Pale Rider Quotes

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

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
The moon went slowly down in loveliness; she departed into the depth of the horizon, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars appeared. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and the advent of the dawn declared itself in the newborn blue of heaven. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as in our tempestuous life the transitory wreaths of sleep brook upon a pain-racked soul, causing it to forget its sorrow. From the east to the west sped those angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain-top to mountain-top, scattering light from breast and wing. On they sped out of the darkness, perfect, glorious; on, over the quiet sea, over the low coast-line, and the swamps beyond, and the mountains above them; over those who slept in peace and those who woke in sorrow; over the evil and the good; over the living and the dead; over the wide world and all that breathes or as breathed thereon.
H. Rider Haggard (She: A History of Adventure (She, #1))
Don't you love being alive?" asked Miranda. "Don't you love weather and the colors at different times of the day, and all the sounds and noises like children screaming in the next lot, and automobile horns and little bands playing in the street and the smell of food cooking?" "I love to swim, too." said Adam. "So do I," said Miranda, "we never did swim together.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
A great fear came over me, and my body went entirely cold, and I stood as if paralyzed with fear; for I knew that the horse was no earthly horse, but the pale horse that will be sent at the Day of Reckoning, and the rider of it is Death; and it was Death himself who stood behind me, with his arms wrapped around me as tight as iron bands, and his lipless mouth kissing my neck as if in love. But as well as the horror, I also felt a strange longing.
Margaret Atwood (Alias Grace)
The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
[From Pale Horse, Pale Rider] The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . .
Katherine Anne Porter (The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter)
Banyak orang berpikir bahwa mimpi hanya dapat diraih kala ada uang. Padahal semangat, komitmen, dan kerja keras adalah modal yang paling utama.
Jeffrey Polnaja (Wind Rider - Menyerempet Bahaya Demi Perdamaian Dunia)
Shut your eyes,” said Miss Tanner. “Oh no,” said Miranda, “for then I see worse things…
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
The riders, too, were like nothing she had ever seen before: ethereal men and women with pale visages, their cheekbones so sharply sculpted that she could see their skulls through translucent skin. They surrounded her and looked at her with steely blue eyes, each gaze an arrow staking her to that spot, and she could not close her eyes though the sight of them made her eyes burn as if she were looking at the sun.
Malinda Lo (Ash)
the moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels)
What the Spanish flu taught us, in essence, is that another flu pandemic is inevitable, but whether it kills 10 million or 100 million will be determined by the world into which it emerges.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
One-fourth of humanity must be eliminated from the social body. We are in charge of God's selection process for planet Earth. He selects, we destroy. We are the riders of the pale horse, Death.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively. Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
No more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets, the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there would be time for everything.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels)
Hippocrates argued that the causes of disease were physical, and that they could be divined by observing a patient’s symptoms.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Most of the death occurred in the thirteen weeks between mid-September and mid-December 1918. It was broad in space and shallow in time, compared to a narrow, deep war.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World)
Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
He let out another chuckle, one that slithered up her spine and wrapped around her throat.
Jackie Morse Kessler (Rage (Riders of the Apocalypse, #2))
Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean? No more sleep. Where are are my boots and what horse shall I ride? Fiddler or Graylie or Miss Lucy with the long nose and the wicked eye? How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I just stared in amazement. 'It's in the gospel book,' he explained sheepishly, 'and it just cam to mind.
