Riddle Of The Sands Quotes

As you may well know by now, the Givers are mysterious, and love to speak in riddles. It's more annoying than having sand in your underpants...

- vague, very vague.

His copy was full of lofty echoes: Greek Tragedy; Damocle's sword; manna from heaven; the myth of Sisyphus; the last of the Mohicans; hydra-headed and Circe-voiced; experiments with truth; discovery of India; biblical resonance; the lessons of Vedanta; the centre does not hold; the road not taken; the mimic men; for whom the bell tolls; a hundred visions and revisions; the power and the glory; the heart of the matter; the heart of darkness; the agony and the ecstasy; sands of time; riddle of the Sphinx; test of tantalus; murmurs of mortality; Falstaffian figure; Dickensian darkness; ...

A keen wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry dome of heaven...

Germany's a thundering great nation . . . I wonder if we shall ever fight her.

Riddle me this: I belong to no one, yet am used by everyone. To some, I am money, to others I can fly. I make up space, yet don’t take it up. To those who never change, I hold no sway. But to those who do, I carry the weight of desert sands. What am I?

What builds up castles, tears down mountains, makes some blind, helps others to see? SAND. (Thankee-sai) What lives in winter, dies in summer, and grows with its roots upward? AN ICICLE. (Blaine, you say true) Man walks over, man walks under, in time of war he burns asunder? A BRIDGE. (Thankee-sai)

Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies. Her alleged abilities to sift the sands of daydreams until she produced the solid stuff, golden realities. Her power resided in her attitude: she behaved as though she believed she was irresistible. She sounds the way bananas taste. Some cities, like wrapped boxes under Christmas trees, conceal unexpected gifts, secret delights. Some cities will always remain wrapped boxes, containers of riddles never to be solved, nor even to be seen by vacationing visitors, or, for that matter, the most inquisitive, persistent travelers. To know such cities, to unwrap them, as it were, one has to have been born there. Venice is like that.

They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street—the great majority of modernday seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck we are looking at. As a kind of preemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question “What you looking at?” and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer —“Nothing”—might be avoided.

What are we but a false set of laws laid over a wild land? We hope to tame it, but what we can’t tame we destroy. The Lammers are not as important and powerful as we like to believe. There are other magics waiting to take our place.” I think of my recent conversation with Yew – it’s true, the Lammers fear. And what they fear, they destroy. It is our way. “You sound like a tea shop revolutionary,” he says with a sneer. “And maybe I am, or maybe I used to be, or maybe I was almost one.” “You talk in riddles.” “Better than talking in rhymes.

She climbs a tree And scrapes her knee Her dress has got a tear. She waltzes on her way to mass And whistles on the stair. And underneath her wimple She has curlers in her hair! Maria's not an asset to the abbey. She's always late for chapel, But her penitence is real. She's always late for everything! Except for every meal. I hate to have to say it But I very firmly feel Maria's not an asset to the abbey! I'd like to say a word on her behalf. Maria makes me laugh. How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet! A will o' the wisp! A clown! Many a thing you know you'd like to tell her, Many a thing she ought to understand. But how do you make her stay And listen to all you say, How do you keep a wave upon the sand? Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? When I'm with her I'm confused Out of focus and bemused, And I never know exactly where I am. Unpredictable as weather, She's as flighty as a feather, She's a darling, She's a demon, She's a lamb. She'd out-pester any pest, Drive a hornet from his nest, She can throw a whirling dervish out of whirl. She is gentle, She is wild, She's a riddle. She's a child. She's a headache! She's an angel! She's a girl. How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet! A will o' the wisp! A clown! Many a thing you know you'd like to tell her, Many a thing she ought to understand. But how do you make her stay? And listen to all you say? How do you keep a wave upon the sand? Oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? "Maria" from The Sound of Music

Down at the foamy shoreline, where small tight waves explode against black rocks, a lifeguard with feet wedged in the wet and vaguely tangerine sand stands shirtless like a magnificent sea-Jesus. An ill-timed journey into a breaker knocks a boy on his little back. A bald man throws a tennis ball for his Labrador and a second, unrelated dog bounds in after it. Through a gauze of mist a brunette—tall, and from where we’re sitting seemingly riddled with breasts—kicks water on the sunlit torso of her blond companion. There are three other drinkers in the place, already tethered to the sunbleached bar. It is eleven a.m. Slumped in his cumbersome mechanised wheelchair that squeaks somewhere down by the left back wheel when he’s doing pressure lifts, Aldo squints out from sand-whipped windows into the tumour of searing light. He turns to me and says, ‘I’m nobody’s muse.’ I think: That’s a great line right there. I take out my notebook and when he shoots me an outraged look I say, ‘That’s right, motherfucker. I’m writing it down.

