Watching The Sunrise Quotes

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If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, just watch the sunrise.
Jeannette Walls (Half Broke Horses)
So often in my life I've been with people and shared beautiful moments like travelling or staying up all night and watching the sunrise, and I knew it was a special moment, but something was always wrong. I wished I'd been with someone else. I knew that what I was feeling - exactly what was so important to me - they didn't understand.
Julie Delpy (Before Sunrise & Before Sunset: Two Screenplays)
If I could live again my life, In the next - I'll try, - to make more mistakes, I won't try to be so perfect, I'll be more relaxed... I'll take fewer things seriously.. I'll take more risks, I'll take more trips, I'll watch more sunsets, I'll climb more mountains, I'll swim more rivers, I'll go to more places I've never been I'll eat more ice ...I'll have more real problems and less imaginary ones If I could live again - I will travel light If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn, I'll watch more sunrises ...If I have the life to live
Anonymous
Finished in a frenzy that reminded me of our last night in Cambridge. Watched my final sunrise. Enjoyed a last cigarette. Didn’t think the view could be any more perfect until I saw that beat-up trilby. Honestly, Sixsmith, as ridiculous as that thing makes you look, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. Watched you for as long as I dared. I don’t believe it was a fluke that I saw you first. I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world, and I’ll be waiting for you there. I believe we do not stay dead long. Find me beneath the Corsican stars, where we first kissed. Yours eternally, R.F.
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
I feel so grateful to discover that each new day brings me the opportunity to watch the sunrise and fall in love with you again.
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
Watch the sunrise at least once a year, put a lot of marshmallows in your hot chocolate, lie on your back and look at the stars, never buy a coffee table you can't put your feet on, never pass up a chance to jump on a trampoline, don't overlook life's small joys while searching for the big ones.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Watching the sunrise.....what an act of beauty, of unwavering faith, something to look forward to each and every day.
Kira Jane Buxton (Hollow Kingdom (Hollow Kingdom, #1))
You bend the laws of the universe when you fly," I say. "It's impressive. Defying gravity? Watching sunrises and sunsets from places Mother Nature didn't intend for you to watch them from? You really are superheroes, if you think about it.
Colleen Hoover (Ugly Love)
I wake up wating you. I fall asleep wanting you. I watch a magnificent sunrise and can think only of sharing it with you. I glimpse a piece of amver and see your eyes. Jillian, I've caught a disease, and the fever abates only when I'm near you.
Karen Marie Moning (To Tame a Highland Warrior (Highlander, #2))
Watching them was like watching the sunset and the sunrise, equally beautiful in different ways.
Shannon A. Thompson (Death Before Daylight (Timely Death, #3))
Somewhere someone thinks they love someone else exactly like I love you. Somewhere someone shakes from the ripple of a thousand butterflies inside a single stomach. Somewhere someone is packing their bags to see the world with someone else. Somewhere someone is reaching through the most terrifying few feet of space to hold the hand of someone else. Somewhere someone is watching someone else’s chest rise and fall with the breath of slumber. Somewhere someone is pouring ink like blood onto pages fighting to say the truth that has no words. Somewhere someone is waiting patient but exhausted to just be with someone else. Somewhere someone is opening their eyes to a sunrise in someplace they have never seen. Somewhere someone is pulling out the petals twisting the apple stem picking up the heads up penny rubbing the rabbits foot knocking on wood throwing coins into fountains hunting for the only clover with only 4 leaves skipping over the cracks snapping the wishbone crossing their fingers blowing out the candles sending dandelion seeds into the air ushering eyelashes off their thumbs finding the first star and waiting for 11:11 on their clock to spend their wishes on someone else. Somewhere someone is saying goodbye but somewhere someone else is saying hello. Somewhere someone is sharing their first or their last kiss with their or no longer their someone else. Somewhere someone is wondering if how they feel is how the other they feels about them and if both theys could ever become a they together. Somewhere someone is the decoder ring to all of the great mysteries of life for someone else. Somewhere someone is the treasure map. Somewhere someone thinks they love someone else exactly like I love you. Somewhere someone is wrong.
Tyler Knott Gregson
Watching Ky wake is better than a sunrise.
Ally Condie (Crossed (Matched, #2))
The sunrise, of course, doesn't care if we watch it or not. It will keep on being beautiful even if no one bothers to look at it.
Gene Amole
Without looking at Jacob, I said slowly, 'Well, it seeps into you. It doesn't make you forget yourself, but totally the opposite.' I chance a glance at him. He was watching me intently. No glaze in his eyes. So I continued more bravely: 'It connect you with everything and fills you with awe that you share the same space with something that glorious. Like a sunrise on a clear blue day of the most extraordinary piece of glass. And then suddenly'--my hands escaped their tight grip in my lap, and now my fingers splayed wide like fireworks in the air--'you have this epiphany that there's more to the world than just you and what you want or even who you are.
Justina Chen (North of Beautiful)
If I could live again my life, In the next – I’ll try, - to make more mistakes, I won’t try to be so perfect, I’ll be more relaxed, I’ll be more full – than I am now, In fact, I’ll take fewer things seriously, I’ll be less hygienic, I’ll take more risks, I’ll take more trips, I’ll watch more sunsets, I’ll climb more mountains, I’ll swim more rivers, I’ll go to more places – I’ve never been, I’ll eat more ice creams and less lima beans, I’ll have more real problems – and less imaginary ones, I was one of those people who live prudent and prolific lives - each minute of his life, Of course that I had moments of joy – but, if I could go back I’ll try to have only good moments, If you don’t know – that’s what life is made of, Don’t lose the now! I was one of those who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, without a hot-water bottle, and without an umbrella and without a parachute, If I could live again – I will travel light, If I could live again – I’ll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn, I’ll ride more carts, I’ll watch more sunrises and play with more children, If I have the life to live – but now I am 85, - and I know that I am dying …
Jorge Luis Borges
The Captain of the Watch says if you're still in the City by sunrise he will personally have you buried alive.
Terry Pratchett (Soul Music (Discworld, #16; Death, #3))
That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched its whole magnificence for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sun light, and set out to become what I became.
Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1))
At least I want to get up early one more morning, before sunrise. Before the birds, even. I want to throw cold water on my face and be at my work table when the sky lightens and smoke begins to rise from the chimneys of the other houses. I want to see the waves break on this rocky beach, not just hear them break as I did in my sleep. I want to see again the ships that pass through the Strait from every seafaring country in the world - old, dirty freighters just barely moving along, and the swift new cargo vessels painted every color under the sun that cut the water as they pass. I want to keep an eye out for them. And for the little boat that plies the water between the ships and the pilot station near the lighthouse. I want to see them take a man off the ship and put another one up on board. I want to spend the day watching this happen and reach my own conclusions. I hate to seem greedy - I have so much to be thankful for already. But I want to get up early one more morning, at least. And go to my place with some coffee and wait. Just wait, to see what's going to happen.
Raymond Carver
Every now and then I sit and watch the sun rise to remind myself how it's done—peacefully, steadily, warmly, and in beautiful color.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Smile Anyway: Quotes, Verse, and Grumblings for Every Day of the Year)
I’m the girl who wakes up early to watch the sunrise. I’m the girl who wants to see the good in everyone, the one who is taken away by a song, inspired by art.” Turning to me, she smiled. “I’m that girl, Rune. The one who waits out the storm simply to catch a glimpse of a rainbow. Why be miserable when you can be happy? It’s an obvious choice to me.
Tillie Cole (A Thousand Boy Kisses (A Thousand Boy Kisses, #1))
All the idylls of youth: beauty manifest in lakes, mountains, people; richness in experience, conversation, friendships. Nights during a full moon, the light flooded the wilderness, so it was possible to hike without a headlamp. We would hit the trail at two A.M., summiting the nearest peak, Mount Tallac, just before sunrise, the clear, starry night reflected in the flat, still lakes spread below us. Snuggled together in sleeping bags at the peak, nearly ten thousand feet up, we weathered frigid blasts of wind with coffee someone had been thoughtful enough to bring. And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
Stephen King (End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #3))
Watch, how the sun slowly rises from behind my ear new lines, new countries spring up in my palms my rough hair become swaying silk and all the leaves in my body become lusher than fruits.
Sanober Khan (A Thousand Flamingos)
I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.
Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
I thought of him now-in his room-watching the sunrise; hoping I should soon come to say I would stay with him and be his. I longed to be his; I panted to return; it was not too late.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
There are many romantic reasons to watch the sunrise. Once it started, it was hard to leave. I wanted to own it. I wanted it to be a confirmation that I was alive. Most of the time, however, it felt condemning.
Stephanie Danler (Sweetbitter)
Sometimes I get up before sunrise to watch the way the dark thins out and objects slowly reveal themselves, the trees, the rest of the landscape. You can hear the river below and roosters in the village. The light of dawn, cold and blue, gradually fills the world, and it's the same in every place I've been.
Andrzej Stasiuk (On The Road To Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe)
I got to bed later than most People to see the moon in the night sky. And wake up earlier than most people to watch the Sunrise.
Bed,sleep,dreams,goodnight,Goodmorning,sunrise,sunset.
I want to see the sunrise with you. I want to watch the sunset. I want to make out during a movie. Silly, huh?
Emma Nichols (Sin at Sea (Sinful, #1))
Help me, Mikey, she wanted to say. I’m afraid. More afraid than you’d ever believe.’ And he’d take her hand and they’d fly across the rooftops and up into space and sit on some planet and watch a double sunrise or maybe a star being born or some other event that no human had ever seen, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. And she’d tell him everything.
Jenny Downham (You Against Me)
I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.
Bill Bryson
If I could live again - I will travel light, If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn, I'll ride more carts, I'll watch more sunrises...
Jorge Luis Borges
In the beauty of whitecaps, I sometimes see sadness, sometimes how lucky we are to watch the sunrise one more time.
Kelli Russell Agodon (Dialogues with Rising Tides)
Get outside. Watch the sunrise. Watch the sunset. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel big or tiny? Because there's something good about feeling both.
Amy Grant
This poem is very long So long, in fact, that your attention span May be stretched to its very limits But that’s okay It’s what’s so special about poetry See, poetry takes time We live in a time Call it our culture or society It doesn’t matter to me cause neither one rhymes A time where most people don’t want to listen Our throats wait like matchsticks waiting to catch fire Waiting until we can speak No patience to listen But this poem is long It’s so long, in fact, that during the time of this poem You could’ve done any number of other wonderful things You could’ve called your father Call your father You could be writing a postcard right now Write a postcard When was the last time you wrote a postcard? You could be outside You’re probably not too far away from a sunrise or a sunset Watch the sun rise Maybe you could’ve written your own poem A better poem You could have played a tune or sung a song You could have met your neighbor And memorized their name Memorize the name of your neighbor You could’ve drawn a picture (Or, at least, colored one in) You could’ve started a book Or finished a prayer You could’ve talked to God Pray When was the last time you prayed? Really prayed? This is a long poem So long, in fact, that you’ve already spent a minute with it When was the last time you hugged a friend for a minute? Or told them that you love them? Tell your friends you love them …no, I mean it, tell them Say, I love you Say, you make life worth living Because that, is what friends do Of all of the wonderful things that you could’ve done During this very, very long poem You could have connected Maybe you are connecting Maybe we’re connecting See, I believe that the only things that really matter In the grand scheme of life are God and people And if people are made in the image of God Then when you spend your time with people It’s never wasted And in this very long poem I’m trying to let a poem do what a poem does: Make things simpler We don’t need poems to make things more complicated We have each other for that We need poems to remind ourselves of the things that really matter To take time A long time To be alive for the sake of someone else for a single moment Or for many moments Cause we need each other To hold the hands of a broken person All you have to do is meet a person Shake their hand Look in their eyes They are you We are all broken together But these shattered pieces of our existence don’t have to be a mess We just have to care enough to hold our tongues sometimes To sit and listen to a very long poem A story of a life The joy of a friend and the grief of friend To hold and be held And be quiet So, pray Write a postcard Call your parents and forgive them and then thank them Turn off the TV Create art as best as you can Share as much as possible, especially money Tell someone about a very long poem you once heard And how afterward it brought you to them
Colleen Hoover (This Girl (Slammed, #3))
Mania was a mental state every bit as dangerous as depression. At first, however, it felt like a rush of euphoria. You were completely captivating, completely charming; everybody loved you. You took ridiculous physical risks, jumping out of a third-floor dorm room into a snowbank, for instance. It made you spend your year's fellowship money in five days. It was like having a wild party in your head, a party at which you were the drunken host who refused to let anyone leave, who grabbed people by the collar and said, "Come on. One more!" When those people inevitably did vanish, you went out and found others, anyone and anything to keep the party going. You couldn't stop talking. Everything you said was brilliant. You just had the best idea. Let's drive down to New York! Tonight! Let's climb on top of List and watch the sunrise! Leonard got people to do these things. He led them on incredible escapades. But at some point things began to turn. His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who'd been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue...
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
Dad, will they ever come back?" "No. And yes." Dad tucked away his harmonica. "No not them. But yes, other people like them. Not in a carnival. God knows what shape they'll come in next. But sunrise, noon, or at the latest, sunset tomorrow they'll show. They're on the road." "Oh, no," said Will. "Oh, yes, said Dad. "We got to watch out the rest of our lives. The fight's just begun." They moved around the carousel slowly. "What will they look like? How will we know them?" "Why," said Dad, quietly, "maybe they're already here." Both boys looked around swiftly. But there was only the meadow, the machine, and themselves. Will looked at Jim, at his father, and then down at his own body and hands. He glanced up at Dad. Dad nodded, once, gravely, and then nodded at the carousel, and stepped up on it, and touched a brass pole. Will stepped up beside him. Jim stepped up beside Will. Jim stroked a horse's mane. Will patted a horse's shoulders. The great machine softly tilted in the tides of night. Just three times around, ahead, thought Will. Hey. Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy. Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway. Lord. Each read the thoughts in the other's eyes. How easy, thought Will. Just this once, thought Jim. But then, thought Charles Halloway, once you start, you'd always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And, after awhile, you'd offer rides to friends, and more friends until finally... The thought hit them all in the same quiet moment. ...finally you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks... proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival shows.... Maybe, said their eyes, they're already here.
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
He watched the sun rise beyond the grape arbor. In the thin golden light the young leaves and tendrils of the Scuppernong were like Twink Weatherby's hair. He decided that sunrise and sunset both gave him a pleasantly sad feeling. The sunrise brought a wild, free sadness; the sunset, a lonely yet a comforting one. He indulged his agreeable melancholy until the earth under him turned from gray to lavender and then to the color dried corn husks.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling)
One key relationship we have is with ourselves. It may seem odd to think of having a relationship with ourselves, but we do. Some people can’t get along with themselves. They criticize and belittle themselves all day long until they begin to hate themselves. May I suggest that you reduce the rush and take a little extra time to get to know yourself better. Walk in nature, watch a sunrise, enjoy God’s creations, ponder the truths of the restored gospel, and find out what they mean for you personally. Learn to see yourself as Heavenly Father sees you—as His precious daughter or son with divine potential.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise.