Bernard Cornwell (The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Stories, #2))
To try to prevent some of these problems, in 2015 the World Health Organization issued guidelines stipulating that disease names should not make reference to specific places, people, animals or food.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Strolling, keeping step, his stout polished well-made boots setting themselves down firmly beside her thin-soled black suede, they put off as long as they could the end of their moment together, and kept up as well as they could their small talk that flew back and forth over little grooves worn in the thin upper suface of the brain, things you could say and hear clink reassuringly at once without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty-four years old each, alive and on earth at the same moment: 'Are you in the mood for dancing, Miranda?' and 'I'm always in the mood for dancing, Adam!' but there were things in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.’” Vega
Amanda Hocking (Hollowland (The Hollows, #1))
On the flat expanse of pancake ice, War stood by the Pale Rider’s side. Though their forms did not touch, their shadows intertwined, black on black, in a smoky caress. “Knew you’d come,” Death said cheerfully. She smiled, and that slow motion of her lips hinted at many things. “The White Rider divided, and the world on the brink of destruction. How could I stay away?” “I could set my watch by you.” “You don’t have a watch.” Her smile broadened into a grin. “An hourglass, maybe . . .” “Please, not another joke about a scythe . . .” She mimed zipping her mouth shut. A pause, as they listened to the sounds of the boy healing and the man summoning doom. “I like him,” War said. Even though she hadn’t specified whether she meant the boy or the man, Death smiled and nodded. “Me too.” “You like everyone.” “Well, yes.” The two shared a quiet laugh, their voices mingling in perfect harmony. A longer pause, and then War asked, “What of Famine?” “What of her? She’s not mine. Not yet, anyway. She will be soon enough.” The Red Rider slid him a look. “That’s cold, even for you.” “Eh, just practical.” A shrug. “Everyone comes to me eventually. It’s the journey that makes it interesting.” “Such a people person!” He flashed her a grin. “My best quality.” “Oh,” said War, sliding her gloved hand into his pale one, “I can think of others that are better.
Jackie Morse Kessler (Loss (Riders of the Apocalypse, #3))
He really did look, Miranda thought, like a fine healthy apple this morning.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
For flu to spread, therefore, people must live fairly close together.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
that density–collectively called ‘social distancing’–can both bring it to an end sooner, and reduce the number of casualties.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Schools, theatres and places of worship were closed, the use of public transport systems was restricted and mass gatherings were banned.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
strategies have to be imposed in a top-down fashion. But
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
The tubercular Franz Kafka caught it in Prague on 14 October and, confined to his sickbed, witnessed the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from his window.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Wars, too, brought epidemics in their wake. Conflict makes people hungry and anxious; it uproots them, packs them into insanitary camps and requisitions their doctors.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
It makes them vulnerable to infection, and then it sets large numbers of them in motion so that they can carry that infection to new places.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
In August the flu returned transformed. This was the second and most lethal wave of the pandemic, and again by
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
When asked what was the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, almost nobody answers the Spanish flu.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
The bubonic form is characterised by telltale ‘buboes’, when lymph nodes swell painfully; the septicaemic form arises from an infection of the
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Lazarus, come forth. Not unless you bring me my top hat and stick. Stay where you are then, you snob. Not at all. I’m coming forth.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels)
It was the greatest tidal wave of death since the Black Death, perhaps in the whole of human history.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Memory is an active process. Details have to be rehearsed to be retained,
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Because the pale horse has been saddled, and the rider has put a foot in the stirrup.
Arkady Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic)
His voice, dark and velvety soft, intimate and yet cold: You have blood on your hands.
Jackie Morse Kessler (Rage (Riders of the Apocalypse, #2))
It was a fine night for treachery - dark with a pale moon rising.
Marsha Canham (Pale Moon Rider)
Cordon sanitaire. Isolation. Quarantine. These are age-old concepts that human beings have been putting into practice since long before they understood the nature of the agents of contagion, long before they even considered epidemics to be acts of God. In fact, we may have had strategies for distancing ourselves from sources of infection since before we were strictly human.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
...without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty four years old each, alive and on earth at the same moment: 'Are you in the mood for dancing?' and 'I'm always in the mood for dancing, Adam!' but there were things in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
Against other things it is possible to obtain security,’ wrote the Greek philosopher Epicurus in the third century BC, ‘but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
What Casanova’s finding meant was that, regardless of their culture, diet, social status or income, one in 10,000 people are particularly vulnerable to flu–a vulnerability that they inherit from their parents.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him.
