Quartz Quotes

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.” “But what if he is your friend?” Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. “Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?” “You ask a question that philosophers argue over,” Chiron had said. “He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?” We had been silent. We were fourteen, and these things were too hard for us. Now that we are twenty-seven, they still feel too hard. He is half of my soul, as the poets say. He will be dead soon, and his honor is all that will remain. It is his child, his dearest self. Should I reproach him for it? I have saved Briseis. I cannot save them all. I know, now, how I would answer Chiron. I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘life and no escape.

With a chaste heart With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty Holding the leash of blood So that it might leap out and trace your outline Where you lie down in my Ode As in a land of forests or in surf In aromatic loam, or in sea music Beautiful nude Equally beautiful your feet Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound Your ears, small shells Of the splendid American sea Your breasts of level plentitude Fulfilled by living light Your flying eyelids of wheat Revealing or enclosing The two deep countries of your eyes The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of Burnished gold Fine alabaster To sink into the two grapes of your feet Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises Flowering fire Open chandelier A swelling fruit Over the pact of sea and earth From what materials Agate? Quartz? Wheat? Did your body come together? Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills The cleavage of one petal Sweet fruits of a deep velvet Until alone remained Astonished The fine and firm feminine form It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body Yet suffocate itself So much is clarity Taking its leave of you As if you were on fire within The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

She was a diamond in a quarry full of quartz.

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift, The road is forlorn all day, Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift, And the hoof-prints vanish away. The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee, Expend their bloom in vain. Come over the hills and far with me, And be my love in the rain.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, And Yesterday, or Centuries before? The Feet, mechanical, go round – Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone – This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Don't forget about the stardust. Don't forget about the quartz rocks in the woods. You are small. But you are also so much more.

You're not a thing in the dark," Kelly said under his breath. "No." Nick clutched his fingers tighter. "But I can be." Kelly stared at him for a long time, nodding, blue-gray eyes turning to quartz granite. "Then we'll be things in the dark together.

It always puzzled Billy that so many of his most fond and formative memories took place in winter. The fact was that he never liked this season, except as a young child when falling white flakes were magical, and the sun on the snow-covered baseball fields in the park was the color of light through quartz.

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimson-weed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping Charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother’s hand on your check. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A Sunflower, four more one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

His plate was full but his fists sat motionless like two dark quartz stones on either side of it.

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

you need not bleed for me. you need not leave fruit at my altar. i accept no blood oaths, no special offerings. my loyalty to you is not something you can spell out of thin air with a rose quartz & a pink candle. when it’s there, it’s there—no exceptions. it will never allow itself to fade, either.- the most powerful witch couldn’t banish it.

If an evil spirit had to hide from God, it would hide in a diamond. If an angel had to hide from the Devil, it would hide in rose quartz.

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers. Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.

The palace was beautiful and cold. Each room was different, displaying one rich color after another. Wide pillars and reliefs decorated each room, quartz giving way to marble, marble giving way to onyx, malachite, and granite. While the memory of Mount Olympus from her one childhood visit was hazy, she most clearly remembered the stark white walls and absence of color. The Palace of Hades was its opposite and spoke to its master's dominion over everything that lay within the earth.

But I was also becoming aware of the changes in my own energy as I walked over different kinds of terrain. Sometimes there was clay under my feet, sometimes iron ore, sometimes quartz or copper. I wanted to try to understand the connections between human energy and the earth itself. In

How can I number the worlds to which the eye gives me entry? - the world of light, of colour, of shape, of shadow: of mathematical precision in the snowflake, the ice formation, the quartz crystal, the patterns of stamen and petal: of rhythm in the fluid curve and plunging line of the mountain faces. Why some blocks of stone, hacked into violent and tortured shapes, should so profoundly tranquillise the mind I do not know. Perhaps the eye imposes its own rhythm on what is only a confusion: one has to look creatively to see this mass of rock as more than jag and pinnacle - as beauty. Else why did men for so many centuries think mountains repulsive? A certain kind of consciousness interacts with the mountain-forms to create this sense of beauty. Yet the forms must be there for the eye to see. And forms of a certain distinction: mere dollops won't do it. It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

Petulance is not wit, although a few grains of wit may be found in petulance; quartz is not gold, although a few grains of gold may be found in quartz.

You're elegance in a misunderstood form. Crystal quartz in a world of platinum. Oh, my dizzy boy, there's a fire in you that I use to warm my hands on chilly mornings.