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

Desire is… " Desire is the glow of bathing lunatics. Starlight is the liquid used to power a whispering machine. Humming is the music of a forest moving in unison with your eyes. * A slip of the tongue and the hummingbird’s empty throne make the acquaintance of the word frenzy, which in turn adopts the phrase: “I am closest to you when we are furthest apart,” and together they follow the anxious doorway that leads far out of the city, where travelers always meet, alone and abandoned with only their mysteries to guide them… and when the sun bleeds out of the dampness of the earth, like pale limbs entwined and exhausted, they all pause in their own fashion to reflect not upon themselves but on the white wolves in the garden shivering like mist, in the mirror hiding your face. * The nature of movement is an image lost between the objects of an eclipse fervently scratched into the face of a sleeping woman when she approaches the liquid state of a circle, wandering aimlessly in search of lucidity and those moments of inarticulate suspicion… when the riddle is only half solved and the alphabet is still adding letters according to the human motors that have not yet arrived, as a species, scintillating in the grass, burning time. Not far from your name there is always a question mark, followed by silent paws… * It is not without the mask of the Enchanter’s dance of unreason, that joy follows the torment of seductive shapes, and sudden appearances in the whisper of long corridors. Tribal veils rising out of fingerprints on invisible entrances in the middle of the landscape, assume the form of her shoulders and the intimacy of her bones making dust, taking flight. * The axis of revolt and the nobility of a springtime stripped of its flowers, expertly balanced with a murmur of the heart on the anvil of chance. Your voice arcing between the two points of day and night, where the oracle of water spinning rapidly above, that is your city of numerology, mixes with the flux of a long voyage more stone-like and absurdly graceful then either milkweed or deadly nightshade, when it acclimatizes the elements of transparency in the host of purity. * The dream birds of a lost language are growing underground in the bed of sorcery. It is all revealed in the arms of your obsession, Arachne, (crawling to kiss) pale Ariadne, (kneeling to feed) in a pool of light that exceeds the dimensions of the loveliest crime. She turns into your evidence, gaining speed and recognition, becoming a brightness never solved, and a clarity that makes crystals. * The early morning hours share their nakedness with those who bare fruit and corset fireflies in long slender bath-like caresses. “Your serum, Sir Moor’s Head, follows the grand figures of the sea, ignites them, throws them like vessels out of fire, raising the sand upwards into oddly repetitive enchantments. Drown me in flight, daughter of wonder…

Riddle of the Sphinx Moth Your hawk eyed wing peers with fierce stillness upon the day scorched Sonoran sands which, humbled in sparseness like the Sinai, found favor in God’s eye to cloak you in Joseph’s many colored coat. Tail horned larvae, thick in hermetic mystery, raise their headsin sphinx-like pose, riddling enemies with their stony gaze,spitting green soup at trespassers, worthy of Linda Blair in the Exorcist. At dusk you emerge from your cryptic shyness to pry the secrets of the Dune Evening Primrose with your well hung proboscis, so tapered to the task she can’t reproduce without your whirring whispers bruited in her ear, her cloying nectar saved only for you. With pugilist’s craft you woo all the desert blooms, bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali midair, swift and relentless, then hovering patiently like predatory helicopters on the Mekong spewing their gift of Agent Orange.

