Gone With The Wind Book Quotes

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Life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech and often drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitter words. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
I understand addiction now. I never did before, you know. How could a man (or a woman) do something so self-destructive, knowing that they’re hurting not only themselves, but the people they love? It seemed that it would be so incredibly easy for them to just not take that next drink. Just stop. It’s so simple, really. But as so often happens with me, my arrogance kept me from seeing the truth of the matter. I see it now though. Every day, I tell myself it will be the last. Every night, as I’m falling asleep in his bed, I tell myself that tomorrow I’ll book a flight to Paris, or Hawaii, or maybe New York. It doesn’t matter where I go, as long as it’s not here. I need to get away from Phoenix—away from him—before this goes even one step further. And then he touches me again, and my convictions disappear like smoke in the wind. This cannot end well. That’s the crux of the matter, Sweets. I’ve been down this road before—you know I have—and there’s only heartache at the end. There’s no happy ending waiting for me like there was for you and Matt. If I stay here with him, I will become restless and angry. It’s happening already, and I cannot stop it. I’m becoming bitter and terribly resentful. Before long, I will be intolerable, and eventually, he’ll leave me. But if I do what I have to do, what my very nature compels me to do, and move on, the end is no better. One way or another, he’ll be gone. Is it not wiser to end it now, Sweets, before it gets to that point? Is it not better to accept that this happiness I have is destined to self-destruct? Tomorrow I will leave. Tomorrow I will stop delaying the inevitable. Tomorrow I will quit lying to myself, and to him. Tomorrow. What about today, you ask? Today it’s already too late. He’ll be home soon, and I have dinner on the stove, and wine chilling in the fridge. And he will smile at me when he comes through the door, and I will pretend like this fragile, dangerous thing we have created between us can last forever. Just one last time, Sweets. Just one last fix. That’s all I need. And that is why I now understand addiction.
Marie Sexton (Strawberries for Dessert (Coda, #4; Strawberries for Dessert, #1))
And of course I'm in the press all the time. So many books have been written about me; Into thin air, up in the air,Gone with the wind-
Rick Riordan (The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, #1))
There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind...
Ben Hecht
They are kind of queer about music and books and scenery. Mother says it’s because their grandfather came from Virginia. She says Virginians set quite a store by such things.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for.
Neil Gaiman
Oh, why was he so handsomely blond, so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all - and yet so desirable?
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
I close my eyes Only for a moment, then the moment's gone All my dreams Pass before my eyes, a curiosity... Same old song Just a drop of water in an endless sea All we do Crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see... Now, don't hang on Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky It slips away And all your money won't another minute buy... Dust in the wind All we are is dust in the wind." (Kansas guitarist Kerry Livgren wrote this after reading a book of Native American poetry. The line that caught his attention was "For All We Are Is Dust In The Wind.")
Kansas (band)
I was secretly convinced that with such a marvel one would be able to write anything, from novels to encyclopedias, and letters whose supernatural power would surpass any postal limitations--a letter written with that pen would reach the most remote corners of the world, even that unknowable place to which my father said my mother had gone and from where she would never return.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #1))
Here is the solitude from which you are absent. It is raining. The sea wind is hunting stray gulls. The water walks barefoot in the wet streets. From that tree the leaves complain as though they were sick. White bee, even when you are gone, you live in my soul. You live again in time, slender and silent. Ah, you who are silent.
Pablo Neruda (The Book of Questions)
For Ashley was born of a line of men who used their leisure for thinking, not doing, for spinning brightly colored dreams that had in them no touch of reality... He looked on people, and he neither liked nor disliked them. He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened. He accepted the universe and his place in it for what they were and, shrugging, turned to his music and books and his better world.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again.
Laura Miller (The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia)
My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wind' as the central book in her life, and made it the central book in her family.
Pat Conroy
Making fiction for children, making books for children, isn't something you do for money. It's something you do because what children read and learn and see and take in changes them and forms them, and they make the future. They make the world we're going to wind up in, the world that will be here when we're gone. Which sounds preachy (and is more than you need for a quotebyte) but it's true. I want to tell kids important things, and I want them to love stories and love reading and love finding things out. I want them to be brave and wise. So I write for them.
Neil Gaiman
Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it’s a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it’s hard, because someone’s in trouble and you have to know how it’s all going to end … that’s a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you’re on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far. The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them. I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children’s books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I’ve seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy. It’s tosh. It’s snobbery and it’s foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you. Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant. We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. [from, Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming]
Neil Gaiman
Well--you know how the Wilkes are. They are kind of queer about music and books and scenery. Mother says it's because their grandfather came from Virginia. She says Virginians set quite a store by such things.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
He looked on people, and he neither liked nor disliked them. He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened. He accepted the universe and his place in it for what they were and, shrugging, turned to his music and books and his better world.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me, the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of 'Middlemarch' and 'A little Princess', and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with 'Anna Karenina'. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read 'Gone with the Wind', 'Rebecca' and 'Jane Eyre'.
Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)
Sometimes driven aground by the photon storms, by the swirling of the galaxies, clockwise and counterclockwise, ticking with light down the dark sea-corridors lined with our silver sails, our demon-haunted sails, our hundred-league masts as fine as threads, as fine as silver needles sewing the threads of starlight, embroidering the stars on black velvet, wet with the winds of Time that go racing by. The bone in her teeth! The spume, the flying spume of Time, cast up on these beaches where old sailors can no longer keep their bones from the restless, the unwearied universe. Where has she gone? My lady, the mate of my soul? Gone across the running tides of Aquarius, of Pisces, of Aries. Gone. Gone in her little boat, her nipples pressed against the black velvet lid, gone, sailing away forever from the star-washed shores, the dry shoals of the habitable worlds. She is her own ship, she is the figurehead of her own ship, and the captain. Bosun, Bosun, put out the launch! Sailmaker, make a sail! She has left us behind. We have left her behind. She is in the past we never knew and the future we will not see. Put out more sail, Captain for the universe is leaving us behind…
Gene Wolfe (The Citadel of the Autarch (The Book of the New Sun, #4))
In a weak moment I have written a book...
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
Do you really mean they like it? You wouldn’t fox an old friend, would you?' – in response to Lois Cole’s telegram announcing that Macmillan liked the book that would become known as Gone With the Wind.
Margaret Mitchell
Have you ever wondered What happens to all the poems people write? The poems they never let anyone else read? Perhaps they are Too private and personal Perhaps they are just not good enough. Perhaps the prospect of such a heartfelt expression being seen as clumsy shallow silly pretentious saccharine unoriginal sentimental trite boring overwrought obscure stupid pointless or simply embarrassing is enough to give any aspiring poet good reason to hide their work from public view. forever. Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED. Burnt shredded flushed away Occasionally they are folded Into little squares And wedged under the corner of An unstable piece of furniture (So actually quite useful) Others are hidden behind a loose brick or drainpipe or sealed into the back of an old alarm clock or put between the pages of AN OBSCURE BOOK that is unlikely to ever be opened. someone might find them one day, BUT PROBABLY NOT The truth is that unread poetry Will almost always be just that. DOOMED to join a vast invisible river of waste that flows out of suburbia. well Almost always. On rare occasions, Some especially insistent pieces of writing will escape into a backyard or a laneway be blown along a roadside embankment and finally come to rest in a shopping center parking lot as so many things do It is here that something quite Remarkable takes place two or more pieces of poetry drift toward each other through a strange force of attraction unknown to science and ever so slowly cling together to form a tiny, shapeless ball. Left undisturbed, this ball gradually becomes larger and rounder as other free verses confessions secrets stray musings wishes and unsent love letters attach themselves one by one. Such a ball creeps through the streets Like a tumbleweed for months even years If it comes out only at night it has a good Chance of surviving traffic and children and through a slow rolling motion AVOIDS SNAILS (its number one predator) At a certain size, it instinctively shelters from bad weather, unnoticed but otherwise roams the streets searching for scraps of forgotten thought and feeling. Given time and luck the poetry ball becomes large HUGE ENORMOUS: A vast accumulation of papery bits That ultimately takes to the air, levitating by The sheer force of so much unspoken emotion. It floats gently above suburban rooftops when everybody is asleep inspiring lonely dogs to bark in the middle of the night. Sadly a big ball of paper no matter how large and buoyant, is still a fragile thing. Sooner or LATER it will be surprised by a sudden gust of wind Beaten by driving rain and REDUCED in a matter of minutes to a billion soggy shreds. One morning everyone will wake up to find a pulpy mess covering front lawns clogging up gutters and plastering car windscreens. Traffic will be delayed children delighted adults baffled unable to figure out where it all came from Stranger still Will be the Discovery that Every lump of Wet paper Contains various faded words pressed into accidental verse. Barely visible but undeniably present To each reader they will whisper something different something joyful something sad truthful absurd hilarious profound and perfect No one will be able to explain the Strange feeling of weightlessness or the private smile that remains Long after the street sweepers have come and gone.
