V Shape Back Quotes

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The War Sonnets: V. The Soldier If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Rupert Brooke (If I Should Die (Phoenix 60p Paperbacks))
Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on 'what happened then' than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again?
Saidiya Hartman
She stands there, rooted to the spot at the top of the subway steps until he’s out of sight, holds her breath and waits to feel the thread snap, the world shudder back into shape, waits for the fear and the loss and knowledge that it was just a fluke, a cosmic error, a mistake, that it is over now, that it will never happen again. But she doesn’t feel any of those things. All she feels is joy, and hope.
V.E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.
Thomas Pynchon (V.)
She squints into the shadows between the trees, but there is no shape, no god to be found—only that voice, close as a breath against her cheek. “Adeline, Adeline,” it says, mocking, “… they are calling for you.” She turns again, finding nothing but deep shadow. “Show yourself,” she orders, her own voice sharp and brittle as a stick. Something brushes her shoulder, grazes her wrist, drapes itself around her like a lover. Adeline swallows. “What are you?” The shadow’s touch withdraws. “What am I?” it asks, an edge of humor in that velvet tone. “That depends on what you believe.” The voice splits, doubles, rattling through tree limbs and snaking over moss, folding over on itself until it is everywhere. “So tell me—tell me—tell me,” it echoes. “Am I the devil—the devil—or the dark—dark—dark? Am I a monster—monster—or a god—god—god—or…” The shadows in the woods begin to pull together, drawn like storm clouds. But when they settle, the edges are no longer wisps of smoke, but hard lines, the shape of a man, made firm by the light of the village lanterns at his back. “Or am I this?” The voice spills from a perfect pair of lips, a shadow revealing emerald eyes that dance below black brows, black hair that curls across his forehead, framing a face Adeline knows too well. One that she has conjured up a thousand times, in pencil and charcoal and dream. It is the stranger. Her stranger. She knows it is a trick, a shadow parading as a man, but the sight of him still robs her breath. The darkness looks down at his shape, seeing himself as if for the first time, and seems to approve. “Ah, so the girl believes in something after all.” Those green eyes lift. “Well now,” he says, “you have called, and I have come.” Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
V.E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
I can’t,” she says, looking up. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.” “But no photographs. No film.” Her expression falters, just a fraction. “No,” she says, the word a shape on her lips. And he feels bad for asking, for drawing her back to the bars of her curse, instead of the gaps she’s found between them. But then Addie straightens, lifts her chin, smiles with an almost defiant kind of joy. “But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?
V.E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
Reading this book, you will probably get motivated to take a major faith step, but life can stare you back in the face and tell you that you are stupid to believe that God will answer your prayer. The bottom line is, GOD CAN DO IT, and He will do it if you let Him. Numbers, 23:19 states, “God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?” Your entrepreneurial dream may seem impossible, but God can do it. Your finances might be in the worst shape that you have ever experienced in your life, but God can fix it. You might not have the education or the skill that you know is required to follow through on your dream, but God can supplement it. Will you trust Him to do it?
V.L. Thompson (CEO - The Christian Entrepreneur's Outlook)
So Dad was a tedious, well-connected workaholic. But the other thing you need to understand is that Mom was a living wet dream. A former Guess model and Miller Lite girl, she was tall, curvy and gorgeous. At thirty-eight, she had somehow managed to remain ageless and maintained her killer body. She’s five-foot-nine with never-ending legs, generous breasts and full hips that scoop dramatically into her slim waist. People who say Barbie’s proportions are unrealistic obviously never met my stepmother. Her face is pretty too, with long eyelashes, sculpted cheekbones and big, blue eyes that tease and smile at the same time. Her long brown hair rests on her shoulders in thick, tousled layers like in one of those Pantene Pro-V commercials. One memory seared in to my brain from my early teenage years is of Mom parading around the house one evening in nothing but her heels and underwear. I was sitting on the couch in the living room watching TV when a flurry of long limbs and blow-dried hair burst in front of the screen. “Teddy-bear. Do you know where Silvia left the dry cleaning? I’m running late for dinner with the Blackwells and I can’t find my red cocktail dress.” Mom stood before me in matching off-white, La Perla bra and panties and Manolo Blahnik stilettos. Some subtle gold hoop earrings hung from her ears and a tiny bit of mascara on her eye lashes highlighted her sparkling, blue eyes. Aside from the missing dress, she was otherwise ready to go. “I think she left them hanging on the chair next to the other sofa,” I said, trying my best not to gape at Mom’s perfect body. Mom trotted across the room, her heels tocking on the hard wood floor. I watched her slim, sexy back as she lifted the dry cleaning onto the sofa and then bent over to sort through the garments. My eyes followed her long mane of brown hair down to her heart-shaped ass. Her panties stretched tightly across each cheek as she bent further down. “Found it!” She cried, springing back upright, causing her 35Cs to bounce up and down from the sudden motion. They were thrusting proudly off her ribcage and bulging out over the fabric of the balconette bra like two titanic eggs. Her supple skin pushed out over the silk edges. And then she was gone as quickly as she had arrived, her long legs striding back down the hallway.