She remembers these as happy times - tomboy days, when she still glittered like quartz in her father's eye. Until puberty came along, as puberty will, and shattered the cosy sense of conspiracy.

Pink, the color of rose quartz, is a color with a harmonizing, loving vibration. The color and the physical makeup of this kind of quartz combine to make it a powerful force for drawing love into your life. Likewise, the color green has a vibrational resonance with abundance. Therefore, some green stones, such as bloodstone, are particularly good for spellwork involving matters of prosperity.

How could I forget. I was her ghost daughter, sitting at empty tables with crayons and pens while she worked on a poem, a girl malleable as white clay. Someone to shape, instruct in the ways of being her. She was always shaping me. She showed me an orange, a cluster of pine needles, a faceted quartz, and made me describe them to her. I couldn’t have been more than three or four. My words, that’s what she wanted. ”What’s this?” she kept asking. ”What’s this?” But how could I tell her? She’d taken all the words. The smell of tuberoses saturated the night air, and the wind clicked through the palms like thoughts through my sleepless mind. Who am I? I am a girl you don’t know, mother. The silent girl in the back row of the classroom, drawing in notebooks. Remember how they didn’t know if I even spoke English when we came back to the country? They tested me to find out if I was retarded or deaf. But you never asked why. You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words. I thought of Yvonne in our room, asleep, thumb in mouth, wrapped around her baby like a top. ”I can see her,” you said. You could never see her, Mother. Not if you stood in that room all night. You could only see her plucked eyebrows, her bad teeth, the books that she read with the fainting women on the covers. You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong, that’s why she was pregnant again. You could judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren’t real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy playing guitar, you’d have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.

Like a god, like an ogre? The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

Crystal skulls are a metaphor that reality is a consciousness hologram through which we experience virtually.

Enough to snuff the quick Of her small heat out, but before the weight Of stones and hills of stones could break Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light She turned back.

Polished round and smooth as marbles or lozenges of stone veined and striped. Black disclets and bits of polished quartz all bright from the mist off the river.

Sphinx of the Black Quartz, judge my vow,

Even in her nightgown, without her makeup on, Aracely was a slice of color against the window. Her hair was as bright as the fruit of a nectarine. The brown of her skin looked like raw gold stripped from quartz. And she stood tall enough that she looked like she could meet the gaze of the sky out on the horizon.

What do you know about me? What do you know about love that comes into a life in which everything has become questionable? What is your cheap intoxication compared to that? When falling and falling suddenly changes, when the endless Why becomes the final You, when like a fata morgana above the desert of silence feeling suddenly arises, takes shape, and inexorably the delusion of the blood becomes a landscape compared with which all dreams are pale and commonplace? A landscape of silver, a city of filigree and rose quartz, shining like the bright reflection of blooming blood—what do you know about it? Do you think that one can talk about it so easily? That a glib tongue can quickly press it into a cliché of words or even of feelings? What do you know about graves that open and how one stands in dread of the many colorless empty nights of yesterday—yet they open and no skeletons now lie bleaching there, only earth is there, earth, fertile seeds, and already the first green. What do you know about that? You love the intoxication, the conquest, the Other You that wants to die in you and that will never die, you love the stormy deceit of the blood, but your heart will remain empty because one cannot keep anything that does not grow from within oneself. And not much can grow in a storm. It is in the empty nights of loneliness that it grows, if one does not despair. What do you know about it?

keep this / with you / it is part / of your story / sometimes / to remember / a wound / is the way / of healing

Until I met Annick I’d always been certain that the edgy cynicism and disbelief in which I dealt, plus a cowed trust in the word of any imaginative writer, were the only tools for the painful, wrenching extraction of truths from the surrounding quartz of hypocrisy and deceit. The pursuit of truth had always seemed something combative. Now, not exactly in a flash, but over a few weeks, I wondered if it weren’t something both higher – above the supposed conflict – and simpler, attainable not through striving but a simple inward glance.

Your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest—and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and sprays of gold. Sometimes

It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? […] We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.