I give you a riddle,’ Olsen said suddenly. ‘It is black. It has eight wheels. But it is no vehicle. What is it?’ His penetrating, slightly protuberant eyes surveyed them as they shook their heads. ‘What is it?’ he repeated. ‘We shall not find that,’ Josef said. Olsen gave a short laugh. ‘A priest, on roller skates. I give you another riddle. It is greater than the universe. It is less than a grain of sand. The dead eat it. If we eat it, we too shall be dead.

at the town

So how do I know that I am making the right choice?” “If it feels right, it’s always the right choice, at least in my book, but if you need confirmation, then you go by how easy it is. If the choice is right it usually comes effortlessly, whereas the wrong ones are usually riddled with disaster, strife, and trouble.

By Jove! we want a man like this Kaiser, who doesn't wait to be kicked, but works like a nigger for his country, and sees ahead.

invasion titled The Riddle of the Sands. It became his most successful novel.

It was eight years since publication of The Riddle of the Sands, but people still read it. “Do you fear war too?

They were volcano bombs, and where they touched the sand, green rings of glass spread out.

Stars from the last night It was a vast and endless desert, Of sand, of dust, of the unforgiving sun, Life crawled on its belly and ever effort hurt, Yet life ventured to fulfil what yesterday was left undone, The sand storm blew from every end, Life was caught in its middle, It had nowhere to go, though it had a universe to defend, I watched life pitted against all forces that prevented it from solving the riddle, The dust, the storm, connived with the hot Sun, And they all held life in its cage of atrocities, While life only thought of the universe whose affairs it had to run, So, it heaved its chest and breathed in all the adversities, And blew it at these forces evil, In seconds the dust settled, the storm turned calm and the Sun shone humbly, Because if life wishes to be; it can be the meanest devil, But that is not what it fancies for it has universe to manage and it wants to do so proudly, Life that deals with million adversities, sees storms of dust as nature’s vanities, Because life that thrives everywhere cannot be contained in cages of temporary storms, Life shall always reward the victor who fulfils his/her duties, And is never scared of anything no matter how loud the alarms, That is why it lives in the desert of dust and sand too, Where everything is against its existence, But life shall do what it has to do, while the desert of savagery will do what it has to do, And there shall be neither any hand nor any role of providence, For life that believes in love and equality of all sorts, Will surmount every peak of resistance no matter how high, And shoot itself at the the desert, at the storm, like brave darts, That only love one thing, one purpose, that to fly, So, I saw life wrestling with storm, with dust, with the desert, and even the Sun, They all held her down like an animal of sacrifice to be offered to the God’s of vanity, Yet life resisted and cast all these forces away, one by one, And I witnessed desert’s travesty of life’s magnanimity, Whenever you are in the desert and you see the storm coming closer to you, Remember the actual fact, the life is always on your side, As long as you do not believe it is the desert that favours you, Because it takes some wisdom to realise that in the day sky the bright stars of yesternight still reside! Just like in my eyes her dreams, her thoughts are as fresh as ever, That no storm, no time can fade away, Because I love her like life, that is in love forever, And it shall be so, even in the tempest of all sorts, anyhow and anyway! So you brave soldiers of life and love, If you love someone, love her true love her the same in the desert and in the beautiful summer, And do not wait for the providence from above, Life of love is not always calm because in the desert of life, you shall witness a storm that ceases never!

