Lark Ascending Quotes

Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere to a higher plane, and purify yourself by drinking as if it were ambrosia the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness. Free from the futile strivings and the cares which dim existence to a realm of mist, happy is he who wings an upward way on mighty pinions to the fields of light; whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked, outreaches life and readily comprehends the language of flowers and of all mute things.

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself.

We won’t fade quietly into this darkness.

…as long as there were still cedar trees and dogs, I reckoned I had a reason to keep going.

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

She trekked back across the meadow and down through the trees in possession of the oldest secret known to man. She sat on the mooring stone and surrendered immediately to the down of night. She hadn't slept long before she suddenly jolted awake. Thought she had heard the sweet call of a lark ascending. Unaware that it was actually the sound of her soul awakening.

There was some comfort in knowing that, although the world was being torn in two, there were still remarkable things that went on being, that refused to lose their shine. Some days it was only the wonder that kept us going.

Zealots are always ready to take over. No one ever thought it could happen here, but we were overestimating human beings. Turns out it’s easy to convert more people to a cause that takes power from others, that thrives on meanness.

There is an animal in all of us who knows how to survive.

There is strength in numbers, but there is danger in it as well. Danger of one desiring a rise to power. Danger of many being blinded by one and doing his bidding.

There never was any hope,” Caesar muttered. “There was, before you destroyed it.

The world became smaller, yet louder.

I’d open my eyes and look out at the aching blue of the ocean–a color I had never seen in nature and that most likely only exists in the middle of the Atlantic, a gray blue like a storm cloud full of unspent lightning and unfallen rain.

I wasn’t just seasick; I was undone in sorrow.

I waited for hours, until the day bloomed and eased itself over the sea.

His man carried him. There was nothing but him and his man.

If we can’t trust a few people in this world, then there’s no point at all… It’s one of the things that gets us through.

The Lark Ascending”;

He grimaced back, and for a moment it was a little easier to pretend we both believed there’s be an “eventually” to look forward to.

Stars, Sam. We mucked it. I mean, I mucked it. And not just for us. Yet I recall pure joy: your bike hot between my legs, your arms locked ’round my waist. I recall poor Second’s chiding before I blinked it off. I recall laughter and all of those soldiers from someone else’s war standing on that terrace singing yet another Terran victory rag. You told me later that you didn’t know I’d make a run at the canyon wall ’til I torqued it, thumbing your bike’s twin throttles hard enough to singe our legs as the acceleration turned into an increasing roar. By the time we hit fifty, I couldn’t even hear you yelling at me to stop over the wind. I didn’t think you were serious. We’d climbed that mesa in daylight when we were younger, smaller, bendier. We’d done it with safety rails and belts, with hoverbikes that floated back down like carnival balloons when we failed; we’d done it with our parents cheering and a Grass Priest standing watch in case we needed healing. That run should’ve been a lark, Sam. But the night was dark as space, and our planet has no moon. You grabbed hard as I pulled the yoke. The engines screamed. I meant to pull up, climb that mesa vertically—see if we could rocket to the top before I gunned again like we’d done a hundred times as kids. But I timed it too late. I saw the mesa wall in our headlamps, and then everything went black. The next thing I recall is waking up on the Unity ship Ascendant with Ken’ri Mureen of Glos smiling down at me. Those big round eyes in her lovely, lying face. I thought I’d surely killed you, Sam, but Mureen swore you were fine. Mureen swore removing my Second was only temporary—swore surgery would fix the soup the crash had made of my brain. She made me sign forms, and then Ma came in with pastries. I still didn’t believe you’d made it out, but Ma swore it too. You know the gist after that—mostly—but there’s a lot I never told—

Don’t you have some songs, boyo?” she asked, after one of her songs. I didn’t know any of them all the way through, but I sang the verses and choruses of all the songs we used to sing back on the Preserve: “Angel from Montgomery,” “No Hard Feelings,” “You Got Gold,” “The Story.