Fleetwood Mac
Sunset and sunrise are two splendid movies that you can watch for seventy or eight years every day!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Read a nice poem or watch the sunrise, both are the same thing!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Don’t you feel you get value for your day if you’ve actually watched the sun rise?
A.J. Vosse
Watching the sunrise every morning is a blessing.
Anuj Jasani
And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones--the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her--kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward; remembering and looking back.
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can't tell the difference between a sunset and a sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me--and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn't so much surprised by its effect--how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves--but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
If you want to be reminded of the love of the Lord, Mom always said, just watch the sunrise. And if you want to be reminded of the wrath of the Lord, Dad said, watch a tornado.
Jeannette Walls (Half Broke Horses)
Watching Ky wake is better than a sunrise. One moment, he's still and down deep, and the next moment I can see him returning out of the dark, coming to the surface. His face shifts, his lips move, his eyes open. And then his smile, the sun At the same time that he bends down to me, I reach up and am warmed as our lips meet.
Ally Condie (Crossed (Matched, #2))
God seems to far away. Does He? Have you noted the splendid display of wildflowers? Have you listened to a child's laughter or watched a sunrise or a sunset? Have you seen peace on a person's face when they should be miserable? I want that for you. I want you to be able to face very moment of the day knowing God loves you.
DiAnn Mills (Lanterns and Lace (Texas Legacy #2))
He opens his voice, showing me other sunrises he has seen, where the fields turn golden and the Source and his one in particular stood up from their early morning labours to watch it rise, a memory as simple as that, yet covered in joy and loss and love and grief- And hope.
Patrick Ness (Monsters of Men (Chaos Walking, #3))
From sunrise to sunset, I was in the forest, sometimes far from the house, with my goat who watched me as a mother does a child. All the animals in the forest became my friends, even dangerous and poisonous ones. Thanks to my goat-mother and my Indian nurse, I have always enjoyed the trust of animals--a precious gift. I still love animals infinitely more than human beings.
Diego Rivera (My Art, My Life)
And yet morning will come,” I say to myself. “And you will watch the sunrise.
Ilsa Madden-Mills (The Revenge Pact (Kings of Football, #1))
The smile kindles in his dark eyes before it reaches his mouth. With a wonder that actually steals my breath, I watch its genesis like a mini-sunrise lighting his whole face.
Ann Aguirre (Wanderlust (Sirantha Jax, #2))
As I watched the sun began its daily routine, casting golden hue and illuminating cities, I wondered, “what an exemplary way to start my daily routine?
Val Uchendu
One unfogged window. One boy, watching. One gnarled tree. Three quiet deer. Four rusty cars. Seven wild sunflowers. One bus ride at sunrise under an infinite sky.
Grant Snider (One Boy Watching)
Now, to look is one of the most difficult things in life – or to listen – to look and listen are the same. If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset. Most of us have lost touch with nature. Civilisation is tending more and more towards large cities; we are becoming more and more an urban people, living in crowded apartments and having very little space even to look at the sky of an evening and morning, and therefore we are losing touch with a great deal of beauty. I don’t know if you have noticed how few of us look at a sunrise or a sunset or the moonlight or the reflection of light on water. Having lost touch with nature we naturally tend to develop intellectual capacities. We read a great many books, go to a great many museums and concerts, watch television and have many other entertainments. We quote endlessly from other people’s ideas and think and talk a great deal about art. Why is it that we depend so much upon art? Is it a form of escape, of stimulation? If you are directly in contact with nature; if you watch the movement of a bird on the wing, see the beauty of every movement of the sky, watch the shadows on the hills or the beauty on the face of another, do you think you will want to go to any museum to look at any picture? Perhaps it is because you do not know how to look at all the things about you that you resort to some form of drug to stimulate you to see better. There
J. Krishnamurti (Freedom from the Known)
Watching the rain is as beautiful as watching the sunset or the sunrise and it is even better because in addition to watching you can also listen to it, the fantastic music of the drop sounds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath. “More
Stephen King (End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #3))
Perhaps he was fit for the life of a hermit. Give up all of his worldly possessions and go live in a hut on a shelf of rock and watch the sunrise every morning. Up before the sun! What a dreadful idea; he shuddered.
Martha Grimes (The Lamorna Wink (Richard Jury #16))
weren't we all the same as children?" eiko asked. "all of us, destined to become beautiful brides in fluffy white dresses!" she giggled to herself. "where did we go wrong?" isn't that what keeps life interesting?" i replied. "and who knows? next year you could be somebody's wife. no one knows what will happen." sometimes i think it would be wonderful just to stay the way i am forever, just kick back and space out during the afternoon thinking about all the exciting things that the night will bring, all the naughty things i might take part in." she snickered again. well," i said, "aren't you the happy one." she squinted her tiny nose and laughed. dawn was breaking as we said good-bye. i saw her off by watching her small body disappear into the background, her high heels clapping along, echoing in the early morning city. my drunkenness, the sunrise, the bright sky, and a friend who was leaving. if i had died in my fall i would have missed that morning - that splendid sunrise over tokyo.
Banana Yoshimoto
When I look into your eyes it's like watching the night sky or a beautiful sunrise; well, there's so much they hold. And just like them old stars, I see that you've come so far to be right where you are. How old is your soul?
Jason Mraz (Jason Mraz - Love Is a Four Letter Word)
of all the things that have brought me suffering, being apart from you is the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced. But please know, I would suffer this a thousand days to spend one day with you. And there will come a time when we will walk together along the ocean, watching sunsets and sunrises. But we will be together in honor.
Heather Burch (One Lavender Ribbon)
on the continent I'm soft. I dream too. I let myself dream. I dream of being famous. I dream of walking the streets of London and Paris. I dream of sitting in cafes drinking fine wines and taking a taxi back to a good hotel. I dream of meeting beautiful ladies in the hall and turning them away because I have a sonnet in mind that I want to write before sunrise. at sunrise I will be asleep and there will be a strange cat curled up on the windowsill. I think we all feel like this now and then. I'd even like to visit Andernach, Germany, the place where I began, then I'd like to fly on to Moscow to check out their mass transit system so I'd have something faintly lewd to whisper into the ear of the mayor of Los Angeles upon to my return to this fucking place. it could happen. I'm ready. I've watched snails crawl over ten foot walls and vanish. you mustn't confuse this with ambition. I would be able to laugh at my good turn of the cards - and I won't forget you. I'll send postcards and snapshots, and the finished sonnet.
Charles Bukowski (Love Is a Dog from Hell)
From sunrise to sunset, from one day to the next, till our black hair turns white, we eat, we sleep, we bear children and we watch them grow. We watch them get married and in turn bear children of their own. How time flies, we say to ourselves. Then one day, we look down at our feet and we're surprised. Roots have sprouted in the ground of our daily living.
Suchen Christine Lim (A Bit of Earth)
The sun is origin of both the dawn’s light and birds’ morning songs. The glow on the horizon is light filtered through our atmosphere; the music in the air is the sun’s energy filtered through the plants and animals that powered the singing birds. The enchantment of an April sunrise is a web of flowing energy. The web is anchored at one end by matter turned to energy in the sun and at the other end by energy turned to beauty in our consciousness. April 22nd—Walking Seeds The springtime flush of flowers is over.
David George Haskell (The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature)
She leaned back in her chair, watching the sunrise as if it were a private performance intended just for her. And for a moment it felt that way: as if the sun was showing off for her benefit, reminding her how wonderful it was to be young and alive and in New York.
Katharine McGee (The Towering Sky (The Thousandth Floor, #3))
Gate C22 At gate C22 in the Portland airport a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed a woman arriving from Orange County. They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking, the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island, like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing. Neither of them was young. His beard was gray. She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish kisses like the ocean in the early morning, the way it gathers and swells, sucking each rock under, swallowing it again and again. We were all watching– passengers waiting for the delayed flight to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots, the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could taste the kisses crushed in our mouths. But the best part was his face. When he drew back and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost as though he were a mother still open from giving birth, as your mother must have looked at you, no matter what happened after–if she beat you or left you or you’re lonely now–you once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth. The whole wing of the airport hushed, all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body, her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses, little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
Ellen Bass (The Human Line)
Everyone worked day and night, Monday through Saturday. Oppenheimer insisted people take Sundays off to rest and recharge. Scientists fished for trout in nearby streams, or climbed mountains and discussed physics while watching the sunrise. "This is how many discoveries were made," one scientist said.
Steve Sheinkin (Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon)
Life is so fragile and uncertain that every daybreak is a miracle, almost a triumph. That first blush in the sky is all the hope of the world distilled into light. I watch the dark fade, and say to myself, “Okay, I’m still here,” and the more sunrises I see, the more I feel as if I’ll live to see another twenty thousand.
Dean Koontz (The Other Emily)
I am swimming and it is just sunrise, the sky so gray as to be almost invisible. I rise to the surface to breathe and that’s when I see the dark shadow of a boat, gliding gently toward me in the water. Men ride in the boat, their faces grim and greedy and silent, and as I turn to watch them I feel a bite in my side, a piercing pain.
Kendall Kulper (Salt & Storm (Salt & Storm, #1))
You may forever, child, feel a type of way, but you must get up every morning and watch the sun rise from the ocean.
Kwame Opoku-Duku
I could watch a million sunrises and still never see one quite as beautiful as your eyes slowly opening in the morning.
Michael Faudet (Bitter Sweet Love)
Could you even imagine a place where we watch sunrises, have sex, eat, shower, have sex, lay in the sun, watch sunsets, sex.” “I’m picking up on a theme …
Keri Lake (Ricochet (Vigilantes, #1))
We’re going down to the Margarita Grill to smell the lobster, then we’re going to watch the sunrise, and in between we’ll probably have hot, unsafe animal sex.
Darynda Jones (First Grave on the Right (Charley Davidson, #1))
I sit and watch The sunsets with the tears Flowing down my cheeks I wake up before the sunrise And look for you until the night
Jyoti Patel (The Curved Rainbow)
I’m the girl who wakes up early to watch the sunrise. I’m the girl who wants to see the good in everyone, the one who is taken away by a song, inspired by art.
Tillie Cole (A Thousand Boy Kisses (NEW BONUS CONTENT))
Poppy was quirky, not cool. She wasn't concerned with what people thought of her - she never had been. She read books, she studied for fun, she woke at dawn just to watch the sunrise.
Tillie Cole (A Thousand Boy Kisses (A Thousand Boy Kisses, #1))
but your letter, it reminded me of those sunrises I watch every morning, and that sacred moment when light and dark can co-exist, making something beautiful across the sky. I’ve always been the dark, but you’ve always been the light, Ollie, and together, our love burns in color. You are my every beautiful sacred moment, and I promise to stay for the rest of my life.
Nicole Fiorina (Now Open Your Eyes (Stay with Me, #3))
The sun had reached the horizon, and the crickets slowed their chirping as the air began to cool. Sunset and sunrise, he thought, the edges of the day, were the only times you could see the sun move. It touched the top of the ridge and began to disappear. He reminded himself that it was the earth's rotation, that the sun itself only seemed to move, but what difference did that make? He felt he was watching time itself pass. The last bright quarter shrank to an eighth, a sixteenth, a point, and then nothing, the sun's dark negative lingering in his retina.
James A. McLaughlin (Bearskin)
Poppy gestured to the sky. “I’m the girl who wakes up early to watch the sunrise. I’m the girl who wants to see the good in everyone, the one who is taken away by a song, inspired by art.” Turning to me, she smiled. “I’m that girl, Rune. The one who waits out the storm simply to catch a glimpse of a rainbow. Why be miserable when you can be happy? It’s an obvious choice to me.
Tillie Cole (A Thousand Boy Kisses (NEW BONUS CONTENT))
And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
Stephen King (End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #3))
And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath. “More
Stephen King (End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #3))
I prefer sunsets over sunrises, but only because I love to watch the constellations begin to burn. My favorite season is autumn, because my mum and I both believed that’s the only time when magic can be tasted in the air.
Rebecca Ross (Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment, #1))
Greta smiled suddenly, and he had to blink. It was a little like watching a small and self-contained sunrise. 'Thank you,' she said. 'I'm...very glad you're here.' Just for a moment, Varney thought that *he* was, too. For a moment.
Vivian Shaw (Strange Practice (Dr. Greta Helsing, #1))
Most visitors, however, will need a car to watch the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain, a park tradition. At 1,530 feet the highest peak on the U.S. Atlantic coast, this is the spot where America catches its first rays of the morning sun.
Patricia Schultz (1,000 Places to See in the United States & Canada Before You Die)
Find something new to live for,” said Peter softly. “I had to do that when I lost my family. Granted, they weren’t dead, but they were as good as dead for twelve years.” “What did you learn to live for?” “Sunrises. I never used to be an early riser, but the centaurs don’t believe in sleeping in. I found that there’s nothing quite like watching the sunlight come over the prairie and make it shine like gold.” Peter sighed and added, “Sometimes, it’s all about the little things.
Isabella Auer (Daughter of Kings)
Bliss?” I called. “Yeah?” “Check the drawers of the nightstand! She was playing with it in the middle of the night, and I think I remember taking it away and sticking it in there.” “Okay!” Through the open door, I watched her circle around the edge of the bed. I walked in place for a few seconds, letting my feet drop a little heavier than necessary, then opened and closed the door like I’d gone back inside the bathroom. Then I hid in the space between the back of the bedroom door and the wall where I could just see through the crack between the hinges. She pulled open the top drawer, and my heartbeat was like a bass drum. I don’t know when it had started beating so hard, but now it was all that I could hear. It wasn’t like I was asking her to marry me now. I just knew Bliss, and knew she tended to panic. I was giving her a very big, very obvious hint so that she’d have time to adjust before I actually asked her. Then in a few months, when I thought she’d gotten used to the idea, I’d ask her for real. That was the plan anyway. It was supposed to be simple, but this felt… complicated. Suddenly, I thought of all the thousands of ways this could go wrong. What if she freaked out? What if she ran like she did our first night together? If she ran, would she go back to Texas? Or would she go to Cade who lived in North Philly? He’d let her stay until she figured things out, and then what if something developed between them? What if she just flat out told me no? Everything was good right now. Perfect, actually. What if I was ruining it by pulling this stunt? I was so caught up in my doomsday predictions that I didn’t even see the moment that she found the box. I heard her open it though, and I heard her exhale and say, “Oh my God.” Where before my mouth had been dry, now I couldn’t swallow fast enough. My hands were shaking against the door. She was just standing there with her back to me. I couldn’t see her face. All I could see was her tense, straight spine. She swayed slightly. What if she passed out? What if I’d scared her so much that she actually lost consciousness? I started to think of ways to explain it away. I was keeping it for a friend? It was a prop for a show? It was… It was… shit, I didn’t know. I could just apologize. Tell her I knew it was too fast. I waited for her to do something—scream, run, cry, faint. Anything would be better than her stillness. I should have just been honest with her. I wasn’t good at things like this. I said what I was thinking—no plans, no manipulation. Finally, when I thought my body would crumble under the stress alone, she turned. She faced the bed, and I only got her profile, but she was biting her lip. What did that mean? Was she just thinking? Thinking of a way to get out of it? Then, slowly, like the sunrise peeking over the horizon, she smiled. She snapped the box closed. She didn’t scream. She didn’t run. She didn’t faint. There might have been a little crying. But mostly… she danced. She swayed and jumped and smiled the same way she had when the cast list was posted for Phaedra. She lost herself the same way she did after opening night, right before we made love for the first time. Maybe I didn’t have to wait a few months after all. She said she wanted my best line tomorrow after the show, and now I knew what it was going to be.