I turn and walk back to the home shore whose tall yellow bluffs still bare of snow I can see nearly half a mile to the north. I find my way as I came, over dusty sandbars and by old channels, through shrubby stands of willows. The cold, late afternoon sun breaks through its cloud cover and streaks the grey sand mixed with snow. As it has fallen steadily in the past weeks, the river has left behind many shallow pools, and these are now roofed with ice. When I am close to the main shore I come upon one of them, not far from the wooded bank. The light snow that fell a few days ago has blown away; the ice is polished and is thick enough to stand on. I can see to the bottom without difficulty, as through heavy dark glass. I bend over, looking at the debris caught there in the clear, black depth of the ice: I see a few small sticks, and many leaves. There are alder leaves, roughly toothed and still half green; the more delicate birch leaves and aspen leaves, the big, smooth poplar leaves, and narrow leaves from the willows. They are massed or scattered, as they fell quietly or as the wind blew them into the freezing water. Some of them are still fresh in color, glowing yellow and orange; others are mottled with grey and brown. A few older leaves lie sunken and black on the silty bottom. Here and there a pebble of quartz is gleaming. But nothing moves there. It is a still, cold world, something like night, with its own fixed planets and stars.

I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there.

White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz—in lumps that took the light reflected into the painting and made it dance.3

The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.

Image the whole, then execute the parts— Fancy the fabric Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz Ere mortar dab brick!

I had a soul that was veined like granite. Light parts, black parts, quartz, and impurities combined.

Marriage is a jewellery box which, by some mysterious opposite of alchemy, turns gold, silver and diamonds back into base metal, paste and quartz.

And this is Los Angeles, a town full of oracles, con men, real estate speculators, all high on self-delusion, self-gratification, marijuana, and a shitload of quartz.

meteoroid had hit with such force it melted the ground around it, making it look like foundry slag. The heat turned quartz intrusions in the bedrock into chunks of colored glass. The Dry Valleys We went on like this for hours, as though there was no being done with the astonishment landscapes might offer us, or to the potential for any seemingly inconsequential thing out there to startle and inform, or

for the ocean so loved / the quartz / feldspar / the tiny homes of tiny creatures / that she ground them / into sand / to keep them close / to kiss them with / well / i suppose you would call it / a mouth

Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed. It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook. It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor. The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one. As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude. There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images. Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly... Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle. Nanny grinned. 'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over.

The light sleeps under the skin of the rive stone. What brings out the fire in the feldspar the tiger in the agate the rose in the quartz is the persistence of desire. The intractable will of light invisible things!

What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good.

Some 80 percent of the world’s high-quality quartz that ultimately makes up electronic-grade silicon comes from a single mine in North Freakin’ Carolina. Want to remain modern? You pretty much must get along well with the Americans. They will soon have something they have never had: resource control over the base material of the Digital Age. (They’re also going to do pretty well dominating the overall high-end semiconductor space, but that particular breakdown is in the next chapter.)

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. 'No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.' 'But what if he is your friend?' Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. 'Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?' 'You ask a question that philosophers argue over,' Chiron had said. 'He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else's friend and brother. So which life is more important?

Using this same principle, we can also use specific gems or gem elixirs to energize and rebalance the individual chakras. Dark opal and tiger's eye help to rebalance the base chakra. Fire agate works on the second chakra. The solar plexus and third chakra are aided by quartz and pearl. Ruby and emerald stimulate the heart chakra. Lapis lazuli is good for the throat chakra. Quartz resonates with both the pituitary and pineal glands, or sixth and seventh chakras. Diamond is beneficial for the crown chakra.18

And time is something we made up. Digital clocks, quartz watches, atomic clocks don’t measure ‘time’ they are just devices that exhibit change. Clocks are navigational devices that we morphed into devices that somehow allow us to control time. However no matter how you ‘change’ a clock or a watch - you can make a clock slower or faster, put it ahead or back – it doesn’t affect the sunrise, or the galaxy speed, or death (or taxes). It’s just a game. Change is a constant. Whatever you do – change happens. Time Control

Juliette set her jaw and strode across the green-quartz floor to Joaquín’s side. She tapped one of the men fighting him on the shoulder. When he turned, she ripped out his throat with one clawed hand. “Maybe take them alive!” said Alec. “Not that guy, obviously.

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone. In any case, forty thousand years ago, we left painted handprints on the cave walls of Lascaux, Ardennes, Chauvet. The black pigment used to paint the animals at Lascaux was made of manganese dioxide and ground quartz; and almost half the mixture was calcium phosphate. Calcium phosphate is produced by heating bone four hundred degrees Celsius, then grinding it. We made our paints from bones of the animals we painted. No image forgets this origin.

One of the wilder proselytizers, a Scandinavian geologist Henrick Steffens, was said to have stated that ‘The diamond is a piece of carbon that has come to its sense.’ To which a Scottish geologist, probably John Playfair gave the legendary reply, ‘Then a quartz, therefore, must be a diamond run mad.

There was no ‘linkage’, in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget.