Shaun Tan (Tales from Outer Suburbia)
When? In Gone with the Wind, my mother’s favorite book, Scarlett O’Hara, when confronted with a difficulty, says, “I’ll think about it tomorrow … After all, tomorrow is another day.” If we are to evolve instead of revolve, it’s time to take action now.
Edith Eger (The Choice)
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.
Rebecca Solnit (The Faraway Nearby (ALA Notable Books for Adults))
I first met Winston Churchill in the early summer of 1906 at a dinner party to which I went as a very young girl. Our hostess was Lady Wemyss and I remember that Arthur Balfour, George Wyndman, Hilaire Belloc and Charles Whibley were among the guests… I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met. For a long time he seemed sunk in abstraction. Then he appeared to become suddenly aware of my existence. He turned on me a lowering gaze and asked me abruptly how old I was. I replied that I was nineteen. “And I,” he said despairingly, “am thirty-two already. Younger than anyone else who counts, though, “he added, as if to comfort himself. Then savagely: “Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is this allotted span for all we must cram into it!” And he burst forth into an eloquent diatribe on the shortness of human life, the immensity of possible human accomplishment—a theme so well exploited by the poets, prophets, and philosophers of all ages that it might seem difficult to invest it with new and startling significance. Yet for me he did so, in a torrent of magnificent language which appeared to be both effortless and inexhaustible and ended up with the words I shall always remember: “We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm.” By this time I was convinced of it—and my conviction remained unshaken throughout the years that followed. Later he asked me whether I thought that words had a magic and music quite independent of their meaning. I said I certainly thought so, and I quoted as a classic though familiar instance the first lines that came into my head. Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. His eyes blazed with excitement. “Say that again,” he said, “say it again—it is marvelous!” “But I objected, “You know these lines. You know the ‘Ode to a Nightengale.’ ” He had apparently never read or heard of it before (I must, however, add that next time I met him he had not learned not merely this but all of the odes to Keats by heart—and he recited them quite mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable). Finding that he liked poetry, I quoted to him from one of my own favorite poets, Blake. He listened avidly, repeating some lines to himself with varying emphases and stresses, then added meditatively: “I never knew that old Admiral had found so much time to write such good poetry.” I was astounded that he, with his acute susceptibility to words and power of using them, should have left such tracts of English literature entirely unexplored. But however it happened he had lost nothing by it, when he approached books it was “with a hungry, empty mind and with fairly srong jaws, and what I got I *bit*.” And his ear for the beauty of language needed no tuning fork. Until the end of dinner I listened to him spellbound. I can remember thinking: This is what people mean when they talk of seeing stars. That is what I am doing now. I do not to this day know who was on my other side. Good manners, social obligation, duty—all had gone with the wind. I was transfixed, transported into a new element. I knew only that I had seen a great light. I recognized it as the light of genius… I cannot attempt to analyze, still less transmit, the light of genius. But I will try to set down, as I remember them, some of the differences which struck me between him and all the others, young and old, whom I have known. First and foremost he was incalculable. He ran true to no form. There lurked in his every thought and world the ambush of the unexpected. I felt also that the impact of life, ideas and even words upon his mind, was not only vivid and immediate, but direct. Between him and them there was no shock absorber of vicarious thought or precedent gleaned either from books or other minds. His relationship wit
Violet Bonham Carter
so courteously aloof, so maddeningly boring with his talk about Europe and books and music and poetry and things that interested her not at all
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
There were no sounds tonight. Only the whistle of the wind coming through the alleys. There's something lonely about October with the summer sounds all gone and the cold winter ahead.
Jackie French Koller (Nothing to Fear (Gulliver Books))
I don't want any money for it," he said. "It's a gift." Scarlett's mouth dropped open. The line was so closely, so carefully drawn where gifts from men were concerned. "Candy and flowers, dear," Ellen had said time and again, "and perhaps a book of poetry or an album or a small bottle of Florida water are the only things a lady may accept from a gentleman. Never, never any expensive gift, even from your fiance. And never any gift of jewelry or wearing apparel, not even gloves or handkerchiefs. Should you accept such gifts, men would know you were no lady and would try to take liberties.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the wind)
You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them. I don’t think I’ll ever get over Melanie’s death in Gone With the Wind. But I’m still so glad I got to know her.
Will Schwalbe (The End of Your Life Book Club)
1. What do you want? This is a deceptively simple question. It can be much more difficult than we realize to give ourselves permission to know and listen to ourselves, to align ourselves with our desires. How often when we answer this question do we say what we want for someone else? I reminded Ling and Jun that they needed to answer this question for themselves. To say I want Jun to stop drinking or I want Ling to stop nagging was to avoid the question. 2. Who wants it? This is our charge and our struggle: to understand our own expectations for ourselves versus trying to live up to others’ expectations of us. My father became a tailor because his father wouldn’t allow him to become a doctor. My father was good at his profession, he was commended and awarded for it—but he was never the one who wanted it, and he always regretted his unlived dream. It’s our responsibility to act in service of our authentic selves. Sometimes this means giving up the need to please others, giving up our need for others’ approval. 3. What are you going to do about it? I believe in the power of positive thinking—but change and freedom also require positive action. Anything we practice, we become better at. If we practice anger, we’ll have more anger. If we practice fear, we’ll have more fear. In many cases, we actually work very hard to ensure that we go nowhere. Change is about noticing what’s no longer working and stepping out of the familiar, imprisoning patterns. 4. When? In Gone with the Wind, my mother’s favorite book, Scarlett O’Hara, when confronted with a difficulty, says, “I’ll think about it tomorrow. … After all, tomorrow is another day.” If we are to evolve instead of revolve, it’s time to take action now.
Edith Eger (The Choice: Embrace the Possible)
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
M-m-master, when I was on the Quasar I had a paracoita, a doll, you see, a genicon, so beautiful with her great pupils as dark as wells, her i-irises purple like asters or pansies blooming in summer, Master, whole beds of them, I thought, had b-been gathered to make those eyes, that flesh that always felt sun-warmed. Wh-wh-where is she now, my own scopolagna, my poppet? Let h-h-hooks be buried in the hands that took her! Crush them, master, beneath stones. Where has she gone from the lemon-wood box I made for her, where she never slept at all, for she lay with me all night, not in the box, the lemon-wood box where she waited all day, watch-and-watch, Master, smiling when I laid her in so she might smile when I drew her out. How soft her hands were, her little hands. Like d-d-doves. She might have flown with them about the cabin had she not chosen instead to lie with me. W-w-wind their guts about your w-windlass, snuff their eyes into their mouths. Unman them, shave them clean below so their doxies may not know them, their lemans may rebuke them, leave them to the brazen laughter of the brazen mouths of st-st-strumpets. Work your will upon those guilty. Where was their mercy on the innocent? When did they tremble, when weep? What kind of men could do as they have done—thieves, false friends, betrayers, bad shipmates, no shipmates, murderers and kidnappers. W-without you, where are their nightmares, where are their restitutions, so long promised? Where are their abacinations, that shall leave them blind? Where are the defenestrations that shall break their bones, where is the estrapade that shall grind their joints? Where is she, the beloved whom I lost?
Gene Wolfe (The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1))
This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell. It's easy to imagine how they might have turned up, though. The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theater programs, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greeting cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogs, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners-all kinds of things that once served a real and useful purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to. They might have come from anywhere. They might have come from other worlds. That scribbled-on map, that publisher's catalog-they might have been put down absentmindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves after many adventures on a market stall in our world.