Cora Carmack (Losing It (Losing It, #1))
it is a valuable lesson that should often be reinforced—that many who are faced with impending death, a disease that will likely take them in a year’s time, for example, quite often insist that their affliction is the best thing that ever happened to them. It takes the immediacy of mortality to remind them to watch the sunrise and the sunset, to note the solitary flower among the rocks, to appreciate those loved ones around them, to taste their food, and revel in the feel of a cool breeze.
R.A. Salvatore (The Companions (The Sundering, #1, The Legend of Drizzt, #27))
I know I’ve given you reason to doubt me, Oliver, but I promise that’s behind us. I’m here. I’m yours.” He brings my hand to his chest. “I promise it all—my body, my soul, my life, for you, everything for you, to care for you and love you, if you’ll let me. You’re the fucking sunrise of my heart, love. All I need is to wake up beside you, to hold your hand and keep you steady when you need me, to watch you with pride and admiration, to give you hell for not being more selfish on the field and too generous off of it. I love you. Do you believe me?” Nodding, frantic, I tell him, “Yes.” I pull him close, kiss him soft and slow, and he kisses me, too, his mouth firm, smooth, so gentle, remembering mine. “I love you,” I tell him. “I love you so much.
Chloe Liese (Everything for You (Bergman Brothers, #5))
The dark breaks wide in fragile rays. Dawn on Ithiss-Tor is more subtle than other sunrises. I have lost count of the worlds where I have stood and watched the light rise, peeling away the sky, sometimes in quiet colors, and sometimes in raw, violent slashes, as if the goddess I don't believe in has cut her veins. And sometimes, as on Gehenna, the sky changes not at all, just endless night, or endless brilliance--and after a time, the constant uniformity makes you feel as if you are the thing that must give way.
Ann Aguirre (Doubleblind (Sirantha Jax, #3))
Was this all there was to life, after all? You finished school, found an occupation, got married, became a father, watched your wife die, and then lived through days and nights that seemed to have no sunrises, no dawns and no dusks, nothing but a gray drabness.
Robert Cormier (The Chocolate War)
And time is something we made up. Digital clocks, quartz watches, atomic clocks don’t measure ‘time’ they are just devices that exhibit change. Clocks are navigational devices that we morphed into devices that somehow allow us to control time. However no matter how you ‘change’ a clock or a watch - you can make a clock slower or faster, put it ahead or back – it doesn’t affect the sunrise, or the galaxy speed, or death (or taxes). It’s just a game. Change is a constant. Whatever you do – change happens. Time Control
Martin Gover (Time Control - Taking Control and Achieving Goals)
If there was a predominant season in heaven, Jenny Flanigan believed it would be summer. The long days and warm nights felt endless no matter how rushed the rest of the year was. With summer came the sense that all of life slowed to smell the deep green grass, to watch fireflies dance on an evening breeze, or to hear the gentle lap of lake water against the sandy shore. Summer was barbecues and quiet conversation in the fading light of a nine o'clock sunset. It was cutoffs and flip-flops and afternoons on Lake Monroe.
Karen Kingsbury (Summer (Sunrise, #2))
And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe. The successful ones—the ones who had been there enough years to have maimed, mutilated, maybe even buried her—kept watch over the others who were still in her cock-teasing hug, caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back.
Toni Morrison (Beloved: Pulitzer Prize Winner (Vintage International))
- I'll throw the world at your feet, girl. He began to stroke my bare shoulder with his hand, following the movement of his fingers. - I'll show you places you never dreamed of. He leaned down and kissed the piece of skin he was stroking. "I want you to see the sunrise in Burma when we fly a balloon." His lips rolled down my neck. - Let you get drunk at night in Tokyo, watching the colorful lights of the city. I closed my eyes as Nacho's lips stroked my ear. - You'll love me on a board off the coast of Australia. I will show you the whole world.
Blanka Lipińska (Kolejne 365 dni (365 dni, #3))
Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters. Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought. The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.
Chila Woychik (On Being a Rat and Other Observations)
Yes! The rosy fingers of dawn had finally slipped through the fog and gently pulled it apart, separating the tendrils, weakening it. Wendy watched in fascination. She almost never saw the sunrise except in winter and that was through her window, under the gray sprawl of London Town. Nothing like this. As the sea lightened and the sky began to clear, the two elements resolved themselves into colors unlike anything she was used to: brilliant emerald and deep aquamarine, pellucid azure and shining lapis. It was so storybook perfect she wouldn't have been surprised at all if the sun came out with a great smiley face drawn on it.
Liz Braswell (Straight On Till Morning)
you, if you’ll let me. You’re the fucking sunrise of my heart, love. All I need is to wake up beside you, to hold your hand and keep you steady when you need me, to watch you with pride and admiration, to give you hell for not being more selfish on the field and too generous off of it. I love you. Do you believe me?
Chloe Liese (Everything for You (Bergman Brothers, #5))
Sometimes I watch the moon and think about all the people in the entire history of people who also looked up at that very same moon. And I think about how they all saw sunsets and sunrises put off by the very same sun I see, and that they enjoyed all those streaks of colors. That one moon and one sun unites the entire human race.
James Russell Lingerfelt (Alabama Irish)
Montana farmers today who continue to farm into their old age do it in part because they love the lifestyle and take great pride in it. As Tim Huls told me, “It’s a wonderful lifestyle to get up before dawn and see the sunrise, to watch hawks fly overhead, and to see deer jump through your hay field to avoid your haying equipment.
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed)
When, in the morning at sunrise, I go out to Walheim, and with my own hands gather in the garden the peas which are to serve for my dinner, when I sit down to shell them, and read my Homer during the intervals, and then, selecting a saucepan from the kitchen, fetch my own butter, put my mess on the fire, cover it up, and sit down to stir it as occasion requires, I figure to myself the illustrious suitors of Penelope, killing, dressing, and preparing their own oxen and swine. Nothing fills me with a more pure and genuine sense of happiness than those traits of patriarchal life which, thank Heaven! I can imitate without affectation. Happy is it, indeed, for me that my heart is capable of feeling the same simple and innocent pleasure as the peasant whose table is covered with food of his own rearing, and who not only enjoys his meal, but remembers with delight the happy days and sunny mornings when he planted it, the soft evenings when he watered it, and the pleasure he experienced in watching its daily growth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
Quinces are ripe...when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. they are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. but even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate--useless...until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak-up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. to answer your question__love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched__. ~The Book of Salt
Monique Truong
He could remember the way she felt in his arms, her back to his chest as they watched the sunrise. The whole world had been alive then, full of promise. They had been young. So fucking young. Strong. Neither of them had known how broken they could be, how easy it was to take a life and snap it like a twig until nothing remained but meaningless pieces.
Lexi Blake (On Her Master's Secret Service (Masters and Mercenaries, #4))
Her bed faced three large uncurtained windows that looked due eat, and she loved the endless variety of sunrises that greeted her from day to day. Growing up in Florida and in the suburbs, she had never realized how the sun paced back and forth through the year, like a restless dog on a tether. During the winter it rose far to the southeast and skulked along the ridgeline, disappearing in mid-afternoon. But now it rising a little past due east, on its way to the northeast where it would achieve the summer solstice, then begin the slow day-by-day journey back to the winter solstice. Watching the sunrise, with its reminder of the endless and inevitable cycles of life, was, she thought, her version of religion.
Vicki Lane (Signs in the Blood (Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mystery, #1))
When life seems like an uphill task do not ever give up on yourself or on life! Travel to a new place, learn a new language, embrace a new culture, play a musical instrument, read a good book, watch the sunrise, experience the sunset, go for a swim in the river, hug a tree, sit near the lake, or climb a mountain! You will fall in love with life all over again!
Avijeet Das
Something happened that day. When she speaks again, her voice is almost a whisper. “It was still early when I got there. I sat down on the beach, watching the morning waves roll in.” A wistful look fills her eyes. “It was so beautiful. People love looking at the ocean at sunrise or sunset, but I love looking at it right before the sun is up or right after sundown.
Penelope Douglas (Credence)
So in the meantime, exist as you exist. Only do not forget one thing, namely, at your age it is indispensably necessary that every day, at sunrise, while watching the reflection of its splendor, you bring about a contact between your consciousness and the various unconscious parts of your general presence. Try to make this state last and to convince the unconscious parts--not as if they were conscious--that if they hinder your general functioning, they, in the period of your responsible age, not only cannot fulfill the good that befits them, but your general presence of which they are part, will not be able to be a good servant of our Common Endless Creator, and by that will not even be worthy to pay for your arising and existence.
G.I. Gurdjieff
What a blessing life is. If you don’t believe it, get up and watch the sunrise tomorrow or take time to gaze up at the stars. Listen to the restful sound of a mourning dove in the quiet woods, or the wind whispering through the leaves above you. Contemplate all that you are grateful for, and never give up on your dreams. Most importantly, give your whole heart to all that you love in this life.
Julianne MacLean (The Color of Love (The Color of Heaven, #6))
I have important things to tell you, but who can concentrate with all that racket?" That "racket" turned out to be because of flowers, hundreds of them, arriving by the cartful. Roses, orchids, lilies, daffodils, irises, and a dozen other varieties that she could not name. Heavy porcelain vases were mounted all around the grand ballroom and the royal gardens, displaying the arrangements in all their grandeur. But one arrangement stood out from the rest. From the duchess's window, Cinderella watched the gardeners erect a trellis studded with roses. When the palace staff wheeled out a barrow of flowers, white pearlescent roses intertwined with pink ones as flushed as the height of sunrise, she nearly gasped. Her parents' favorite flowers. White and pink roses, with a touch of myrtle. Charles had been listening.
Elizabeth Lim (So This is Love)
I have something to show you." He sank down next to me and handed me a sketchbook. I opened it. And saw the mermaid. She was drawn in colored ink, exquisitely detailed; each scale had a little picture in it: a pyramid, a rocket, a peacock, a lamp. Her torso was patterened red, like a tattoo, like coral. She had a thin strand of seaweed around her neck, with a starfish holding on to the center. Her hair was a tumble of loose black curls. She had my face. I turned the page.And another and another. There she was fighting a creature that was half human, half octopus. Exploring a cave. Riding a shark. Laughing and petting a stingray that rested on her lap. "I'm calling her Cora Lia for the moment," Alex told me. "I thought about Corella, but it sounded like cheap dishware." "She's...amazing." "She's fierce. Fighting the Evil Sea-Dragon King and his minions." I traced the red tattoo on her chest. "This is beautiful." Alex reached into my sweater, pulled the loose neck of the T-shirt away from my shoulder. I didn't stop him. "It looks like coral to me." He touched me, then,the pad of his thumb tracing the outline of the scar. It felt strange, partly because of the difference in the tissue, but more because in the last few years, the only hands that had touched me there were mine. I set the book aside carefully. "Guess I don't see what you do." "That's too bad, because I see you perfectly." I curved myself into him. "Maybe you're exactly what I need." "Like there's any doubt?" He buried his face in my neck.I didn't stop him. "So." "So?" "We'll kill a few hours, watch the sunrise, have pancakes, and you'll drive home." "What?" I felt him smile against my skin. "I got you swimming with sharks. Next on the Conquer Your Fears list is driving a stick shift.Right?" "One thing at a time," I said. Then, "Oh. Do that again." In another story, the intrepid heroine would have gone running out and splashed in the surf, hypothermia be damned. She would have driven the Mustang home, booked a haircut, taken up stand-up comedy, and danced on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. But this was me, and I was moving at my own pace. Truth: My story started a hundred years ago. There's time.
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
Long ago, darkness reigned over the night. People were afraid and remained inside their shelters from sundown until sunrise. The goddess Selene saw their fear and gave light to their nocturnal world by driving her moon chariot across the starry sky. She followed her brother Helios, who rode the sun and caught his shining rays on her magnificent silver chariot, then cast them down to earth as moonbeams. She felt pride in the way the earthlings were comforted by her light. But one night when she had abandoned her chariot to walk upon the earth, she noticed that in times of trouble many people lost all hope. Their despair bewildered her. After considering their plight, she knew how she could make her moon the greatest gift from the gods. From then on she drove around the earth and each night caught her brother's rays from a different angle. This way the face of the moon was everchanging. People watched the moon decrease in light every night, until it could no longer be seen from the earth. Then after three nights of darkness, a crescent sliver returned and the moon increased in light until it was fully illuminated as before. Selene did this to remind people that their darkest times can lead them to their brightest. The ancients understood Selene's gift in the lunar phases. Each night when they gazed at the moon, they knew Selene was telling them to never give up hope.
Lynne Ewing (The Secret Scroll (Daughters of the Moon, #4))
When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper (fig. 74), spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the account of a priest, Leonardo would “come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding,” and then “remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting continually.” On other days, however, nothing would be painted. “He would remain in front of it for one or two hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created.” Then there were dramatic days that combined his obsessiveness and his penchant for procrastination. As if caught by whim or passion, he would arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, “climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two to one of the figures, and suddenly depart.”1 Leonardo’s quirky work habits may have fascinated the public, but they eventually began to worry Ludovico Sforza. Upon the death of his nephew, he had become the official Duke of Milan in early 1494, and he set about enhancing his stature in a time-honored way, through art patronage and public commissions. He also wanted to create a holy mausoleum for himself and his family, choosing a small but elegant church and monastery in the heart of Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie, which he had Leonardo’s friend Donato Bramante reconstruct. For the north wall of the new dining hall, or refectory, he had commissioned Leonardo to paint a Last Supper, one of the most popular scenes in religious art. At first Leonardo’s procrastination led to amusing tales, such as the time the church prior became frustrated and complained to Ludovico. “He wanted him never to lay down his brush, as if he were a laborer hoeing the Prior’s garden,” Vasari wrote. When Leonardo was summoned by the duke, they ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he told the duke, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo Da Vinci)
I SEEK SOLACE IN THE CRIMSON SUNRISE, That splashes the east with beauty; I am captivated by the azure skies, Which follow with an air of serenity! I watch the color of the seas That paints the canvas of my heart; I brush my thoughts with the elegant breeze That translates my ideas to art! The dainty garden of beauteous flowers - Red, yellow, lilac and white - Toss and frolic in breezy hours Spreading the waves of lucid delight. The hills covered with foliage green, And the faded ones, blue and grey, Enthrall me as my eyes glean Their glimpses while I move away. Each speck of dust, each grain of rice, And the farms reflect life and mirth; Colors of nature, at ease, entice, Bringing the sweet scent of earth. I chase the mesmerizing butterflies Laden with hues of heaven, Solitude becomes a joyous exercise. When by beauty, I am madly driven! The world is filled with colors galore, Each day is a colorful festivity; Every moment you amass more and more, There is no end to beauty!