C.R.R. Crawford (Sins from my Stepmother: Forbidden Desires)
With a gasp, she yanked her hand out of his light hold as though she had been burned. "You are bold, sir!" "And you are blushing." He slipped her a narrow, charming little smile and went to answer the door. Anger and confusion thudded in her temples as she tucked her still-tingling hand in her lap. She scowled, furious at her own bewildering state of arousal. She had never felt such things before. Wet and aching between her legs, she squeezed her knees together firmly under her skirts, trying to remind her body that her head and her morals were in charge. Lucien Knight was not. Lust was hardly a sentiment to which she aspired. She slid a furtive glance his way, wondering why he had not yet opened the door. He just stood there, one hand on the doorknob, his head down. Then she realized he was struggling to bring his magnificent body under control. As though he felt her gaze on his powerful, V-shaped back and lean, muscled derriere, he slowly looked over his shoulder and met her stare in raw longing. Neither of them spoke for a moment, swept up in a totally unexpected, unsought, unwanted attraction of dizzying power. "Shall I come to you tonight?" he asked very quietly,
Gaelen Foley (Lord of Fire (Knight Miscellany, #2))
If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.
Thomas Pynchon (V.)
To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
February 21: Cinemonde (France) shows a heavier Marilyn (during the Some Like It Hot period) wearing a strapless back dress, with a v-shaped front that shows off her cleavage and long white gloves.
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
I A. A violent order is a disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.) II If all the green of spring was blue, and it is; If all the flowers of South Africa were bright On the tables of Connecticut, and they are; If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do; And if it all went on in an orderly way, And it does; a law of inherent opposites, Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port, As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough, An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand. III After all the pretty contrast of life and death Proves that these opposite things partake of one, At least that was the theory, when bishops' books Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that. The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so . And yet relation appears, A small relation expanding like the shade Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill. IV A. Well, an old order is a violent one. This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more Element in the immense disorder of truths. B. It is April as I write. The wind Is blowing after days of constant rain. All this, of course, will come to summer soon. But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . . A great disorder is an order. Now, A And B are not like statuary, posed For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see. V The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float For which the intricate Alps are a single nest. -Wallace Stevens, "Connoisseur of Chaos
Wallace Stevens
Imagine yourself standing before your ancestors. Your maternal ancestors to your right and your paternal ancestors to the left. They extend before you almost like the V shape made by the pattern of flying geese. Each ancestor has two ancestors behind them. If you wish, you may fold your hands and bow before the two lineages before you. This is the prayer that I say to each of my lineages, and you may wish to adapt it for yourself or choose words that resonate with you. It can be done between sunrise and sunset. I do it once in the morning. To my maternal lineage, three generations before me, I bow before you. May the lineage be in peace and love and light and harmony. May each of you be in peace, love, light, and harmony. I am grateful for all that I have received from this lineage, including the gifts of the challenges I face. To my paternal lineage, three generations before me, I bow before you. May the lineage be in peace and love and light and harmony. May each of you be in peace, love, light, and harmony. I am grateful for all that I have received from this lineage, including the gifts of the challenges I face. As I say it, I’m very conscious of my breathing, which grounds me and helps me enter a state of gratitude.