Anonymous
Whereas a benign, seasonal virus produced a transient cytokine response and localised, superficial damage to the lung, the 1918 variety produced a strong, prolonged cytokine response and damage that was severe and deep.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
cities now became breeding grounds for crowd diseases, such that urban populations were unable to sustain themselves–they needed a constant influx of healthy peasants from the countryside to make up for the lives lost to infection.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Assuming that you had a place you could call home, the optimal strategy was to stay there (but not immure yourself), not answer the door (especially to doctors), jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help. Not only would this improve your own chances of staying alive, but if everyone did it, the density of susceptible individuals would soon fall below the threshold required to sustain the epidemic, and it would extinguish itself.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Are you seeing strange visions, diviner?” he cooed. “They are not real except to you. Calm your heart, let your breath flow free. You are safe with me, pale bird. Do not fly away.” His tone was so gentle that it almost calmed me, too.
Sarah K.L. Wilson (Dusk Covenant (Dragon School, #6))
Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50–100 million people, or between 2.5 and 5 per cent of the global population–a range that reflects the uncertainty that still surrounds it.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
It had long been assumed that school-age children represented ideal vectors of infection, because they are among the preferred victims of seasonal flu, they meet and mingle on a daily basis, and their snot control has a tendency to be suboptimal.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
The Swiss-born architect known as Le Corbusier retreated to his rooms in Paris and sipped cognac and smoked through the worst of the pandemic, while cogitating on how to revolutionise the way people lived (though he hadn’t even a diploma in architecture).
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Upon the death from flu of one German immigrant to America, for example, his widow and son received a sum of money. They invested it in property, and today the immigrant’s grandson is a property magnate purportedly worth billions. His name is Donald Trump.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Hippocrates argued that the causes of disease were physical, and that they could be divined by observing a patient’s symptoms. He and his disciples introduced a system for classifying diseases, which is why he is often referred to as the father of western medicine: he was responsible for the notions of diagnosis and treatment that still underpin medicine today (he also left us with a code of medical ethics, the Hippocratic Oath, from which we have the promise made by newly qualified doctors to ‘do no harm’).
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
One 2007 study showed that public health measures such as banning mass gatherings and imposing the wearing of masks collectively cut the death toll in some American cities by up to 50 per cent (the US was much better at imposing such measures than Europe). The timing of the measures was critical, however. They had to be introduced early, and kept in place until after the danger had passed. If they were lifted too soon, the virus was presented with a fresh supply of immunologically naive hosts, and the city experienced a second peak of death.9
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World)
Blue darkened to black. The black first appeared at the extremities–the hands and feet, including the nails–stole up the limbs and eventually infused the abdomen and torso. As long as you were conscious, therefore, you watched death enter at your fingertips and fill you up.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown. For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still! And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride; And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. And there lay the rider distorted and pale, With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail: And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown. And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal; And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
null
he took three potentially life-saving decisions. First, he eliminated rush hour by staggering the opening times of factories, shops and cinemas. Second, he established a clearing-house system under which 150 emergency health centres were set up across the city to coordinate the care and reporting of the sick. And third and most controversially, he kept the schools open.12
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean?
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
The moon went slowly down in chastened loveliness, she departed like some sweet bride into her chamber, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars peeped shyly out. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and then the quivering footsteps of the dawn came rushing across the new-born blue, and shook the planets from their places.
H. Rider Haggard (She (She, #1))
The last time he saw her before she returned to Mexico she was coming down out of the mountains riding very stately and erect out of a rainsquall building to the north and the dark clouds towering above her. She rode with her hat pulled down in the front and fastened under her chin with a drawtie and as she rode her black hair twisted and blew about her shoulders and the lightning fell silently through the black clouds behind her and she rode all seeming unaware down through the low hills while the first spits of rain blew on the wind and onto the upper pasturelands and past the pale and reedy lakes riding erect and stately until the rain caught her up and shrouded her figure away in that wild summer landscape: real horse, real rider, real land and sky and yet a dream withal.
Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses by Cormac Mc Carthy: Teacher Guide (Novel Units))
A bedraggled woman stood on his doorstep in the pouring rain, and his first impulse was to slam the door in her face. But she had clearly come as far as she could; her pale face was twisted in pain, and she shivered convulsively beneath a denim jacket that was as soaking wet as the rest of her. Long black strands of hair hung down in twisted ribbons like seaweed in the vanishing daylight, reminding him of a sea creature he'd once dated briefly in his more adventurous youth.