Saravanakumar Murugan (Shades of Life)
The three thousand miles in distance he put between himself and Emma tonight is nothing compared with the enormous chasm separating them when they sit next to each other in calculus. Emma's ability to overlook his existence is a gift-but not one that Poseidon handed down. Rachel insists this gift is uniquely a female trait, regardless of the species. Since their breakup, Emma seems to be the only female utilizing this particular gift. Even Rayna could learn a few lessons from Emma in the art of torturing a smitten male. Smitten? More like fanatical. He shakes his head in disgust. Why couldn't I just sift when I turned of age? Why couldn't I find a suitable mild-tempered female to mate with? Live a peaceful life, produce offspring, grow old, and watch my own fingerlings have fingerlings someday? He searches through his mind for someone he might have missed in the past. For a face he overlooked before but could now look forward to every day. For a docile female who would be honored to mate with a Triton prince-instead of a temperamental siren who mocks his title at every opportunity. He scours his memory for a sweet-natured Syrena who would take care of him, who would do whatever he asked, who would never argue with him. Not some human-raised snippet who stomps her foot when she doesn't get her way, listens to him only when it suits some secret purpose she has, or shoves a handful of chocolate mints down his throat if he lets his guard down. Not some white-haired angelfish whose eyes melt him into a puddle, whose blush is more beautiful than sunrise, and whose lips send heat ripping through him like a mine explosion. He sighs as Emma's face eclipses hundreds of mate-worthy Syrena. That's just one more quality I'll have to add to the list: someone who won't mind being second best. His just locks as he catches a glimpse of his shadow beneath him, cast by slithers of sterling moonlight. Since it's close to three a.m. here, he's comfortable walking around without the inconvenience of clothes, but sitting on the rocky shore in the raw is less than appealing. And it doesn't matter which Jersey shore he sits on, he can't escape the moon that connects them both-and reminds him of Emma's hair. Hovering in the shallows, he stares up at it in resentment, knowing the moon reminds him of something else he can' escape-his conscience. If only he could shirk his responsibilities, his loyalty to his family, his loyalty to his people. If only he could change everything about himself, he could steal Emma away and never look back-that is, if she'll ever talk to him again.
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
When we’d watched Before Sunrise on video one day, she’d said, “Did you know Julie Delpy’s a feminist? I wonder if that’s why she’s not skinnier. No way they’d cast her in this role if she were American. See how soft her arms are? Nobody here tolerates arm flab. Arm flab is a killer. It’s like the SAT’s. You don’t even exist if you’re below 1400.” “Does it make you happy that Julie Delpy has arm flab?” I’d asked her. “No,” she’d said after some consideration. “Happiness is not what I’d call it. More like satisfaction.
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration? You killed that poem, we say. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. ‘Good for you man,’ a man once said to me at a party, ‘you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knocking ‘em dead.’ “-On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, p. 179, Ocean Vuong “I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. Like right now, how the sun is coming on, low behind the elms, and I can’t tell the difference between a sunset and a sunrise. The world, reddening, appears the same to me--and I lose track of east and west. The colors this morning have the frayed tint of something already leaving. I think of the time Trev and I sat on the toolshed roof, watching the sun sink. I wasn’t so much surprised by its effect--how, in a few crushed minutes, it changes the way things are seen, including ourselves--but that it was ever mine to see. Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you first must be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
In zoos, as in nature, the best times to visit are sunrise and sunset. That is when most animals come to life. They stir and leave their shelter and tiptoe to the water's edge. They show their raiments. They sing their songs. They turn to each other and perform their rites. The reward for the watching eye and the listening ear is great. I spent more hours than I can count a quiet witness to the highly mannered, manifold expressions of life that grace our planet. It is something so bright, loud, weird and delicate as to stupefy the senses.
Yann Martel
Remove this quote from your collection “When we’d watched Before Sunrise on video one day, she’d said, “Did you know Julie Delpy’s a feminist? I wonder if that’s why she’s not skinnier. No way they’d cast her in this role if she were American. See how soft her arms are? Nobody here tolerates arm flab. Arm flab is a killer. It’s like the SAT’s. You don’t even exist if you’re below 1400.” “Does it make you happy that Julie Delpy has arm flab?” I’d asked her. “No,” she’d said after some consideration. “Happiness is not what I’d call it. More like satisfaction.
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
Wynter's Pass was a picturesque region in the north of Vohlfhein, where the Bleak Hills eventually collapsed into the Frozen Sea. From the back of Mr. Buckles, who had been on a slow trot since sunrise, Monch watched the light glisten off of the frozen branches of the evergreens. As the sun warmed the frozen ground, sending the evening's frost into retreat, Monch absorbed the splendor of it all and wondered how expensive the local real estate must be around here. He then contemplated attempting to find an agent that would represent his interests well. "This land is such a spectacular wonder," the Lion of Ahriman declared. "It would be very much sought after if they could just do something about the bears, the White Orts, the wolves, the bloodthirsty cannibals, the snow manapés, the frost wizards, the northern bandit gangs, the dire lynxes, the similarly sounding but not related pygmy bloodthirsty cannibals, the demon possessed yaks, the dead-soul animated trees, the..." Monch paused for a moment. "It just occurred to me that this land is really not safe at all. It seems almost everything in it wants to kill me," the Templar admitted.
D.F. Monk (Tales of Yhore: The Chronicles of Monch)
If you only knew about the stupid crush I had on you.” “Oh, I knew.” Her mouth dropped open. “No way. I was stealth.” “You mean when you used to hide in the loft and watch me work?” She grimaced. “Fine. So I liked when you used to chop wood. You’d get hot and take off your shirt.” She slid him a sly smile. “Teenage Alice thanks you.” “Good to know.” He cocked his head. “And grown up Alice?” She bit her lower lip while looking at his mouth. “She’s … undecided.” What an adorably sexy liar. “You’re flirting with me again.” “Am I?” He smiled. “You’re just playing with me right now. Let me know when you mean it.
Jill Shalvis (The Backup Plan (Sunrise Cove, #3))
The Night Watchman by Stewart Stafford Does the night watchman watch the night or does the night watch him? Is there anything in the darkness or is his eyesight growing dim? Does a beast growl in the shadows or is his stomach requesting food? Is his pay adequate compensation or is his boss just being rude? As he prays for the sunrise, does anyone hear his prayers? When he clocks out for breakfast, is anyone standing there? Does he creep home to his bed to count the hours down? Until he sits staring at the darkness once more with a quizzical and resigned frown? © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
For many years I kept grandfather’s church calendar with his notes written inside it. The words “Saved from calamity by these benefactors” were written in straight letters and red ink on the day of Joachim and Anna. I remember that calamity. Worried about supporting his failed children, grandfather had begun to lend money, secretly holding his debtors’ possessions in hock. Someone informed against him, and one night the police descended on the house to search it. There was a great commotion, but it all turned out fine. Grandfather prayed until sunrise, and in the morning I watched him write those words in the calendar.
Maxim Gorky (Childhood: An English Translation)
You making that move, Walt?” He kissed her in a way that should have sufficiently answered the question. “Muriel, I’m sixty-two years old. I didn’t see this coming.” “Aren’t you afraid of us becoming an item?” “Girl, I’ve been dressed down by a president. You can’t scare me with a little gossip. What worries me is that you’ll find me old.” She laughed at him. “You’re just a few years older than I am. And you’re almost irresistibly handsome.” One black brow shot up. “You find me handsome?” She nodded. “And sexy.” “Well, now. That so? Muriel, I want to touch every part of you. And then I want us to watch the sunrise together.
Robyn Carr (Temptation Ridge)
[Hodges] looks over at the card players ... one looks good (as Hodges himself looks good), but the other is cadaverous and hollow-eyed. One foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, Hodges’s father would have said. And the thought that comes to him is too complicated—too fraught with a terrible mixture of anger and sorrow—to be articulated. It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
Stephen King (End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #3))
There are so many moments I wish I could relive again. Especially the smaller ones. The quieter ones that we often don’t think about. Those are the moments I look back and miss the most. Us sitting on the floor in Sam’s room doing homework together, or watching movie musicals in Mika’s living room on the weekends. Or that time we decided to grab blankets and bring them to the backyard to watch the sunrise together, for no reason. We stayed up all night, talking about what we wanted to do ten years from now, waiting to see that burning red glow curve along a dark sky, oblivious to the significance of seeing another day. And oblivious to a future when one of us would be gone.
Dustin Thao (You've Reached Sam)
Finally, I have come to realise that an imperfect Life is actually the most perfect Life. I have come to see how Life is beautiful in all its colours, more so because the shades of grey bind them and paint them with even more radiance. A clear sky is always beautiful but what if we never have rain or storm? Sunshine is always wonderful but what if we never have the soothing dusk or the cold night to coil in our own misty self? Storms that come to jolt us often leave us with more courage as we sail along the gust to chase a silver lining. The scorching heat that chokes us often makes us wait more eagerly for that balm of rain. So is Life, in all those moments of sunset we have the hope of the following sunrise, and if we may wait and absorb all that crumbling ray of that sunset we would be able to paint our sunrise with even more crimson smile. Because just like a story, nothing in Life is really concrete without patience. We cannot skip pages of a book because each line contains just so much to seep in, and to have the story fully lived inside our heart and soul we have to keep reading until the very end to feel that sense of peaceful happiness, that always clutches us no matter how the ending is drafted. In the same manner, we have to keep walking through Life, as each and every step of ours leads us to the destination of our Life, the destination of peace, the destination of knowledge of self. The best part of this walk is that it is never a straight line, but is always filled with curves and turns, making us aware of our spirit, laughing loud at times while mourning deep at times. But that is what Life is all about, a bunch of imperfect moments to smile as perfect memories sailing through the potholes of Life, because a straight line even in the world of science means death, after all monotony of perfection is the most cold imperfection. So as we walk through difficult times, may we realise that this sunset is not forever's and that the winter often makes us more aware of the spring. As we drive through a dark night, may we halt for a moment and watch for the stars, the smile of the very stars of gratitude and love that is always there even in the darkest sky of the gloomiest night. As we sail along the ship of Life, may we remember that the winds often guide us to our destination and the storms only come to make our voyage even more adventurous, while the rain clears the cloud so that we may gaze at the full glory of the sky above, with a perfect smile through a voyage of imperfect moments of forever's shine. And so as we keep turning the pages of Life, may we remember to wear that Smile, through every leaf of Life, for Life is rooted in the blooming foliage of its imperfect perfection.
Debatrayee Banerjee
In the deep woods of the far North, under feathery leaves of fern, was a great fairyland of merry elves, sometimes called forest brownies. These elves lived joyfully. They had everything at hand and did not need to worry much about living. Berries and nuts grew plentiful in the forest. Rivers and springs provided the elves with crystal water. Flowers prepared them drink from their flavorful juices, which the munchkins loved greatly. At midnight the elves climbed into flower cups and drank drops of their sweet water with much delight. Every elf would tell a wonderful fairy tale to the flower to thank it for the treat. Despite this abundance, the pixies did not sit back and do nothing. They tinkered with their tasks all day long. They cleaned their houses. They swung on tree branches and swam in forested streams. Together with the early birds, they welcomed the sunrise, listened to the thunder growling, the whispering of leaves and blades of grass, and the conversations of the animals. The birds told them about warm countries, sunbeams whispered of distant seas, and the moon spoke of treasures hidden deeply in the earth. In winter, the elves lived in abandoned nests and hollows. Every sunny day they came out of their burrows and made the forest ring with their happy shouts, throwing tiny snowballs in all directions and building snowmen as small as the pinky finger of a little girl. The munchkins thought they were giants five times as large as them. With the first breath of spring, the elves left their winter residences and moved to the cups of the snowdrop flowers. Looking around, they watched the snow as it turned black and melted. They kept an eye on the blossoming of hazel trees while the leaves were still sleeping in their warm buds. They observed squirrels moving their last winter supplies from storage back to their homes. Gnomes welcomed the birds coming back to their old nests, where the elves lived during winters. Little by little, the forest once more grew green. One moonlight night, elves were sitting at an old willow tree and listening to mermaids singing about their underwater kingdom. “Brothers! Where is Murzilka? He has not been around for a long time!” said one of the elves, Father Beardie, who had a long white beard. He was older than others and well respected in his striped stocking cap. “I’m here,” a snotty voice arose, and Murzilka himself, nicknamed Feather Head, jumped from the top of the tree. All the brothers loved Murzilka, but thought he was lazy, as he actually was. Also, he loved to dress in a tailcoat, tall black hat, boots with narrow toes, a cane and a single eyeglass, being very proud of that look. “Do you know where I’m coming from? The very Arctic Ocean!” roared he. Usually, his words were hard to believe. That time, though, his announcement sounded so marvelous that all elves around him were agape with wonder. “You were there, really? Were you? How did you get there?” asked the sprites. “As easy as ABC! I came by the fox one day and caught her packing her things to visit her cousin, a silver fox who lives by the Arctic Ocean. “Take me with you,” I said to the fox. “Oh, no, you’ll freeze there! You know, it’s cold there!” she said. “Come on.” I said. “What are you talking about? What cold? Summer is here.” “Here we have summer, but there they have winter,” she answered. “No,” I thought. “She must be lying because she does not want to give me a ride.” Without telling her a word, I jumped upon her back and hid in her bushy fur, so even Father Frost could not find me. Like it or not, she had to take me with her. We ran for a long time. Another forest followed our woods, and then a boundless plain opened, a swamp covered with lichen and moss. Despite the intense heat, it had not entirely thawed. “This is tundra,” said my fellow traveler. “Tundra? What is tundra?” asked I. “Tundra is a huge, forever frozen wetland covering the entire coast of the Arctic Ocean.
Anna Khvolson
A man must be judged by what he makes of himself, Dr. Harrow. By what he does when no one else is looking. And having lived in proximity to Mr. Merripen and Mr. Rohan, I can state with certainty that they are both fine, honorable men." Dodger extracted an object from the coat pocket and wriggled with triumph. He began to lope slowly around the edge of the room, watching Harrow warily. "Forgive me if I don't accept assurances of character from a woman such as you," Harrow said to Miss Marks. "But according to rumor, you've been in rather too much proximity with certain gentlemen in your past." The governess turned white with outrage. "How dare you?" "I find that remark entirely inappropriate," Leo said to Harrow. "It's obvious that no sane man would ever attempt something scandalous with Marks.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things. But— All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.