Philip Pullman (Lyra's Oxford (His Dark Materials, #3.5))
With the introduction of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, Miss Mitchell managed to create the two most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet. Scarlett springs alive in the first sentence of the book and holds the narrative center for over a thousand pages. She is a fabulous, pixilated, one-of-a-kind creation, and she does not utter a dull line in the entire book.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
Why may you not kiss me?” she had demanded. “Am I a corpse?” “Of course not.” “Do you find me less attractive now that weather and wind have scoured the bloom from my cheeks?” “Skaytha, it’s nothing like that. If anything you are more beautiful now than when we lived on Skyrl. Often enough I have no breath when I look at you. You rob me of any other thoughts.” “So you’re afraid my kisses will take what little brain you have left?” “I’m afraid the angels will do something I don’t want them to do if I fly in the face of their commands, commands I can only assume are divine as well as angelic.” “Did you ever think to ask them the reasons behind their demands?” “When it is an angel I just want to get out of the conversation alive or at least without being struck dumb. So I don’t prolong the chat.” “You might have wanted my kisses more than that. If you had any romance in you you’d have told them you were ready to fight ten legions of angels for my love.” Hawk had reached out to hold her. “If I’d told them that they might have taken me up on it. Angels are not just useful for gallant flourishes the moment you declare your intention to battle all comers for the woman you love. Angels burn like fire and blaze like a hundred suns – they strike fear in my heart.” She had pulled away from his embrace and jumped to her feet. “Oh, no, you don’t. If I’m not good enough to kiss I’m not good enough to take in your arms either. It’s angels or me. Make up your mind whom you fear more. Or love more.” “I don’t love the angels.” “Clearly you don’t love me either.” They had been in a tipi. She’d gone to the opening, lifted the flap, bent, and stalked away, passing by warriors of the tribe with her head as high as a goddess and her back as straight as the shaft of the spear. The chief had poked his head in. “All is well, Hawk?’ he had asked. Hawk had learned their tongue. “It couldn’t be better,” Hawk had responded. “Only being slain in battle would be greater than this.” The chief had thought this over and laughed. "That would bring you great honor." "I am in short supply of honor right now and such short supply never pleases a woman like her. Better to die at the end of a spear and have it for a few moments and win her back." The chief had nodded. "Sound wisdom. Would you like to join a raiding party against our enemy tonight?" "I couldn't be happier." (from The Name of the Hawk, Book 2)
Murray Pura (Legion (The Name of the Hawk, #1))
BERLIN, October 29 I’ve been looking into what Germans are reading these dark days. Among novels the three best-sellers are: (1) Gone with the Wind, translated as Vom Winde Verweht—literally “From the Wind Blown About”; (2) Cronin’s Citadel; (3) Beyond Sing the Woods, by Trygve Gulbranssen, a young Norwegian author. Note that all three novels are by foreign authors, one by an Englishman. Most sought-after non-fiction books are: (1) The Coloured Front, an anonymous study of the white-versus-Negro problem; (2) Look Up the Subject of England, a propaganda book about England; (3) Der totale Krieg, Ludendorff’s famous book about the Total War—very timely now; (4) Fifty Years of Germany, by Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer and friend of Hitler; (5) So This is Poland, by von Oertzen, data on Poland, first published in 1928. Three
William L. Shirer (Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41)
A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright. Of course, she had discovered that this was not altogether true but the pleasant fiction still stuck in her mind. Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words. She sat quite still, with the heavy book across her lap, her mouth a little open with surprise, thinking that during the lean months at Tara she had done a man's work and done it well. She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed the plantation without men to help her until Will came. Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men's help--except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
For Ashley was born of a line of men who used their leisure for thinking, not doing, for spinning brightly colored dreams that had in them no touch of reality. He moved in an inner world that was more beautiful than Georgia and came back to reality with reluctance. He looked on people, and he neither liked nor disliked them. He looked on life and was neither heartened nor saddened. He accepted the universe and his place in it for what they were and, shrugging, turned to his music and books and his better world.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
Love isn’t enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are. You would want all of a man, Scarlett, his body, his heart, his soul, his thoughts. And if you did not have them, you would be miserable. And I couldn’t give you all of me. I couldn’t give all of me to anyone. And I would not want all of your mind and your soul. And you would be hurt, and then you would come to hate me—how bitterly! You would hate the books I read and the music I loved, because they took me away from you even for a moment.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind)
It was slow at first, dead things slowly mouldering away. The flies in the corners, the dried flowers in their clay pots. The stuffed bird Alfie bought, only because he was both fascinated and disgusted by it in equal measures, was molting on it's perch. It's feathers falling like leaves then laying, parched and cracking dry. The sea shells I kept on my windowsill turned slowly back into sand and the wind filtering through the curtains blew the pieces into the creases of my bedsheets. When I pulled them over my head at night they felt like waves crashing against my ears. It made my thoughts sodden and heavy like impalpable clay, they dredged through my mind like half-forgotten things. Wave: a face, a feeling, the ghost of a name balancing on my teeth and ready to- crash: and now gone, like a dream I once tried to remember though it was already evaporating quick from my morning-shaking fingers. I started dreaming of crumbling sandcastles and the ocean lapping at my feet. I woke in waves and lay, rocking, until I got up to place my feet in the quiet carpet and watch through my down-turned, dream-filled lashes, as it exhaled dust at every step.
KI (The Dust Book)
How can I make you see these things, my dear? You who are so young and unthinking that you do not know what marriage means. I know I love you. Love isn't enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are. You would want all of a man, Scarlett, his body, his heart, his soul, his thoughts. And if you did not have them, you would be miserable. And I couldn't give you all of me. I couldn't give all of me to anyone. And I would not want all of your mind and your soul. And you would be hurt, and then you would come to hate me-how bitterly! You would hate the books I read and the music I loved, because they took me away from you even for a moment.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
THE BOOK OF A MONK’S LIFE I live my life in circles that grow wide And endlessly unroll, I may not reach the last, but on I glide Strong pinioned toward my goal. About the old tower, dark against the sky, The beat of my wings hums, I circle about God, sweep far and high On through milleniums. Am I a bird that skims the clouds along, Or am I a wild storm, or a great song? Many have painted her. But there was one Who drew his radiant colours from the sun. My God is dark- like woven texture flowing, A hundred drinking roots, all intertwined; I only know that from His warmth I'm growing. More I know not: my roots lie hidden deep My branches only are swayed by the wind. Dost thou not see, before thee stands my soul In silence wrapt my Springtime's prayer to pray? But when thy glance rests on me then my whole Being quickens and blooms like trees in May. When thou art dreaming then I am thy Dream, But when thou art awake I am thy Will Potent with splendour, radiant and sublime, Expanding like far space star-lit and still Into the distant mystic realm of Time. I love my life's dark hours In which my senses quicken and grow deep, While, as from faint incense of faded flowers Or letters old, I magically steep Myself in days gone by: again I give Myself unto the past:- again I live. Out of my dark hours wisdom dawns apace, Infinite Life unrolls its boundless space ... Then I am shaken as a sweeping storm Shakes a ripe tree that grows above a grave ' Round whose cold clay the roots twine fast and warm- And Youth's fair visions that glowed bright and brave, Dreams that were closely cherished and for long, Are lost once more in sadness and in song.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Question number four: I read somewhere that you were an actor before you became an author. CC: That sounded more like a judgement than a question. MG: It was. Usually people pick a career in medicine or business to fall back on. With your chosen professions, it's like you decided to sail upstream without a paddle or a canoe. CC: Well, performing and writing have always been the same thing to me. You get to be a storyteller in both fields, and at the end of the day, I suppose a storyteller is what I consider myself the most. MG: Well, la-di-da. I know what you mean, though. I was an actress myself back in the golden days of Hollywood - you know, before all this streaming trash. CC: Would I recognize your work? MG: Did you ever see the film Gone with the Wind? CC: Of course! MG: I supplied the wind. CC: [A beat of silence.} How much longer is this interview going to take?