The truly perfect pangram would contain all the letters of the alphabet in the right order, but the only thing that achieves that is the alphabet. There are phrases that use fewer characters, but they are not as catchy. And this is not for want of trying. Here are two of the shortest: 'Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim.' 'Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow.

Postcolonial Love Poem (excerpt) I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, Can stop the bleeding-most people forgot this When the war ended. The war ended Depending on which war you mean: those we started, Before those, millennia ago and onward, Those which started me, which I lost and won- Those ever-blooming wounds. --- There are wildflowers in my desert which take up to twenty years to bloom. The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them in its copper current, opens them with memory— they remember what their god whispered into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life. Where your hands have been are diamonds on my shoulders, down my back, thighs- I am your culebra. I am in the dirt for you. Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous, two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood- the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea. --- The rain will eventually come, or not. Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds- The war never ended and somehow begins again.

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, void of all humanly qualities, even the categories of scientific description. ...... I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.

When they reached the Gate at the heart of the Old Square, its quartz archway as clear as a frozen pond, the sun was just hitting its upper edge, refracting and casting small rainbows against one of the buildings flanking it. On Summer Solstice, when the sun lined up perfectly with the Gate, it filled the entire square with rainbows, so many that it was like walking inside a diamond.

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)

I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash. Morrow Mayo

The sun was up and I want to say that it was golden, but it wasn't golden, it was the color of treacle. I want to say the grass was green, but it wasn't, it was turquoise, the color of a quarry pool. The rocks were lion-colored and glimmered with quartz, and the sky I wanted to call blue was in reality lilac. And the colors were moist. It was as much as I could do to prevent myself from getting off the horse and putting my hands into these colors, to see if they would come off on my fingers.

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.” “But what if he is your friend?” Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. “Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?” “You ask a question that philosophers argue over,” Chiron had said. “He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?

the absolute lowest grade for silicon as an actual industrial input is 99.95 percent pure. Getting there requires a blast furnace, which typically requires a lot of coal. Overall, the process isn’t all that complicated—you basically just bake the quartz until anything that is not silicon burns away—which means some 90 percent of this firststep processing tends to be done in countries like Russia and China, countries with a lot of surplus industrial capacity that don’t give two shits about environmental issues.

Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worth crisis period since the early Depression.

I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.

The memory was gone. The hole I had made for it had fallen in on itself; moon-bright roots clung to the sides, forming a tunnel veined with quartz. “Is that how--” Kamala began. “Yes,” I said, pushing her back, “get in, get in!” “I don’t like being underground.” “Not the time!” I said. I squatted to the ground, kicking my legs into the hole, and suppressed a shiver. It was cold and damp. But not like dirt. Like sweat-covered skin cooling in the wind. “Ready?” “Absolutely not--” I grabbed hold of her reins. “Not looking for an answer.” And then we slid forth.

Julius explained that the palace rooms where they stood were called Wunderkammers, or wonder rooms. Souvenirs of nature, of travels across continents and seas; jewels and skulls. A show of wealth, intellect, power. The first room had rose-colored glass walls, with rubies and garnets and bloodred drapes of damask. Bowls of blush quartz; semiprecious stone roses running the spectrum of red down to pink, a hard, glittering garden. The vaulted ceiling, a feature of all the ten rooms Julius and Cymbeline visited, was a trompe l'oeil of a rosy sky at down, golden light edging the morning clouds. The next room was of sapphire and sea and sky; lapis lazuli, turquoise and gold and silver. A silver mermaid lounged on the edge of a lapis lazuli bowl fashioned in the shape of an ocean. Venus stood aloft on the waves draped in pearls. There were gold fish and diamond fish and faceted sterling silver starfish. Silvered mirrors edged in silvered mirror. There were opals and aquamarines and tanzanite and amethyst. Seaweed bloomed in shades of blue-green marble. The ceiling was a dome of endless, pale blue. A jungle room of mica and marble followed, with its rain forest of cats made from tiger's-eye, yellow topaz birds, tortoiseshell giraffes with stubby horns of spun gold. Carved clouds of smoky quartz hovered over a herd of obsidian and ivory zebras. Javelinas of spotted pony hide charged tiny, life-sized dik-diks with velvet hides, and dazzling diamond antlers mingled with miniature stuffed sable minks. Agate columns painted a medley of dark greens were strung with faceted ropes of green gold. A room of ivory: bone, teeth, skulls, and velvet. A room crowded with columns all sheathed in mirrors, reflecting world maps and globes and atlases inlaid with silver, platinum, and white gold; the rubies and diamonds that were sometimes set to mark the location of a city or a town of conquest resembled blood and tears. A room dominated by a fireplace large enough to hold several people, upholstered in velvets and silks the colors of flame. Snakes of gold with orange sapphire and yellow topaz eyes coiled around the room's columns. Statues of smiling black men in turbans offering trays of every gem imaginable-emerald, sapphire, ruby, topaz, diamond-stood at the entrance to a room upholstered in pistachio velvet, accented with malachite, called the Green Vault. Peridot wood nymphs attended to a Diana carved from a single pure crystal of quartz studded with tiny tourmalines. Jade tables, and jade lanterns. The royal jewels, blinding in their sparkling excess: crowns, tiaras, coronets, diadems, heavy ceremonial necklaces, rings, and bracelets that could span a forearm, surrounding the world's largest and most perfect green diamond. Above it all was a night sky of painted stars, with inlaid cut crystal set in a serious of constellations.

