Horizontal Rain Quotes

Please stop shaking your rain water in my direction. What next? Are you going to come over here, cock your leg and urinate upon my person?

that special Manchester rain that manages to be both vertical and horizontal at the same time.

The return of the rain, beating out time on London's rooftops and pavements. Early morning Zombies sheltering beneath copies of the Standard whilst others ran screaming for cover in doorways because water from the heavens is holy and melts the undead.

Culloden, Scotland, April 1746 All around was the awful sound of moaning. It was not just mournful, but the sound of immense suffering, the cries of dying men. The battle had waged on, and the day was far spent. In dirt and blood, the soldiers waded on. Horizontal rain, snow, and wind made the normal battle conditions much worse. Near the edge of the field I stood holding a gun, pointing it at the lad who had once been my best friend. He was dressed in the red coat of a government soldier; I was not.

Imagine the slices of cheese are horizontal and mistakes are raining down from the top. Only mistakes which fall down through holes in every layer make it out the bottom to become accidents. The new element is that the cheese slices themselves are hot and parts of them are liable to drip down, causing new problems.

Do you hear that?” he says. “You mean the crashing thunder and pounding rain?” He shakes his head. I listen closely, trying to filter o ut the sounds of the storm. Then I hear it. A whooshing sound with a fast buzzing underne ath it. It’s so, so familiar but I can’t quite put my finger on it. A very definite blac k spot appears among the dark gray clouds. The spot lengthens horizontally. The puzzle pieces click into place and I get the full pictur e: Fighter jet. Headed straight for us. It could be a coincidence, right? F-22 Raptors fly low through giant thunderstorms over major metropolitan areas in the middle of the night a ll the time. Right. My illusions of a coincidence are shattered - by a mis sile flying straight at me. It would seem this guy has infrared, too. I mean, missiles? Really? Isn’t that a bit overkill? I start flying away, but Sani stops me. “Dive!

But I didn’t feel safer. Maybe it had nothing to do with Australia. Maybe it was just because the clock was ticking down on our mission and we were closer to Tuvalu than we’d ever been. Still, I’d noticed that in spite of the stress, I wasn’t ticking as much as usual. Instead of blinking or gulping, I was sparking more. I wondered if it was just because I was becoming more electric or if my Tourette’s was taking a different form. The weather might have had something to do with my anxiety as well. I think I might have a bit of SAD—seasonal affective disorder—which is just an Ostin way of saying I get blue when the skies aren’t blue. And the skies were definitely not blue. I don’t think that I’d ever seen it rain so hard in my life. Not in Idaho, at least. The rain was practically horizontal. It was a challenge getting Zeus off the plane. First, we couldn’t land because the runways were backed up because of lightning striking the tarmac. Then there was no hangar for the plane—so even if we had wanted to make a run for the terminal, Zeus still had to wait for a break in the weather, which, unfortunately, didn’t come until about

It was 12:08 a.m. I had just six minutes to get to the top of the lighthouse. I took off running up the rocks, trying to go as fast as I could while maintaining some sort of balance. When I got up to the lighthouse door, a loud explosion echoed through the sky behind me and I spun around. I shielded my eyes with my hand from the cold rain, which was now coming down harder than ever, as I looked at the interruption into the otherwise quiet Scottish night. Giant flames rose up into the air on the beach below the manor and two long lines of fire burst horizontally across the sky. The world was on fire.

But the worst that the wind did was to be the primary cause of a huge, vicious, boat-flipping, morale-shattering seaway. The helicopter pilots, who, while hovering, had to dodge them, said the waves were as high as fifty feet. If that estimate were true, it still misses the point, for the danger of the waves lay not in their height but in their shape. “At daybreak the seas were spectacular,” remembered Peter Bruce, a commander in the Royal Navy who was navigator in Eclipse. “They had become very large, very steep, and broke awkwardly, but the boat was handling well.” George Tinley, who had been so badly beaten around in his Windswept, later said, “There were seas coming at one angle with breakers on them, but there were seas coming at another angle also with breakers, and then there were the most fearsome things where the two met in the middle.” After the gale, Major Maclean vividly described the appearance of the waves at night: “All around were white horses with their spray flurrying horizontally and slashing against us with the added impetus of the occasional rain squalls. But these white horses were just the top of some monster waves which hunched up, their tops flaring with spume, and marched on leaving us high at one minute so we could glimpse around, and then bringing us some fifty feet down into their troughs so we could appreciate the enormity of the next wave following. Some waves had boiling foam all over them where they were moving through the break of a previous wave, or, when the foam had fizzled away, they were deep green from the disturbance of the water. Otherwise the sea was black.