The rapid, but uniform motions of the heavenly bodies, serve well enough to typify the grand and continuous motions of the Miltonic mind. But the wild, giddy, fantastic, capricious, incalculable, springing, vaulting, tumbling, dancing, waltzing, caprioling, pirouetting, sky-rocketing of the chamois, the harlequin, the Vestris, the storm-loving raven — the raven? no, the lark (for often he ascends " singing up to heaven's gates," but like the lark he dwells upon the earth), in short, of the Proteus, the Ariel, the Mercury, the monster — John Paul, can be compared to nothing in heaven or earth, or the waters under the earth, except to the motions of the same faculty as existing in Shakspere.

Despair changes the shape of a person’s mouth, the way they hold their bodies, how they look out onto the world. The eyes of the dead in a living person’s face.

somehow. Feeling like it all might be about to end. I had no idea that I stood on the hinge of my life that night, that by tomorrow everything would be completely different.

It is hard to say if a place makes people a particular way or if the kind of people who congregate there shape the place.

There is always someone who must rise to power, after all.

England is not flag or Empire, it is not money, it is not blood. It's limestone gorge and granite fell, it's Wealden clay and Severn mud, It's blackbird singing from the May tree, lark ascending through the scales, Robin watching from your spade and English earth beneath your nails.

The Chet Baker CD had finished, and Banks’s glass was empty. He wandered into the kitchen and refilled it, then went into the entertainment room again, where he programmed the system to play “Après un rêve” from the hoard of music on his computer. He had a vocal version by Véronique Gens, but he chose the violin version by Nicola Benedetti, whose poster Adrienne had on her wall. He added her Thaïs “Meditation” to the mini playlist, too, and stuck on Vaughan Williams’s “The Lark Ascending” and Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” just because he liked them so much. Those

September 7, 2011 at 4:04 PM "THE FORMULA OF LOVE" by Guru Jahseed on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 5:16pm WE ARE ALL GROWING AND WE ARE ALL MADE UP OF PURE LOVE BUT SEEMS LIKE BEINGS ARE STILL STUCK IN THIS 2D 3D REALM OF SELFISHNESS, WHEN WILL WE AS ASTRAL LIGHT COSMIC BEINGS SHOW AND REPRESENT OUR TRUE DIVINITY WITHIN, STILL COMPETITION, GREED, SELFISHNESS, MISTREATMENT TOWARDS OTHERS ARE STILL CAPTIVATED IN THE HEARTS OF MANY, LOTS OF BEINGS TALK THE TALK BUT IS STILL AFRAID TO WALK THE WALK, I'VE BEEN EXPOSED TO THIS WAY OF LIVING FOR SO LONG THAT IT SHOULD BE SECOND NATURE BUT WHEN YOU MAKE UP YOUR MIND AND LOOSE ALL ASPECTS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS THERE MUST BE A TRANSFORMATION WITH MIND, BODY, AND SELF THIS TRANSFORMATION ONE SHOULD UNDERSTAND IF WE AS COSMIC BEINGS SAY THAT WE ARE COSMIC LIGHT BEINGS AND THAT WE ARE ASCENDING AND OUR VIBRATION IS AT THE PEAK OF ASTRAL PROJECTION OF LOVE THAN WHY IS THERE STILL DISEASES IN THE HEARTS OF MANY, LETS ALL WALK THE WALK/TALK THE TALK AND SAY WHAT WE MEAN AND MEAN WHAT WE SAY LETS ALL SHOW UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IN WHICH THIS IS THE FORMULA WE ARE BIRTH WITH... "WHOEVER HOLDS THE FORMULA OF LOVE HOLDS THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE

No Poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it is the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan. He mentions some sixty species in total. He knows, for example, that the martlet builds its nest on exposed walls. Of the singing birds he notices the thrush and the ousel or blackbird. More ominous are the owl and raven, the crow and the maggot-pie. He knows them all, and has observed their course across the sky. The spectacle of birds entrances him. He cannot bear the thought of their being trapped, or caught, or snared. He loves free energy and movement, as if they were in some instinctive sympathy with his own nature.