Gerald Durrell
Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue. Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You are unworthy of her. Yes. No. Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination. Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turns skyward. Is this drizzle? It is. Sound of small sheers closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty and here it is, the separation.
Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
He’d watched the old man live his life “by the signs.” Whether a moon waxed or waned decided when the crops were planted and harvested, the hogs slaughtered and the timber cut, even when a hole was best dug. A red sunrise meant coming rain, as did the call of a raincrow. Other signs that were harbingers of a new life, or a life about to end. Boyd was fourteen when he heard the corpse bird in the woods behind the barn. His grandfather had been sick for months but recently rallied, gaining enough strength to leave his bed and take short walks around the farm. The old man had heard the owl as well, and it was a sound of reckoning to him as final as the thump of dirt clods on his coffin. It’s come to fetch me, the old man had said, and Boyd hadn’t the slightest doubt it was true. Three nights the bird called from the woods behind the barn. Boyd had been in his grandfather’s room those nights, had been there when his grandfather let go of his life and followed the corpse bird into the darkness.
Ron Rash (Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories)
He opened her door, grabbed a quilt from the back of the truck, and pulled her toward the beach. When he found a spot covered with thick sand, he stopped and spread out the blanket. “It’s a little early for sunbathing,” she said. “I don’t remember you being so grumpy in the morning,” he teased. “I didn’t have time for coffee.” He lowered himself to the blanket and pulled her down in front of him. She settled against his chest, his warmth driving away the chill in the air. “Madam . . .” He handed her a thermos she hadn’t noticed before. “Oh, bless you.” She poured the hot brew into the lid, took a sip, and shared with him. Much better. The smell of the brew mingled with the tangy scent of sea air. The cool breeze fanned her skin, pushing her hair from her face, and the water lapped the pebbled shore. The clouds on the horizon were beginning to brighten, the black fading to dark hues of blue. A couple months ago she’d mentioned that she’d never watched a sunrise. He seemed intent on being there for all her firsts. The first time she rented a house. The first time she opened her own bank account. The first time she swam in the ocean. She embraced her freedom, and Beau was there, supporting her however he could.
Denise Hunter (Falling Like Snowflakes (Summer Harbor, #1))
Who are you, Merripen?” he asked softly. The big Rom went back to work. “No one.” “You were part of a tribe once. You must have had family.” “I don’t remember any father. My mother died when I was born.” “So did mine. I was raised by my grandmother.” The brush halted in midstroke. Neither of them moved. The stable became deadly quiet, except for the snuffling and shifting of horses. “I was raised by my uncle. To be one of the asharibe.” “Ah.” Cam kept any hint of pity from his expression, but privately he thought, You poor bastard. No wonder Merripen fought so well. Some Gypsy tribes took their strongest boys and turned them into bare-knuckle fighters, pitting them against each other at fairs and pubs and gatherings, for onlookers to make bets on. Some of the boys were disfigured or even killed. And the ones who survived were hardened fighters down to the bootstraps, and designated as warriors of the tribe. “Well, that explains your sweet temperament,” Cam said. “Was that why you chose to stay with the Hathaways after they took you in? Because you no longer wanted to live as an asharibe?” “Yes.” “You’re lying, phral,” Cam said, watching him closely. “You stayed for another reason.” And Cam knew from the Rom’s visible flush that he’d hit upon the truth. Quietly, Cam added, “You stayed for her.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
I saw the Tracker—but that’s wrong, really. I saw right to where the tracking thing was. I saw those winnowing tentacles come out again, and the front figure pause, and then—it’s the only word that actually describes it—ooze on again on its via dolorosa. And at that the hind figure seemed to summon all its strength. It seemed to open out a fringe of arms or tentacles, a sort of corona of black rays spread out. It gaped with a full expansion, and even I could feel that there was a perfectly horrible attraction, or vacuum drag, being exerted. That was horrible enough, with the face of the super-suffering man now almost under me resonating my own terror. But the worst thing was that, as the tentacles unwrapped and winnowed out toward their prey, I saw they weren’t really tentacles at all. They were spreading cracks, veins, fissures, rents of darkness expanding from a void, a gap of pure blackness. There’s only one way to say it—one was seeing right through the solid world into a gap, an ultimate maelstrom. And from it was spreading out a—I can only call it so—a negative sunrise of black radiation that would deluge and obliterate everything. Of course it was still only a fissure, a vent, but one realized—This is a hole, a widening hole, that has been pierced in the dike that defends the common-sense, sensuous world. Through this vortex-hole that is rapidly opening, over this lip and brink, everything could slip, fall in, find no purchase, be swallowed up. It was like watching a crumbling cliff with survivors clinging to it being undercut and toppling into a black tide that had swallowed up its base. This negative force could drag the solidest things from their base, melt them, engulf the whole hard, visible world. And we were right on that brink. What was after us, for I knew now I was in its field, was not a thing of any passions or desires. Those are limited things, satiable things—in a way, balanced things, and so familiar, safe even, almost friendly in comparison with this. You know the grim saying, “You can give a sop to Cerberus, but not to his Master.” No, this was—that’s the technical term, I found, coined by those who have been up against this and come back alive—this was absolute Deprivation, really insatiable need, need that nothing can satisfy, absolute refusal to give, to yield. It is the second strongest thing in the universe, and, indeed, outside that. It could swallow the whole universe, and the universe would go for nothing, because in that gap the whole universe could fill not a bit of it. It would remain as empty, as gaping, as insatiable as ever, for it is the bottomless pit made by unstanchable Lack.
Gerald Heard (Dromenon: The Best Weird Stories of Gerald Heard)
Anyway, if my lips were rose petals they’d taste too bitter. If my cheeks were apples they’d crawl with apple worms. If my eyes were stars they’d be dead by the time you saw them. If I moved you like the moon I’d disappear once a month. If my teeth were Chiclets you’d want to chew on them and spit them out. If my hands were birds you couldn’t hold them; they’d peck you bloody. Is my skin alabaster? Then it’s cold and hard and one day someone will skin me, make me into a cold hard box tinged with pink or yellow, to hold unguents, then how will you love me? If my vagina is a cool, dark forest you’ll certainly be lost, you have no sense of direction. If my vagina is a cave-watch out! It’s prone to seismic shifts and avalanche. If my vagina is a river of honey: orange, lavender, fine herbs, hazelnut, all too sweet. If my ears are shells I can’t hear you, only the ocean anyway. And if my voice is music, it is unintelligible. Don’t say anything. I am not a flower, but a body with rules and predictable, cellular qualities. My eyelashes and fingernails and skin and spit are organized by proteins designed to erode at a pre-encoded date and time, no matter what you do or do not do to me- I am remarkably like an animal. More like a heifer than a sunrise, I want to bite, stroke, swallow you so stop lying there trying to think of something to say and trying to understand me. I am the body next to but unlike yours. You already know me. You already know what I’m made of.
Rachel Zucker
it’s one of the great sunrises in all literature. Mark Twain: from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side—you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled-up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!
Ursula K. Le Guin (Steering The Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story)
Mrs. Barnstable took her to a beautiful room with windows overlooking the gardens. “This is yours,” the housekeeper said. “No one has occupied it before.” The bed was made of light blue upholstered panels, the bedclothes of white linen. There was a graceful lady’s writing desk in the corner, and a satin maple wardrobe with a looking glass set in the door. “Mr. Merripen personally selected the wallpaper,” Mrs. Barnstable said. “He nearly drove the interior architect mad with his insistence on seeing hundreds of samples until he found this pattern.” The wallpaper was white, with a delicate pattern of flowering branches. And at sparse intervals, there was the motif of a little robin perched on one of the twigs. Slowly Win went to one of the walls and touched one of the birds with her fingertips. Her vision blurred. During her long recuperation from the scarlet fever, when she had grown tired of holding a book in her hands and no one had been available to read to her, she had stared out the window at a robin’s nest in a nearby maple tree. She had watched the fledglings hatch from their blue eggs, their bodies pink and veined and fuzzy. She had watched their feathers grow in, and she had watched the mother robin working to fill their ravenous beaks. And Win had watched as, one by one, they had flown from the nest while she remained in bed. Merripen, despite his fear of heights, had often climbed a ladder to wash the second-floor window for her. He had wanted her view of the outside world to be clear. He had said the sky should always be blue for her. “You’re fond of birds, Miss Hathaway?” the housekeeper asked. Win nodded without looking around, afraid that her face was red with unexpressed emotion. “Robins especially,” she half-whispered.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
Eventually the term ended and I was on the windy mountain road to camp, still slightly worried that I’d made a wrong turn in life. My doubt, however, was short-lived. The camp delivered on its promise, concentrating all the idylls of youth: beauty manifest in lakes, mountains, people; richness in experience, conversation, friendships. Nights during a full moon, the light flooded the wilderness, so it was possible to hike without a headlamp. We would hit the trail at two A.M., summiting the nearest peak, Mount Tallac, just before sunrise, the clear, starry night reflected in the flat, still lakes spread below us. Snuggled together in sleeping bags at the peak, nearly ten thousand feet up, we weathered frigid blasts of wind with coffee someone had been thoughtful enough to bring. And then we would sit and watch as the first hint of sunlight, a light tinge of day blue, would leak out of the eastern horizon, slowly erasing the stars. The day sky would spread wide and high, until the first ray of the sun made an appearance. The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day’s blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered—pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.
Paul Kalanithi (When Breath Becomes Air)
You are driving me mad!” she exclaimed. “I want you to stop this, Kev! Do you have any idea how ridiculous you’re being? How badly you’ve behaved tonight?” “I’ve behaved badly?” he thundered. “You were about to let yourself be compromised.” “Perhaps I want to be compromised.” “That’s too bad,” he said, reaching out to grip her upper arm, preparing to haul her from the conservatory. “Because I’m going to make certain you stay safe.” “Don’t touch me!” Win wrenched free of him, incensed. “I’ve been safe for years. Tucked safely in bed, watching everyone around me enjoying their lives. I’ve had enough safety to last a lifetime, Kev. And if that’s what you want, for me to continue to be alone and unloved, then you can go to the devil.” “You were never alone,” he said harshly. “You’ve never been unloved.” “I want to be loved as a woman. Not as a child, or a sister, or an invalid—” “That’s not how I—” “Perhaps you’re not even capable of such love.” In her blazing frustration, Win experienced something she had never felt before. The desire to hurt someone. “You don’t have it in you.” Merripen moved through a shaft of moonlight that had slipped through the conservatory glass, and Win felt a little shock as she saw his murderous expression. In just a few words she had managed to cut him deeply, enough to open a vein of dark and furious feeling. She fell back a step, alarmed as he seized her in a brutal grip. He jerked her upward. “All the fires of hell could burn for a thousand years and it wouldn’t equal what I feel for you in one minute of the day. I love you so much there is no pleasure in it. Nothing but torment. Because if I could dilute what I feel for you to the millionth part, it would still be enough to kill you. And even if it drives me mad, I would rather see you live in the arms of that cold, soulless bastard than die in mine.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
Dance with me,” Merripen surprised her by murmuring. Win shook her head with a little laugh, watching the couples twirl and move sinuously around each other. Women used their hands in shimmering motions around their bodies, while men stomped with their heels and clapped their hands, and all the while they circled each other while holding each other’s gaze as long as possible. “I don’t know how,” Win said. Merripen stood behind her and crossed his arm around her front, drawing her back against him. Another surprise. She had never known him to touch her so openly. But amid the goings-on, it seemed no one noticed or cared. His voice was hot and soft in her ear. “Watch for a moment. You see how little space is needed? How they circle each other? When Roma dance they lift their hands to the sky, but they stomp their feet to express connection to the earth. And to earthly passions.” He smiled against her cheek and gently turned her to face him. “Come,” he murmured, and hooked his hand around her waist to urge her forward. Win followed him shyly, fascinated by a side of him she hadn’t seen before. She wouldn’t have expected him to be this self-assured, drawing her into the dance with animal grace, watching her with a wicked gleam in his eyes. He coaxed her to raise her arms upward, to snap her fingers, even to swish her skirts at him as he moved around her. She couldn’t seem to stop giggling. They were dancing, and he was so good at it, turning it into a cat-and-mouse game. She twirled in a circle, and he caught her around the waist, pulling her close for one scalding moment. The scent of his skin, the movement of his chest against hers, filled her with intense desire. Leaning his forehead against hers, Merripen stared at her until she was drowning in the depths of his eyes, as dark and bright as hellfire. “Kiss me,” she whispered unevenly, not caring where they were or who might see them. A smile touched his lips. “If I start now, I won’t be able to stop.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
Leo was at her side in an instant, crouching on the floor as he sorted through the hissing tangle of limbs and skirts. “Are you hurt? I feel certain there’s a woman in here somewhere. … Ah, there you are. Easy, now. Let me—” “Don’t touch me,” she snapped, batting at him with her fists. “I’m not touching you. That is, I’m only touching you with the—ow, damn it—with the intention of helping.” Her hat, a little scrap of wool felt with cheap corded trim, had fallen over her face. Leo managed to push it back to the top of her head, narrowly missing a sharp blow to his jaw. “Christ. Would you stop flailing for a moment?” Struggling to a sitting position, she glared at him. Leo crawled to retrieve the spectacles and returned to hand them to her. She snatched them from him without a word of thanks. She was a lean, anxious-looking woman. A young woman with narrowed eyes, from which bad temper flashed out. Her light brown hair was pulled back with a gallows-rope tightness that made Leo wince just to see it. One would have hoped for some compensating feature—a soft pair of lips, perhaps, or a pretty bosom. But no, there was only a stern mouth, a flat chest, and gaunt cheeks. If Leo were compelled to spend any time with her—which, thankfully, he wasn’t—he would have started by feeding her. “If you want to help,” she said coldly, hooking the spectacles around her ears, “retrieve that blasted ferret for me. Perhaps I’ve tired him enough that you may be able to run him to ground.” Still crouching on the floor, Leo glanced at the ferret, which had paused ten yards away and was watching them both with bright, beady eyes. “What is his name?” “Dodger.” Leo gave a low whistle and a few clicks of his tongue. “Come here, Dodger. You’ve caused enough trouble for the morning. Though I can’t fault your taste in … ladies’ garters? Is that what you’re holding?” The woman watched, stupefied, as the ferret’s long, slender body wriggled toward Leo. Chattering busily, Dodger crawled onto Leo’s thigh. “Good fellow,” Leo said, stroking the sleek fur. “How did you do that?” the woman asked in annoyance. “I have a way with animals. They tend to acknowledge me as one of their own.” Leo gently pried a frilly bit of lace and ribbon from the long front teeth. It was definitely a garter, deliciously feminine and impractical. He gave the woman a mocking smile as he handed it to her. “No doubt this is yours.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
Outside the snapdragons, cords of light. Today is easy as weeds & winds & early. Green hills shift green. Cardinals peck at feeders—an air seed salted. A power line across the road blows blue bolts. Crickets make crickets in the grass. We are made & remade together. An ant circles the sugar cube. Our shadow’s a blown sail running blue over cracked tiles. Cool glistening pours from the tap, even on the edges. A red wire, a live red wire, a temperature. Time, in balanced soil, grows inside the snapdragons. In the sizzling cast iron, a cut skin, a sunny side runs yellow across the pan. Silver pots throw a blue shadow across the range. We must carry this the length of our lives. Tall stones lining the garden flower at once. Tin stars burst bold & celestial from the fridge; blue applause. Morning winds crash the columbines; the turf nods. Two reeling petal-whorls gleam & break. Cartoon sheep are wool & want. Happy birthday oak; perfect in another ring. Branch shadows fall across the window in perfect accident without weight. Orange sponge a thousand suds to a squeeze, know your water. School bus, may you never rust, always catching scraps of children’s laughter. Add a few phrases to the sunrise, and the pinks pop. Garlic, ginger, and mangoes hang in tiers in a cradle of red wire. That paw at the door is a soft complaint. Corolla of petals, lean a little toward the light. Everything the worms do for the hills is a secret & enough. Floating sheep turn to wonder. Cracking typewriter, send forth your fire. Watched too long, tin stars throw a tantrum. In the closet in the dust the untouched accordion grows unclean along the white bone of keys. Wrapped in a branch, a canvas balloon, a piece of punctuation signaling the end. Holy honeysuckle, stand in your favorite position, beside the sandbox. The stripes on the couch are running out of color. Perfect in their polished silver, knives in the drawer are still asleep. A May of buzz, a stinger of hot honey, a drip of candy building inside a hive & picking up the pace. Sweetness completes each cell. In the fridge, the juice of a plucked pear. In another month, another set of moths. A mosquito is a moment. Sketched sheep are rather invincible, a destiny trimmed with flouncy ribbon. A basset hound, a paw flick bitching at black fleas. Tonight, maybe we could circle the floodwaters, find some perfect stones to skip across the light or we can float in the swimming pool on our backs—the stars shooting cells of light at each other (cosmic tag)—and watch this little opera, faults & all.