Chris Colfer (The Land of Stories: The Ultimate Book Hugger's Guide)
Yes, I’m sorry for you — sorry to see you throwing away happiness with both hands and reaching out for something that would never make you happy. I’m sorry because you are such a fool you don’t know there can’t ever be happiness except when like mates like. If I were dead, if Miss Melly were dead and you had your precious honorable lover, do you think you’d be happy with him? Hell, no! You would never know him, never know what he was thinking about, never understand him any more than you understand music and poetry and books or anything that isn’t dollars and cents. Whereas, we, dear wife of my bosom, could have been perfectly happy if you had ever given us half a chance, for we are so much alike. We are both scoundrels, Scarlett, and nothing is beyond us when we want something. We could have been happy, for I loved you and I know you, Scarlett, down to your bones, in a way that Ashley could never know you. And he would despise you if he did know...
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell. It's easy to imagine how they might have turned up, though. The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theater programs, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greeting cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogs, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners-all kinds of things that once served a real and useful purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to. They might have come from anywhere. They might have come from other worlds. That scribbled-on map, that publisher's catalog-they might have been put down absentmindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves after many adventures on a market stall in our world.
Philip Pullman
Several days later I decided to go on a good long jog, trusting that Chip would not leave Drake again. As I was on my way back I saw Chip coming down the road in his truck with the trailer on it. He rolled up to me with his window down and said, “Baby, you’re doing so good. I’m heading to work now. I’ve got to go.” I looked in the back, thinking, Of course, he’s got Drake. But I didn’t see a car seat. “Chip, where’s Drake?” she said, and I was like, “Oh, shoot!” She took off without a word and ran like lightning all the way back to the house as I turned the truck around. She got there faster on foot than I did in my truck. I sure hope no one from Child Protective Services reads this book. They can’t come after me retroactively, can they? Chip promised it would never happen again. So the third time I attempted to take a run, I went running down Third Street and made it all the way home. I walked in, and Chip and Drake were gone. I thought, Oh, good. Finally he remembered to take the baby. But then I noticed his car was still parked out front. I looked around and couldn’t find them anywhere. Moments later, Chip pulled up on his four-wheeler--with Drake bungee-strapped to the handlebars in his car seat. “Chip!” I screamed, “What in the heck are you doing?” “Oh, he was crying, and I’d always heard my mom say she would drive me around the neighborhood when I was a baby, and it made me feel better,” Chip said. “He loved it. He fell right to sleep.” “He didn’t love it, Chip. He probably fell asleep because the wind in his face made it impossible to breathe.” I didn’t go for another run for the whole first year of Drake’s life, and I took him to the shop with me every single day. Some people might see that as a burden, but I have to admit I loved it. Having him in that BabyBjörn was the best feeling in the world. Drake was a shop baby. He would come home every night smelling like candles. We had friends who owned a barbecue joint, and their baby always came home smelling like a rack of ribs. I liked Drake’s smell a whole lot better.
Joanna Gaines (The Magnolia Story)
There was a girl next door," he said, slowly. "She's gone now, I think, dead. I can't even remember her face. But she was different. How? How did she happen?" Beatty smiled. "Here or there, that's bound to occur. Clarisse McClellan? We've a record on her family. We've watched them carefully. Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle. We had some false alarms on the McClellans, when they lived in Chicago. Never found a book. Uncle had a mixed record; antisocial. The girl? She was a time bomb. The family had been feeding her subconscious, I'm sure, from what I saw of her school record. She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
The book treats, in fantastical terms, the dread problems of excessive specialization, lack of communication, conformity, cupidity, and all the alarming ills of our time. Things have gone from bad to worse to ugly. The dumbing down of America is proceeding apace. Juster’s allegorical monsters have become all too real. The Demons of Ignorance, the Gross Exaggeration (whose wicked teeth were made “only to mangle the truth”), and the shabby Threadbare Excuse are inside the walls of the Kingdom of Wisdom, while the Gorgons of Hate and Malice, the Overbearing Know-it-all, and most especially the Triple Demons of Compromise are already established in high office all over the world. The fair princesses, Rhyme and Reason, have obviously been banished yet again. We need Milo! We need him and his endearing buddies, Tock the watchdog and the Humbug, to rescue them once more. We need them to clamber aboard the dear little electric car and wind their way around the Doldrums, the Foothills of Confusion, and the Mountains of Ignorance, up into the Castle in the Air, where Rhyme and Reason are imprisoned, so they can restore them to us.
Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth)
Every building was just gone, and every soul as well. Across the Potomac River, the Pentagon shuddered violently from the blast wave and then began to partially collapse. What remained standing was utterly ablaze, as was every structure not flattened for as far as the eye could see. Howling, scorching winds soon began sweeping lethal radioactivity through the city’s northeast quadrant and into Maryland, surging through Prince George’s County and Anne Arundel County, as if they were following 295 to the north and Routes 50 and 214 to the east, through Capitol Heights and Lanham and Bowie toward Crofton and Annapolis. Soon more than five thousand square miles of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia were contaminated with deadly levels of radioactivity. And the nightmare had only just begun. Moments after the first missile hit D.C., a second missile struck the CIA building at Langley directly, its superheated fireball and cataclysmic blast wave obliterating the nation’s premier intelligence headquarters in the tree-lined suburbs of northern Virginia and vaporizing every home and office building, every church and mall for mile after mile
Joel C. Rosenberg (Dead Heat: A Jon Bennett Series Political and Military Action Thriller (Book 5) (The Last Jihad series))
A startling thought this, that a woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett who had been reared in the tradition that men were omniscient and women none too bright. Of course, she had discovered that this was not altogether true but the pleasant fiction still stuck in her mind. Never before had she put this remarkable idea into words. She sat quite still, with the heavy book across her lap, her mouth a little open with surprise, thinking that during the lean months at Tara she had done a man’s work and done it well. She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed the plantation without men to help her until Will came. Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help—except having babies, and God knows, no woman in her right mind would have babies if she could help it. With the idea that she was as capable as a man came a sudden rush of pride and a violent longing to prove it, to make money for herself as men made money. Money which would be her own, which she would neither have to ask for nor account for to any man.
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
July 8, 2013 Review of Bargain with the Devil Author: Gloria Gravitt Moulder My interest in the death of Margaret Mitchell was sparked as a young child growing up in Georgia. I was born in 1953, 4 years after her death. Older relatives, neighbors and friends would sit around discussing her death as I was growing up and with the inquisitive mind of a young child; I found what they were saying interesting enough to listen in. They talked about how the taxi cab driver, Hugh Gravitt, (some of which knew him as this was a small southern town where everyone knew everyone) was not a drinker because of his health and how the newspaper articles had written he was drunk and speeding when it wasn’t true. I overheard many things about how the media was wrong regarding the circumstances of her death. Some speculated she committed suicide; others suspected her husband pushed her in front of the car Mr. Gravitt was driving. All commented that both Margaret and John were drunk and jaywalking across Peachtree Street. I read the book (Gone with the Wind) when I was 13 and went to see the movie in 1969 at the Fox theatre with friends. I cannot relate how this impacted me. I became interested in all I heard as a child again and over the years have read many articles on the subject of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh. I never believed the stories about Hugh Gravitt being at fault in her death as a result of all those conversations I had overheard by my elders as a child. Gloria Gravitt Moulder, the daughter of Hugh Gravitt, has written the perfect book called “Bargain with the Devil” with facts derived from her own father on his death bed. I could not put this book down; I read it in one day. It has confirmed everything I heard from people who suspected in the few years after Margaret Mitchell’s death what actually happened. Thank you Mrs. Moulder, for your courage in bringing your father’s version to light after all his suffering from 1949 to his death. Also, for confirming my beliefs in what I heard growing up as this was only suspicion until I read about your father’s version. Kathy Whiten 621 Brighton Drive Lawrenceville, GA 30043 404-516-0623
Gloria Gravitt Moulder (Bargain With A Devil: The Tragedy Behind Gone With The Wind)
We have not begun to live’, Yeats writes, ‘until we conceive life as a tragedy.’ Newman confessed that he considered most men to be irretrievably damned, although he spent his life ‘trying to make that truth less terrible to human reason’. Goethe could call his life ‘the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever’. Martin Luther told a woman who wished him a long life: ‘Madam, rather than live forty more years, I would give up my chance of paradise.’ No, the Outsider does not make light work of living; at the best, it is hard going; at the worst (to borrow a phrase from Eliot) ‘an intolerable shirt of flame’, It was this vision that made Axel declare: ‘As for living, our servants will do that for us.’ Axel was a mystic; at least, he had the makings of a mystic. For that is just what the mystic says: ‘I refuse to Uve.’ But he doesn’t intend to die. There is another way of living that involves a sort of death: ‘to die in order to Uve’. Axel would have locked himself up in his castle on the Rhine and read Hermetic philosophy. He saw men and the world as Newman saw them, as Eliot saw them in ‘Burnt Norton’: ... strained, time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time But he was not willing to regard himself as hopelessly damned merely because the rest of the world seems to be. He set out to find his own salvation; and although he did it with a strong romantic bias for Gothic castles and golden-haired girls, he still set out in the right direction. And what are the clues in the search for self-expression? There are the moments of insight, the glimpses of harmony. Yeats records one such moment in his poem ‘Vacillation’: My fiftieth year had come and gone I sat, a solitary man In a crowded London shop An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness That I was blessed, and could bless It is an important experience, this moment of Yea-saying, of reconciliation with the ‘devil-ridden chaos’, for it gives the Outsider an important glimpse into the state of mind that the visionary wants to achieve permanently.