Stars from the last night It was a vast and endless desert, Of sand, of dust, of the unforgiving sun, Life crawled on its belly and every effort hurt, Yet life ventured to fulfil what yesterday was left undone, The sand storm blew from every end, Life was caught in its middle, It had nowhere to go, though it had a universe to defend, I watched life pitted against all forces that prevented it from solving the riddle, The dust, the storm, connived with the hot sun, And they all held life in its cage of atrocities, While life only thought of the universe whose affairs it had to run, So, it heaved its chest and breathed in all the adversities, And blew it at these forces evil, In seconds the dust settled, the storm turned calm and the Sun shone humbly, Because if life wishes to be; it can be the meanest devil, But that is not what it fancies for it has the universe to manage and it wants to do so proudly, Life that deals with million adversities, sees storms of dust as nature’s vanities, Because life that thrives everywhere cannot be contained in cages of temporary storms, Life shall always reward the victor who fulfils his/her duties, And is never scared of anything no matter how loud the alarms, That is why it lives in the desert of dust and sand too, Where everything is against its existence, But life shall do what it has to do, while the desert of savagery will do what it has to do, And there shall be neither any hand nor any role of providence, For life that believes in love and equality of all sorts, Will surmount every peak of resistance no matter how high, And shoot itself at the the desert, at the storm, like brave darts, That only love one thing, one purpose, that to fly, So, I saw life wrestling with storm, with dust, with the desert, and even the Sun, They all held her down like an animal of sacrifice to be offered to the God’s of vanity, Yet life resisted and cast all these forces away, one by one, And I witnessed desert’s travesty of life’s magnanimity, Whenever you are in the desert and you see the storm coming closer to you, Remember the actual fact, the life is always on your side, As long as you do not believe it is the desert that favours you, Because it takes some wisdom to realise that in the sky of the day the bright stars of yesternight still reside! Just like in my eyes her dreams, her thoughts are as fresh as ever, That no storm, no time can fade away, Because I love her like life, that is in love forever, And it shall be so, even in the tempest of all sorts, anyhow and anyway! So you brave soldiers of life and love, If you love someone, love her true love her the same in the desert and in the beautiful summer, And do not wait for the providence from above, Life of love is not always calm because in the desert of life, you shall witness a storm that ceases never!

Ecstasy that must look pretty from inside—to core not just an apple but the entire orchard, the family, even the dog. Leave the shells to the crows. A field of red lampshades in the dark Garden of Myiasis. This is no cultivated haven. This is the earth riddled with a brother. The furrows are mountains. Waves of sand and we are ships wrecked. What’s left of a fleet of one hundred shadows shattered and bleached. A crop gone to sticks. The honeysuckle sags with bright sour powder. We have followed the flames, followed him here, where all the black birds in the world have fallen like a shotgun blast to the faded ground. The vines have hardened to worms baking in the desert heat. We are at the gate, shaking the gate, climbing the gate, clanging our cups against the gate. This is no garden. This is my brother and I need a shovel to love him.

Unless the LORD builds the house, The builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over city, The guards stand watch in vain. Jinn had his back turned. Crouching, he was drawing something on the ground of rock? I was almost certain that the sign of the cross, once, the second time, the twentieth time - the infinitude. - What do you think about my art of the crosses? - Bona fide, the art of murdering. - I wasn't entirely sure, there was something I missed in this riddle. - Think, if I will have thousands of faces and didn't want to show you the real one...? - And??? Go on.... - Still vagueness or .... Well, I will never believe it! Jinn turned suddenly, throwing sand in my eyes. Then he roared like a lion.

Before the time of Allan and Delair, Comyns Beaumont reviewed the work of Establishment geologists, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz and James Geikie. He exposed their scientific palaver for the nonsense it is, and wrote of the Ice Age theory in these words: What! No Ice Age which came and went, spreading over hundreds of thousands of years as all good geologists proclaim? No smothering ice sheets which enveloped the British Isles and much of the northern parts of the continent, changed the climate to Arctic conditions – although, strangely enough, much of our fauna and flora survived despite it – and compelled all the survivors to flee? No lengthy periods of ice alternated with warm and even sub-tropical climatic interludes? No. Nothing of the sort. There was admittedly a tremendous convulsion of nature, which had the most direful effect upon the inhabitants of Scandinavia, the British Isles, and those in Northern Asia. It resulted in giving us, it is true, bitter cold, tremendous floods, and cruel dampness. That it affected the climate in the north adversely and permanently cannot be denied. It did other things as well. But no Ice Age – (Riddle of Prehistoric Britain) It was an event…sudden, rapid, devastating, and appalling in its magnitude, and destructiveness. It was a celestial impact of an immense cometary body…It rained or distributed rocks, stones, boulder clay, till, gravel, sand, and other material over great areas, utterly obliterating certain parts, elevating others, and entirely missing some regions. It created islands, drowned others, caused immense tidal waves which swallowed up coastal lands, consumed huge spaces with electric waves, set up volcanoes, and swept away cities and largely populated districts almost in a flash

We’ve heard reports of road surfaces bubbling and catching fire, sand turning to glass, and steaks in a deep freezer turning up cooked well done…

Q. What has a forest with no trees, lakes without water, roads with no cars and deserts with no sand? A. A map!