Deborah Blake (Dangerously Charming (Broken Riders, #1))
In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now. They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)
He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in Spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead. In four days' riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been…..The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. He touched the horse with his heels and rode on. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.
Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses (The Border Trilogy, #1))
Your best chance of survival was to be utterly selfish. Assuming that you had a place you could call home, the optimal strategy was to stay there (but not immure yourself), not answer the door (especially to doctors), jealously guard your hoard of food and water, and ignore all pleas for help. Not only would this improve your own chances of staying alive, but if everyone did it, the density of susceptible individuals would soon fall below the threshold required to sustain the epidemic, and it would extinguish itself.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
One 2007 study showed that public health measures such as banning mass gatherings and imposing the wearing of masks collectively cut the death toll in some American cities by up to 50 per cent (the US was much better at imposing such measures than Europe). The timing of the measures was critical, however. They had to be introduced early, and kept in place until after the danger had passed. If they were lifted too soon, the virus was presented with a fresh supply of immunologically naive hosts, and the city experienced a second peak of death.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Fabrice had gone no more than five hundred paces when his nag stopped dead: a corpse lay right across the path, striking horror into both horse and rider. Fabrice’s face, naturally very pale, turned a pronounced shade of green; the canteen-keeper, after looking at the dead body, said, as if to herself, ‘It’s not from our division.’ Then, turning her gaze upon our hero, she burst out laughing. ‘Haha! me dear!’ she cried, ‘Tasty, ain’t it!’ Fabrice remained frozen. What he was most struck by was the filthy state of the feet of the corpse, which had been stripped of its shoes and of everything except an awful pair of trousers badly stained with blood.
Stendhal (The Charterhouse of Parma)
The new collectives that farming supported gave rise to new diseases–the so-called ‘crowd diseases’ such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza. Humans had always been susceptible to infectious disease–leprosy and malaria were causing misery long before the farming revolution–but these were adapted to surviving in small, dispersed human populations. Among their tricks for doing so were not conferring total immunity on a recovered host, so that he or she could be infected again, and retreating to another host–a so-called ‘animal reservoir’–when humans were scarce. Both strategies helped ensure that they maintained a sufficiently large pool of susceptible hosts.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
It is often said that the First World War killed Romanticism and faith in progress, but if science facilitated industrial-scale slaughter in the form of the war, it also failed to prevent it in the form of the Spanish flu. The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the Second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It ushered in universal healthcare and alternative medicine, our love of fresh air and our passion for sport, and it was probably responsible, at least in part, for the obsession of twentieth-century artists with all the myriad ways in which the human body can fail. ‘Arguably
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
It was a fascinating hint that flu might have a heritable component, but other studies failed to replicate the finding. Then in January 2011, in the midst of the annual flu season in France, a two-year-old girl was admitted to the intensive care unit of the Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris, suffering from ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome). Doctors saved her life, and one of them, Jean-Laurent Casanova, sequenced her genome. He wanted to know if it held the key to why an otherwise healthy child had nearly died of a disease that most children shrug off. It turned out that the girl had inherited a genetic defect that meant she was unable to produce interferon, that all-important first-line defence against viruses. As a result, her besieged immune system went straight to plan B: a massive inflammatory response similar to the one pathologists saw in 1918.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