Colin Wilson
Questions What if green were really yellow, And red really white? Would the sky be blue today, And black still tonight? What if rain were not rain, And snow not really snow? Would the seasons still be there, And would the wind still blow? What if trees were called birds, And grass really sand? Would everything still be the same, All across the land? What if words did not exist, And books, also gone? Would anyone be writing now, Where letters don’t belong? What if you did not exist, And were no longer here? I would be sad indeed, And shed for you a tear. What if it is not that way, And will never be? Will earth stay the way it is, For all eternity?
Alexia Purdy (Whispers of Dreams (A Poetic Collection))
Beneath Albright’s office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day.
Kit Habianic (Until Our Blood is Dry)
The first mile was torture. I passed beneath the massive stone arch at the entrance to the school, pulled off the road and threw up. I felt better and ran down the long palm-lined drive to the Old Quad. Lost somewhere in the thicket to my left was the mausoleum containing the remains of the family by whom the university had been founded. Directly ahead of me loomed a cluster of stone buildings, the Old Quad. I stumbled up the steps and beneath an archway into a dusty courtyard which, with its clumps of spindly bushes and cacti, resembled the garden of a desert monastery. All around me the turrets and dingy stone walls radiated an ominous silence, as if behind each window there stood a soldier with a musket waiting to repel any invader. I looked up at the glittering facade of the chapel across which there was a mosaic depicting a blond Jesus and four angels representing Hope, Faith, Charity, and, for architectural rather than scriptural symmetry, Love. In its gloomy magnificence, the Old Quad never failed to remind me of the presidential palace of a banana republic. Passing out of the quad I cut in front of the engineering school and headed for a back road that led up to the foothills. There was a radar installation at the summit of one of the hills called by the students the Dish. It sat among herds of cattle and the ruins of stables. It, too, was a ruin, shut down for many years, but when the wind whistled through it, the radar produced a strange trilling that could well be music from another planet. The radar was silent as I slowed to a stop at the top of the Dish and caught my breath from the upward climb. I was soaked with sweat, and my headache was gone, replaced by giddy disorientation. It was a clear, hot morning. Looking north and west I saw the white buildings, bridges and spires of the city of San Francisco beneath a crayoned blue sky. The city from this aspect appeared guileless and serene. Yet, when I walked in its streets what I noticed most was how the light seldom fell directly, but from angles, darkening the corners of things. You would look up at the eaves of a house expecting to see a gargoyle rather than the intricate but innocent woodwork. The city had this shadowy presence as if it was a living thing with secrets and memories. Its temperament was too much like my own for me to feel safe or comfortable there. I looked briefly to the south where San Jose sprawled beneath a polluted sky, ugly and raw but without secrets or deceit. Then I stretched and began the slow descent back into town.
Michael Nava (The Little Death (The Henry Rios Mysteries Book 1))
Caleb and Joshua stopped and watched the prophets. The three of them were staring at Rahab as if they saw something in her that they did not quite understand. Then a shudder and a gasp of breath seemed to flow from one to the other. Everyone in the room saw it. It was like a rushing wind that penetrated their bodies, but only their bodies, no one else’s. It was the Spirit of the living God. One of the prophets spoke up, “Thus saith Yahweh, behold this woman before you will bear a child in the line of Judah.” The second spoke as if continuing the sentence like they were all three connected in spirit. “It will be a royal bloodline from which a king of Israel shall arise. A gibborim warrior.” And the last one finished, “The Seed of Promise shall issue forth who will crush the Seed of the Serpent.” A strange peace came over Rahab. It was as if Yahweh’s spirit rested upon her as well. It was as if he were comforting her, clearing away all her doubt, and all her years of pain and anguish in search of one true love. And now she had found it. She kept clinging to Caleb. The prophets then lost their breath and looked at one another. The Spirit that had come over them was now gone.
Brian Godawa (Caleb Vigilant (Chronicles of the Nephilim Book 6))
far as the east is from the west     so far does he remove our sins. As a father has compassion on his sons,     the Lord has pity on those who fear him; for he knows of what we are made,     he remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass;     he flowers like the flower of the field; the wind blows and he is gone     and his place never sees him again. Glory to the Father and to the Son,     and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, is now,     and will be for ever. Amen. As a father has compassion on his sons, the Lord has pity on those who fear him. Psalm 102 (103) Give thanks to the Lord, all his works. But the love of the Lord is everlasting     upon those who hold him in fear; his justice reaches out to children’s children     when they
Universalis Publishing (Liturgy of the Hours 2016 (USA, Ordinary Time) (Divine Office USA Book 2))
Then I felt a sharp pain in my stomach. I pulled away from Adam and looked down to see my own diamond sword buried in my belly. “I’m sorry,” Adam said, standing up with a grim look on his face. “But you gave me no choice.” I looked up at Adam, who looked down at me with eyes full of hate. “You, Dave and all your friends are all the same,” he said. “You’re just trying to ruin my life! I never asked for any of this—I was just trying to protect my wife!” He grabbed the hilt of his sword and pulled it out of me in one swift motion. And everything went black. ??????? I dreamed of time: of the first burst of light that emerged from the Void; the plants and trees that spread across the land; the first animals that roamed the world in peace; the rise of the Old People and their eventual fall into darkness, and the monsters that took their place when they were gone; the villagers who followed in the Old People’s place. All of time passed before my eyes, and it was glorious. Glorious and terrifying. I saw a thousand versions of myself, stretching back to the beginning of the world. Each was a man in blue clothes with brown hair. All the Steves who had lived and died: all my previous lives. “I want to wake up,” I told them. “I need to go back.” “You will,” they replied. “Although you will be changed. That cannot be helped.” And then a wind swept me up; up towards the light.  And I screamed… THURSDAY I jolted awake in bed. “What was that?” I said. “Some kind of a nightmare?
Dave Villager (Dave the Villager 16: An Unofficial Minecraft Book (The Legend of Dave the Villager))
What to read next? Hm…well, if you want more Carrie Jo, check out the Idlewood books. She’s at a new house, and there are heartbreaking child ghosts that need her help, but be warned, you’ll love them too. Most of them, anyway. I have also completed a historical fiction series about Queen Nefertiti. It’s called the Desert Queen series, and I’m very happy with it. If you fancy a bit of adventure in ancient Egypt, check it out. The first book in that series, The Tale of Nefret, is on Kindle. I also have a spooky plantation series called Sugar Hill. There are five books in that one: The Wife of the Left Hand, The Ramparts, and Blood by Candlelight, The Starlight Ball, and His Lovely Garden. I can’t wait to introduce you to the Dufresne family and take you through their plantation, Sugar Hill. Like Seven Sisters, the series will be chock-full of Southern folklore and historical places. Sugar Hill is like Gone With the Wind, but with ghosts! Thanks again for staying with me through this series. I appreciate all your kind words, the reviews, and the emails. Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list or follow me on Amazon or BookBub so you can get the newest release information right in your inbox. I’ve got a website too that I visit infrequently. Check it out. See y’all soon. M.L. Bullock Christmas at Seven Sisters Three Short Stories from the Seven Sisters Series By M.L.