Kevin Phan (How to Be Better by Being Worse)
They came in to look. I watched them. Most people go through museums like they do Macy's: eyes sweeping the display, stopping only if something really grabs their attention. These two looked at everything. They both clearly liked the bicycle picture. Yup, Dutch, I decided. He was a few steps ahead when he got to my favorite painting there. Diana and the Moon. It was-surprise surprise-of Diana, framed by a big open window, the moon dominating the sky outside. She was perched on the windowsill, dressed in a gauzy wrap that could have been nightclothes or a nod to her goddess namesake. She looked beautiful, of course, and happy, but if you looked for more than a second, you could see that her smile had a teasing curve to it and one of her hands was actually wrapped around the outside frame. I thought she looked like she might swing her legs over the sill and jump, turning into a moth or owl or breath of wind even before she was completely out of the room. I thought she looked, too, like she was daring the viewer to come along. Or at least to try. The Dutch guy didn't say anything. He just reached out a hand. His girlfriend stepped in, folding herself into the circle of his outsretched arm. They stood like that, in front of the painting, for a full minute. Then he sneezed. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue.He took in and, without letting go of her, did a surprisingly graceful one-handed blow. Then he crumpled the tissue and looked around for a trash can. There wasn't one in sight. She held out her free hand; he passed over the tissue, and she stuck it right back into her pocket. I wanted to be grossed out. Instead, I had the surprising thought that I really really wanted someone who would do that: put my used Kleenex in his pocket. It seemed like a declaration of something pretty big. Finally,they finished their examination of Diana and moved on.There wasn't much else, just the arrogant Willings and the overblown sunrise. They came over to examine the bronzes. She saw my book. "Excuse me. You know this artist?" Intimately just didn't seem as true anymore. "Pretty well," I answered. "He is famous here?" "Not very." "I like him." she said thoughtfully. "He has...oh, the word...personism?" "Personality?" I offered. "Yes!" she said, delighted. "Personality." She reached behind her without looking. Her boyfriend immediately twined his fingers with hers. They left, unfolding the map again as they went, she chattering cheerfully. I think she was telling him he had personality. They might as well have had exhibit information plaques on their backs: "COUPLE." CONTEMPORARY DUTCH. COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF LOVE, FOR THE VIEWING PLEASURE (OR NOT) OF ANYONE AND EVERYONE.
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. …yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon For simple sheep; and such are daffodils With the green world they live in; Nor do we merely feel these essences For one short hour; no, even as the trees That whisper round a temple become soon Dear as the temple’s self, so does the moon, The passion poesy, glories infinite, Haunt us till they become a cheering light Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast, That, whether there be shine, or gloom o’ercast, They alway must be with us, or we die. For ‘twas the morn: Apollo’s upward fire Made every eastern cloud a silvery pyre Of brightness so unsullied, that therein A melancholy spirit well might win Oblivion, and melt out his essence fine Into the winds: rain-scented eglantine Gave temperate sweets to that well-wooing sun; Man’s voice was on the mountains; and the mass Of nature’s lives and wonders puls’d tenfold, To feel this sun-rise and its glories old. With a faint breath of music, which ev’n then Fill’d out its voice, and died away again. Within a little space again it gave Its airy swellings, with a gentle wave, To light-hung leaves, in smoothest echoes breaking Through copse-clad vallies,—ere their death, oer-taking The surgy murmurs of the lonely sea. All I beheld and felt. Methought I lay Watching the zenith, where the milky way Among the stars in virgin splendour pours; And travelling my eye, until the doors Of heaven appear’d to open for my flight, I became loth and fearful to alight From such high soaring by a downward glance: So kept me stedfast in that airy trance, Spreading imaginary pinions wide. When, presently, the stars began to glide, And lo! from opening clouds, I saw emerge The loveliest moon, that ever silver’d o’er A shell for Neptune’s goblet: she did soar So passionately bright, my dazzled soul Commingling with her argent spheres did roll Through clear and cloudy, even when she went At last into a dark and vapoury tent— Whereat, methought, the lidless-eyed train Of planets all were in the blue again. To commune with those orbs, once more I rais’d My sight right upward: but it was quite dazed By a bright something, sailing down apace, Making me quickly veil my eyes and face: What I know not: but who, of men, can tell That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail, The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale, The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones, The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones, Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet, If human souls did never kiss and greet?
John Keats
HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES: Part I THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom's place, There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind, (Don't you remember that time after a dance, Top hats and all, we and Silk Hat Harry, And old Tom took us behind, brought out a bottle of fizz, With old Jane, Tom's wife; and we got Joe to sing 'I'm proud of all the Irish blood that's in me, 'There's not a man can say a word agin me'). Then we had dinner in good form, and a couple of Bengal lights. When we got into the show, up in Row A, I tried to put my foot in the drum, and didn't the girl squeal, She never did take to me, a nice guy - but rough; The next thing we were out in the street, Oh it was cold! When will you be good? Blew in to the Opera Exchange, Sopped up some gin, sat in to the cork game, Mr. Fay was there, singing 'The Maid of the Mill'; Then we thought we'd breeze along and take a walk. Then we lost Steve. ('I turned up an hour later down at Myrtle's place. What d'y' mean, she says, at two o'clock in the morning, I'm not in business here for guys like you; We've only had a raid last week, I've been warned twice. Sergeant, I said, I've kept a decent house for twenty years, she says, There's three gents from the Buckingham Club upstairs now, I'm going to retire and live on a farm, she says, There's no money in it now, what with the damage don, And the reputation the place gets, on account off of a few bar-flies, I've kept a clean house for twenty years, she says, And the gents from the Buckingham Club know they're safe here; You was well introduced, but this is the last of you. Get me a woman, I said; you're too drunk, she said, But she gave me a bed, and a bath, and ham and eggs, And now you go get a shave, she said; I had a good laugh, couple of laughs (?) Myrtle was always a good sport'). treated me white. We'd just gone up the alley, a fly cop came along, Looking for trouble; committing a nuisance, he said, You come on to the station. I'm sorry, I said, It's no use being sorry, he said; let me get my hat, I said. Well by a stroke of luck who came by but Mr. Donovan. What's this, officer. You're new on this beat, aint you? I thought so. You know who I am? Yes, I do, Said the fresh cop, very peevish. Then let it alone, These gents are particular friends of mine. - Wasn't it luck? Then we went to the German Club, Us We and Mr. Donovan and his friend Joe Leahy, Heinie Gus Krutzsch Found it shut. I want to get home, said the cabman, We all go the same way home, said Mr. Donovan, Cheer up, Trixie and Stella; and put his foot through the window. The next I know the old cab was hauled up on the avenue, And the cabman and little Ben Levin the tailor, The one who read George Meredith, Were running a hundred yards on a bet, And Mr. Donovan holding the watch. So I got out to see the sunrise, and walked home. * * * * April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land....
T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land Facsimile)
The Pitjantjatjara and Pintupi don’t wash with water—for one thing because there isn’t much water in the desert, but for another because they don’t want to bother the Rainbow Serpent, the all-powerful creator god who lives around the water holes. Instead they use ashes from their fires to wash themselves, and it doesn’t deodorize them. The thing that fascinated me most was that they have absolutely no possessions. This is connected to the fact that they don’t believe in tomorrow; there is only today. For example, it is very rare to find a kangaroo in the desert. When they find one, they have food to eat, which is a big deal for them. But after they kill and cook the kangaroo, they can never finish it: there’s always lots of meat left. But since they’re always moving from place to place, when they wake up the next morning, they don’t take the meat with them. They just leave everything—the next day is the next day. Ulay and I separated, because among the Aborigines, the men stay with men and the women with women. The two sexes only make love during nights with a full moon, then they separate again. This creates total harmony—they don’t get a chance to bother each other! My main job with the women was watching them present their dreams. Every morning we would go to a field somewhere, and in hierarchical order, starting with the oldest women and moving down to the youngest, they would show us, using a stick to make drawings in the dirt, what they’d dreamed the night before. Each woman would then assign the rest of us roles to act out the dream as they interpreted it. They all had dreams; they all had to show them—dreams playing all day long! As spring turned to summer, the heat would rise to 50 degrees Celsius or more—130-plus degrees Fahrenheit. It’s like a hot wall. If you just stand up and walk a few paces, your heart feels like it’s going to hammer through your chest. You can’t. There are very few trees; there’s very little shade of any kind. So you literally have to be motionless for long periods of time. You function before sunrise and after sunset—that’s it. To stay motionless during the day, you have to slow down everything: your breathing, even your heartbeat. I also want to mention that Aboriginals are the only people I know who don’t take drugs of any kind. Even tea is much too strong a stimulant for them. That’s why they don’t have any kind of resistance to alcohol—it completely wipes out their memory. In the beginning, there were flies everywhere. I was covered with them—in my nose, in my mouth, all over my body. It was impossible to chase them away. Then after three months, I woke up one morning without a single fly on me. It was then that I understood that the flies had been drawn to me because I was something strange and different: as I became one with my surroundings, I lost my attraction.
Marina Abramović
When you are a witness to a moment in nature you are celebrating. For instance, when you are watching a sunrise or sunset, you are not processing. You simply are. You are captivated by the spectacle. You are not passing any judgment. You just are. Similarly, occasionally, you must rise to be a witness to your own Life. Not to observe, engage, judge or review. But to just be like a fly on your Life's wall. Be a witness. When you are a witness, you learn more about yourself. And when you employ that learning you transform.
AVIS Viswanathan
He and Shinsou followed his gaze to the horizon, and watched with interest as the sky became bluer and gold edged the distant mountains. Todoroki couldn't help a gasp as within minutes the sky was flooded with pinks and oranges, purples and golds. However when Shinsou also gasped he looked over, and froze. Izuku was leant forward, drinking in the view hungrily. The gold of the sunrise lit up his hair, a curly chaotic mass after sleep but angelic in the light. The sun picked out the different colours in his eyes, streaks of blue and flecks of gold among many shades of green. Those beautiful big eyes were wide and innocently fascinated with what they saw Izuku's lips parted in a broad smile. The sight of him like that took their breaths away.
whimsical_girl_357 (The Emerald Prince)
So long as you input the appropriate parameters, the star could be a model for our sun. Think about it. It’s always useful to have the sun in your computer memory. It’s the biggest presence that’s close to us in the cosmos, but we could take more advantage of it. The model may have many more discoveries lying in wait.” Rey Diaz said, “One previous use of the sun is what brought humanity to the brink, and brought you and me to this place.” “But new discoveries might bring humanity back. So today, I’ve invited you here to watch the sunrise.” The rising sun was now just peeking its head over the horizon. The desert in front of them came into focus like a developing photograph, and Rey Diaz could see that this place, once blasted by the fires of hell, was now covered in sparse undergrowth. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Allen exclaimed. “What?” Rey Diaz whipped his head around, as if someone had shot him from behind. “Oppenheimer said that when he watched the first nuclear explosion. I think it’s a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.” The wheel in the east expanded rapidly, casting light across the Earth like a golden web. The same sun was there on that morning when Ye Wenjie had tuned the Red Shore antenna, and even before that, the same sun had shone upon the dust settling after the first bomb blast. Australopithecus a million years ago and the dinosaurs a hundred million years ago had turned their dull eyes upon this very sun, and even earlier than that, the hazy light that penetrated the surface of the primeval ocean and was felt by the first living cell was emitted by this same sun. Allen went on, “And then a man called Bainbridge followed up Oppenheimer’s statement with something completely nonpoetic: ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’” “What are you talking about?” Rey Diaz said. Watching the rising sun, his breathing became ragged. “I’m thanking you, Mr. Rey Diaz, because from now on we’re not sons of bitches.
Liu Cixin (The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2))
By the time Church and I head out to the patio, so I can sit in his lap and watch the sunrise, my feet hurt, and my heart is full.
C.M. Stunich (The Ruthless Boys (Adamson All-Boys Academy #2))
he sat on his couch with Russ and watched the sunrise as he let his thoughts take him where they wanted to take him. Sometimes, that was the only way to really see what you were thinking.
Victor Methos (The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray #1))
Summer was long, clear, beautiful. I was learning to starwatch; that is when you lie down outside on the open hills in the dry season at night, and find a certain star in the eastern sky, and watch it cross the sky till it sets. You can look away, of course, to rest your eyes, and doze, but you try to keep looking back at the star and the stars around it, until you feel the earth turning, until you become aware of how the stars and the world and the soul move together. After the certain star sets you sleep until dawn wakes you. Then as always you greet the sunrise with aware silence. I was very happy on the hills those warm great nights, those clear dawns.
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin)
Oh,” I whispered, having never seen a werewolf change before. A stripe of skin appeared over the ridges of his spine and his claws morphed into fingers. It was almost like watching a sunrise on a foreign moon, an alien light cascading through darkness in little peeks, and then a more steady glow, illuminating a rugged, foreign landscape. Unfamiliar, but beautiful in its own way.
