“
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my open mind,
Possessing and caressing me.
Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe,
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way
Across the universe
Sounds of laughter shades of love are
Ringing through my open ears inciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a
Million suns, and calls me on and on
Across the universe
”
”
John Lennon
“
Persian envoy "our arrows will black out the sun..." Dienekes of the Spartans.."Good, then we'll fight in the shade.
”
”
Steven Pressfield (Gates of Fire)
“
Ol' man Simon, planted a diamond. Grew hisself a garden the likes of none. Sprouts all growin' comin' up glowin' Fruit of jewels all shinin' in the sun. Colors of the rainbow. See the sun and the rain grow sapphires and rubies on ivory vines, Grapes of jade, just ripenin' in the shade, just ready for the squeezin' into green jade wine. Pure gold corn there, Blowin' in the warm air. Ol' crow nibblin' on the amnythyst seeds. In between the diamonds, Ol' man Simon crawls about pullin' out platinum weeds. Pink pearl berries, all you can carry, put 'em in a bushel and haul 'em into town. Up in the tree there's opal nuts and gold pears- Hurry quick, grab a stick and shake some down. Take a silver tater, emerald tomater, fresh plump coral melons. Hangin' in reach. Ol' man Simon, diggin' in his diamonds, stops and rests and dreams about one... real... peach.
”
”
Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)
“
The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.
The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.
The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.
The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.
The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.
The moral of the story?
Kids are smart.
”
”
Vera Nazarian (The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration)
“
Dear Max -
You looked so beautiful today. I'm going to remember what you looked like forever.
...
And I hope you remember me the same way - clean, ha-ha. I'm glad our last time together was happy.
But I'm leaving tonight, leaving the flock, and this time it's for good. I don't know if I'll ever see any of you again. The thing is, Max, that everyone is a little bit right. Added up all together, it makes this one big right.
Dylan's a little bit right about how my being here might be putting the rest of you in danger. The threat might have been just about Dr. Hans, but we don't know that for sure. Angel is a little bit right about how splitting up the flock will help all of us survive. And the rest of the flock is a little bit right about how when you and I are together, we're focused on each other - we can't help it.
The thing is, Maximum, I love you. I can't help but be focused on you when we're together. If you're in the room, I want to be next to you. If you're gone, I think about you. You're the one who I want to talk to. In a fight, I want you at my back. When we're together, the sun is shining. When we're apart, everything is in shades of gray.
I hope you'll forgive me someday for turning our worlds into shades of gray - at least for a while.
...
You're not at your best when you're focused on me. I mean, you're at your best Maxness, but not your best leaderness. I mostly need Maxness. The flock mostly needs leaderness. And Angel, if you're listening to this, it ain't you, sweetie. Not yet.
...
At least for a couple more years, the flock needs a leader to survive, no matter how capable everyone thinks he or she is. The truth is that they do need a leader, and the truth is that you are the best leader. It's one of the things I love about you.
But the more I thought about it, the more sure I got that this is the right thing to do. Maybe not for you, or for me, but for all of us together, our flock.
Please don't try to find me. This is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, besides wearing that suit today, and seeing you again will only make it harder. You'd ask me to come back, and I would, because I can't say no to you. But all the same problems would still be there, and I'd end up leaving again, and then we'd have to go through this all over again.
Please make us only go through this once.
...
I love you. I love your smile, your snarl, your grin, your face when you're sleeping. I love your hair streaming out behind you as we fly, with the sunlight making it shine, if it doesn't have too much mud or blood in it. I love seeing your wings spreading out, white and brown and tan and speckled, and the tiny, downy feathers right at the top of your shoulders. I love your eyes, whether they're cold or calculating or suspicious or laughing or warm, like when you look at me.
...
You're the best warrior I know, the best leader. You're the most comforting mom we've ever had. You're the biggest goofball, the worst driver, and a truly lousy cook. You've kept us safe and provided for us, in good times and bad. You're my best friend, my first and only love, and the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, with wings or without.
...
Tell you what, sweetie: If in twenty years we haven't expired yet, and the world is still more or less in one piece, I'll meet you at the top of that cliff where we first met the hawks and learned to fly with them. You know the one. Twenty years from today, if I'm alive, I'll be there, waiting for you. You can bet on it.
Good-bye, my love.
Fang
P.S. Tell everyone I sure will miss them
”
”
James Patterson
“
Hydarnes: When we attack today, our arrows will blot out the sun!
Leonidas: Good; then we will fight in the shade.
”
”
Frank Miller (300)
“
Kestrel's eyes slipped shut. She faded in and out of sleep. When Arin spoke again, she wasn't sure whether he expected her to to hear him.
'I remember sitting with my mother in a carriage.' There was a long pause. Then Arin's voice came again in that slow, fluid way that showed the singer in him. 'In my memory, I am small and sleepy, and she is doing something strange. Every time the carriage turns into the sun, she raises her hand as if reaching for something. The light lines her fingers with fire. Then the carriage passes through shadows, and her hand falls. Again sunlight beams through the window, and again her hand lifts. It becomes and eclipse.'
Kestrel listened, and it was as if the story itself was an eclipse, drawing its darkness over her.
'Just before I fell asleep,' he said, 'I realized that she was shading my eyes from the sun.'
She heard Arin shift, felt him look at her.
'Kestrel.' She imagined how he would sit, lean forward. How he would look in the glow of the carriage lantern. 'Survival isn't wrong. You can sell your honor in small ways, so long as you guard yourself. You can pour a glass of wine like it's meant to be poured, and watch a man drink, and plot your revenge.' Perhaps his head tilted slightly at this. 'You probably plot even in your sleep.'
There was a silence as long as a smile.
'Plot away, Kestrel. Survive. If I hadn't lived, no one would remember my mother, not like I do.'
Kestrel could no longer deny sleep. It pulled her under.
'And I would never have met you.
”
”
Marie Rutkoski (The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1))
“
See me. See me for who I am. I am magic. I am human. I am inhuman. See me. I am a boy. I am a girl. I am everything and nothing in between. See me. You do. You see me. You recoil in fear. You scream in anger. See me. I bleed. I ache. You see me, and you wish you hadn’t. You wish I was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Unseen, faded, muted. You want my color. You want my joy. You want a monochrome world with monochrome beliefs. You see me, and you want to take it all away. But you can’t. You want me lost, but I am found in the breaths I take, in the spaces between heartbeats. I am found because I refuse to be in black and white, or any shade of gray. I am color. I am fire. I am the sun, and I will burn away the shadows until only light remains. And then you will have no choice but to see
”
”
T.J. Klune (Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2))
“
Although extraordinary valor was displayed by the entire corps of Spartans and Thespians, yet bravest of all was declared the Spartan Dienekes. It is said that on the eve of battle, he was told by a native of Trachis that the Persian archers were so numerous that, their arrows would block out the sun. Dienekes, however, undaunted by this prospect, remarked with a laugh, 'Good. Then we will fight in the shade.
”
”
Herodotus
“
I love the hint of copper in your eyes, radiating out like the sun, turning your pupils into an eclipse.' He ran his thumb down my cheekbone. 'The different striations of color, how every band of green is its own unique shade. A shard of a broken Heineken bottle, a blade of grass, moss on a rusty can.'
'Romantic...' I laughed.
”
”
Anastasia Hopcus
“
I could have screamed, but I didn't. I could have fought, but I didn't. I just lay there and let it happen, wathcing the winter-white sky go gray above me. One wolf prodded his nose into my hand and agianst my cheek, casting a shadow along my face. His yellow eyes looked into mine as the other wolves moved me this way and that. I held onto those eyes for as long as I could. Yellow. And, up close, flecked brillantly with every shade of gold and hazel. I didn't want him to look away, and he didn't. I wanted to reach out and grab a hold of his ruff, but my hands stayed curled to my chest, my arms frozen to my body. I couldn't remember what it felt like to be warm. Then he was gone, without him, the other wolves closed in, too close, sufficating. Something seemed too flutter in my chest. There was no sun; there was no light. I was dying. I couldn't remember what the sky looked like. But I didn't die, I was lost in a sea of cold, and then I was reborn into a sea of warmth. I remember this: his yellow eyes. I thought I would never see them again.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1))
“
Lord, if I thought you were listening, I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive. That it should be not like a palace with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood for the carpenter; but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow, 'Get out, you don't belong here?' Does the tree say to the hungry man, 'This fruit is not for you?' Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?
”
”
Philip Pullman (The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ)
“
This is how the soul heals. it thaws out bit by bit, the way the ground warms after a hard winter. you notive the sun or hear the whippoorwill calling across the flats. You sweep your porch, go drink coffee in the shade of the trumpet vines. You have days where you want to lay down and die, but what you learn is this: As long as there's somebody left on this earth who loves you, it's reason enough to stay alive. You don't give in to your broke heart-- you just let the wide, cracked space fill up again.
”
”
Michael Lee West (American Pie)
“
Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.
”
”
Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
“
Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that! I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it—that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen and then I can’t write like that. Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. But I must return to Swann.
My great adventure is really Proust. Well—what remains to be written after that? I’m only in the first volume, and there are, I suppose, faults to be found, but I am in a state of amazement; as if a miracle were being done before my eyes. How, at last, has someone solidified what has always escaped—and made it too into this beautiful and perfectly enduring substance? One has to put the book down and gasp. The pleasure becomes physical—like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined.
Jacques Raverat...sent me a letter about Mrs Dalloway which gave me one of the happiest moments days of my life. I wonder if this time I have achieved something? Well, nothing anyhow compared with Proust, in whom I am embedded now. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut & as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom. And he will I suppose both influence me & make out of temper with every sentence of my own.
”
”
Virginia Woolf
“
The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but
the shade still belongs to winter.
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
“
In The Wood
I heard the water-fall rejoice
Singing like a choir,
I saw the sun flash out of it
Azure and amber fire.