All about the hills the hosts of Mordor raged. The Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea. The sun gleamed red, and under the wings of the Nazgul the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth. Aragorn stood beneath his banner, silent and stern, as one lost in thought of things long past or far away; but his eyes gleamed like stars that shine the brighter as the night deepens. Upon the hill-top stood Gandalf, and he was white and cold and no shadow fell on him. The onslaught of Mordor broke like a wave on the beleaguered hills, voices roaring like a tide amid the wreck and crash of arms. As if to his eyes some sudden vision had been given, Gandalf stirred; and he turned, looking back north where the skies were pale and clear. Then he lifted up his hands and cried in a loud voice ringing above the din: The Eagles are coming! And many voices answered crying: The Eagles are coming! The Eagles are coming! The hosts of Mordor looked up and wondered what this sign might mean. There came Gwaihir the Windlord, and Landroval his brother, greatest of all the Eagles of the North, mightiest of the descendants of old Thorondor, who built his eyries in the inaccessible peaks of the Encircling Mountains when Middle-earth was young. Behind them in long swift lines came all their vassals from the northern mountains, speeding on a gathering wind. Straight down upon the Nazgul they bore, stooping suddenly out of the high airs, and the rush of their wide wings as they passed over was like a gale. But the Nazgul turned and fled, and vanished into Mordor's shadows, hearing a sudden terrible call out of the Dark Tower; and even at that moment all the hosts of Mordor trembled, doubt clutched their hearts, their laughter failed, their hands shook and their limbs were loosed. The Power that drove them on and filled them with hate and fury was wavering, its will was removed from them; and now looking in the eyes of their enemies they saw a deadly light and were afraid. Then all the Captains of the West cried aloud, for their hearts were filled with a new hope in the midst of darkness. Out from the beleaguered hills knights of Gondor, Riders of Rohan, Dunedain of the North, close-serried companies, drove against their wavering foes, piercing the press with the thrust of bitter spears. But Gandalf lifted up his arms and called once more in a clear voice: 'Stand, Men of the West! Stand and wait! This is the hour of doom.' And even as he spoke the earth rocked beneath their feet. Then rising swiftly up, far above the Towers of the Black Gate, high above the mountains, a vast soaring darkness sprang into the sky, flickering with fire. The earth groaned and quaked. The Towers of the Teeth swayed, tottered, and fell down; the mighty rampart crumbled; the Black Gate was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds, there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise. 'The realm of Sauron is ended!' said Gandalf. 'The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest.' And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell. The Captains bowed their heads...
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3))
I meant what I said about sex.” His hand slid all the way up her leg, pushing what little skirt was still covering her out of the way, holding it in a bunch at her belly button. Her nudity was fully exposed to his gaze and he looked his fill, breathing out hard. “Who said anything about sex?” He leaned in, his mouth dropping to the pale slice of skin between where his hand held her skirt and the thatch of hair between her legs. She wasn’t trimmed as was the fashion among the women he usually took to his bed but Troy was not a fussy guy and here, under the stars, his head filling with the musky scent of her arousal, au naturel seemed fitting. The ragged pant of her breathing stuttered into the air as he lazily stroked his tongue down. Down. Down. Down. She roused. Shifted. Raised herself up on her elbows, her abs tightening, her thighs tensing. “I think you’ll find that still counts,” she said, obviously throwing one last-ditch effort into denying herself the pleasure she so clearly craved. He chuckled low, his warm breath fanning her belly, satisfied to feel gooseflesh stippling the soft skin. “If you think this is sex, you need to read some more textbooks, doc.
Amy Andrews (Troy (American Extreme Bull Riders Tour, #5))
Bells Screamed all off key, wrangling together as they collided in midair, horns and whistles mingled shrilly with cries of human distress; sulphur-colored light ex-ploded through the black windowpane and flashed away in darkness. Miranda waking from a dreamless sleep asked without expecting an answer, “What is happening?” for there was a bustle of voices and footsteps in the corridor, and a sharpness in the air; the far clamour went on, a furious exasperated shrieking like a mob in revolt. The light came on, and Miss Tanner said in a furry voice, “Hear that? They’re celebrating . It’s the Armistice. The war is over, my dear.” Her hands trembled. She rattled a spoon in a cup, stopped to listen, held the cup out to Miranda. From the ward for old bedridden women down the hall floated a ragged chorus of cracked voices singing, “My country, ’tis of thee…” Sweet land… oh terrible land of this bitter world where the sound of rejoicing was a clamour of pain, where ragged tuneless old women, sitting up waiting for their evening bowl of cocoa, were singing, “Sweet land of Liberty-” “Oh, say, can you see?” their hopeless voices were asking next, the hammer strokes of metal tongues drowning them out. “The war is over,” said Miss Tanner, her underlap held firmly, her eyes blurred. Miranda said, “Please open the window, please, I smell death in here.
Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider)
Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilization is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whalebone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort--sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. 'And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!' The waves broke on the shore.