M.L. Bullock (Seven Sisters Series)
How strange it is our little perception of life. The child says 'when I am a big boy.." The big boy says "When I grow up" And grown up he says "When I am married" The thought then changes to "When im able to retire". Then when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed, a cold wind seems to sweep over it. Somehow he has missed it all and it is gone, Life, we learn too long is in the living.
Dale Carnegie (How to Stop Worrying and Start Living: Time-Tested Methods for Conquering Worry (Dale Carnegie Books))
Worries are only so stable like these clouds. The wind of life blows all gone in this second. From the German Book Inneres Gold - Das Glück wohnt in der Tiefe.
Inneres Gold
There is no reason why any sane person should read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. It is one of the worst books ever written by an American, shoddy, meretricious and without any redeeming social value.
James A. Michener (Chesapeake)
ONE OF THE most popular books in Poland in the summer of 1939 was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.
Lynne Olson (A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II)
I wasn't an Irishman, but I knew how it felt to have someone standing over you, controlling your life and wanting to call it something else. From the people at Christian Fellowship to First Academy to my parents to Confucius to thousands of years of ass-backwards Chinese thinking, I knew how it felt. Everything my parents did to me and their parents did to them was justified under the banner of Tradition, Family, and Culture. And when it wasn't them it was someone impressing Christianity on me and when it wasn't Christianity it was whiteness. Those other kids had more vocabs than me and more knowledge of the American canon. At that age, I didn't know what Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, or even A Christmas Story was. There were so many gaps in my American cultural understanding because we just didn't get it at home. It always hurt me writing or debating because I didn't share their references, but that summer I was determined that it wouldn't stop me. I wouldn't try to talk about things they knew anymore. I would use the references that made sense to me and make them catch up. Before I ever read a marketing book in college, I understood what "pull marketing" was. Unlike the other kids, I wasn't memorizing words or events. I was speaking from experience. For the first time, I wasn't arguing just to argue. I wasn't wildin' out' couse Iw as bored. I finally found another mind I fucked with and it was just my luck he was dead-ass Irishman. (123-124)
Eddie Huang (Fresh Off the Boat)
After the phone call from Daley, the University of Chicago presented me with my two termination options. I wrote back to Dean Fischel—whom I believed I had been on good terms with—that I was “stunned and shocked at being requested to resign.” I told him that I had gone to the conference simply to answer reporters’ questions about my research. I asked him whether, if I took the second option, I could still talk about my book and other research. Fischel responded, “I cannot give you a specific answer to your questions.” He noted, “With respect [to] damage to your reputation, many think you have only yourself to blame by winding up in a public confrontation at the mayor’s press conference.” He added in a later email: “If you cannot make yourself for all practical purposes invisible (at least in terms of any mention of the university), you should resign.” I took the second option and completely stopped talking to the media for over three months.
John R. Lott Jr. (The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies)
Razieh had an amazing capacity for beauty. She said, You know, all my life I have lived in poverty. I had to steal books and sneak into movie houses-but, God, I loved those books! I don't think any rich kid has ever cherished Rebecca or Gone with the Wind the way I did when I borrowed the translations from houses where my mother worked.
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
The two eyed each other, each through her own prejudices. The woman was tall and powerfully built, although her dark uniform made her look smaller. Her brown hair had gone fuzzy in the sea wind, bushing out and making her face look even more like a bright-eyed potato. She outweighed Merry by a hundred pounds, and her strong hands could have crushed a throat with ease. There were tales of mad bodyguards who’d turned on their employers. Merry sometimes thought of those stories when she looked at Worth. The woman saw just another child, featureless—her job. At least this one was polite, but then quite often her type used manners to mask contempt, as this one’s parents did. But that was part of the job, putting up with their attitude. At least the pay was good and the living quarters better than most. For that she could put up with listening to this kid whose idea of casual conversation was telling you about some stupid old book she’d read or some boring fact she’d learned. But then most members of the ruling class were a little crazy.
Helen Mary Hoover (The Shepherd Moon)
Shift said, ‘And what if the hillsides your houses are on slip into the valleys, and everything is buried in mud? What if the wind flattens your houses, or floods wash them off their foundations? What if you’re all like too many mound-building birds in the same forest—you get so tired of stealing each other’s twigs and sticks that no nests are finished, and no chicks hatch? You can’t keep doing everything over, so you sit down in the ruins and starve. What if that? What if the floods sweep the soil into the sea, and the sea seeps up through the land and turns it sour? What if the conditions for civilisation are gone?’ Taryn
Elizabeth Knox (The Absolute Book)
Just like that, they were gone and the patio was mellow again. As Rich said later, it was like a “gust of wind.” MJ was the gust; everyone else was the twigs, leaves, and branches flying around.
Bill Simmons (The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy)
And the Pixelmon moves they did were amazing, too. They had Pixelmon doing stuff I had never seen before. They had moves like: Air Biscuit Nose Picker Break Wind Toe Jam Back Wash Ugly Stick Wet Willie Dragon Breath Barking Spider John Cena Projectile Vomit And one Pixelmon called a Creeperchu even had a move called Hydrogen Bomb. He used it once in a battle, and it was awesome! Except. . .he didn’t make it to the finals.
Zack Zombie (Diary of a Minecraft Zombie Book 12: Pixelmon Gone!)
My people, the pigmen, have lived in the Nether for generations,” Porkins said. “It’s a hard place, but we had a good life there. Until three years ago when a strange man came to visit us. Do you know the hero Steve?” “All too well,” said Dave. “Well this man looked just like him,” said Porkins. “Apart from his eyes were white. He called himself Herobrine.” As Porkins said the word Herobrine a shiver went down Dave’s spine, and at the same moment the wind pushed open the door to their cabin, whistling eerily. He went over and closed it. He’d never heard that name before, but something about it chilled him to the bone. “My people were always being attacked by ghasts,” Porkins went on, “and the man promised he could make us stronger, so we’d be able to fight back. Our leaders agreed, and Herobrine gave us all a potion to drink. “I was the only one who didn’t trust this chap Herobrine, so I never drank mine. But everyone else did. By morning, Herobrine had gone, and my people had been transformed into mindless zombies. “Even my own father didn’t recognize me anymore, he just looked at me blankly with his dead, zombie eyes. I ran as fast as I could, until I found a nether portal inside an old fortress and used it to come to your world. I’ve been here ever since.
Dave Villager (The Legend of Dave the Villager 1: An Unofficial Minecraft Book)
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground. In
Rebecca Solnit (The Faraway Nearby (ALA Notable Books for Adults))
and Gone with the Wind, popular books, and textbooks joined with biased academic histories to indoctrinate Americans with erroneous ideas about law and order in the post–Civil War South. Concerns remain about the lack of public knowledge of the era—especially for how, in the words of the Equal Justice Initiative, the deadly attacks in the first years of freedom paved the way for the later era of racial terrorism that employed lynching to solidify Jim Crow policies and practices. The extent of atrocities has
William A. Blair (The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction (Civil War America))
Indeed, this is the sort of show critics love to ghoul out on. It’s so romantic, so twice-told, so … yes: so corny. That’s the worst insult possible in a rock culture. The American Gone With the Wind, still in the Layton production but wholly recast with Lesley Ann Warren and Pernell Roberts in the leads, was to have opened in Los Angeles, toured for the better part of a year, then hit Broadway. But the California showing did not go over, and after San Francisco the show folded. We are losing important history here. Harold Rome’s career typifies the evolution of theatre music in the Golden Age, from hi-ho ditties to the dramatic sophistication of the “musical scene.” An invention of twenties operetta but not popularized till Rodgers and Hammerstein, the musical scene is what gives modern shows their depth and point. Isolated song spots are mostly gone; now the music breathes with the story.