First and simplest were multi-runes. Multi-runes were the most common type, and they both looked and functioned much like typical runes, just with lots of lines to incorporate different features. The most common multi-runes included capacity, recharge, and a single function of the same type. A basic example would be a rune with a regeneration function, a life mana recharge feature, and a life mana capacity feature. The rune for this would look like a regeneration function rune, but with an extra line for recharge and the extra bracket-looking lines around it for capacity. There would also be lines to signify the levels of each, if it’s a higher-than-Quartz enchantment.

Mindless punishment and super-incarceration have been societal disasters: locking away tens of thousands of young people in hyper-violent prisons, dominated by institutionalized race wars, without any semblance of education, rehabilitation or hope. The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street.

yeah’! Page stopped in front of a smaller room, enclosed by heavy quartz. Inside that room was the great bank of mercury-vapor rectifiers. From them lashed a blue-green glare that splashed against his face and shoulders, painting him in angry, garish color. The glass guarded him from the terrific blast of ultra-violet light that flared from the pool of shimmering molten metal, a terrible emanation that would have flayed a man’s skin from his body within the space of seconds. * * * * The scientist squinted his eyes against the glare. There was something in it that caught him with a deadly fascination. The personification of power—the incredibly intense spot of incandescent vapor, the tiny sphere of blue-green fire, the spinning surge of that shining pool, the intense glare of ionization. Power…the breath of modern mankind, the pulse of progress.

By probing questions such as these, the Swiss watch company Swatch, for example, was able to arrive at a cost structure some 30 percent lower than any other watch company in the world. At the start, Nicolas Hayek, chairman of Swatch, set up a project team to determine the strategic price for the Swatch. At the time, cheap (about $75), high-precision quartz watches from Japan and Hong Kong were capturing the mass market. Swatch set the price at $40, a price at which people could buy multiple Swatches as fashion accessories. The low price left no profit margin for Japanese or Hong Kong–based companies to copy Swatch and undercut its price. Directed to sell the Swatch for that price and not a penny more, the Swatch project team worked backwards to arrive at the target cost, a process that involved determining the margin Swatch needed to support marketing and services and earn a profit. Given

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. "No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from." "But what if he is your friend?" Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. "Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?" "You ask a question that philosophers argue over," Chiron had said. "He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else's friend and brother. So which life is more important?" We had been silent. We were fourteen, and these things were too hard for us. Now that we are twenty-seven, they still feel too hard. He is half of my soul, as the poets say. He will be dead soon, and his honor is all that will remain. It is his child, his dearest self. Should I reproach him for it? I have saved Briseis. I cannot save them all. I know, now, how I would answer Chiron. I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.

Beyond that, all whites depended on laws to defend slavery and segregation so as to elevate us politically, socially and economically. We were dependent on Mexicans to teach us how to extract gold from river-beds and quartz—critical to the growth of the economy in the mid-to-late 1800s—and had we not taken over half their nation in an unprovoked war, the Pacific ports so vital to the modern U.S. economy would have been not ours, but Mexico’s. Then we were dependent on their labor in the mid-twentieth century under the bracero program, through which more than five million Mexicans were brought into the country for agricultural work, and then sent back across the border.140 And we were dependent on Asian labor to build the railroads that made transcontinental commerce possible. Ninety percent of the labor used to build the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s was Chinese, imported for the purpose, and exploited because the rail bosses felt that group was easier to control than white workers.