Virginia Woolf (The Waves)
The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the grey riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a pipping of boneflutes and dropping down off the side of their mounts with one heel hung in the the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, ridding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair beneath their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodsoaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
The fleabitten grey mare's short legs are slightly over at the knee, she has a Roman nose and a neck of solid muscle well-practiced at pulling her rider out of the saddle. Her head is up and a layer of sweat darkens her pale shoulders, but Alec’s holding his reins tight and he’s maintaining control. All the riders who have gone before on beautifully turned out, well-schooled ponies were merely passengers as their ponies jumped. Alec has harnessed the raw talent of his mare, her power barely held in check as the bell rings and he canters her around towards the first jump. Jess strains against the martingale as she charges towards the first fence and with one strong push off her hocks, flies over the jump with her knees tucked into her chest.
Kate Lattey (Flying Changes (Clearwater Bay, #1))
On, on we went, till at last the east began to blush like the cheek of a girl. Then there came faint rays of primrose light, that changed presently to golden bars, through which the dawn glided out across the desert. The stars grew pale and paler still, till at last they vanished; the golden moon waxed wan, and her mountain ridges stood out against her sickly face like the bones on the cheek of a dying man. Then came spear upon spear of light flashing far away across the boundless wilderness, piercing and firing the veils of mist, till the desert was draped in a tremulous golden glow, and it was day.
H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines (Annotated))
Experience has shown that people have a low tolerance for mandatory health measures, and that such measures are most effective when they are voluntary, when they respect and depend on individual choice, and when they avoid the use of police powers. In 2007, the CDC issued guidelines for how to ensure maximum compliance with public health measures in a pandemic. Based partly on lessons learned in 1918, these recommended that measures only be made mandatory when the proportion of the sick who die rises above 1 per cent (remember that this proportion was at least 2.5 per cent for the Spanish flu). Using 2016 numbers, that means that more than 3 million Americans would have to die before the CDC would advise such a step – a measure of how counterproductive that organisation believes compulsion to be.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World)
The public might instinctively feel that something is wrong, but because of the technical nature of the silent weapon, they cannot express their feeling in a rational way. . . . They do not know how to cry for help, and do not know how to associate with others to defend themselves against it.
Mark Jacobson (Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America)
will
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
four criteria he had laid down for establishing that a particular microbe causes a particular
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
disease: the microbe must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
doctors’ dilemma in 1918: they did not know the cause of flu, so they could not diagnose it with certainty.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Typhus is transmitted by lice, which means that it spreads much less easily than breath-borne flu.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
his ‘theory of happenings’, the British malaria expert and Nobel laureate Ronald Ross had come up with a set of differential equations that could help determine, at any given time, the proportion of a
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
An epidemic will run its course and vanish on its own, without intervention, but measures that reduce
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Public information campaigns advised people to use handkerchiefs
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
crowds, but to keep their windows open (because germs were known to breed in warm, humid conditions).
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Japan this probably marked the beginning of the practice of mask-wearing to protect others from one’s
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
use of disinfectant too. In late October 1918, well into the autumn wave–when metro stations
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
The closing of schools was therefore a knee-jerk reaction, in case of a flu epidemic, and so it was in 1918.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
the secondary bacterial infections that caused the pneumonia that killed so many patients.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
the ones that kept the sick and the healthy apart–worked, as long as people complied.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
First, the collective may have competing priorities–the need to make money, say, or the need to raise an army–and deny or water down the authority’s
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
the flu was practically absent from school-age children that
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
(There may be another reason why Ranger proposed a feminised history of the Spanish flu: it was generally women who nursed the ill. They were the ones who registered the sights and sounds of the sickroom, who laid out the dead and took in the orphans. They were the link between the personal and the collective.) At the root of every pandemic is an encounter between a disease-causing microorganism and a human being.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
Like humans, flu carries information about its origins within itself. Both of us are living records of our evolutionary past.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
This is where the flu story becomes interesting, however, because being a parasite, its survival depends both on its own behaviour and on that of its host. And though for a long time scientists were in the dark about flu’s past, they knew a few things about what humans were doing before 412 BC.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)
The natural reservoir of influenza is generally considered to be birds, especially waterbirds. The big giveaway that a certain species plays the role of reservoir for a certain pathogen is that it doesn’t get sick from it.
Laura Spinney (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World)