The earth was like an open flower
Enamelled and arrayed,
The path I took to find its heart
Fluttered with sun and shade.
And while earth lured me, gently, gently,
Happy and all alone,
Suddenly a heavy snake
Reared black upon a stone.
”
”
Sara Teasdale (Dark of the Moon)
“
The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death's dominion. But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays. And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge of light appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river sparkled under it.
”
”
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities)
“
She didn't want to recall how Nehemia had been used—had used herself—against her, to force her to act. Wanted to pretend she wasn't starting to forget what Nehemia had looked like.
"Shift again," Rowan ordered, jerking his chin at her. "This time, try to—"
She was forgetting what Nehemia looked like. The shade of her eyes, the curve of her lips, the smell of her. Her laugh. The roaring in Celaena's head went quiet, silenced by that familiar nothingness.
Do not let that light go out
But Celaena didn't know how to stop it. The one person she could have told, who might have understood . . . She was buried in an unadorned grave, so far from the sun-warmed soil that she had loved.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
“
I waked that I judged it was after eight o'clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in
”
”
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
“
See me.
See me for who I am. I am magic. I am human. I am inhuman.
See me.
I am a boy. I am a girl. I am everything and nothing in between.
See me.
You do. You see me. You recoil in fear. You scream in anger.
See me.
I bleed. I ache. You see me, and you wish you hadn’t. You wish I was invisible.
Out of sight, out of mind. Unseen, faded, muted. You want my color. You want my joy. You want a monochrome world with monochrome beliefs. You see me, and you want to take it all away. But you can’t.
You want me lost, but I am found in the breaths I take, in the spaces between heartbeats.
I am found because I refuse to be in black and white, or any shade of gray.
I am color. I am fire.
I am the sun, and I will burn away the shadows until only light remains.
And then you will have no choice but to see me.
”
”
T.J. Klune (Somewhere Beyond the Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #2))
“
From where I am," the sun said, "I can see the Soul of the World. It communicates with my soul, and together we cause the plants to grow and the sheep to seek out shade. From where I am--and I'm a long way from the earth--I learned ow to love. I know that if I came even a little bit closer to the earth, everything there would die, and the Soul of the World would no longer exist. So we contemplate each other, and we want each other, and I give it light and warmth, and it gives me my reason for living.
”
”
Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)
“
The Words, Kaladin. That was Syl’s voice. You have to speak the Words!
I FORBID THIS.
YOUR WILL MATTERS NOT! Syl shouted. YOU CANNOT HOLD ME BACK IF HE SPEAKS THE WORDS! THE WORDS, KALADIN! SAY THEM!
“I will protect even those I hate,” Kaladin whispered through bloody lips. “So long as it is right.”
A Shardblade appeared in Moash’s hands.
A distant rumbling. Thunder.
THE WORDS ARE ACCEPTED, the Stormfather said reluctantly.
“Kaladin!” Syl’s voice. “Stretch forth thy hand!” She zipped around him, suddenly visible as a ribbon of light.
“I can’t…” Kaladin said, drained.
“Stretch forth thy hand!”
He reached out a trembling hand. Moash hesitated.
Wind blew in the opening in the wall, and Syl’s ribbon of light became mist, a form she often took. Silver mist, which grew larger, coalesced before Kaladin, extending into his hand.
Glowing, brilliant, a Shardblade emerged from the mist, vivid blue light shining from swirling patterns along its length.
Kaladin gasped a deep breath as if coming fully awake for the first time. The entire hallway went black as the Stormlight in every lamp down the length of the hall winked out.
For a moment, they stood in darkness.
Then Kaladin exploded with Light.
It erupted from his body, making him shine like a blazing white sun in the darkness. Moash backed away, face pale in the white brilliance, throwing up a hand to shade his eyes.
Pain evaporated like mist on a hot day. Kaladin’s grip firmed upon the glowing Shardblade, a weapon beside which those of Graves and Moash looked dull. One after another, shutters burst open up and down the hallway, wind screaming into the corridor. Behind Kaladin, frost crystalized on the ground, growing backward away from him. A glyph formed in the frost, almost in the shape of wings.
Graves screamed, falling in his haste to get away. Moash backed up, staring at Kaladin.
“The Knights Radiant,” Kaladin said softly, “have returned.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (The Way of Kings: Book One of the Stormlight Archive)
“
Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can’t speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space — none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that cases I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature — lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.
”
”
Mark Twain (The Diaries of Adam and Eve)
“
the sun was up so high when i waked, that i judged it was after eight o’clock. i laid there in the grass and the cool shade, thinking about things and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. i could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in there amongst them. there was freckled places on the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze up there. a couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me very friendly.
”
”
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
“
But my daughter, not minding, scampered off towards the pond. I ran after her, out of breath. A weeping willow stood at the point where the side path joined the main one. As it caught the rays of the sinking sun full on, its brightness was dazzling to eyes grown accustomed to the shadows. My daughter was jumping up and down, trying to grab one of the willow’s dangling branches. All right, I would wow her by grabbing a whole bunch. Shading my eyes with one hand, I approached my daughter in the light.
”
”
Yūko Tsushima (Territory of Light)
“
Commala-come-come
There’s a young man with a gun.
Young man lost his honey
When she took it on the run.
Commala-come-one!
She took it on the run!
Left her baby lonely
But he baby ain’t done.
Commala-come-coo
The wind’ll blow ya through.
Ya gotta go where ka’s wind blows ya
Cause there’s nothin else to do.
Commala-come-two!
Nothin else to do!
Gotta go where ka’s wind blows ya
Cause there’s nothin else to do.
Commala-come-key
Can you tell me what ya see?
Is it ghosts or just the mirror
That makes ya wanna flee?
Commala-come-three!
I beg ya, tell me!
Is it ghosts or just your darker self
That makes ya wanna flee?
Commala-come-ko
Whatcha doin at my do’?
If ya doan tell me now, my friend
I’ll lay ya on de flo’.
Commala-come-fo’!
I can lay ya low!
The things I’ve do to such as you
You never wanna know.
Commala-gin-jive
Ain’t it grand to be alive?
To look out on Discordia
When the Demon Moon arrives.
Commala-come-five!
Even when the shadows rise!
To see the world and walk the world
Makes ya glad to be alive.
Commala-mox-nix!
You’re in a nasty fix!
To take a hand in traitor’s glove
Is to grasp a sheaf of sticks!
Commala-come-six!
Nothing there but thorns and sticks!
When your find your hand in traitor’s glove
You’re in a nasty fix.
Commala-loaf-leaven!
They go to hell or up to heaven!
The the guns are shot and the fires hot,
You got to poke em in the oven.
Commala-come-seven!
Salt and yow’ for leaven!
Heat em up and knock em down
And poke em in the oven.
Commala-ka-kate
You’re in the hands of fate.
No matter if it’s real or not,
The hour groweth late.
Commala-come-eight!
The hour groweth late!
No matter what shade ya cast
You’re in the hands of fate.
Commala-me-mine
You have to walk the line.
When you finally get the thing you need
It makes you feel so fine.
Commala-come-nine!
It makes ya feel fine!
But if you’d have the thing you need
You have to walk the line.
Commala-come-ken
It’s the other one again.
You may know her name and face
But that don’t make her your friend.
Commala-come-ten!
She is not your friend!
If you let her get too close
She’ll cut you up again!
Commala-come-call
We hail the one who made us all,
Who made the men and made the maids,
Who made the great and small.
Commala-come-call!
He made us great and small!
And yet how great the hand of fate
That rules us one and all.
Commala-come-ki,
There’s a time to live and one to die.
With your back against the final wall
Ya gotta let the bullets fly.
Commala-come-ki!
Let the bullets fly!
Don’t ‘ee mourn for me, my lads
When it comes my day to die.
Commala-come-kass!
The child has come at last!
Sing your song, O sing it well,
The child has come to pass.
Commala-come-kass,
The worst has come to pass.
The Tower trembles on its ground;
The child has come at last.
Commala-come-come,
The battle’s now begun!
And all the foes of men and rose
Rise with the setting sun.
”
”
Stephen King (Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower, #6))
“
You don’t think me a handsome man?” She shrugged. “I’ve only seen your hands and eyes. For all I know, you’re hiding the face of a sun spirit in that hood.” Brishen scoffed at the idea. “Hardly.” He’d never lacked female company, and his people thought him well-favored. Certainly nothing as wretched as a sun spirit. He slid the hood back to his shoulders. The woman’s eyes rounded. She inhaled a harsh breath and clasped one hand to her chest. Her mollusk skin went a far more attractive shade of ash. She remained silent and stared at him until he raised a hand in question. “Well?” She exhaled slowly. The space between her eyebrows stitched into a single vertical frown line. “Had you crawled out from under my bed when I was a child, I would have bludgeoned you to death with my father’s mace.
”
”
Grace Draven (Radiance (Wraith Kings, #1))
“
The sun comes out every day and teaches us that no matter what the shade is, it does not last forever.
”
”
Pawan Pandit (Alive Sentence)
“
Words are flying out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting thorough my open mind
Possessing and caressing me
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Sounds of laughter shades of life
are ringing through my open ears
exciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Jai guru deva
Jai guru deva
”
”
The Beatles
“
Midsummer Night was roasting hot. The shore, of red granite, glowed with the heat; the dark blood of the earth seemed to be rising from below. There was a sharp, unbearable smell of birds, of cod, of green decaying seaweed. Through the mist the huge ruddy sun loomed nearer and nearer. And in the sea, dark blood welled up to meet it - in bloated, rearing, huge white waves.
Night. The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade-white woolly fog. And all that you could see was that behind it something red was happening. ("The North")
”
”
Yevgeny Zamyatin (The Dragon: Fifteen Stories (English and Russian Edition))
“
Many of us are sundials in the shade. Things aren’t working, but we are not broken. We are just in the wrong spot. We need to move out of the shade and into the sun, or we need to start chopping down trees.