Ethan Mordden (One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s (The History of the Broadway Musical Book 6))
Harold Rome traveled with us, starting in the lowest of jobs as a specialist in revue. This is music without story or character. But by the 1950s, Rome had abandoned revue, and in Fanny in particular he exploited the musical scene—writing, in effect, partway to opera. Now, in Gone With the Wind, Rome expanded into an intricate interlacing of speech and song—aided, I imagine, by the instincts of Joe Layton. Naturally, he would know enough to delay Rhett Butler’s entrance till the Atlanta ball, have him defiantly escort the black-clad Scarlett onto the floor, and let him rip into an establishing song, “Two of a Kind.” This better suited Presnell’s sexy scooping up to high notes than Roberts’ more limited instrument, but the climax really comes when the orchestra takes over as Rhett sweeps Scarlett around the stage and the good folk of Atlanta go off like astonished firecrackers.
Ethan Mordden (One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 1970s (The History of the Broadway Musical Book 6))
In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.
Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
prophetic and scarily pertinent to late-nineties urban living. The book treats, in fantastical terms, the dread problems of excessive specialization, lack of communication, conformity, cupidity, and all the alarming ills of our time. Things have gone from bad to worse to ugly. The dumbing down of America is proceeding apace. Juster’s allegorical monsters have become all too real. The Demons of Ignorance, the Gross Exaggeration (whose wicked teeth were made “only to mangle the truth”), and the shabby Threadbare Excuse are inside the walls of the Kingdom of Wisdom, while the Gorgons of Hate and Malice, the Overbearing Know-it-all, and most especially the Triple Demons of Compromise are already established in high office all over the world. The fair princesses, Rhyme and Reason, have obviously been banished yet again. We need Milo! We need him and his endearing buddies, Tock the watchdog and the Humbug, to rescue them once more. We need them to clamber aboard the dear little electric car and wind their way around the Doldrums, the Foothills of Confusion, and the Mountains of Ignorance, up into the Castle in the Air, where Rhyme and Reason are imprisoned, so they can restore them to us.
Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth)
autumn Look, the migrating birds Are leaving us, small souls That brave three thousand miles To Africa, to warmth; They populate the sky, They take the last Attributes of summer; They are gone, and now The winds will have them, Their journey starts In the knowledge that this, Like the seasons, has to be. Autumn is a time of reflection; Of the making of lists, Of books to be read now That the nights are drawing in; Of letters to be written, Friends to be remembered, The things they said To be thought about further. Perhaps, in short, to think About what it is that makes This life so precious Of what it is that breaks the heart.
Alexander McCall Smith (In a Time of Distance: and Other Poems)
Blessed be any wind that blows us into the port of our Saviour's love! Happy wounds, which make us seek the beloved Physician. Ye tempted ones, come to your tempted Saviour, for he can be touched with a feeling of your infirmities, and will succour every tried and tempted one. Morning, October 4 "At evening time it shall be light." Zechariah 14:7 Oftentimes we look forward with forebodings to the time of old age, forgetful that at eventide it shall be light. To many saints, old age is the choicest season in their lives. A balmier air fans the mariner's cheek as he nears the shore of immortality, fewer waves ruffle his sea, quiet reigns, deep, still and solemn. From the altar of age the flashes of the fire of youth are gone, but the more real flame of earnest feeling remains. The pilgrims have reached the land Beulah, that happy country, whose days are as the days of heaven upon earth. Angels visit it, celestial gales blow over it, flowers of paradise grow in it, and the air is filled with seraphic music. Some dwell here for years, and others come to it but a few hours before their departure, but it is an Eden on earth. We may well long for the time when we shall recline in its shady groves and be satisfied with hope until the time of fruition comes. The setting sun seems larger than when aloft in the sky, and a splendour of glory tinges all the clouds which surround his going down. Pain breaks not the calm of the sweet twilight of age, for strength made perfect in weakness bears up with patience under it all. Ripe fruits of choice experience are gathered as the rare repast of life's evening, and the soul prepares itself for rest. The Lord's people shall also enjoy light in the hour of death. Unbelief laments; the shadows fall, the night is coming, existence is ending. Ah no, crieth faith, the night is far spent, the true day is at hand. Light is come, the light of immortality, the light of a Father's countenance. Gather up thy feet in the bed, see the waiting bands of spirits! Angels waft thee away. Farewell, beloved one, thou art gone, thou wavest thine hand. Ah, now it is light. The pearly gates are open, the golden streets shine in the jasper light. We cover our eyes, but thou beholdest the unseen; adieu, brother, thou hast light at even-tide, such as we have
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Christian Classics: Six books by Charles Spurgeon in a single collection, with active table of contents)
M-m-master, when I was on the Quasar I had a paracoita, a doll, you see, a genicon, so beautiful with her great pupils as dark as wells, her i-irises purple like asters or pansies blooming in summer, Master, whole beds of them, I thought, had b-been gathered to make those eyes, that flesh that always felt sun-warmed. Wh-wh-where is she now, my own scopolagna, my poppet? Let h-h-hooks be buried in the hands that took her! Crush them, Master, beneath stones. Where has she gone from the lemon-wood box I made for her, where she never slept at all, for she lay with me all night, not in the box, the lemon-wood box where she waited all day, watch-and-watch, Master, smiling when I laid her in so she might smile when I drew her out. How soft her hands were, her little hands. Like d-d-doves. She might have flown with them about the cabin had she not chosen instead to lie with me. W-w-wind their guts about your w-windlass, stuff their eyes into their mouths. Unman them, shave them clean below so their doxies may not know them, their lemans may rebuke them, leave them to the brazen laughter of the brazen mouths of st-st-strumpets. Work your will upon those guilty. Where was their mercy on the innocent? When did they tremble, when weep? What kind of men could do as they have done—thieves, false friends, betrayers, bad shipmates, no shipmates, murderers and kidnappers. W-without you, where are their nightmares, where are their restitutions, so long promised? Where are their chains, fetters, manacles, and cangues? Where are their abacinations, that shall leave them blind? Where are the defenestrations that shall break their bones, where is the estrapade that shall grind their joints? Where is she, the beloved whom I lost?
Gene Wolfe (Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2))
He sat down there on what had been a doorstep or a hearthstone, between the city and the sun. The blowing of the country wind had finally blown his thoughts away. For a long time he sat hearing only the wind in the new grass. He sought stillness of heart, the void, the gap, the silence that had been his kingdom in the sunlit afternoons of the years at Malafrena. That was liberty, but it was gone. He had lost it.
Ursula K. Le Guin (Malafrena: A Library of America eBook Classic)
death. Gone was the witch who had raged at the truth that had torn her to shreds. And in her place, fighting as if she were the very wind, unfaltering against the Matrons, stood someone Dorian had not yet met. Stood a queen of two peoples.
Sarah J. Maas (Throne of Glass)
He grabbed her around the middle, nearly tackling her, and they were gone. Wind roared and the world spun out from beneath her,
Sarah J. Maas (Crescent City Ebook Bundle: A 2-book bundle)
For several years, I taught Sunday school in my church. As an object lesson, I distributed several excerpts from recent news articles. I had students read the excerpt and then explain to the class what they believed was happening. One news excerpt stated: The huge black triangular-shaped flying object came silently out of nowhere over the treetops and was gone in seconds. The lights – three on each side – were huge, seemingly as big as cars and bright yellow…. After the craft flew over the Laurie area around 8:30 p.m. Oct. 5, a handful of Laurie area residents questioned what this unidentified object flying in the night sky could be. A second excerpt from another article read: The UFO was spotted by hundreds of witnesses with many believing it was the work of an ‘alien’ craft. One saw orangey-yellow spheres skimming across the sky. Another reported a ‘massive ball of light’ with ‘tentacles going right down to the ground.’ Then witnesses told of an ear splitting bang at 4 a.m. Come dawn the plot thickens. At the nearby wind farm one of the 60ft blades from a 200ft turbine was found ripped off. Another had been left twisted and useless.…the strange goings on at a wind farm in Conisholme, Lincolnshire, can be explained by a flying saucer crashing into the turbine in a close encounter that could, at last, provide the evidence of other life forms they have been waiting for all their lives. After reading the excerpts, I asked the students to explain what the article was about. Hesitantly, the students said the articles were about a UFO sighting and crash; after all, that is specifically what the excerpt said. I then held up a printout of the actual news articles, which were titled respectively, “UFO over Laurie ID’d as stealth bomber” and “Unmanned Stealth Bomber Could Have Been UFO Responsible for Destroying Wind Turbine.” The whole article described a US military exercise with the Stealth bomber. The aircraft crashed into a turbine on the wind farm. The local residents were unfamiliar with the Stealth Bomber and some believed it to be a UFO. The problem in accurately interpreting the news excerpts, for my students, was that I did not give them the full article. They did not understand the background or the whole story so they were left to fill in the gaps with their own ideas and interpretations. Sadly, we often do this same thing when interpreting the Bible. Very few of us are well versed in the customs and traditions of the ancient Jews during Jesus’ time. That background provides a context in which the books of the Bible were written. It is a context that shaped the very foundation of Christianity and it is a context that without, we cannot possibly hope to truly understand what the Bible’s authors were trying to teach us.