Anuradha Dayal-Gulati (Heal Your Ancestral Roots: Release the Family Patterns That Hold You Back)
This important theme of Abraham’s deep trust in God’s promise and faithfulness helped shape Israel’s own self-understanding and identity. So it’s not surprising to hear Moses’s words to Israel at Sinai: “Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test [the Hebrew verb is nasah] you, and in order that the fear [yir’ah] of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin” (Exod. 20:20). These two key verbs link back to Genesis 22. Abraham was tested by God (Gen. 22:1) and through this ordeal demonstrated his fear of God (v. 12). Abraham’s obedience is intended to serve as a model for Israel and to inspire Israel’s obedience and solidify their relationship with (“fear of”) God.5
Paul Copan (Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God)
The gondola slowed to a stop and Falco tied up the boat directly beneath the bridge. The stone structure blocked out the light and the wind, making Cass feel as if she and Falco were alone in a warm, dark room. “Here,” he said, pulling a flask from his cloak pocket. “Celebratory libations.” “What are we celebrating?” she asked. “We set out to discover the dead girl’s identity,” Falco said. “And we did.” He pressed the slick metal container into Cass’s palm. “I say that’s progress.” Cass sniffed the flash warily. The liquid within smelled sharp and sour, almost chemical. “What is it?” she asked. “Some witches’ brew I found in my master’s studio. Go on, try it.” He winked. “Unless you’re afraid.” Cass put her lips to the flask and tipped it up just enough to let a tiny sip of liquid make its way into her mouth. She held her breath to keep from gagging. Whatever it was, it tasted awful, nothing like the tart sweetness of the burgundy wine to which she was accustomed. Falco took the flask back and shook it in his hand as if he were weighing it. “You didn’t even take a drink, did you?” “I did so.” Falco shook the container again. “I don’t believe you.” Cass leaned in toward him and blew gently in his face. “See? You can smell that ghastly poison on my breath.” Falco sniffed the air. “All I smell is canal water, and a hint of flowers, probably from whatever soap you use on your hair.” He put his face very close to Cass’s, reached out, and tilted her chin toward him. “Try again.” Her lips were mere inches from his. Cass struggled to exhale. Her chest tightened as the air trickled out of her body. She noticed a V-shaped scar beneath Falco’s right eye. She was seized by an irrational urge to touch her lips to the small imperfection. “What about now?” she asked. Falco brushed a spiral of hair from her freckled cheek and touched his forehead to hers. “One more time?” He closed his eyes. He reached up with one of his hands and cradled the back of her head, pulling her toward him.
Fiona Paul (Venom (Secrets of the Eternal Rose, #1))
You didn’t even take a drink, did you?” “I did so.” Falco shook the container again. “I don’t believe you.” Cass leaned in toward him and blew gently in his face. “See? You can smell that ghastly poison on my breath.” Falco sniffed the air. “All I smell is canal water, and a hint of flowers, probably from whatever soap you use on your hair.” He put his face very close to Cass’s, reached out, and tilted her chin toward him. “Try again.” Her lips were mere inches from his. Cass struggled to exhale. Her chest tightened as the air trickled out of her body. She noticed a V-shaped scar beneath Falco’s right eye. She was seized by an irrational urge to touch her lips to the small imperfection. “What about now?” she asked. Falco brushed a spiral of hair from her freckled cheek and touched his forehead to hers. “One more time?” He closed his eyes. He reached up with one of his hands and cradled the back of her head, pulling her toward him. He was going to kiss her. She was going to let him. Falco’s face blurred in the darkness as he closed the distance between them. And then…it wasn’t Falco she was about to kiss. It was Luca. She lunged backward in her seat, causing the gondola to lurch to one side. Falco’s eyes snapped open. “What happened?” Cass had no idea what to say. “I--I thought I saw something,” she stammered out. Falco glanced around, as if reaffirming that it would be impossible to see anything in the blackness under the bridge. “A vampire?” His voice was thick with sarcasm.
Fiona Paul (Venom (Secrets of the Eternal Rose, #1))