”
”
David J. Rendall (The Freak Factor: Discovering Uniqueness by Flaunting Weakness)
“
Michael writes of sun, but all I can think of is sunsickness, too much in the sun never a daughter. As if God's light still shone on we who have shaded our eyes. A few phrases remain but the drift is vanish. No way out and no way in--a straight call to blast, Adrift on stage for all to view--the cringe, the sigh, the curveilinear clide. The scholar-trancemaker hangs from the end of a trope and asks to be cut down. An umbilical cord signifies no less. Yet despite, i can now see or is it all a mitake? & does it splatter?
”
”
Charles Bernstein (Dark City (Sun & Moon Classics))
“
Just before the Battle of Thermoplyae, a Spartan warrior named Dienekes was told that the Persian archers could blank out the sun with their arrows. He replied "Good, then we shall have our battle in the shade.
”
”
Herodotus (The Histories)
“
It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light.
”
”
Kat Rosenfield (Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone)
“
ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near
lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are
flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life
and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I
saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get
round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he
asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the
sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey
and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the
sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they
called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with
the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish
girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in
the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who
else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all
clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep
and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and
the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of
years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like
kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with
the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her
lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the
castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman
going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and
the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and
the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets
and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the
jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was
a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the
Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
”
”
James Joyce (Ulysses)
“
She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods--come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn't value.
”
”
Zora Neale Hurston
“
Looking up, I stare into the most unique and beautiful shade of blue that a pair of eyes has ever possessed. Of that I am certain. Blue just shouldn’t be that multi-faceted and twinkling. There should be a law or something.
Or at least a warning label:
Caution, these eyes may cause female knees to tremble.
Looking up, I stare into the most unique and beautiful shade of blue that a pair of eyes has ever possessed. Of that I am certain. Blue just shouldn’t be that multi-faceted and twinkling. There should be a law or something.
Or at least a warning label:
Caution, these eyes may cause female knees to tremble.
Before I can help it, I scan the rest of him. Sweet Mary. This guy had lucked out in the gene department. Tall, slender, beautiful. Honey colored hair that had natural highlights that could even catch the crappy airport light, broad shoulders, slim hips, long legs. He is tan and golden with a bright, white smile.
I am surely staring at Apollo, the god of the sun.
”
”
Courtney Cole (Dante's Girl (The Paradise Diaries, #1))
“
Between takeoff and landing, we are each in suspended animation, a pause between chapters of our lives. When we stare out the window into the sun's glare, the landscape is only a flat projection with mountain ranges reduced to wrinkles in the continental skin. Oblivious to our passage overhead, other stories are unfolding beneath us. Blackberries ripen in the August sun, a woman packs a suitcase and hesitates at her doorway, a letter is opened and the most surprising photograph slides from between the pages. But we are moving too fast and we are too far away; all the stories escape us, except our own. When I turn away from the window, the stories recede into the two-dimensional map of green and brown below. Like a trout disappearing into the shade of an overhanging bank, leaving you staring at the flat surface of the water and wondering if you saw it at all.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses)
“
A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again) but now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning< which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal.
”
”
Virginia Woolf
“
You would -- you would take him into Your heaven, my lord?" asked Ingrey in astonishment and outrage. "He slew, not in defense of his own life, but in malice and madness. He tried to steal powers not rightly given to him. If I guess right, he plotted the death of his own brother. He would have raped Ijada, if he could, and killed again for his sport!"
The Son held up his hands. Luminescent, they seemed, as if dappled by autumn sun reflecting off a stream into shade. "My grace flows from me as a river, wolf-lord. Would you have me dole it out in the exact measure that men earn, as from an apothecary's dropper? Would you stand in pure water to your waist, and administer it by the scant spoon to men dying of thirst on a parched shore?"
Ingrey stood silent, abashed, but Ijada lifted her face, and said steadily, "No, my lord, for my part. Give him to the river. Tumble him down in the thunder of Your cataract. His loss is no gain of mine, nor his dark deserving any joy to me."
The god smiled brilliantly at her. Tears slid down her face like silver threads: like benedictions.
"It is unjust," whispered Ingrey. "Unfair to all who -- who would try to do rightly...."
"Ah, but I am not the god for justice," murmured the Son. "Would you both stand before my Father instead?
”
”
Lois McMaster Bujold (The Hallowed Hunt (World of the Five Gods, #3))
“
The Son held up his hands. Luminescent, they seemed, as if dappled by autumn sun reflecting off a stream into shade. “My grace flows from these as a river, wolf-lord. Would you have me dole it out in the exact measure that men earn, as from an apothecary’s dropper? Would you stand in pure water to your waist, and administer it by the scant spoon to men dying of thirst on a parched shore?
”
”
Lois McMaster Bujold (The Hallowed Hunt (World of the Five Gods, #3))
“
I had to go back and reread the page a few times. As I read it, I kept drifting out of the book, out of the booth, and coasting on the green crest of the song, to the momentary idea that any point on Earth was mine for the visiting, that I'd lucked out living in the reality I was in. And I also got the feeling I was souring and damaging that luck by enjoying the contentment of pulling the shades on the sun, and shutting out my fellow employees and the world, and folding myself up in the construct of a brilliant novel like The Man in the High Castle, that all the reading I'd been doing up to this point hadn't enhanced my life, but rather had replaced and delayed it.
”
”
Patton Oswalt (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland)
“
When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires.
("The Basilisk")
”
”
R. Murray Gilchrist (Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror)
“
The season of the world before us will be like no other in the history of mankind. Satan has unleashed every evil, every scheme, every blatant, vile perversion ever known to man in any generation. Just as this is the dispensation of the fullness of times, so it is also the dispensation of the fullness of evil. We and our wives and husbands, our children, and our members must find safety. There is no safety in the world: wealth cannot provide it, enforcement agencies cannot assure it, membership in this Church alone cannot bring it.
As the evil night darkens upon this generation, we must come to the temple for light and safety. In our temples we find quiet, sacred havens where the storm cannot penetrate to us. There are hosts of unseen sentinels watching over and guarding our temples. Angels attend every door. As it was in the days of Elisha, so it will be for us: “Those that be with us are more than they that be against us.”
Before the Savior comes the world will darken. There will come a period of time where even the elect will lose hope if they do not come to the temples. The world will be so filled with evil that the righteous will only feel secure within these walls. The saints will come here not only to do vicarious work, but to find a haven of peace. They will long to bring their children here for safety’s sake.
I believe we may well have living on the earth now or very soon the boy or babe who will be the prophet of the Church when the Savior comes. Those who will sit in the Quorum of Twelve Apostles are here. There are many in our homes and communities who will have apostolic callings. We must keep them clean, sweet and pure in an oh so wicked world. There will be greater hosts of unseen beings in the temple. Prophets of old as well as those in this dispensation will visit the temples. Those who attend will feel their strength and feel their companionship. We will not be alone in our temples.
Our garments worn as instructed will clothe us in a manner as protective as temple walls. The covenants and ordinances will fill us with faith as a living fire. In a day of desolating sickness, scorched earth, barren wastes, sickening plagues, disease, destruction, and death, we as a people will rest in the shade of trees, we will drink from the cooling fountains. We will abide in places of refuge from the storm, we will mount up as on eagle’s wings, we will be lifted out of an insane and evil world. We will be as fair as the sun and clear as the moon.
The Savior will come and will honor his people. Those who are spared and prepared will be a temple-loving people. They will know Him. They will cry out, “Blessed be the name of He that cometh in the name of the Lord; thou are my God and I will bless thee; thou are my God and I will exalt thee.”
Our children will bow down at His feet and worship Him as the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings. They will bathe His feet with their tears and He will weep and bless them for having suffered through the greatest trials ever known to man. His bowels will be filled with compassion and His heart will swell wide as eternity and He will love them. He will bring peace that will last a thousand years and they will receive their reward to dwell with Him. Let us prepare them with faith to surmount every trial and every condition. We will do it in these holy, sacred temples. Come, come, oh come up to the temples of the Lord and abide in His presence.
”
”
Vaughn J. Featherstone
“
In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up, the handsome son of the Brahman, the young falcon, together with his friend Govinda, son of a Brahman. The sun tanned his light shoulders by the banks of the river when bathing, performing the sacred ablutions, the sacred offerings. In the mango grove, shade poured into his black eyes, when playing as a boy, when his mother sang, when the sacred offerings were made, when his father, the scholar, taught him, when the wise men talked. For a long time, Siddhartha had been partaking in the discussions of the wise men, practising debate with Govinda, practising with Govinda the art of reflection, the service of meditation. He already knew how to speak the Om silently, the word of words, to speak it silently into himself while inhaling, to speak it silently out of himself while exhaling, with all the concentration of his soul, the forehead surrounded by the glow of the clear-thinking spirit. He already knew to feel Atman in the depths of his being, indestructible, one with the universe.
”
”
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
“
You carry your soul in your hands and hold it out for the world to see, and all I want is to pull it close to me and cover it with my own. All I want is to take this fragile part of you that you so generously share with the world and protect it. Shade it from the sun yet hide it from darkness,
”
”
Danielle Rose (Blood Rose (Blood Books #1))
“
Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun. Fairyland-Below is the shadow of Fairyland, and this is where magic gets born and grows up and sows its oats before coming out into the world. The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming. Before Halloween, we lived in the upper world, where the light makes us insubstantial, thin, scraps of thought and shade. We weren’t unhappy—we made good magic for the world, sportsmanlike stuff. We reflected our bodies’ deeds, and when our brothers and sisters went to sleep, we had our own pretty lives, our shadow loves, our shadow markets, our shadow races. But we had no idea, no idea how it could be under the world with our Hollow Queen. And now we shall never go back.