Karl was the last to be with him. He found him calm and almost gay. After he had gone, Ludwig put his few things in order and wrote for some time. Then he drew a chair to the window and set a basin with warm water on the table beside him. He locked the door, sat himself on the settle and with his arm in the water, he cut the artery. The pain was slight. He saw the blood flowing, a scene he had often thought on—to let this hateful, poisoned blood pour out of his body. His room became very clear. He saw every hook, every nail, every glint of the quartzes, the iridescence, the colours; he absorbed it: his room. It gathered about him, it passed in with his breath and was one with his life. Then it receded, uncertain. His youth began, in pictures. Eichendorff, the woods, homesickness. Reconciled, without pain. Beyond the woods rose up barbed-wire entanglements, little white shrapnel clouds, the burst of heavier shells. But they alarmed him no longer. They were muffled, almost like bells. The bells became louder, but the woods were still there. The bells pealed in his head so loudly that he felt it must burst. Then it grew darker. The pealing sounded fainter, and the evening came in at the window, clouds floated up under his feet. He had wished once in his life to see flamingoes; now he knew; these were flamingoes, with broad, pinkish-grey wings, lots of them, a phalanx—Did wild ducks not once fly so toward the very red moon, red as poppies in Flanders? —The landscape receded farther and farther, the woods sank deeper, rivers rose up, gleaming, silver, and islands; the pinkish-grey wings flew ever higher and higher, and the horizon became ever brighter—Now, suddenly, a dark cry swelled in his throat, hot, insistent, a last thought spilled over out of the brain into the failing consciousness: fear, rescue, bind it up! —He tried to rise, staggering, to lift his hand; the body jerked, but already it was too weak. —It spun round and spun round, then it vanished; and the giant bird with dark pinions came very gently with slow sweeps and the wings closed noiselessly over him. A

This is about my crucifixion watch,” Dr. Lecter said. “They won’t give me a patent, but they advise me to copyright the face. Look here.” He put a drawing the size of a dinner napkin in the carrier and Starling pulled it through. “You may have noticed that in most crucifixions the hands point to, say, a quarter to three, or ten till two at the earliest, while the feet are at six. On this watch face, Jesus is on the cross, as you see there, and the arms revolve to indicate the time, just like the arms on the popular Disney watches. The feet remain at six and at the top a small second hand revolves in the halo. What do you think?” The quality of the anatomical sketching was very good. The head was hers. “You’ll lose a lot of detail when it’s reduced to watch size,” Starling said. “True, unfortunately, but think of the clocks. Do you think this is safe without a patent?” “You’d be buying quartz watch movements—wouldn’t you?—and they’re already under patent. I’m not sure, but I think patents only apply to unique mechanical devices and copyright applies to design.

Although Keir would always prefer his island to anywhere else in the world, he had to admit this place had its own magic. There was a softness about the air and the sun, a trance of mist that made everything luminous. Lowering to his haunches, he ran his palm back and forth over the fine golden sand, so different from the caster-sugar grains of the beaches on Islay. At Merritt's quizzical glance, he dusted his hands and smiled crookedly. "'Tis quiet," he explained. "On the shore near my home, it sings." "The sand sings?" Merritt asked, perplexed. "Aye. When you move it with your foot or hand, or the wind blows over it, the sand makes a sound. Some say it's more like a squeak, or a whistle." "What makes it do that?" "'Tis pure quartz, and the grains are all the same size. A scientist could explain it. But I'd rather call it magic." "Do you believe in magic?" Keir stood and smiled into her upturned face. "No, but I like the wonderments of life. Like the ghost fire that shines on a ship's mast at storm's end, or the way a bird's instinct leads him to the wintering grounds each year. I enjoy such things better for no' understanding them." "Wonderments," Merritt repeated, seeming to relish the word.

I stood next to Breeze in a small quartz room. A sea lantern served as the only light source, bathing the room in its pale blue light. Against the center of one wall stood a mysterious object. It was three meters tall, three meters wide, and flat, like a banner. However, instead of dyed wool was a surface like the calmest pool of water. Breeze reached out with her right hand. Her fingers touched those of her reflection. After she lowered her arm, we continued staring at ourselves in silence. In awe. It was the first time we'd seen ourselves this way. But more than that were our outfits. Our clothes were made of spider silk, a type of cloth crafted using spider string. Puddles, the owner of the Clothing Castle, had worked with the humans for days to craft perfect recreations of Earth fashion. Then, to make us look even more majestic, our cloaks had been modified to fall over our shoulders. Poster children. Symbols of hope. Villagetown's biggest stars. That's what we've become. Some say it's sweet: a budding romance between two young heroes fighting valiantly against all odds. I'd say that's an exaggeration. Although Breeze and I are close, we haven't had much time for anything beyond battle or preparing for the next. I guess the mayor wants to change that, though. The people need something to believe in, he says. I suppose that's why he whisked us away in