Deborah Wilde (Throwing Shade (Magic After Midlife #1))
Chasing the sunrise and the sunset. Angels watching over me as I rest. With a soft melody playing in my chest. Guiding me to the ultimate quest - Love
Farah Ayaad (Coming Home)
watched the sunrise as he let his thoughts take him where they wanted to take him. Sometimes, that was the only way to really see what you were thinking.
Victor Methos (The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray #1))
His words explained, but they did not convince. Was this sudden-bursting glory only the sun rising behind storm clouds? She could see the clouds moving while they were being colored. The universal gray surrendered under some magic paint brush. The rifts widened, and the gloom of the pale-gray world seemed to vanish. Beyond the billowy, rolling, creamy edges of clouds, white and pink, shone the soft exquisite fresh blue sky. And a blaze of fire, a burst of molten gold, sheered up from behind the rim of cloud and suddenly poured a sea of sunlight from east to west. It trans-figured the round foothills. They seemed bathed in ethereal light, and the silver mists that overhung them faded while Carley gazed, and a rosy flush crowned the symmetrical domes. Southward along the horizon line, down-dropping veils of rain, just touched with the sunrise tint, streamed in drifting slow movement from cloud to earth. To the north the range of foothills lifted toward the majestic dome of Sunset Peak, a volcanic upheaval of red and purple cinders, bare as rock, round as the lower hills, and wonderful in its color. Full in the blaze of the rising sun it flaunted an unchangeable front. Carley understood now what had been told her about this peak. Volcanic fires had thrown up a colossal mound of cinders burned forever to the hues of the setting sun. In every light and shade of day it held true to its name. Farther north rose the bold bulk of the San Francisco Peaks, that, half lost in the clouds, still dominated the desert scene. Then as Carley gazed the rifts began to close. Another transformation began, the reverse of what she watched. The golden radiance of sunrise vanished, and under a gray, lowering) coalescing pall of cloud the round hills returned to their bleak somberness, and the green desert took again its cold sheen.
Zane Grey (The Call Of The Canyon)
Oddly, on occasion, I sense a peacefulness within. You would think that after all I have seen-after all I have suffered-my soul would be a twisted jumble of stress, confusion, and melancholy. Often, it's just that. But then, there is the peace. I feel it sometimes, as I do now, staring out over the frozen cliffs and glass mountains in the still of morning, watching a sunrise that is so majestic that I know that none shall ever be its match. If there are prophecies, if there is a Hero of Ages, then my mind whispers that there must be something directing my path. Something is watching; something cares. These peaceful whispers tell me a truth I wish very much to believe. If I fail, another shall come to finish my work.
Brandon Sanderson (The Final Empire (Mistborn, #1))
There were a hundred thousand ways to detail his mate’s physical attributes, and not one single sentence, or indeed an entire book, that could come close to describing her presence. She was the watch on his wrist, the roast beef when he was starving, and the pitcher of lemonade when he was thirsty. She was his chapel and his choir, the mountain range to his wanderlust, the library for his curiosity, and every sunrise or sunset that ever was or would ever be. With one look or the mere syllable of a word, she had the power to transform his mood, giving him flight even as his feet stayed on the ground. With a single touch, she could chain his inner dragon, or make him come even before he got hard. She was all the power in the universe coalesced into a living, breathing thing, the miracle that he had been granted in spite of the fact that he had long been undeserving of anything but his curse.
J.R. Ward (The Beast (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #14))
In the imagination of two late-twentieth-century filmmakers, an unseen force of artificial intelligence has overtaken the human species, has managed to control humans in an alternate reality in which everything one sees, feels, hears, tastes, smells, touches is in actuality a program. There are programs within programs, and humans become not just programmed but are in danger of and, in fact, well on their way to becoming nothing more than programs. What is reality and what is a program morph into one. The interlocking program passes for life itself. The great quest in the film series The Matrix involves those humans who awaken to this realization as they search for a way to escape their entrapment. Those who accept their programming get to lead deadened, surface lives enslaved to a semblance of reality. They are captives, safe on the surface, as long as they are unaware of their captivity. Perhaps it is the unthinking acquiescence, the blindness to one’s imprisonment, that is the most effective way for human beings to remain captive. People who do not know that they are captive will not resist their bondage. But those who awaken to their captivity threaten the hum of the matrix. Any attempt to escape their imprisonment risks detection, signals a breach in the order, exposes the artifice of unreality that has been imposed upon human beings. The Matrix, the unseen master program fed by the survival instinct of an automated collective, does not react well to threats to its existence. In a crucial moment, a man who has only recently awakened to the program in which he and his species are ensnared consults a wise woman, the Oracle, who, it appears, could guide him. He is uncertain and wary, as he takes a seat next to her on a park bench that may or may not be real. She speaks in code and metaphor. A flock of birds alights on the pavement beyond them. “See those birds,” the Oracle says to him. “At some point a program was written to govern them.” She looks up and scans the horizon. “A program was written to watch over the trees and the wind, the sunrise and sunset. There are programs running all over the place.” Some of these programs go without notice, so perfectly attuned they are to their task, so deeply embedded in the drone of existence. “The ones doing their job,” she tells him, “doing what they were meant to do are invisible. You’d never even know they were here.” So, too, with the caste system as it goes about its work in silence, the string of a puppet master unseen by those whose subconscious it directs, its instructions an intravenous drip to the mind, caste in the guise of normalcy, injustice looking just, atrocities looking unavoidable to keep the machinery humming, the matrix of caste as a facsimile for life itself and whose purpose is maintaining the primacy of those hoarding and holding tight to power.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
We have company", Estelle said. The twin, Justin saw when he looked over his shoulder. Standing at the end of the bridge, looking steadily at them. "Tell me," Watley said. "Is this a very late-night walk or an early- morning pilgrimage to watch the sunrise?" His room was next to Estelle's. And they had that odd twin connection even though they were not identical... "Tell me," Justin said. "In what way is the answer to that any of of your business?" Estelle gave a little huff of what might have been laughter. "It is not," Watley said amiably. "I just thought it was a more original conversation opener than a comment upon weather." "Was any conversation opener necessary?" Justin said. "Have you ever heard the one about three being a crowd?" Rather than look abashed, Watley grinned. "You are going to have to get used to it, old chap", he said. "That is my twin whose hands you have trapped against your chest. Whom you were about to kiss, if I'm not much mistaken. In what is now broad daylight. For every servant and house guest to see.
Mary Balogh (Someone Perfect (Westcott, #9))
The sunrise cares not if we watch it or not. It will keep rising even if no one bothers to watch.
Reginald Williams
Observe the presence of contentment. Select some times when you are most likely to feel contentment, such as sitting down with your coffee in the morning, taking a hot shower, watching your favorite show on television, being greeted by your pet when you return home, watching the sunrise or sunset. List as many such routine moments of contentment or pleasure as you can think of. Post the list on your refrigerator door. When these occasions arrive, practice observing the subtle sensations associated with contentment. Notice how this feels in your body. Notice the gentle urge to have more contentment, but do not rush past the contentment that you are already feeling. Feel the contentment in the moment and watch to see if gratitude also appears.
Cedar R. Koons (The Mindfulness Solution for Intense Emotions: Take Control of Borderline Personality Disorder with DBT)
blinking, then rose to his paws. “If you wish.” “He creeps me out,” a voice whispered in Hollyleaf’s ear. Hollyleaf started and turned to see Birchfall. “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” she snapped, annoyed with herself because Sol was spooking her, too. “He’s just a cat.” As she finished speaking, Sol padded past her toward the entrance to the den. “I told you I would come back,” he murmured, quietly enough that she was the only cat to hear. Struggling to shrug off her feelings of uneasiness, Hollyleaf roused Lionblaze, and the sound of voices woke Purdy, who stumbled sleepily over to the remains of the rabbit. “You got to eat something before you go,” he meowed. “But you need it more than we do,” Brackenfur protested. “I can catch another,” Purdy retorted, his neck fur beginning to bristle. “You need to keep your strength up if you’re goin’ on a long journey.” The ThunderClan cats exchanged glances; clearly Purdy would be insulted if they refused, so they crowded around the last of the prey and forced down a few gristly scraps. Purdy watched them, while Sol just waited in the entrance, his gaze lifted to the sky. “Don’t go near them monsters,” Purdy instructed. “They’ll flatten you as soon as look at you. And there’s dogs give trouble sometimes.
Erin Hunter (Sunrise (Warriors: Power of Three #6))
—Have you ever seen the sunrise here? and as though she'd answered she hadn't, as though she'd answered at all —especially in winter. You'll see it in winter, it's moved south where the river's its widest and it comes up so fast, it's as if it just wanted to prove the day, get it established so it can loiter through the rest of it, spend the first damned half of your life complicating things in that eagerness to take on everything and straighten all of it out and the second half cleaning up the mess you've made of the first, that's what they won't understand. Finally realize you can't leave things better than you found them the best you can do is try not to leave them any worse but they won't forgive you, get toward the end of the day like the sun going down in Key West if you've ever seen that? They're all down there for the sunset, watching it drop like a bucket of blood and clapping and cheering the instant it disappears, cheer you out the door and damned glad to see the last of you.
William Gaddis (Carpenter's Gothic)
I’d like each and every one of you out there to consider your problems for a moment and consider that maybe they’re not as epic as you think they are. The solution may be staring you in the face. Or it may be you’ve let a mere annoyance take over your life until it’s become a problem. And while you’re considering your problems and grasping for solutions, you should also take a moment to find that one good thing that makes getting through the tough times worthwhile. Those of us who spend our nights awake and watchful need those reminders, that sunrises are beautiful and worth waiting for.
Carrie Vaughn (Kitty's House of Horrors (Kitty Norville, #7))
Watch the sunrise? My dear Mortlock, do not let impending mortality render you an imbecile. Two good things occur before breakfast: Servants clean, and I slumber. All else is rubbish.
Elisa Braden (Ever Yours, Annabelle (Rescued from Ruin, #0.5))
The universe is full of miracles,” he’d murmured as we watched the sunrise, “but you’re the most precious one of all.
Nikole Knight (Fire & Brimstone Scrolls: The Complete Series)
For the next two hours, he would toy with her, giving her a chance to repent. Whether she did or not made no difference. He fingered the knife in his pocket. The blade was sharp and tonight she would feel it. Her time would run out an hour before sunrise. As with the others, he would weigh down her body with a cement block. Barely alive, she would struggle against death as they all had. The water would fill her lungs. The last thing she would see on this earth would be his eyes, the eyes of her murderer. How long would it take before her family, her friends reported her missing? A day, possibly two? Surely no longer. Then the search would begin. He would watch the news reports, recording them all on his DVR. In a week or two, some tourist or jogger would spot a floater in the Potomac. All evidence washed away, she would be just another woman executed by the D.C. Killer. He would add her disc to his collection. He whiled away the time thinking about his first kill. She had lounged in her bath, thinking she was alone. When he entered the bathroom, she smiled. The expression on his face made her smile falter. He came at her, grasping her by the shoulders. He pushed her down, holding her struggling body under. Her eyes wide with terror, she tried to plead with her murderer, to ask her husband “Why?” He sank her body in the Potomac, the first victim of the D.C. Killer. The door opened. Shannon Miller stood in the breach, surveying the parking lot. Nervous, she started to go back inside, then changed her mind. She peered toward him, her eyes straining to penetrate the mist and gloom. He was a shadow, invisible to her. Seeing no threat, she stepped out, locked the door and hurried across the deserted lot to her car, a red Toyota with more rust than red. The tap-tap of her high heels pulsated on the cracked asphalt. The beat of her shoes matched the throb of his heart. He could hear her heavy, fearful breathing. He smiled. The moon scurried behind the clouds as if hiding its face in horror. He was an avenger, a messenger of God. His mission was to rid the nation's capital of immoral women. Fearing him, prostitutes now walked the streets in pairs. Even in their terror, they still pursued their wicked trade. At times he saw them huddled in groups of three or four. They reminded him of children in a thunderstorm. Like a spirit, he crept in her direction. The only light was cast by the Miller Lite sign and a distant street lamp. The light in the parking lot had burned out weeks ago, throwing it into darkness. He stalked her as a lion does its prey. He moved slowly, silently, low to the ground, keeping the car between them. His dark running suit blended with the night. He was the Dark Angel, the Angel of Death. In another life, he had passed over Egypt, killing the firstborn of those condemned by God. Her eyes darted in every direction, still she didn't see him. He was invisible. Her hands shook as she tried to get the key in the door. The 11 o'clock news reported that another one had been found. If he stuck with his pattern, the D.C. Killer would strike again tonight. By morning a woman would be dead. She prayed it wouldn’t be her. She fumbled, dropping the key ring. She stooped to pick it up, her head turning in every direction, her ears alert to every sound. Now, without seeing him, she sensed him. She lowered her eyes, trying again, successfully this time. She turned the key. There was a click. She sighed, unaware that she had been holding her breath. The dome light flashed as she opened the door. He was on her in an instant. Their bodies slammed against the door. The light blinked out. He held her in an iron grip with one hand over her mouth and the blade poking into her
Darrell Case
I stared hard at Suzanne, at her perfect heart-shaped face and reddish-brown skin, feeling comforted somehow by the youthful smoothness of her cheeks and the girlish curve in her lips. She seemed oddly undiminished by the illness. Her dark hair was still lustrous and long; someone had put in two ropy braids that reached almost to her waist. Her track runner's legs lay hidden beneath the blankets. She looked young, like a sweet, beautiful, twenty-six-year-old who was maybe in the middle of a nap. I regretted not coming earlier. I regretted the many times, over the course of our seesawing friendship, that I'd insisted she was making a wrong move, when possibly she'd been doing it right. I was suddenly glad for all the times she'd ignored my advice. I was glad that she hadn't overworked herself to get some fancy business school degree. That she'd gone off for a lost weekend with a semi-famous pop star, just for fun. I was happy that she'd made it to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise with her mom. Suzanne had lived in ways that I had not.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
I've come to realize that the true lie the darkness tells is one of omission. The darkness doesn't tell you how pain is simply the price of admission. And it's a steal, really, a bargain. One I will pay a hundred times over for the simple pleasure of a beautiful sunrise or a mug of tea heavy in my hands or another mile run or a hug from a longtime friend or the simple of my child across a crowded room. For the comfort of my soon-to-be husband's arm strong across my waist while he watched me sleep. For the moments when the darkness whispers is lies in the night and I am able, still, to answer it with the only two words that matter: I'm here.
Liz Petrone (The Price of Admission: Embracing a Life of Grief and Joy)
TIPS TO BECOME A GREAT OBSERVER: ---------- 1). Watch the sunrise and sundown at least a week and make a note what you truly noticed. -- 2). Feel the daylight and dark night at least a week and notice how you are truly feeling. -- 3). Walk around the nearest market at least a month and notice whatever you are hearing. -- 4). Use google search and watch YouTube videos of your interest and keep moving. -- 5). Join social media twitter and Facebook and keep observing the people you are meeting. -- 6). Listen online radio a random song at lest 2 hours at night and keep capturing the lyrics. -- 7). And the main meditate, think, imagine at night while sleeping and keep going. -- 8). Many Congratulations you are on your way to become a great observer.