”
”
Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Fairyland, #2))
“
Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become.
”
”
Kent Haruf (Plainsong (Plainsong, #1))
“
The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but the shade still belongs to winter,
”
”
Victoria E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
“
As for describing the smell of a spaniel mixed with the smell of torches, laurels, incense, banners, wax candles and a garland of rose leaves crushed by a satin heel that has been laid up in camphor, perhaps Shakespeare, had he paused in the middle of writing Antony and Cleopatra — But Shakespeare did not pause. Confessing our inadequacy, then, we can but note that to Flush Italy, in these the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life, meant mainly a succession of smells. Love, it must be supposed, was gradually losing its appeal. Smell remained. Now that they were established in Casa Guidi again, all had their avocations. Mr. Browning wrote regularly in one room; Mrs. Browning wrote regularly in another. The baby played in the nursery. But Flush wandered off into the streets of Florence to enjoy the rapture of smell. He threaded his path through main streets and back streets, through squares and alleys, by smell. He nosed his way from smell to smell; the rough, the smooth, the dark, the golden. He went in and out, up and down, where they beat brass, where they bake bread, where the women sit combing their hair, where the bird-cages are piled high on the causeway, where the wine spills itself in dark red stains on the pavement, where leather smells and harness and garlic, where cloth is beaten, where vine leaves tremble, where men sit and drink and spit and dice — he ran in and out, always with his nose to the ground, drinking in the essence; or with his nose in the air vibrating with the aroma. He slept in this hot patch of sun — how sun made the stone reek! he sought that tunnel of shade — how acid shade made the stone smell! He devoured whole bunches of ripe grapes largely because of their purple smell; he chewed and spat out whatever tough relic of goat or macaroni the Italian housewife had thrown from the balcony — goat and macaroni were raucous smells, crimson smells. He followed the swooning sweetness of incense into the violet intricacies of dark cathedrals; and, sniffing, tried to lap the gold on the window- stained tomb. Nor was his sense of touch much less acute. He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness. Hoary folds of drapery, smooth fingers and feet of stone received the lick of his tongue, the quiver of his shivering snout. Upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet he took the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions. In short, he knew Florence as no human being has ever known it; as Ruskin never knew it or George Eliot either.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (Flush)
“
I knew she could burn brighter than the sun if she only stepped out of his shade. But fuck. Even my faith in her strength didn’t match up to just how magnificent she really is.
That’s my girl.
”
”
Raven Kennedy (Gleam (The Plated Prisoner, #3))
“
Your powers are great, you can do everything.
If your life bring you a trouble
that's just to get the best out of you,
Shade exists only because the sun shines
Diamond is created just under pressure
Slobodan Boban Manic
”
”
Slobodan Boban Manic
“
They all gave place when the signing was done, and Little Dorrit and her husband walked out of the church alone. They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun’s bright rays, and then went down. Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother’s care, in the fulness of time, to Fanny’s neglected children no less than to their own, and to leave that lady going into Society forever and a day. Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip for some few years, who was never vexed by the great exactions he made of her in return for the riches he might have given her if he had ever had them, and who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.
”
”
Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit)
“
I walked awhile among the rocks: the sky was perfectly clear, and the sun so hot, that I was forced to turn my face from it: when all on a sudden it became obscure, as I thought, in a manner very different from what happens by the interposition of a cloud. I turned back, and perceived a vast opaque body between me and the sun moving forwards towards the island: it seemed to be about two miles high, and hid the sun six or seven minutes; but I did not observe the air to be much colder, or the sky more darkened, than if I had stood under the shade of a mountain. As it approached nearer over the place where I was, it appeared to be a firm substance, the bottom flat, smooth, and shining very bright, from the reflection of the sea below. I stood upon a height about two hundred yards from the shore, and saw this vast body descending almost to a parallel with me, at less than an English mile distance. I took out my pocket perspective, and could plainly discover numbers of people moving up and down the sides of it, which appeared to be sloping; but what those people where doing I was not able to distinguish.
”
”
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels)
“
Grandfather died a few days after his hundredth birthday. Both Father and I were there at the end, in the room where I'd been born, forty-four years ago. It was not unlike that day, with sunlight streaming through the windows, and hummingbirds hovering outside, iridescent sun-glittering flashes of jewels. A dove was calling, back in the cool shade. Grandfather's hand was cool, as cool as the river. He tried to sit up to look out at the sunlight.
"Sycamores grow by running water," he sang, "cottonwoods by still water," and then he died, and I felt a century slip away.
”
”
Rick Bass (The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness)
“
One morning she at last succeeded in helping him to the foot of the steps, trampling down the grass before him with her feet, and clearing a way for him through the briars, whose supple arms barred the last few yards. Then they slowly entered the wood of roses. It was indeed a very wood, with thickets of tall standard roses throwing out leafy clumps as big as trees, and enormous rose bushes impenetrable as copses of young oaks. Here, formerly, there had been a most marvellous collection of plants. But since the flower garden had been left in abandonment, everything had run wild, and a virgin forest had arisen, a forest of roses over-running the paths, crowded with wild offshoots, so mingled, so blended, that roses of every scent and hue seemed to blossom on the same stem. Creeping roses formed mossy carpets on the ground, while climbing roses clung to others like greedy ivy plants, and ascended in spindles of verdure, letting a shower of their loosened petals fall at the lightest breeze. Natural paths coursed through the wood — narrow footways, broad avenues, enchanting covered walks in which one strolled in the shade and scent. These led to glades and clearings, under bowers of small red roses, and between walls hung with tiny yellow ones. Some sunny nooks gleamed like green silken stuff embroidered with bright patterns; other shadier corners offered the seclusion of alcoves and an aroma of love, the balmy warmth, as it were, of a posy languishing on a woman’s bosom. The rose bushes had whispering voices too. And the rose bushes were full of songbirds’ nests. ‘We must take care not to lose ourselves,’ said Albine, as she entered the wood. ‘I did lose myself once, and the sun had set before I was able to free myself from the rose bushes which caught me by the skirt at every step.’ They had barely walked a few minutes, however, before Serge, worn out with fatigue, wished to sit down. He stretched himself upon the ground, and fell into deep slumber. Albine sat musing by his side. They were on the edge of a glade, near a narrow path which stretched away through the wood, streaked with flashes of sunlight, and, through a small round blue gap at its far end, revealed the sky. Other little paths led from the clearing into leafy recesses. The glade was formed of tall rose bushes rising one above the other with such a wealth of branches, such a tangle of thorny shoots, that big patches of foliage were caught aloft, and hung there tent-like, stretching out from bush to bush. Through the tiny apertures in the patches of leaves, which were suggestive of fine lace, the light
”
”
Émile Zola (Delphi Complete Works of Emile Zola)
“
The woods were definitely changing. Aurora and Phillip could no longer see the sky at all because of the ancient tall trees that stretched far overhead. Pines and other shaggy-barked species shot a hundred feet straight up on massive trunks, some of which were as thick around as a small house. The canopies that spread out at their tops blocked out most of the sun; only a rare dappled shaft made it through. But it didn't feel claustrophobic. The absence of light kept the underbrush low: moss on ancient fallen logs, puddles of shade flowers, mushrooms and tiny lilies. It was airy and endless like the largest cathedral ever imagined.
”
”
Liz Braswell (Once Upon a Dream)
“
We need to get you laid."
Despite the fact she couldn't see my face, my brow furrowed. "How is that going to help?"
"Rebound sex is exactly what you need right now, sweaty, dirty, work-your-frustration-out sex. In fact, I have the perfect guy in mind—"
I jolted up quickly at the sound of a firm tapping. I looked over at the window to see Kacey's sun kissed face, his shades resting at the edge of his long nose, baby blue eyes fixed on me.
I placed my hand over my thumping heart. "You ass."
"Bitch?"
"Not you, Jayne." I climbed off my bed. "Kay and Ty are here."
"Speak of the devil, and his sexy ass will most definitely appear.
”
”
Elizabeth Morgan (Creak)
“
Robert Jordan put up his field glasses, shading the lenses carefully with his cupped hands even though there was now no sun to make a glint, and there was the rail of the bridge as clear as though you could reach out and touch it and there was the face of the sentry so clear he could see the sunken cheeks the ash on the cigarette and the greasy shine of the bayonet.
”
”
James Scott Bell (Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing)
“
And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.
”
”
Toni Morrison (Jazz (Beloved Trilogy, #2))
“
Mabel grips Eleanor's arm tight as the bowl fast along the country lane, Dilly's hooves kicking dust into sultry July air. Limbs of the trees which stand like sentries beside the lane reach out and curl above them, joining like the high arches of a cathedral to form a cool green canopy, shading the little pony and trap and its occupants from the fierce heat of the afternoon sun.
”
”
Louise Fein (The Hidden Child)
“
There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me.
I decided I'd better go to work, maybe that would exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast counter now. I didn't want any, anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers. In the end I didn't go to work, either. I couldn't, I wouldn't have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come, and it was no idle excuse, even though I was upright on my two legs.
I roamed around the rest of the day in the sunshine. Wherever the sunshine was the brightest, I sought and stayed in that place, and when it moved on I moved with it. I couldn't get it bright enough or strong enough. I avoided the shade, I edged away from it, even the slight shade of an awning or of a tree.
And yet the sunshine didn't warm me. Where others mopped their brows and moved out of it, I stayed - and remained cold inside. And the shade was winning the battle as the hours lengthened. It outlasted the sun. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on, the time of dreams, the enemy. ("Nightmare")
”
”
Cornell Woolrich (Baker's Dozen: 13 Short Mystery Novels)
“
Clara smoked in the shallow pool as Lana del Rey poured from her phone. She shaded her eyes. She liked the shallow pool because she could lay out, half in the sun, half in the water, and not get her hair wet. She had black eyeliner smeared under her eyes from who-knows-when, and while she never bothered to fix it, she did apply more, so she looked permanently hung over. She liked that.