The important thing is that short and strenuous reverence be paid to the spirit of discipline. Three things keep a body of troops in fighting form: fighting spirit, strength and discipline. Fighting spirit – as I have said before – is the least easy to influence. It is the great prerequisite and justification of war – the spirit of the race and of the blood pledged to the last drop. There lie the roos of the strength whose full development is dependent on outward conditions, fresh air nourishment, clothing, and a lot else. When this soil fails fighting spirit is like a seedling plated in arenaceous quartz – it goes on growing for a while of its own resources and then gives out. It is a tragic destiny when a great enterprise comes to grief from this cause. Finally, the purpose of discipline is to economize and direct the two elements so that they are brought to bear on one aim with overwhelming force. It is a means, not an end; it is in seeing it in its true proportion that the real fighter is distinguished from the soldier. It is one of the danger-points of the Prussian system that it easily loses sight of the spirit in the letter and of real strength in the empty show of it. One of the most terrible apparitions is the sheer drill-master – a machine that goes by clockwork. It is bound to break down for the mere reason that in war there is no rule but the exception.

Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance – a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75

Quartz Solutions is a one-stop-search for cleaning, protection, repairing and redesigning storage rooms, creep spaces and air conduits in Bloomfield, NJ.

quartz sand is perhaps the most abundant substance on the planet’s surface. If we’re running out of that, we really need to rethink how we’re using everything.

It was at ten o’clock to-day that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.

Ultrasonic drilling fully explains how the holes and cores found in the Valley Temple at Giza could have been cut, and it is capable of creating all the details that Petrie and I puzzled over. Unfortunately for Petrie, ultrasonic drilling was unknown at the time he made his studies, so it is not surprising that he could not find satisfactory answers to his queries. In my opinion, the application of ultrasonic machining is the only method that completely satisfies logic, from a technical viewpoint, and explains all noted phenomena. [...] The most significant detail of the drilled holes and cores studied by Petrie was that the groove was cut deeper through the quartz than through the feldspar. Quartz crystals are employed in the production of ultrasonic sound and, conversely, are responsive to the influence of vibration in the ultrasonic ranges and can be induced to vibrate at high frequency. When machining granite using ultrasonics, the harder material (quartz) would not necessarily offer more resistance, as it would during conventional machining practices. An ultrasonically vibrating tool bit would find numerous sympathetic partners, while cutting through granite, embedded right in the granite itself. Instead of resisting the cutting action, the quartz would be induced to respond and vibrate in sympathy with the high-frequency waves and amplify the abrasive action as the tool cut through it.

The evidence presented in this book, for the most part, was recorded many years ago by men of integrity who worked in the fields of archaeology and Egyptology. That much of this evidence was misunderstood only reveals the pressing need for an interdisciplinary approach to fields that have until recently been closed to nonacademics and others outside the fold of formal archaeology and Egyptology. Much of our ignorance of ancient cultures can be placed at the feet of closed-minded theorists who ignore evidence that does not fit their theories or fall within the province of their expertise. Sometimes it takes a machinist to recognize machined parts or machines! As a result, much of the evidence that supports a purpose for the Great Pyramid as anything other than a tomb has been ignored, discounted without serious consideration, or simply explained away as purely coincidental. Is it coincidence that the Great Pyramid is so huge and so precise? That the King's Chamber contains so many indications that tremendous forces disturbed it or were created within it at one time? Are the exuviae, the chocolate-colored granite, the resonating chambers with their giant granite monoliths placed above, and the unique properties of the quartz crystal present in vast quantities in the granite complex all coincidental? Can the design and physical tests of the movement of sound inside the Grand Gallery be just a happy accident?

One solution, instituted by Winston Churchill when he was at the Treasury, was the ‘Ten Year Rule’, the doctrine that defence budgets could be written on the assumption that there would be no war for ten years. On that basis spending on expendables such as ammunition and even quartz transducers for sonars (Asdics) could be eliminated (major capital items such as ships could still be bought).