Jedediah McClure (Myths of Christianity: A Five Thousand Year Journey to Find the Son of God)
What's so amusing?" he inquired, eyeing her curiously. "I don't believe this. I'm lying in bed with a near stranger, calmly chatting after making love. You are a wicked and potent temptation. You should be ashamed of yourself for demoralizing me. This is the most illogical and incredible thing I've ever done." He chuckled. "Count me in. I'm just as astonished and confused. I'm glad I met you first. You'd best be on your guard, woman; I'll probably shoot the first cowpoke who looks at you sideways." "How could I possibly notice him when my eyes are for you alone?" she quipped, caressing his smooth jawline. "Just make sure you remember that while I'm gone. I wouldn't want to challenge some new sweetheart the moment I return." "Aren't you mighty possessive for a man who has no claim on me?" she teased, snuggling up to him, savoring his words and new mood. Lynx shifted to remove a cross of pounded Spanish silver from his neck. He slipped it over her head and vowed, "That says you're mine." -Lynx & Calinda
Janelle Taylor (First Love, Wild Love (Western Wind, Book 1))
Tucker doesn’t skip a beat. “Why, my dear Stella, I do believe thou havest a dirty side!” He smiles, leaning forward and follows with, “Don’t I get credit for that? No? Oh well. Now, as I was saying, not only are you surrounded by your dusty books, the fact that you’re an English major, I’ve seen you at the public library. I know for a fact that it takes you at least thirty minutes to decide what book to read next and often times you can’t decide so you read something you’ve already read.” He points at the open copy of Gone with the Wind and a huge cheesy grin spreads across his face, pleased with himself. “I’m done now by the way.
Jessica Danow (Providence in the Fall (Seasons Series Book 1))
They parked in a pay-bay on George Square and walked through the gardens, emerging in front of the university library. Most of the buildings here had gone up in the 1960s, and Rebus hated them: blocks of sand-colored concrete replacing the square's original eighteenth-century town houses. Rows of treacherous steps, and a notorious wind-tunnel effect which could blow over the unwary on the wrong day. Students walked between the buildings, hugging books and folders in front of them. Some stood and chatted in groups. "Bloody students," was Wylie's concise summing-up of the situation.
Ian Rankin (Fleshmarket Close (Inspector Rebus, #15))
There was no mistaking it, throughout the 1950’s, Liberia proudly brandished its American roots by flaunting the palatial homes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean near Monrovia or the antebellum style mansions dominating rubber plantations owned by wealth Americo Liberians who considered themselves privileged. Their homes were closely modeled after the affluent homes of the pre-civil war era in the Confederacy. These beautiful homes stood out when compared to the dirt floor, thatch roofed village homes most Liberians lived in. The best visual description of Liberian architecture,would be in film clips taken from the movie Gone With The Wind.. In the 1950's, Liberia had all the trappings of an American colony stuck in the past. To a great extent it was this great social divide between the indigenous natives and the Americo-Liberians that brought on the two civil wars in Liberia. This aspect of life in Liberia is highlighted in Seawater Two and will be covered in my upcoming book about the history of West Africa. Many of the Americo Liberians including President Talbert, have been killed of displaced. Because of the fierce civil wars in Liberia the coastal ships of the Farrell Lines fleet were sunk in “The Port of Monrovia” and much of Liberia’s antebellum architecture has been destroyed .
Hank Bracker
John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.
Alan Moore (Jerusalem, Book One: The Boroughs (Jerusalem, #1))
where am I going? This society? The whole human race?” These are questions which many of us today are asking urgently, deeply troubled about what we see happening in our world Our concerns may be quite personal ones, centered around our own particular life situation. They may be general ones, related to the state of things as a whole or both. For this is a strange and difficult time, a time when all the old values and traditions seem to have been cut out from under us without anything clear and definitive having been substituted for them. From every direction and every possible source, we’re being bombarded by the newfangled ideas, values and behaviors of the New Age in which we live. The New Age is an age with many interesting features. One of these is confusion. Great numbers of us no longer seem to have a clear sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Under the impact of too much personal freedom and the flood of new ideas and values, we’re falling apart, frightened, uncertain, lost. After all, how is it possible to have certainty about anything when even the most basic, time-honored values are being called into question? In comparison to earlier times, everything around us today seems upside-down and backwards. A great deal of what was previously considered right is now looked upon as outmoded, irrelevant or just plain dumb. At the same time, much of what used to be considered wrong is now accepted as right, normal and okay. Members of the older generation, like myself, still maintain our vision of what things were like in an earlier, simpler, less perplexing period. But when our generation goes, apart from people of strong religious faith, who will be left that still retains a clear vision of a saner, more stable society? That vision will have gone with the winds of change. This turn-about in basic human values and morals has led to a steady unraveling of civilized standards and behavior, not only in the country but worldwide. Brutality, lust and all manner of other evils flourish around the globe; violence, vice and exploitation seem to have become the new order of the day. And fear hangs over the whole world. Those of us who are even slightly sensitive to the currents and energies around us realize that something is wrong-deeply, awfully wrong. And we carry the collective burden of humanity’s pain and turmoil deep within our hearts. Day by day the fear and uneasiness increases. Often we sense that we’re at the edge of a terrible and dangerous abyss, surrounded by intense darkness. As the end of this millennium approaches, predictions of a worldwide Armageddon-like catastrophe haunt our minds. And how can it be otherwise when we sense deep within ourselves that things have gone so wrong that such a crisis is due? For each day, new and deeper holes appear in the social and moral fabric of mankind, and it seem obvious that when the holes become more than the fabric itself, it’s past repair.” source: Suzanne Haneef, Islam: The Path of God, pages 11-12 (PDF Version) Written by an American Muslim, this work presents a brief yet comprehensive survey of the basic teachings on the significance of Islam's central concept, faith in and submission to God. It introduces the reader to how Muslims feel about various aspects of life, how they worship, and how Muslims living in the West practice their religion. Perhaps you have been hearing a lot about Islam and Muslims in the news and are interested in knowing, justifiably, just what this religion is all about. This is the classic English-language book for introducing Islam to non-Muslims in the West. It is a well-balanced book that does an excellent job of covering the basics of belief, practice, and culture, without overwhelming the reader in minutia. This is generally the first book that I recommend to people who are interested in learning about Islam. read her other book: What Everyone Should Know About Islam and Muslims
Suzanne Haneef (Islam: The Path of God)
And when we died, we simply vanished. A few generations would go by. And no one would know we even were. No one would remember the color of our eyes or the passion that raged inside us. Eventually, we all became stones in the grass, moss-covered monuments, and sometimes . . . not even that. Even if I returned to the life I’d lost in the lough, the book would still be gone. Thomas Smith would be gone—the slant of his words, the turn of his phrase, his hopes and his fears. His life. Gone. And the thought was unbearable to me.
Amy Harmon (What the Wind Knows)
There are encounters that change nothing. Urth turns her aged face to the sun and he beams upon her snows; they scintillate and coruscate until each little point of ice hanging from the swelling sides of the towers seems the Claw of the Conciliator, the most precious of gems. Then everyone except the wisest believes that the snow must melt and give way to a protracted summer beyond summer. Nothing of the sort occurs. The paradise endures for a watch or two, then shadows blue as watered milk lengthen on the snow, which shifts and dances under the spur of an east wind. Night comes, and all is at it was. My finding Triskele was like that. I felt that it could have and should have changed everything, but it was only the episode of a few months, and when it was over and he was gone, it was only another winter passed and the Feast of Holy Katharine come again, and nothing had changed.
Gene Wolfe (Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun, #1-2))