”
”
Lisa Martens (What Grows in Heavy Rain)
“
Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer’s article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I’m all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact—that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special unique way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes. Natural history indeed! Unnatural history—because that precision of senses and sense must seem unpleasantly peculiar to peasants, and because the detail is all: The song of a Tuscan Firecrest or a Sitka Kinglet in a cemetery cypress; a minty whiff of Summer Savory or Yerba Buena on a coastal slope; the dancing flitter of a Holly Blue or an Echo Azure—combined with other birds, flowers and butterflies: that has to be heard, smelled and seen through the transparency of death and ardent beauty. And the most difficult: beauty itself as perceived through the there and then. The males of the firefly (now it’s really your turn, Van).
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle)
“
There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut.
There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness.
The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine.
On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy.
Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair.
The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Shirley)
“
She was forgetting what Nehemia looked like. The shade of her eyes, the curve of her lips, the smell of her. Her laugh. The roaring in Celaena’s head went quiet, silenced by that familiar nothingness. Do not let that light go out. But Celaena didn’t know how to stop it. The one person she could have told, who might have understood … She was buried in an unadorned grave, so far from the sun-warmed soil that she had loved.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
“
It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete. People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder. Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun. It certainly was hot. Robert climbed down and fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top. Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us to start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time. He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of the bus. Every one took a drink very politely, and then they made us cork it up and put it away. They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles. They were peasants going up into the hills.
”
”
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises)
“
A morning-flowered dalliance
demured and dulcet-sweet
with ebullience and efflorescence
admiring, cozy cottages
and elixirs of eloquence
lie waiting at our feet -
We'll dance through fetching pleasantries
as we walk ephemeral roads
evocative epiphanies
ethereal, though we know
our hearts are linked with gossamer
halcyon our day
a harbinger of pretty things
infused with whispers longing still
and gamboling in sultry ways
to feelings, all ineffable
screaming with insouciance
masking labyrinthine paths
where, in our nonchalance, we walk
through the lilt of love’s new morning rays.
Mellifluous murmurings
from a babbling brook
that soothes our heated passion-songs
and panoplies perplexed with thought
of shadows carried off with clouds
in stormy summer rains…
My dear, and that I can call you 'dear'
after ripples turned to crashing waves
after pyrrhic wins, emotions drained
we find our palace sunned and rayed
with quintessential moments lit
with wildflower lanterns arrayed
on verandahs lush with mutual love,
the softest love – our preferred décor
of life's lilly-blossom gate
in white-fenced serendipity…
Twilight sunlit heavens cross
our gardens, graced with perseverance,
bliss, and thee, and thou, so splendid, delicate
as a morning dove of charm and mirth –
at least with me; our misty mornings
glide through air...
So with whippoorwill’d sweet poetry -
of moonstones, triumphs, wonder-woven
in chandliers of winglet cherubs
wrought with time immemorial,
crafted with innocence, stowed away
and brought to light upon our day
in hallelujah tapestries
of ocean-windswept galleries
in breaths of ballet kisses, light,
skipping to the breakfast room
cascading chrysalis's love
in diaphanous imaginings
delightful, fleeting, celestial-viewed
as in our eyes which come to rest
evocative, exuberant
on one another’s moon-stowed dreams
idyllic, in quiescent ways,
peaceful in their radiance
resplendent with a myriad of thought
soothing muse, rhapsodic song
until the somnolence of night
spreads out again its shaded truss
of luminescent fantasies
waiting to be loved by us…
Oh, love! Your sincerest pardons begged!
I’ve gone too long, I’ve rambled, dear,
and on and on and on and on -
as if our hours were endless here…
A morning toast, with orange-juiced lips
exalting transcendent minds
suffused with sunrise symphonies
organic-born tranquilities
sublimed sonorous assemblages
with scintillas of eternity beating
at our breasts – their embraces but
a blushing, longing glance away…
I’ll end my charms this enraptured morn'
before cacophony and chafe
coarse in crude and rough abrade
when cynical distrust is laid
by hoarse and leeching parasites,
distaste fraught with smug disgust
by hairy, smelly maladroit
mediocrities born of poisoned wells
grotesque with selfish lies -
shrill and shrieking, biting, creeping
around our love, as if they rose
from Edgar Allen’s own immortal
rumpled decomposing clothes…
Oh me, oh my! I am so sorry!
can you forgive me? I gone and kissed you
for so long, in my morning imaginings,
through these words, through this song -
‘twas supposed to be "a trifle treat,"
but little treats do sometimes last
a little longer; and, oh, but oh,
but if I could, I surly would
keep you just a little longer tarrying here,
tarrying here with me this pleasant morn
”
”
Numi Who
“
No matter what Jody did, she said nothing. She had learned how to talk some and leave some. She was a rut in the road. Plenty of life beneath the surface but it was kept beaten down by the wheels. Sometimes she stuck out into the future, imagining her life different from what it was. But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun.
”
”
Zadie Smith (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays)
“
They came to a destroyed cabin and he pulled up and then went inside. Broken cups and pieces of dress material torn on a nail. A doll’s body without a head. He dug a .50-caliber bullet out of the wall with his knife and then carefully placed it on the windowsill as if for a memento. Here were memories, loves, deep heartstring notes like the place where he had been raised in Georgia. Here had been people whose dearest memories were the sound of a dipper dropped in the water bucket after taking a drink and the click of it as it hit bottom. The quiet of evening. The shade of the Devil’s trumpet vine over a window, scattered shadows gently hypnotic. The smell of a new calf, a long bar of sun falling into the back door over worn planks and every knot outlined. The familiar path to the barn walked for years by one’s father, grandfather, uncles, the way they called out, Horses, horses. How they swung the bucket by the handle as they went at an easy walk down the path between the trees, between here and there, between babyhood and adulthood, between innocence and death, that worn path and the lifting of the heart as the horses called out to you, how you knew each by the sound of its voice in the long cool evening after a day of hard work. Your heart melted sweetly, it slowed, lost its edges. Horses, horses. All gone in the burning.
”
”
Paulette Jiles (News of the World)
“
I looked around I realized I was standing on the edge of the muddy bank with tall trees in the distance. I could see the sun rising over the water just as the sky glistened a beautiful rose gold with ombre shades of purple and blue––just like in my dream. But this wasn’t my dream or was it? I can openly admit I have been mentally lost for months, but now as I sit here with an irate otter yelling at me, the idea of lost took on a whole new meaning.
”
”
Brynn Myers (Falling Out of Focus)
“
Curious?” This second man was tall as a lamp post. His pale face, lunar pockmarks denting it, cast light on those who stood below. His vest was the color of fresh blood. His eyebrows, his hair, his suit were licorice black, and the sun-yellow gem which stared from the tie pin thrust in his cravat was the same unblinking shade and bright crystal as his eyes. But in this instant, swiftly, and with utter clearness, it was the suit which fascinated Will. For it seemed woven of boar-bramble, clock-spring hair, bristle, and a sort of ever-trembling, ever-glistening dark hemp. The suit caught light and stirred like a bed of black tweed-thorns, interminably itching, covering the man’s long body with motion so it seemed he should excruciate, cry out, and tear the clothes free. Yet here he stood, moon-calm, inhabiting his itch-weed suit and watching Jim’s mouth with his yellow eyes. He never looked once at Will. “The name is Dark.
”
”
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2))
“
Leaving him and going out into the paint-fuming air I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me. Like the servant about whom I'd read in psychology class who, during a trance, had recited pages of Greek philosophy which she had overheard one day while she worked. It was as though I were acting out a scene from some crazy movie. Or perhaps I was catching up with myself and had put into words feelings which I had hitherto suppressed. Or was it, I thought, starting up the walk, that I was no longer afraid? I stopped, looking at the buildings down the bright street slanting with sun and shade. I was no longer afraid. Not of important men, not of trustees and such; for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid. Was that it? I felt light-headed, my ears were ringing. I went on.
”
”
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
“
This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket.
Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.
I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. ("The Vane Sisters")
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now)
“
Either Jupiter or Saturn was still visible, pale against the lightening sky. The wind was blustery and full of voices. I sat as sun lipped the horizon. The grass changed in the light, from brown to yellowish to green. The grass: it was green.
It was the end of March. I'd been in the country for three weeks. All around me, as if the scales had fallen from my eyes, I saw color flushing the slopes, a color I'd never again hoped to see: that green that is the herald of flavor and pleasure, that says: look, says: wait, says: taste: the gates of the underworld unlatched for mints and sorrels and pine-dark needles in shade and the pale sun-swell of the honeysuckle that bells out the triumphant return, after long winter, of a daughter. It was a green made possible by a man who held in his sway horticulturalists and biologists and chicken geneticists and meteorologists who could control the weather itself, and I forgot those wan, distant orbs in the sky as I opened my mouth, I bayed.
And then, at last, it was spring.
”
”
C Pam Zhang (Land of Milk and Honey)
“
A paradisiacal lagoon lay below them. The water was an unbelievable, unreal turquoise, its surface so still that every feature of the bottom could be admired in magnified detail: colorful pebbles, bright red kelp, fish as pretty and colorful as the jungle birds. A waterfall on the far side fell softly from a height of at least twenty feet. A triple rainbow graced its frothy bottom. Large boulders stuck out of the water at seemingly random intervals, black and sun-warmed and extremely inviting, like they had been placed there on purpose by some ancient giant.
And on these were the mermaids.
Wendy gasped at their beauty.
Their tails were all colors of the rainbow, somehow managing not to look tawdry or clownish. Deep royal blue, glittery emerald green, coral red, anemone purple. Slick and wet and as beautifully real as the salmon Wendy's father had once caught on holiday in Scotland. Shining and voluptuously alive.