To create your own poppet, you’ll need: 2 large pieces of fabric or felt Scissors A needle and thread Cotton balls and/or dried lavender or rose herbs A few strands of your hair Rose quartz (optional) 1. To create the poppet, take the pieces of fabric/felt and lay them on top of one another. Cut out the shape of the doll you want to make, then sew the sides and top together. 2. Use the opening at the bottom to stuff the doll with the cotton or herbs and your hair (or other small item that symbolizes “you”). Add rose quartz if desired to symbolize high-vibe self-love. 3. Sew the bottom shut. 4. Hold the poppet in your hand and affirm that it is an extension of you. Imagine your energy radiating out from your heart into your arms, through your hands, and into the doll. Allow yourself to feel the emotions as they come, making sure to ground yourself afterward to rebalance. 5. Sleep with the poppet under your pillow for at least one night to solidify the bond. 6. Once you have bonded with your poppet, place it somewhere that is readily accessible to you. Treat it like an extension of yourself, taking care to speak to it kindly and hold it gently, giving it the respect and love that you would want from another to support you in healing. This poppet can be taken out during emotional moments, shadow work, or just when you want a visual cue to remind you that you’re a person too! The ultimate purpose is to create a proxy by which you can hold space for yourself and your healing.

We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.

A grey Quartz pens on my book and lasts a red Horn.

Granite is composed of feldspar and quartz, along with a collection of other minor accessory minerals: zircon, apatite, magnetite, ilmenite, and sphene.

I think I change the colour of my hair in grey now.

Whether you’re looking for the traditional natural beauty of granite, the modern look of quartz worktops, or the earthy warmth of marble or limestone, Cheshire Marble have the craftsmanship and experience to exceed your expectations.

The room is a hundred shades of white. The enormous desk is the color of sand dollar beer foam with a plush cotton eggshell chair behind it. To its side, a tall shaving cream topped Swiss coffee lamp with a mozzarella sour cream lampshade. Official certificates the color of chalky whitecaps in limestone glacier frames hang on the frosted beluga whale wall. The wall is covered with rice powder cloud bookcases, full of books the color of moonstone jasmine, opal daffodil, quartz daisy, and polar bear hibiscus. The books are being tended by a man with his back to me, dressed in a milky, baking soda suit in seagull bone shoes, riding a rolling ladder the color of marshmallow tofu glue.

The extension of minds into the world through the use of artifacts was perhaps the last vital step in the evolution of culture that underlies the modern mind. Written symbols, alphabets and number systems, are ways of using the world to hold ideas. These external symbols allow a society a capacity for systematic thinking that would be impossible otherwise, a process we have referred to earlier as progressive externalization. Indeed, these external devices are not just static devices for memory storage. We have built external devices that process information, mirroring the process of thought inside our heads, at least loosely. Consider numerical calculation. You are limited in the amount of numbers you can easily add in your head. A paper and pencil increase this ability tremendously by letting you manipulate external symbols and hold intermediate steps in the calculation. By using artifacts that themselves process symbols, such as a handheld calculator, however, you can dramatically extend the realm of thought.

Perhaps. Once when I was a child,” says Pandey, “I was walking along a dry creek bed. I walked it many times in my youth, but that day I saw one of the creek bed walls had fallen in, General. And inside this wall, in all the loose earth piled there, were dozens and dozens of crystals. Quartz, of course. I didn’t know that it was a commonly found thing, not then. I couldn’t imagine something like this just existing. You know? It was beautiful and wonderful to me, because I didn’t know any better. So now, faced with this strange stuff, I have to wonder if we just don’t know any better.

tugging her through the crowds and toward the real tourist draw of the Gate. Jutting out of the quartz about four feet off the ground lay the dial pad: a solid-gold block embedded with seven different gems, each for a different quarter of the city, the insignia of each district etched beneath it. Emerald and a rose for Five Roses. Opal and a pair of wings for the CBD. Ruby and a heart for the Old Square. Sapphire and an oak tree for Moonwood. Amethyst and a human hand for Asphodel Meadows. Tiger’s-eye and a serpent for the Meat Market. And onyx—so black it gobbled the light—and a set of skull and crossbones for the Bone Quarter.

Bryce raised her eyes to the bronze plaque above her head. The quartz Gates were memorials, though she didn’t know for which conflict or war. But each bore the same plaque: The power shall always belong to those who give their lives to the city.

first discovered the magic of rose quartz at my Dentist, when correctly identifying me as a nervous patient, the Dentist handed me a pink stone and told me to close my eyes and concentrate on the feel of it in my hands as she went about her work, and while you will never convince me that dental work is fun, from then on it has been a much calmer experience thanks to the gentle tranquillizing effect of rose quartz....