One of his favorite examples, repeated several times in the thousands of pages of his writings, is of American experiments to bring rain in time of drought by shooting cannons into the air: a simple reorientation of aim from horizontal to vertical, from weapons of destruction to instruments of salvation. And this simple but radical change in orientation, from horizontal to vertical, returns throughout his writings to symbolize the reorientation needed in every field of activity: from a horizontal “zoomorphic” culture of human animals to a vertical, fully human stance of broad rational perspective; from a Ptolemaic, earth-centered worldview to a Copernican, cosmos-centered worldview; from the horizontal position of a body lying in its grave to the vertical position of the monument and mourner standing over that grave; from the horizontality of the railroad track to the verticality of the air balloon now and the spaceship tomorrow.

right now my mind is full of images, an overwhelming flood of memories and ideas—you have any idea how many memories are buried in the mind? Fishing for bluegill on Lake Argyle with my father, the hook caught in his thumb, forcing it through the other side and cutting it off with wirecutters, the severed barb flying dangerously into the air spinning its cut facet gleaming in the sun and I jerking back for fear it would plunge into my eye, squinting protectively, opening my eyes again it is mud, all mud, a universe of mud and the mortar shell has just taken flight, my fingers jammed into my ears, the smell of the explosion penetrating my sinuses making them clench up and bleed, the shell exploding in the trees, a puff of white smoke but the trees are still there and the gunfire still raining down like hailstones on the cellar door on the day that the tornado wrecked our farmhouse and we packed into my aunt’s fruit cellar and I looked up at the stacked mason jars of rhubarb and tomatoes and wondered what would happen to us when the glass shattered and flew through the air like the horizontal sleet of Soldier Field on the day that I caught five for eighty-seven yards and put such a hit on Cornelius Hayes that he took five minutes to get up. God, I can see my entire life!

HER FINGERS TOYED ABSENTLY WITH HER RINGS There are fallen angels in the way you look And great bridges over silent streams at your smile. Your gestures are a lonely princess dreaming over a book At a window over a lake, on some distant isle. If I were to stretch my hand and touch yours that would be Dawn behind the turrets of a city in some East. The words hidden in my gesture would be moonlight on the sea Of your being something in my soul like gaiety in a feast. Let your silence tell me of the numberless dreams that are you. Let the drooping of your eyelids prolong landscapes far away. The jets of water return on the listening of being untrue And this is the flower I pluck, with a sound, from what you unsay. Blossoms, blossoms, blossoms along the road of your going to speak. Eighteenth century gardens, so sad in the middle of our drearning them now, Are the way you are conscious of yourself on your eyelids, by your lips, through your cheek. A sick child sees the rain blur through the window of what you allow. Do not footfall the silence that is the palace where our consciousness Is living at seeing gardens our duplicate lives of one soul. What are we, in our dream of each other, but a picture which is The masterpiece of a painter that never painted at all? Fernando Pessoa, Poesia Inglesa (Organização e tradução de Luísa Freire. Prefácio de Teresa Rita Lopes.) Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1995.

The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On

firmly by the shoulders. Jon says, ‘How the hell did you ever get keys for this place?’ I chuckle, though there is really nothing to laugh about. It is the irony, I suppose. ‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’ The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to Jon, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can. The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor. Sally is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth. I grab Karen by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing. Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull my daughter off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination. We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air. I guide Karen away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth. She gasps, almost choking, and I feel her body next to mine, racked by sobs, as she

When I was three or four meters away, one of them stood. The others continued to squat, watching, alert for whatever distraction was promised. I had already noted the absence of any of the security cameras that were growing more pervasive in the streets and subways with every passing year. Sometimes I have to fight the feeling that those cameras are looking specifically for me. “Oi,” the one who had stood called out. Hey. I stole a quick glance behind me to ensure that we were alone. It wouldn’t pay to have anyone see what I would do if these idiots got in my way. Without altering my pace or direction, I looked into the chinpira’s eyes, my expression obsidian flat. I let him know with this look that I was neither afraid nor looking for trouble, that I’d done this kind of thing many times before, that if he was in search of some excitement tonight the smart thing would be to find it elsewhere. Most people, especially those even loosely acquainted with violence, understand these signals, and can be relied on to respond in ways that increase their survival prospects. But apparently this guy was too stupid, or too jacked on kakuseizai. Or he might have misinterpreted my initial backward glance as a sign of fear. Regardless, he ignored the warning I had given him and started edging into my path. I recognized the procedure: I was being interviewed for my suitability as a victim. Would I allow myself to be forced out into the street and the oncoming traffic? Would I cringe and flinch in the process? If so, he would know I was a safe target, and he would then escalate, probably to real violence. But I prefer my violence sudden. Keeping him to my right, I stepped past him with my left leg, shooting my right leg through on the same side immediately after and then sweeping it backward to reap his legs out from under him in osoto-gari, one of the most basic and powerful judo throws. Simultaneously I twisted counterclockwise and blasted my right arm into his neck, taking his upper body in the opposite direction of his legs. For a split instant he was suspended horizontally over the spot where he had been standing. Then I drilled him into the sidewalk, jerking his collar up at the last instant so the back of his head wouldn’t take excessive impact. I didn’t want a fatality. Too much attention.

Coorie has long been synonymous with nestling affectionately into a loved one, but only recently has it entered everyday parlance as a way to describe a scene. One equally warm and comforting where a cosy room lit by a flickering fire provides refuge from the banshee wind and horizontal rain outside.

The night rain sheeted the street, blowing almost horizontally with the gusts of wind.

Phragmipedium kovachii. It is a stunningly beautiful orchid from the Amazon rain forest in northeast Peru, with a blue-purple flower that can have a horizontal spread of up to nine and a half inches.