The mermaids were rather scandalously naked except for a few who wore carefully placed shells and starfish, although their hair did afford some measure of decorum as it trailed down their torsos. Their locks were long and thick and sinuous and mostly the same shades as their tails. Some had very tightly coiled curls, some had braids. Some had decorated their tresses with limpets and bright hibiscus flowers.
Their "human" skins were familiar tones: dark brown to pale white, pink and beige and golden and everything in between. Their eyes were also familiar eye colors but strangely clear and flat. Either depthless or extremely shallow depending on how one stared.
They sang, they brushed their hair, they played in the water. In short, they did everything mythical and magical mermaids were supposed to do, laughing and splashing as they did.
"Oh!" Wendy whispered. "They're-" And then she stopped.
Tinker Bell was giving her a funny look. An unhappy funny look.
The mermaids were beautiful. Indescribably, perfectly beautiful. They glowed and were radiant and seemed to suck up every ray of sun and sparkle of water; Wendy found she had no interest looking anywhere else.
”
”
Liz Braswell (Straight On Till Morning)
“
PART TWO Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD CHAPTER ONE Alicia Berenson’s Diary JULY 16 I never thought I’d be longing for rain. We’re into our fourth week of the heat wave, and it feels like an endurance test. Each day seems hotter than the last. It doesn’t feel like England. More like a foreign country—Greece or somewhere. I’m writing this on Hampstead Heath. The whole park is strewn with red-faced, semi-naked bodies, like a beach or a battlefield, on blankets or benches or spread out on the grass. I’m sitting under a tree, in the shade. It’s six o’clock, and it has started to cool down. The sun is low and red in a golden sky—the park looks different in this light—darker shadows, brighter colors. The grass looks like it’s on fire, flickering flames under my feet. I took off my shoes on my way here and walked barefoot. It reminded me of when I was little and I’d play outside. It reminded me of another summer, hot like this one—the summer Mum died—playing outside with Paul, cycling on our bikes through golden fields dotted with wild daisies, exploring abandoned houses and haunted orchards. In my memory that summer lasts forever. I remember Mum and those colorful tops she’d wear, with the yellow stringy straps, so flimsy and delicate—just like her. She was so thin, like a little bird. She would put on the radio and pick me up and dance me around to pop songs on the radio. I remember how she smelled of shampoo and cigarettes and Nivea hand cream, always with an undertone of vodka. How old was she then?
”
”
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
“
If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada Goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England Asters. Not the pale domesticates of the perennial border, the weak sauce of lavender or sky blue, but full-on royal purple that would make a violet shrink. The daisylike fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning. Purple and gold, the heraldic colors of the king and queen of the meadow, a regal procession in complementary colors. I just wanted to know why.
In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair.
Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis; it’s a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty.
Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both.
The question of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.
”
”
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
“
I don’t know. I hope this is just a little fling, that’s all.” Georgeta shrugged, her eyes back on the Kindle. “We need to move the blankets more into the shade. The sun is creeping out from behind that tree, and I’m getting way too hot. Maybe we should go to Ray's Boathouse for lunch?”
“Lusia, relax. Georgeta’s right—this might not last past next week.” Bogdan looked from his girlfriend to Jatred and Jasmira, who now were passionately kissing in the water.
“You think?” Lusia motioned at the couple with her hand. “He’s our Race’s Prince. The Goddess will freak out.
”
”
A.O. Peart
“
The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.
”
”
Padma Lakshmi (Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir)
“
Night falls
And the sun rises,
And I dig niggers, niggers, niggers of all shades and sizes
And the sun, the sun it plays on my eyes
And I hear the hungry cries
Of black children
Their stomachs turned inside out
Their minds full of fear and doubt
Being told lies
Being watched by spies
With loophole-proof alibis
While another nigger, nigger, nigger in Vietnam dies
But the sun still rises and the night still falls
And junkies still O.D. in ghetto halls
And Miles he still blows
And the oppression still grows
And where it stops, nobody knows
And black people cry out in vain
Against injustice and pain
To one whose mind is insane...
from "Surprises" by the Last Poets
”
”
Jalal Mansur Nuriddin
“
In that moment Ned felt a swelling, a ripping expansion, a hugeness that rang through him for the length of his life, a feeling that was sometimes rivalled but never quite matched. Not at weddings, not at births, not at funerals. Not when he worked his way north to Longreach, where he finally saw Toby again, finding him cocky, funny and largely unchanged. Not during good seasons or bad. Not when he was alone on cold waterways, not when he was in the grip of people he loved. Not as he poured dirt into graves, not as he watched his children, then his grandchildren, play. Not on the white sands of hidden beaches. Not in the shade of ancient trees, in whose canopies he imagined he could see the darting of cream-brown quolls. Not on rocky mountain roofs. Not in the presence of whales, not while viewing fine ships. Not at the scent of Huon pine. Not as Callie's last breath eased out of her, in their house overlooking kanamaluka, the eastern sun warming her face right up to the final moments of her life. Not at his ninetieth birthday, surrounded by his family and what was left of his friends, as he felt both powerfully loved and profoundly alone.
Not even then, at the very end of his life, did he feel it again, although he always remembered it: this hugeness of feeling. This undamming of a whole summer's fear, this half-sickening lurch to joy. (pp.225-6)
”
”
Robbie Arnott (Limberlost)
“
The last rain had come at the beginning of April and now, at the first of June, all but the hardiest mosquitoes had left their papery skins in the grass. It was already seven o'clock in the morning, long past time to close windows and doors, trap what was left of the night air slightly cooler only by virtue of the dark. The dust on the gravel had just enough energy to drift a short distance and then collapse on the flower beds. The sun had a white cast, as if shade and shadow, any flicker of nuance, had been burned out by its own fierce center. There would be no late afternoon gold, no pale early morning yellow, no flaming orange at sunset. If the plants had vocal cords they would sing their holy dirges like slaves.
”
”
Jane Hamilton (A Map of the World)
“
The Dying Man"
in memoriam W.B. Yeats
1. His words
I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.
“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.
“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.
2. What Now?
Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.
Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.
I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.
In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.
3. The Wall
A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.
Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.
The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.
4. The Exulting
Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.
5. They Sing, They Sing
All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.
Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.
I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.
The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
”
”
Theodore Roethke (The Collected Poems)
“
sun caught the edge of his belt buckle, projecting a flash that shimmered across the desert plain. A shrill whistle sounded, and as I stepped to the right I caught sight of his shadow spilling a whole other set of sophisms from an entirely different angle. —I been here before, haven’t I? He just sat there staring out at the plain. Son of a bitch, I thought. He’s ignoring me. —Hey, I said, I’m not the dead, not a shade passing. I’m flesh and blood here. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and started writing. —You got to at least look at me, I said. After all, it is my dream. I drew closer. Close enough to see what he was writing. He had his notebook open to a blank page and three words suddenly materialized. Nope, it’s mine. —Well, I’ll be damned, I murmured. I
”
”
Patti Smith (M Train: A Memoir)
“
The Desert
A weary eye may see endless wastes stretching beyond the horizon,
but the trained eye sees a story hiding in every grain of sand.
A coiling tower of Babel rises from a rattler's knots,
their tongues forking in the shade of a gopher's den.
Sounds of birds on mesquite trees mix with cricket chirps,
displaced at night by a coyote's howl carried on wings of shifting sands.
Listen closely and you'll hear her pup's plaintive whimpers until she returns.
The desert sky becomes a festival of stars, entertaining an exclusive audience of sidewinders, Gila monsters, scorpions and horned toads.
Sun rises over the blackened mountains greeted by a whip-tailed lizard who bobs its head, saying, 'this is my piece of paradise, keep out.'
The desert is no empty place,
but heaven's own retreat filled with amazing grace.
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold, and, filling in the
branches, complete the pathos of dishevelled autumnal plane trees in London squares. Now, become as the leaf or the daisy, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky
is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!—this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and
waggons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and
wafting them away—this endless activity, with the waste of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy, has been left to work its will year in year out.
”
”
Virginia Woolf (On Being Ill)
“
Before reaching it, we would meet the smell of his lilacs, coming out to greet the strangers. From among the fresh green little hearts of their leaves, the flowers would curiously lift above the gate of the park their tufts of mauve or white feathers, glazed, even in the shade, by the sun in which they had bathed. A few, half hidden by the little tiled lodge called the Archers’ House, where the caretaker lived, overtopped its Gothic gable with their pink minarets. The Nymphs of Spring would have seemed vulgar compared to these young houris, which preserved within this French garden the pure and vivid tones of Persian miniatures. Despite my desire to entwine their supple waists and draw down to me the starry curls of their fragrant heads, we would pass by without stopping because my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann’s marriage…
We stopped for a moment in front of the gate. Lilac time was nearly over; a few, still, poured forth in tall mauve chandeliers the delicate bubbles of their flowers, but in many places among the leaves where only a week before they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, a hollow scum now withered, shrunken and dark, dry and odorless.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Swann's Way)
“
Hitherto all that has given colour to existence has lacked a history: where would one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? Even a comparative history of law, as also of punishment, has hitherto been completely lacking. Have the different divisions of the day, the consequences of a regular appointment of the times for labour, feast, and repose, ever been made the object of investigation? Do we know the moral effects of the alimentary substances? Is there a philosophy of nutrition? (The ever-recurring outcry for and against vegetarianism proves that as yet there is no such philosophy!) Have the experiences with regard to communal living, for example, in monasteries, been collected? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been set forth? The customs of the learned, of trades-people, of areists, and of mechanics have they already found been found and thought about? There is so much in them to think about! All that up till now has been considered as the "conditions of existence," of human beings, and all reason, passion and superstition in this consideration have they been investigated to the end? The observation alone of the different degrees of development which the human impulses have attained, and could yet attain, according to the different moral climates, would furnish too much work for the most laborious; whole generations, and regular co-operating generations of the learned, would be needed in order to exhaust the points of view and the material here furnished. The same is true of the determining of the reasons for the differences of the moral climates ("on what account does this sun of a fundamental moral judgment and standard of highest value shine here and that sun there?") And there is again a new labour which points out the erroneousness of all these reasons, and determines the entire essence of the moral judgments hitherto made. Supposing all these labours to be accomplished, the most critical of all questions would then come into the foreground: whether science is in a position to provide goals for human action, after it has proved that it can take them away and destroy them and then would be the time for a process of experimenting, in which every kind of heroism could satisfy itself, an experimenting for centuries, which would put into the shade all the great labours and sacrifices of previous history. Science has not as yet built its Cyclopic buildings; but for that also the time will come.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
“
CUCHULAIN’S FIGHT WITH THE SEA
A MAN came slowly from the setting sun,
To Emer, raddling raiment in her dun,
And said, ‘I am that swineherd whom you bid
Go watch the road between the wood and tide,
But now I have no need to watch it more.’