Santosh Kumar
Can a person live without hope? Must a middle-aged man such as me who underwent a bevy of loss and failure aim to summon the interior moxie to watch the sunrise on each new day while wearing a faint smile of hope? Must I stoically resolve to endure bearing the weighty load of previous personal debacles? I gain nothing by wallowing in self-denunciation. Guilt and shame exact a severe tithe. I cannot lead a worthy life by tumbling into alcoholic numbness or a drug-induced pit.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.
William Gibson (Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1))
strawberry sunrise Though its name is somewhat evocative of a sweet elderly couple holding hands as they watch the sunrise, this drink is rather bold in its combination of prosecco, white wine, and tequila. In other words, this beautiful farm-to-table beverage has a bit of a sneaky bite. It’s best enjoyed, I’d say, with a lover, though it goes down just as easily with friends over brunch, during an at-home happy hour, or when alone on a Saturday afternoon with your cat/dog/pig/opossum. TIME: 5 MINUTES SERVES: 1 2 strawberries Ground pink peppercorns 1 ounce tequila 2 ounces sauvignon blanc 1 ounce Strawberry Syrup 1½ ounces Strawberry Mint Lemonade 1 ounce prosecco Splash of fresh orange juice Cut the stem out of each strawberry with a “V” cut, then slice each strawberry from top to bottom into ¼-inch-thick slices so that each slice resembles a heart. Take the prettiest slice and cut a small notch in its narrow end. Spread the pink peppercorns on a small plate. Dip one edge of the strawberry slice in the pink pepper until the edge is coated. Set aside, reserving the pink pepper. Fill a wineglass with ice and add the remaining strawberry slices. Add the tequila, sauvignon blanc, strawberry syrup, lemonade, prosecco, and orange juice to the glass. Sprinkle a pinch of pink pepper on top of the drink. Stir with a barspoon. Secure the notched strawberry garnish to the rim of the glass. Serve and enjoy.
Moby (The Little Pine Cookbook: Modern Plant-Based Comfort)
That postage stamp of a moment has always remained with me as a reminder of the innocent world in which I grew up. Or at least the innocent world in which we chose to live, perhaps to our regret. When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn’t have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.
James Lee Burke (The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux #22))
They sit together peering out over the Pacific Ocean watching the honey colours of the sunrise. Amelia is grateful for the life she has now. William is her husband and they live in paradise.
Maria P. Frino (The Decision They Made)
We're sitting on a hill, reminiscing about our deeds. These are mesmerising moments of ease; scenes are harmonising in keys. But we're in a state of oblivion, shunned from the view of fate in this period. We think about the nice days from our teens; the things that we did at our free will. We're in sync with the future and past tensions. Indeed, we could enjoy the present intentions. But we're in a state of oblivion, shunned from the view of fate in this period. We envision our problems gone; with collisions exposed and pawned. Oh! We could enjoy this peaceful time, on this hill, watching the sunrise. But we're in a state of oblivion, shunned from the view of fate in this period. The beautiful birds stride pass our face. Thick cuticles blurred, striped by hours of grace. They flap their wings, forming art; tail lamps for us, bleeding hearts. But we're in a state of oblivion, shunned from the view of fate in this period. People of different cultures come to us. Simple, they offer their services; no Judas. Wave their hands with care; give their food to share. But we're in a state of oblivion, shunned from the view of fate in this period. What a sad case this is; our mindfulness is butchered. Heads are swimming between the past and the future. Opportunities to love others in truth are being missed. Communities could share true love; limiting the rifts. But we're in a state of oblivion, shunned from the view of fate in this period.
Mitta Xinindlu
Recall the feeling you have when someone praises you, when you are approved, accepted, applauded. Now contrast that with the kind of feeling that arises within you when you look at the sunset or the sunrise—or nature in general—or when you read a book or watch a movie that you thoroughly enjoy. Get the taste of this feeling and contrast it with the first, namely, the one that was generated within you when you were praised. The first type of feeling comes from self-glorification and self-promotion. It is a worldly feeling. The second type comes from self-fulfillment, which is a soul feeling.
Anthony de Mello (Stop Fixing Yourself: Wake Up, All Is Well)
Fabric shades on the ceiling mechanically drew back to reveal a star-filled black sky through a cantilevered glass roof. “I can follow the moon and stars as they move across the sky,” he said. “Will you watch the sunrise with me tomorrow?” Dominika forced herself to smile. The svin’ya in his sty. But how could such a man amass such wealth while others still stood in lines for bread?
Jason Matthews (Red Sparrow (Red Sparrow Trilogy #1))
The journey into the vast unquiet universe, watched by faces in railway compartments, tolerant and incurious. In the nights Ravi curled up on luggage racks and slept to the soft beat of the rails. The names of railway stations changed, their scripts changed. Then on the road, up the high ranges, past hairpin bends in gasoline-perfumed buses. The roadway dust changed colour, sunrise and sunset changed places, directions were lost in an assailing infinity. The journey took him through cheerless suburbs, through streets of sordid trades, past cacti villages and lost townships of lepers, and ashramas where, in saffron beds, voluptuous swaminis lay in wait for nirvana.
O V Vijayan
Once every year for four days the tens of thousands of Athenian citizens sat in the open air on the stone seats at the side of the Acropolis and from sunrise to sunset watched the plays of the competing dramatists. All that we have to correspond is a Test match. The manner in which the drama arrived will tell us something valuable about Test matches and (for the moment let us whisper it) the way Test matches arrived may start a trail into that vexed question: the origin of Greek drama. There are so many that another wouldn't hurt.
C.L.R. James
I was attracted to Cecily without ever having seen her clearly with my eyes. Because I know her. I know what she’s like inside. I know how she expresses herself and the way she loves to take photos and watch sunrises, and that’s what I’m attracted to.
Josh Sundquist (Love and First Sight)
Because we weren’t really fighting. More like two angry old men in the sunset of our lives bickering back and forth on the front porch as we watched the sunrise of the new generation with ample disdain, bitching about kids these days.
Shayne Silvers (Legend (The Nate Temple Series, #11))
The Lee Shore" Wheel gull spin and glide ... you've got no place to hide 'Cause you don't need one All along the lee shore shells lie scattered in the sand Winking up like shining eyes at me, from the sea Here is one like sunrise older than you know It's still lying there where some careless wave Forgot it long ago When I awoke this morning Dove beneath my floating home Down below her graceful side In the turning tide To watch the sea fish roam And there I heard a story From the sailors of the Sandra Marie There's another island a day's run away from here It's empty and free From here to Venezuela nothing more to see Than a hundred thousand islands Flung like jewels upon the sea For you and me Sunset smells of dinner Women are calling at me to end my tales But perhaps I'll see you the next quiet place I furl my sails 4 Way Street (1971)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Win's sense of unease grew as evening settled over the house. She stayed in the parlor with her sisters and Miss Marks until Beatrix had tired of reading. The only relief from Win's growing tension was in watching the antics of Beatrix's ferret, Dodger, who seemed enamored of Miss Marks, despite-or perhaps because of-her obvious antipathy. He kept creeping up to the governess and trying to steal one of her knitting needles, while she watched him with narrowed eyes. "Don't even consider it," Miss Marks told the hopeful ferret with chilling calm. "Or I'll cut off your tail with a carving knife." Beatrix grinned. "I thought that only happened to blind mice, Miss Marks," "It works on any offending rodent," Miss Marks returned darkly. "Ferrets are not rodents, actually," Beatrix said. "They're classified as mustelidae. Weasels. So one might say the ferret is a distant cousin of the mouse." "It's not a family I'd care to become closely acquainted with," Poppy said. Dodger draped himself across the arm of the settee and pinned a love-struck gaze on Miss Marks, who ignored him.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
Dance together. Miss her when she’s gone. Tell her you love her every day. Every. Single. Day. Love her, but let her be free to soar, too. Support her dreams as she supports yours. Watch the sunrise and love the sunsets.
Brittainy C. Cherry (Disgrace)
As the sun rises on the top of the mountain, the valleys in the dark watch it enviously! The light first visits those who have raised their mind high! Those who are at the lowest gets the light last!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I just came back from a trip and my heart aches for another, may be that's what Hills do they smoke the gypsy spirit in you, because no matter what as long as there is life there is hope and as long as there is Hope there is an urge to explore all that is unknown, to embark on adventures without ceasing to get amazed at every maze of Life. ❤️ To those who dream, to those who never settle, to those who wear their souls and to those who watch the sky fall both in the ruddy glance of a sunset and a sunrise!
Debatrayee Banerjee (A Whispering Leaf. . .)
Simon did everything inexpertly. He was really good at it. He was one of those tall lads apparently made out of knees, thumbs and elbows. Watching him walk was a strain, you kept waiting for the strings to snap, and when he talked the spasm of agony on his face if he spotted an S or W looming ahead in the sentence made people instinctively say them for him. It was worth it for the grateful look which spread across his acned face like sunrise on the moon.
Anonymous
God of Wonder Praise the Lord! How good it is to sing praises to our God! How delightful and how right! The Lord is rebuilding Jerusalem and bringing the exiles back to Israel. He heals the brokenhearted, binding up their wounds. He counts the stars and calls them all by name. How great is our Lord! His power is absolute! His understanding is beyond comprehension! Psalm 147:1-5 I loved seeing my little grandson Noah as he watched snowflakes twirling from the sky, patted our dog’s black, furry coat, and later folded his hands and bowed his red head to say thank you to God for his peanut butter sandwich. He is aware and alive, and his wonder was contagious. Kids are full of wonder, amazement, and awe. Many of us adults, however, have lost our sense of wonder and awe. So God gives us psalms such as this one. They draw us from our ho-hum existence that takes such things as rainbows, snowflakes, and sunrises for granted back to a childlike wonder of our great God who fills the sky with clouds, sends the snow like white wool, and hurls hail like stones. He created everything and possesses all power yet cares for the weak and brokenhearted. He calls the stars by name yet supports the humble. He reigns over all creation yet delights in the simple, heartfelt devotion of those who trust him. His understanding is beyond human comprehension. Surely a God like this can inspire our wonder and awe! Meditate today on the amazing greatness of God, and find your own words to sing his praise.   GOD OF WONDER, I am in awe of your creation, your power, and your compassion. I sing out my praise to you. Your understanding is beyond comprehension! Your power is absolute! How good it is to sing praises to my God! How delightful and how right! Praise the Lord!   RECEIVE EVERY DAY AS A RESURRECTION FROM DEATH, AS A NEW ENJOYMENT OF LIFE. . . . LET YOUR JOYFUL HEART PRAISE AND MAGNIFY SO GOOD AND GLORIOUS A CREATOR. William Law (1686-1761)
Cheri Fuller (The One Year Praying through the Bible: Experience the Power of the Bible Through Prayer (One Year Bible))
Jake Sullivan, elder of the Grimnoir Society, kept the sword and watched the sunrise. Someday he would pass it to his son. END
Anonymous
Here are the real jewels of mankind: Breathing, smiling, walking, watching the sunrise, listening to the birds, smelling the forests… Know thy true treasures!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A single star twirled, danced, swooped, and spun so close to him that he might have touched it. Where did that brightness in the sky come from? Was it in the mists? Was it sunrise? And as he watched the mists, rising and swirling, a joy grew in him so strong that it spread from his heart to his limbs, his paws, his head. It shone in his eyes, filled his lungs, and exploded into stars. One last pain tore his heart before joy overwhelmed him and he reached out his paws. “It’s you!” he cried, and fell.
Margaret McAllister (Urchin and the Rage Tide (The Mistmantle Chronicles, #5))
But life is beautiful, Sariel!’ Gabriel said, trying to convince him. ‘Watch the sunrise sometime lying in the scented flowers of the field, or the shooting stars at the end of summer! Read a couple of really exciting books or lose yourself in the unselfconscious smiles of children. Have a swim in a clear mountain lake or take a run among trees clothed in autumn colours. If you can see the good in Earth, your own existence will become the richer for it!’ ‘That all sounds very well and good, but you haven’t convinced me,’ the deep-voiced angel murmured and Ariel laughed. ‘My friend, Gabriel was very gently trying to suggest that you should fall in love and that will better dispose you to the world!
A.O. Esther (Breath of Darkness (Shattered Glories, #4))
The sunrise was the most amazing part of the day. The quiet of the block seemed even more silent when I watched the light make its way effortlessly into the world. Its serenity bathed itself in the rose colored light above bleeding into the sky. The road was vulnerable. The pink and the orange seeped onto the street and lit up my path, just for me. I saw it in front of my feet and it pulled me forward, my footsteps hitting the gravel. I wanted to run into it, to dive feet first and plunge into the harmony of my safe haven. It serenaded me into a calm sense of security. A calm idea that everything was just the way it was supposed to, and everything else, would always get better. Siempre mejorando.
Adriana Rodrigues (Protect These Streets)
When young, the humans are all Imagination because Memory is so much smaller a part of their experience, so little of them is grounded in it. As they grow older, however, Memory overtakes their Imagination, outweighs it. But when they pray with ever increasing confidence, they see with an ever-increasing and youthful Imagination and such burgeoning of possibility causes even their Memory to be lightened and redeemed. The scales fall from their eyes and they wait on their Father with the same childlike wonder that watches a sunrise to see what might happen this time.
Geoffrey Wood
Melrose sipped his tea and ate his bun in perfect peace. How wonderful! Solitude even at Ardry End was hard to come by. Perhaps he was fit for the life of a hermit. Give up all of his worldly possessions and go live in a hut on a shelf of rock and watch the sunrise every morning. Up before the sun! What a dreadful idea; he shuddered.
Martha Grimes (The Lamorna Wink (Richard Jury #16))
How many nights and sunrises came to caress our hearts. Then, as often happens, I see I'm just lonely in living the poetry of these moments, and I'm throwing away my magic. I can find refuge in my songs, they surround me like a mother, but then I realize that this hug is becoming a cage, I'm prisoner in my dreams, and I wonder: "may I be condemned to dream forever?" ... I wish I could watch again beauty of the moon, creating a big heart made of shells on the beach, as a castaway's signal ... hoping to be seen by someone who's flying up there ... and loudly saying .. "Hey .. I'm here ! please help me to escape
Alice James
From the opening lines of the play Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise All you need, To find poetry, Is to look for it with a lantern.
Wallace Stevens (Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose)
So your tribe members who left you for dead …,” Win said, bringing Kev’s thoughts back to the present, “… they’re allowed to know your name, but I’m not?” “That’s right.” Kev watched the brindling of sun and leaf shadows on her face. He wondered how it would feel to press his lips to that soft light-tricked skin. A delectable notch appeared between Win’s tawny brows. “Why? Why can’t I know?” “Because you’re a gadji.” His tone was more tender than he had meant it to be. “Your gadji.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))