeking to extract the sole drop of coolness vouchsafed by a sky less ardent than in the midday heat but already as sterilely pure.
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Marcel Proust (The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6))
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The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous β€œturn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially β€œescapist,” nor β€œfugitive.” In its fairy-tale--or otherworld--setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the β€œturn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality ... In such stories when the sudden β€œturn” comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (Tolkien On Fairy-stories)
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That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one’s back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never know.
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Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)