Vertical Lips Quotes

Calm down, man, the wedding isn’t off,” Luke announced. “It is,” Ava retorted angrily, whirling on her man. “It isn’t,” Luke replied calmly, staring down his nose at his woman. “Are you going to dance with me?” she asked. “Vertically?” he asked back, and I pressed my lips together in order not to laugh. “Yes!” she snapped. “Yeah, baby,” he said. “I’ll dance with you vertically, in the bathroom on the plane on the way to Bermuda.

L'union libre [Freedom of Love]" My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes With the tongue of an unbelievable stone My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof And of steam on the panes My wife with shoulders of champagne And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice My wife with wrists of matches My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts With fingers of mown hay My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut And of Midsummer Night Of privet and of an angelfish nest With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill My wife with legs of flares With the movements of clockwork and despair My wife with calves of eldertree pith My wife with feet of initials With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking My wife with a neck of unpearled barley My wife with a throat of the valley of gold Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent With breasts of night My wife with breasts of a marine molehill My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days With the belly of a gigantic claw My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically With a back of quicksilver With a back of light With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking My wife with hips of a skiff With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers And of shafts of white peacock plumes Of an insensible pendulum My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos My wife with buttocks of swans' backs My wife with buttocks of spring With the sex of an iris My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat My wife with a sex of mirror My wife with eyes full of tears With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle My wife with savanna eyes My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, when I suddenly glimpsed my own father, a rare but oddly peaceful recollection, as if he actually approved of my play in the way he himself had always laughed and played, great updrafts of light, burning off distant plateaus of bistre & sage, throwing him up like an angel, high above the red earth, deep into the sparkling blank, the tender sky that never once let him down, preserving his attachment to youth, propriety and kindness, his plane almost, but never quite, outracing his whoops of joy, trailing him in his sudden turn to the wind, followed then by a near vertical climb up to the angles of the sun, and I was barely eight and still with him and yes, that was the thought that flickered madly through me, a brief instant of communion, possessing me with warmth and ageless ease, causing me to smile again and relax as if memory alone could lift the heart like the wind lifts a wing, and so I renewed my kisses with even greater enthusiasm, caressing and in turn devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died and condoms littered the floor and Christina threw up in the sink and Amber chuckled a little and kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave.

And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river's grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep. Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river's cunning unseen lips, murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky. 'Mag-gie!' the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they've been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path--the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.

You are really tall for fifteen.” His eyes drifted over me, a small smile playing on his lips. “A lot of people must seem tall to you.” “Are you calling me short?” “Are you saying you’re not short?” I wrinkled my nose. “I’m not delusional. It’s just not polite to comment on a girl’s shortness. For all you know I’m really mad at the world because I’m vertically challenged.

For the first time in his life, Midhat wished he were more religious. Of course he prayed, but though that was a private mechanism it sometimes felt like a public act, and the lessons of the Quran were lessons by rote, one was steeped in them, hearing them so often. They were the texture of his world, and yet they did not occupy that central, vital part of his mind, the part that was vibrating at this moment, on this train, rattling forward while he struggled to hold all these pieces. As a child he had felt some of the same curiosity he held for the mysteries of other creeds—for Christianity with its holy fire, the Samaritans with their alphabets—but that feeling had dulled while he was still young, when traditional religion began to seem a worldly thing, a realm of morals and laws and the same old stories and holidays. They were acts, not thoughts. He faced the water now along the coast, steadying his gaze on the slow distance, beyond the blur of trees pushing past the tracks, on the desolate fishing boats hobbling over the waves. He sensed himself tracing the lip of something very large, something black and well-like, a vessel which was at the same time an emptiness, and he thought, without thinking precisely, only feeling with the tender edges of his mind, what the Revelation might have been for in its origin. Why it was so important that they could argue to the sword what it meant if God had hands, and whether He had made the universe. Underneath it all was a living urgency, that original issue of magnitude; the way several hundred miles on foot could be nothing to the mind, Nablus to Cairo, one thought of a day’s journey by train, but placed vertically that same distance in depth exposed the body’s smallness and suddenly one thought of dying. Did one need to face the earth, nose to soil, to feel that distance towering above? There was something of his own mortality in this. Oh then but why, in a moment of someone else’s death, must he think of his own disappearance?

Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though

remember how we used to play" in the upper atmosphere in the vertical climb in the sky above the clouds remember how we used to play in the nautical dusk along the radians of midheaven… out there amid the scattered wavelengths within the aerosols of a meteorological meadow we tread upon the aether side by side the ampere and the joule the whisper and the gleam borne along effervescent freeways remember how we came to rest inside the amethyst auditorium of a storm there - suspended in an echo-plex of thunder you drew me close and I tasted the voltage of your skin the radiometry of your eyes the amphetamine of your lips the flushed cushion of your tongue

But sex at twenty-two, well, that was really something, Jules thought, and Dennis apparently thought so too. Both of their bodies were still perfect, or perfect enough; they would come to see this later on, though they couldn’t see it at the time. Self-conscious, dying with embarrassment, but so excited, they stripped to their skin for each other for the first time standing beside the loft bed in his apartment that day, and she made him go up the ladder first so he wouldn’t be able to watch her from behind—knowing that if he did, as she lifted a leg to reach the next rung the most private section of herself would have been briefly cleaved and displayed. The hair, the shadow, the pinch of lip, the stingy little anus—how could she let him watch that particular show? “After you, kind sir,” she said—oh God, had she really said that? And why? Was she pretending to be a Victorian prostitute?—sweeping out her arm. Dark, woolly Dennis swung up the ladder naked. She watched as his parts did the male version of what hers would have done, his balls moving, if not swinging, and his downy ass separating into two as he bent his knee and climbed the vertical ladder into the bed near the ceiling. Dennis Boyd’s loft bed was so high up that they could not sit upright in it, but could only half-slouch, or else lie flat, or lie with their bodies on top of each other like a two-car pileup.

1944 - Exploring London in wartime, a city with stiff upper lip, gritted teeth, clenched fists, makes you realize that Paris is a bit of whore. Every day and every night for weeks now, London has been bleeding and hiding its wounds with impressive dignity. A ‘don’t show off’ attitude prevails. From time to time a sputtering doodle-bug (a VI) shatters the torpor of the overcast sky. One second, sometimes two ... at most three ... of silence. Visualizing that fat cigar with shark fins as it stops dead, sways, idiotically tips over, then goes into a vertical dive. And explodes. Usually it’s an entire building that’s destroyed. Apparently the Civil Defense rescue teams observe a very strict rule of discretion and restraint. You never see any panic. In this impassive city detachment is the expression of panic.

We stopped talking about Zampanô then. She paged her friend Christina who took less than twenty minutes to come over. There were no introductions. We just sat down on the floor and snorted lines of coke off a CD case, gulped down a bottle of wine and then used it to play spin the bottle. They kissed each other first, then they both kissed me, and then we forgot about the bottle, and I even managed to forget about Zampanô, about this, and about how much that attack in the tattoo shop had put me on edge. Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, when I suddenly glimpsed my own father, a rare but oddly peaceful recollection, as if he actually approved of my play in the way he himself had always laughed and played, always laughing, surrendering to its ease, especially when he soared in great updrafts of light, burning off distant plateaus of bistre & sage, throwing him up like an angel, high above the red earth, deep into the sparkling blank, the tender sky that never once let him down, preserving his attachment to youth, propriety and kindness, his plane almost, but never quite, outracing his whoops of joy, trailing him in his sudden turn to the wind, followed then by a near vertical climb up to the angles of the sun, and I was barely eight and still with him and yes, that the thought that flickered madly through me, a brief instant of communion, possessing me with warmth and ageless ease, causing me to smile again and relax as if memory alone could lift the heart like the wind lifts a wing, and so I renewed my kisses with even greater enthusiasm, caressing and in turn devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died and condoms littered the floor and Christina threw up in the sink and Amber chuckled a little and kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave.

A fost odată Louis Armstrong, cântând la frumoasa lui trompetă în noroaiele din New Orleans. Înaintea lui fuseseră muzicienii trăsniţi care mărşăluiau la paradele oficiale şi transformau marşurile în ragtime. Pe urmă a apărut swingul şi Roy Elridge, viguros, viril, scoţând din trompetă valuri de forţă şi logică şi subtilitate - se apleca asupra ei cu ochi sclipitori şi cu un zâmbet minunat şi trimitea sunetele prin radio să legene lumea jazzului. Sosise apoi Charlie Parker, care copilărise doar cu maică-sa într-o căsuţă de lemn din Kansas City, unde cântase la saxofon alto printre buşteni, repetând în zile ploioase, mergând în oraş să-i vadă pe bătrânii interpreţi de swing Basie şi Benny Moten cu a lor Hot Lips Page şi celelalte, Charlie Parker plecând de acasă şi sosind în Harlem, întâlnindu-se cu nebunul de Thelonius Monk şi cu celălalt smintit, Gillespie, Charlie Parker la începuturile carierei sale, când cânta învârtindu-se în cerc. Puţin mai tânăr decât Lester Young, tot din K. C., un scrântit de geniu, sumbru, a cărui muzică acoperea toată istoria jazzului. Când îşi ţinea saxofonul în sus, în poziţie orizontală, scotea cel mai formidabil sunet. Pe urmă părul îi crescu şi deveni mai leneş şi saxul îi coborî mai jos, ajunse în sfârşit să-l ţină vertical, şi acum, când purta pantofi cu talpa groasă ca să nu mai simtă cărările tari ale vieţii, instrumentul îi zăcea rezemat de piept, iar el sufla lejer şi scotea fraze tot mai simple. Aceştia erau copiii bopului din noaptea americană.