Then Emer cast the web upon the floor,
And raising arms all raddled with the dye,
Parted her lips with a loud sudden cry.
That swineherd stared upon her face and said,
‘No man alive, no man among the dead,
Has won the gold his cars of battle bring.’
‘But if your master comes home triumphing
Why must you blench and shake from foot to crown?’
Thereon he shook the more and cast him down
Upon the web-heaped floor, and cried his word:
‘With him is one sweet-throated like a bird.’
‘You dare me to my face,’ and thereupon
She smote with raddled fist, and where her son
Herded the cattle came with stumbling feet,
And cried with angry voice, ’It is not meet
To idle life away, a common herd.’
‘I have long waited, mother, for that word:
But wherefore now?’
‘There is a man to die;
You have the heaviest arm under the sky.’
‘Whether under its daylight or its stars
My father stands amid his battle-cars.’
‘But you have grown to be the taller man.’
‘Yet somewhere under starlight or the sun
My father stands.’
‘Aged, worn out with wars
On foot, on horseback or in battle-cars.’
‘I only ask what way my journey lies,
For He who made you bitter made you wise.’
‘The Red Branch camp in a great company
Between wood’s rim and the horses of the sea.
Go there, and light a camp-fire at wood’s rim;
But tell your name and lineage to him
Whose blade compels, and wait till they have found
Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.’
Among those feasting men Cuchulain dwelt,
And his young sweetheart close beside him knelt,
Stared on the mournful wonder of his eyes,
Even as Spring upon the ancient skies,
And pondered on the glory of his days;
And all around the harp-string told his praise,
And Conchubar, the Red Branch king of kings,
With his own fingers touched the brazen strings.
At last Cuchulain spake, ‘Some man has made
His evening fire amid the leafy shade.
I have often heard him singing to and fro,
I have often heard the sweet sound of his bow.
Seek out what man he is.’
One went and came.
‘He bade me let all know he gives his name
At the sword-point, and waits till we have found
Some feasting man that the same oath has bound.’
Cuchulain cried, ‘I am the only man
Of all this host so bound from childhood on.
After short fighting in the leafy shade,
He spake to the young man, ’Is there no maid
Who loves you, no white arms to wrap you round,
Or do you long for the dim sleepy ground,
That you have come and dared me to my face?’
‘The dooms of men are in God’s hidden place,’
‘Your head a while seemed like a woman’s head
That I loved once.’
Again the fighting sped,
But now the war-rage in Cuchulain woke,
And through that new blade’s guard the old blade broke,
And pierced him.
‘Speak before your breath is done.’
‘Cuchulain I, mighty Cuchulain’s son.’
‘I put you from your pain. I can no more.’
While day its burden on to evening bore,
With head bowed on his knees Cuchulain stayed;
Then Conchubar sent that sweet-throated maid,
And she, to win him, his grey hair caressed;
In vain her arms, in vain her soft white breast.
Then Conchubar, the subtlest of all men,
Ranking his Druids round him ten by ten,
Spake thus: ‘Cuchulain will dwell there and brood
For three days more in dreadful quietude,
And then arise, and raving slay us all.
Chaunt in his ear delusions magical,
That he may fight the horses of the sea.’
The Druids took them to their mystery,
And chaunted for three days.
Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
”
”
W.B. Yeats
“
Ione
III.
TO-DAY my skies are bare and ashen,
And bend on me without a beam.
Since love is held the master-passion,
Its loss must be the pain supreme —
And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream.
But pardon, dear departed Guest,
I will not rant, I will not rail;
For good the grain must feel the flail;
There are whom love has never blessed.
I had and have a younger brother,
One whom I loved and love to-day
As never fond and doting mother
Adored the babe who found its way
From heavenly scenes into her day.
Oh, he was full of youth's new wine, —
A man on life's ascending slope,
Flushed with ambition, full of hope;
And every wish of his was mine.
A kingly youth; the way before him
Was thronged with victories to be won;
so joyous, too, the heavens o'er him
Were bright with an unchanging sun, —
His days with rhyme were overrun.
Toil had not taught him Nature's prose,
Tears had not dimmed his brilliant eyes,
And sorrow had not made him wise;
His life was in the budding rose.
I know not how I came to waken,
Some instinct pricked my soul to sight;
My heart by some vague thrill was shaken, —
A thrill so true and yet so slight,
I hardly deemed I read aright.
As when a sleeper, ign'rant why,
Not knowing what mysterious hand
Has called him out of slumberland,
Starts up to find some danger nigh.
Love is a guest that comes, unbidden,
But, having come, asserts his right;
He will not be repressed nor hidden.
And so my brother's dawning plight
Became uncovered to my sight.
Some sound-mote in his passing tone
Caught in the meshes of my ear;
Some little glance, a shade too dear,
Betrayed the love he bore Ione.
What could I do? He was my brother,
And young, and full of hope and trust;
I could not, dared not try to smother
His flame, and turn his heart to dust.
I knew how oft life gives a crust
To starving men who cry for bread;
But he was young, so few his days,
He had not learned the great world's ways,
Nor Disappointment's volumes read.
However fair and rich the booty,
I could not make his loss my gain.
For love is dear, but dearer, duty,
And here my way was clear and plain.
I saw how I could save him pain.
And so, with all my day grown dim,
That this loved brother's sun might shine,
I joined his suit, gave over mine,
And sought Ione, to plead for him.
I found her in an eastern bower,
Where all day long the am'rous sun
Lay by to woo a timid flower.
This day his course was well-nigh run,
But still with lingering art he spun
Gold fancies on the shadowed wall.
The vines waved soft and green above,
And there where one might tell his love,
I told my griefs — I told her all!
I told her all, and as she hearkened,
A tear-drop fell upon her dress.
With grief her flushing brow was darkened;
One sob that she could not repress
Betrayed the depths of her distress.
Upon her grief my sorrow fed,
And I was bowed with unlived years,
My heart swelled with a sea of tears,
The tears my manhood could not shed.
The world is Rome, and Fate is Nero,
Disporting in the hour of doom.
God made us men; times make the hero —
But in that awful space of gloom
I gave no thought but sorrow's room.
All — all was dim within that bower,
What time the sun divorced the day;
And all the shadows, glooming gray,
Proclaimed the sadness of the hour.
She could not speak — no word was needed;
Her look, half strength and half despair,
Told me I had not vainly pleaded,
That she would not ignore my prayer.
And so she turned and left me there,
And as she went, so passed my bliss;
She loved me, I could not mistake —
But for her own and my love's sake,
Her womanhood could rise to this!
My wounded heart fled swift to cover,
And life at times seemed very drear.
My brother proved an ardent lover —
What had so young a man to fear?
He wed Ione within the year.
No shadow clouds her tranquil brow,
Men speak her husband's name with pride,
While she sits honored at his side —
”
”
Paul Laurence Dunbar
“
Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world, when day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry asea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.
And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that will forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to her own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a forest that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. This effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough.
”
”
Amanda Gorman
“
The morning after / my death”
The morning after
my death
we will sit in cafés
but I will not
be there
I will not be
*
There was the great death of birds
the moon was consumed with
fire
the stars were visible
until noon.
Green was the forest drenched
with shadows
the roads were serpentine
A redwood tree stood
alone
with its lean and lit body
unable to follow the
cars that went by with
frenzy
a tree is always an immutable
traveller.
The moon darkened at dawn
the mountain quivered
with anticipation
and the ocean was double-shaded:
the blue of its surface with the
blue of flowers
mingled in horizontal water trails
there was a breeze to
witness the hour
*
The sun darkened at the
fifth hour of the
day
the beach was covered with
conversations
pebbles started to pour into holes
and waves came in like
horses.
*
The moon darkened on Christmas eve
angels ate lemons
in illuminated churches
there was a blue rug
planted with stars
above our heads
lemonade and war news
competed for our attention
our breath was warmer than
the hills.
*
There was a great slaughter of
rocks of spring leaves
of creeks
the stars showed fully
the last king of the Mountain
gave battle
and got killed.
We lay on the grass
covered dried blood with our
bodies
green blades swayed between
our teeth.
*
We went out to sea
a bank of whales was heading
South
a young man among us a hero
tried to straddle one of the
sea creatures
his body emerged as a muddy pool
as mud
we waved goodbye to his remnants
happy not to have to bury
him in the early hours of the day
We got drunk in a barroom
the small town of Fairfax
had just gone to bed
cherry trees were bending under the
weight of their flowers:
they were involved in a ceremonial
dance to which no one
had ever been invited.
*
I know flowers to be funeral companions
they make poisons and venoms
and eat abandoned stone walls
I know flowers shine stronger
than the sun
their eclipse means the end of
times
but I love flowers for their treachery
their fragile bodies
grace my imagination’s avenues
without their presence
my mind would be an unmarked
grave.
*
We met a great storm at sea
looked back at the
rocking cliffs
the sand was going under
black birds were
leaving
the storm ate friends and foes
alike
water turned into salt for
my wounds.
*
Flowers end in frozen patterns
artificial gardens cover
the floors
we get up close to midnight
search with powerful lights
the tiniest shrubs on the
meadows
A stream desperately is running to
the ocean
The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage (The Post-Apollo Press, 1990)
”
”
Elinor Wylie
“
Out of all green ends and correlated mystic blend underlying the wholesome beauty only one note could speak and flow when nothing else on the barren wet streets she laughed at my grin speaking of what I missed. How is the realm so lovely when the rain tells me how perfect the self organizing smooth system far less attracted so please the muse to the scene, swirling in utter beauty turn away from conversations of horrific overwhelming tension your sublime nature forces half naked bare legged bathing in geometrical arrangements; a future rebelled, tame and dominate your blessed frightened glass ceiling, breath or goodness spells glitter rains down on your laced chest, taking off your shades and notable note from off your written thoughts on the reality page of mirrored candy smile hair twisting, back alone chasing drinks with cheers toward all we saved in the red ashes; smiling how perfect we feel tonight, I could end any beings or spirit. A sucker for the matter found without presence in unlimited rising smoke you weep and invent forms, or nature reflection internality on how few nerves you leave me squirming producing works of utter biting beauty art works off afternoon body gasping at whatever is near or afar, look how smart you get when you cant always get what you dreamt of, on time naughty morning sun baking eyes in mine.
”
”
Brandon Villasenor (Prima Materia (Radiance Hotter than Shade, #1))
“
The sight of the canyon down there as we renegotiated the mountain road made me bite my lip with marvel and sadness.
It's as familiar as an old face in an old photograph as tho I'm gone a million years from all that sun shaded brush on rocks and that heartless blue of the sea washing white on yellow sand, those rills of yellow arroyo running down mighty cliff shoulders, those distant blue meadows, that whole ponderous groaning upheaval so strange to see after the last several days of just looking at little faces and mouths of people -- As tho nature had a Gargantuan leprous face of its own with broad nostrils and huge bags under its eyes and a mouth big enough to swallow five thousand jeepster stationwagons and ten thousand Dave Wains and Cody Pomerays without a sigh of reminiscence or regret -- There it is, every sad contour of my valley, the gaps, the Mien Mo captop mountain again, the dreaming woods below our high shelved road, suddenly indeed the sight of poor Alf again far way grazing in the mid afternoon by the corral fence -- And there's the creek bouncing along as tho nothing had ever happened elsewhere and even in the daytime somehow dark and hungry looking in its deeper tangled grass.
Cody's never seen this country before altho he's an old Californian by now, I can see he's very impressed and even glad he's come out on a little jaunt with the boys and with me and is seeing a grand sight.
”
”
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
“
Straight off, we were in the country. It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys lying spread out below, with streams winding through them, and island groves of trees here and there, and huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching away in billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we knew was a castle. We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew, and we moved like spirits, the cushioned turf giving out no sound of footfall; we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green light that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of runlets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of whispering music, comfortable to hear; and at times we left the world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and scurried by and were gone before you could even get your eye on the place where the noise was; and where only the earliest birds were turning out and getting to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder and a mysterious far-off hammering and drumming for worms on a tree trunk away somewhere in the impenetrable remotenesses of the woods. And by and by out we would swing again into the glare.
”
”
Mark Twain (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)
“
Stay there,’ said Mathis. He kicked back his chair and hurtled through the empty window-frame on to the pavement. 6 ....... TWO MEN IN STRAW HATS WHEN BOND left the bar he walked purposefully along the pavement flanking the tree-lined boulevard towards his hotel a few hundred yards away. He was hungry. The day was still beautiful, but by now the sun was very hot and the plane-trees, spaced about twenty feet apart on the grass verge between the pavement and the broad tarmac, gave a cool shade. There were few people abroad and the two men standing quietly under a tree on the opposite side of the boulevard looked out of place. Bond noticed them when he was still a hundred yards away and when the same distance separated them from the ornamental ‘porte cochère’ of the Splendide. There was something rather disquieting about their appearance. They were both small and they were dressed alike in dark and, Bond reflected, rather hot-looking suits. They had the appearance of a variety turn waiting for a bus on the way to the theatre. Each wore a straw hat with a thick black ribbon as a concession, perhaps, to the holiday atmosphere of the resort, and the brims of these and the shadow from the tree under which they stood obscured their faces. Incongruously, each dark, squat little figure was illuminated by a touch of bright colour. They were both carrying square camera-cases slung from the shoulder. And one case was bright red and the other case bright blue. By the time Bond had taken in these details, he had come to within fifty yards of the two men. He was reflecting on the ranges of various types of weapon and the possibilities of cover when an extraordinary and terrible scene was enacted.
”
”
Ian Fleming (Casino Royale (James Bond, #1))
“
Comus.
The Star that bids the Shepherd fold,
Now the top of Heav'n doth hold,
And the gilded Car of Day, [ 95 ]
His glowing Axle doth allay
In the steep Atlantick stream,
And the slope Sun his upward beam
Shoots against the dusky Pole,
Pacing toward the other gole [ 100 ]
Of his Chamber in the East.
Mean while welcom Joy, and Feast,
Midnight shout, and revelry,
Tipsie dance and Jollity.
Braid your Locks with rosie Twine [ 105 ]
Dropping odours, dropping Wine.
Rigor now is gone to bed,
And Advice with scrupulous head,
Strict Age, and sowre Severity,
With their grave Saws in slumber ly. [ 110 ]
We that are of purer fire
Imitate the Starry Quire,
Who in their nightly watchfull Sphears,
Lead in swift round the Months and Years.
The Sounds, and Seas with all their finny drove [ 115 ]
Now to the Moon in wavering Morrice move,
And on the Tawny Sands and Shelves,
Trip the pert Fairies and the dapper Elves;
By dimpled Brook, and Fountain brim,
The Wood-Nymphs deckt with Daisies trim, [ 120 ]
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
What hath night to do with sleep?
Night hath better sweets to prove,
Venus now wakes, and wak'ns Love.
Com let us our rights begin, [ 125 ]
Tis onely day-light that makes Sin,
Which these dun shades will ne're report.
Hail Goddesse of Nocturnal sport
Dark vaild Cotytto, t' whom the secret flame
Of mid-night Torches burns; mysterious Dame [ 130 ]
That ne're art call'd, but when the Dragon woom
Of Stygian darknes spets her thickest gloom,
And makes one blot of all the ayr,
Stay thy cloudy Ebon chair,
Wherin thou rid'st with Hecat', and befriend [ 135 ]
Us thy vow'd Priests, till utmost end
Of all thy dues be done, and none left out,
Ere the blabbing Eastern scout,
The nice Morn on th' Indian steep
From her cabin'd loop hole peep, [ 140 ]
And to the tel-tale Sun discry
Our conceal'd Solemnity.
Com, knit hands, and beat the ground,
In a light fantastick round.
”
”
John Milton (Comus and Some Shorter Poems of Milton: Harrap's English Classics)
“
Land and Sea
The brilliant colors are the first thing that strike a visitor to the Greek Isles. From the stunning azure waters and blindingly white houses to the deep green-black of cypresses and the sky-blue domes of a thousand churches, saturated hues dominate the landscape. A strong, constant sun brings out all of nature’s colors with great intensity.
Basking in sunshine, the Greek Isles enjoy a year-round temperate climate. Lemons grow to the size of grapefruits and grapes hang in heavy clusters from the vines of arbors that shade tables outside the tavernas. The silver leaves of olive trees shiver in the least sea breezes.
The Greek Isles boast some of the most spectacular and diverse geography on Earth. From natural hot springs to arcs of soft-sand beaches and secret valleys, the scenery is characterized by dramatic beauty. Volcanic formations send craggy cliffsides plummeting to the sea, cause lone rock formations to emerge from blue waters, and carve beaches of black pebbles. In the Valley of the Butterflies on Rhodes, thousands of radiant winged creatures blanket the sky in summer. Crete’s Samaria Gorge is the longest in Europe, a magnificent natural wonder rife with local flora and fauna. Corfu bursts with lush greenery and wildflowers, nurtured by heavy rainfall and a sultry sun. The mountain ranges, gorges, and riverbeds on Andros recall the mainland more than the islands. Both golden beaches and rocky countrysides make Mykonos distinctive. Around Mount Olympus, in central Cyprus, timeless villages emerge from the morning mist of craggy peaks and scrub vegetation. On Evia and Ikaria, natural hot springs draw those seeking the therapeutic power of healing waters.
Caves abound in the Greek Isles; there are some three thousand on Crete alone. The Minoans gathered to worship their gods in the shallow caves that pepper the remotest hilltops and mountain ranges. A cave near the town of Amnissos, a shrine to Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, once revealed a treasure trove of small idols dedicated to her. Some caves were later transformed into monasteries. On the islands of Halki and Cyprus, wall paintings on the interiors of such natural monasteries survive from the Middle Ages.
Above ground, trees and other flora abound on the islands in a stunning variety. ON Crete, a veritable forest of palm trees shades the beaches at Vai and Preveli, while the high, desolate plateaus of the interior gleam in the sunlight. Forest meets sea on the island of Poros, and on Thasos, many species of pine coexist. Cedars, cypress, oak, and chestnut trees blanket the mountainous interiors of Crete, Cyprus, and other large islands. Rhodes overflows with wildflowers during the summer months.
Even a single island can be home to disparate natural wonders. Amorgos’ steep, rocky coastline gives way to tranquil bays. The scenery of Crete--the largest of the Greek Isles--ranges from majestic mountains and barren plateaus to expansive coves, fertile valleys, and wooded thickets.
”
”
Laura Brooks (Greek Isles (Timeless Places))