Reggie, sweetheart, I’ll need you to open your eyes. Just for a bit.” “Ugh,” she said and sighed. “All right.” The light still hurt. She was staring into Colin’s eyes now, though. They were the same metallic silver that they’d been in his dragon form, with serpentine vertical pupils. “You . . .” She waved a hand, trying to think of words. “You changed.” “It seemed wise at the moment. And you can shut your eyes again. What’s your name?” “Regina Talbot-Jones. Typical of a man to forget, after,” she said, laughing as the idea struck her. Colin’s hand tightened on hers. “And what year is it?” “Eighteen ninety-five.” He sighed. “All right. I’ll be picking you up now. Put your arms around my neck, aye? And hold tight. This will take a while.” “I guess you can’t fly me,” she said with a sigh of her own, “in the middle of the day.” “For sixpence I would,” he said curtly, “and damn the daylight. But I’d not be able to carry you without hurting you, and you can’t hang on like this. Brace yourself.” Then his arms were around her, beneath her knees and her neck. Colin lifted her and held her, her head against his hard chest. It would have been very pleasant to lie that way if the motion hadn’t set her brain bouncing against the inside of her skull. She bit her lip. She would not cry out, because Colin was doing the best he could, and she would certainly not be sick, because it was disgusting and would just make her head hurt more.

Pike didn’t like this business about guns. He studied her face, trying to read her. Her eyes were light brown, almost hazel, but not. A vertical line cut the skin between her eyebrows, matched by a scar on her upper lip. No laugh lines, but no frown lines, either. Pike didn’t like her certainty. “How did you find me?” She made an offhand shrug, her face as flat as a Texas highway, ignoring his question.

She appears not to have changed; however, when she begins to speak, her face is abruptly transformed: her skin creases and creases again, her upper lip shows fine vertical lines, while wrinkles on her cheeks and chin shift rapidly with every expression. Irena thinks Milada certainly must not realize this: people don't talk to themselves in front of a mirror; she would see her own face only when it is at rest, with the skin nearly smooth; every mirror in the world would have her believe that she is still beautiful.

Anja saw this as a cultural inability to recognize phonemes as anything but literal; it was like Newspeak but for pronunciation. Americans believed that letters should act like what they looked like to the American eye, nothing more and nothing less, signifier swallowing signified down it s wide open gullet, the vertical relationship between the sign and its referent rendered entirely irrelevant because the lips and tongue just didn't think it mattered whether the vowel sounds were melted properly.

And there, seated at the heart of all that sumptuousness and leaning forward in his chair behind the great desk, was a figure that looked like nothing so much as a dapper but exceedingly despondent frog. The very shape of his head seemed as if it had been altered by a powerful vertical vice, resulting in a symmetrical ovoid with a horizontal polar axis. His complexion was not so much sallow as lightly green. His mouth was unnaturally wide, with thick, tautly stretched lips the color and texture of earthworms. What ears he had were small and circular and somewhat recessed. His nose was broad and rather flat, as if it had been spread on his face unevenly by a butter knife, and had what looked more like nares than full nostrils. The sparse, slick tendrils of his hair were of some murkily nondescript hue and clung unguinously to his scalp. The dense convex lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles made it seem as if his greenish-gray eyes were peering out at the world from the bottom of a shallow pond, through a thin layer of algae. If he had a jawline, it was not immediately evident where he kept it. His hunched, narrow, rounded shoulders, moreover, amplified the amphibian quality of his appearance. He was, however, dressed in the height of fashion: a high collar and pearl-colored cravat, a waistcoat of forest-green velvet, and a formal coat of lighter, lettuce-green damask with lapels of cream-white satin with pink borders.

Brilliant little irruptions Brilliant little connections Brilliant little illusions Brilliant little lips Brilliant little altercations Very brilliant little honey combs Brilliant little adversities Very brilliant little ravages Brilliant little cogs Brilliant little circumvolutions Around a vertical axis Why has the deficiency of the mentally deficient become a cultural fact, whereas the very much more terrible fact of ordinary stupidity strikes no one as very odd?

After they departed the river, the beach, and the raised lip of land, it all readjusted under the towering awareness of the trees. The pebbles lost the stain of human warmth. The water shook off its taste of sweat and the flattened grasses slowly clicked back into their vertical semblance of the rest of the forest. The breeze cleared the air and the birds changed their tune of alarm and disgust into a softer conversation about being here, there, and now. The ants and the clustering insects stopped waiting for the bodies to be still and foraged elsewhere, and the omnipresent mosquitoes reassessed their menu. In one hour all traces of the intrusion were lost and decent time settled back, oblivious to the rubbed-out moment of blight.