Wings Of A Dove Quotes

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People want you to be happy. Don't keep serving them your pain! If you could untie your wings and free your soul of jealousy, you and everyone around you would fly up like doves.
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
After the sharp-eyed jay and the roaring lion, peace will come on dove's gentle wing.
Erin Hunter
When angels visit us, we do not hear the rustle of wings, nor feel the feathery touch of the breast of a dove; but we know their presence by the love they create in our hearts.
Mary Baker Eddy (Poems by Mary Baker Eddy)
Do you know when they say soul-mates? Everybody uses it in personal ads. "Soul-mate wanted". It doesn't mean too much now. But soul mates- think about it. When your soul-whatever that is anyway-something so alive when you make music or love and so mysteriously hidden most of the rest of the time, so colorful and big but without color or shape-when your soul finds another soul it can recognize even before the rest of you knows about it. The rest of you just feels sweaty and jumpy at first. And your souls get married without even meaning to-even if you can't be together for some reason in real life, your souls just go ahead and make the wedding plans. A soul's wedding must be too beautiful to even look at. It must be blinding. In must be like all the weddings in the world-gondolas with canopies of doves, champagne glasses shattering, wings of veils, drums beating, flutes and trumpets,showers of roses. And after that happens-that's it, this is it. But sometimes you have to let that person go. When you are little, people , movie and fairy tales all tell you that one day you're going to meet this person. So you keep waiting and it's a lot harder than they make it sound. Then you meet and you think, okay, now we can just get on with it but you find out that sometimes your sould brother partner lover has other ideas about that.
Francesca Lia Block (Dangerous Angels (Weetzie Bat, #1-5))
So, Angel?" I said, looking over at her. She was gliding through the night, her eight-foot wings looking like a dove's. "Have you picked up anything from Anne, about anything? Anything off?" Not really." Angel thought. "From what I can tell, she does work for the FBI. She does care about us and wants us to be happy. She thinks the boys are slobs. I'm blind," Iggy said irritably. "How am I supposed to make everything all tidy?" Yeah, because you're so handicapped," I said sarcastically. "Like- you can't build bombs or cook or win at Monopoly. You can't tell us apart by the feel of our skin or feathers.
James Patterson (School's Out—Forever (Maximum Ride, #2))
The women one meets - what are they but books one has already read? You're a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I've a subscription.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove (Norton Critical Editions))
Words Be careful of words, even the miraculous ones. For the miraculous we do our best, sometimes they swarm like insects and leave not a sting but a kiss. They can be as good as fingers. They can be as trusty as the rock you stick your bottom on. But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words. They are doves falling out of the ceiling. They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap. They are the trees, the legs of summer, and the sun, its passionate face. Yet often they fail me. I have so much I want to say, so many stories, images, proverbs, etc. But the words aren't good enough, the wrong ones kiss me. Sometimes I fly like an eagle but with the wings of a wren. But I try to take care and be gentle to them. Words and eggs must be handled with care. Once broken they are impossible things to repair.
Anne Sexton (The Complete Poems)
The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.
Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason)
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love. Yet love me--wilt thou? Open thine heart wide, And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese)
His lashes, fluttered like butterfly wings. "I could've made you happy, dove." "You did," I whispered
Ann Aguirre (Horde (Razorland, #3))
Her memory's your love. You want no other.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it.
Henry James
Gansey turned the key. The engine turned over once, paused for the briefest of moments - and then roared to deafening life. The Camaro lived to fight another day. The radio was even working, playing the Stevie Nicks song that always sounded to Gansey like it was about a one-winged dove.
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1))
How I wish I was like the water, Flowing so freely with every drop Let my every emotion wonder, No need to start, nor even stop How I wish I was like the fire, Burning with every flame up Leaving a trace of hot desire As a Phoenix raises its' wings up How I wish I was like the earth, Raising each flower from the ground Seeing the beauty of death and birth And then returning to the ground How I wish I was like the wind, Hearing each whisper, sound and thought A lonesome and wandering little wind, Shattering all that has been sought Oh, how I wish I was where you are, Not separated by empty space, so far It seems like we're galaxies apart, But we find hope within our heart And how I wish I was all of the above, So I can come below and yet forget, The beauty of angels which come down like a dove And demons who love with no regret.
Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache
have a mind so quiet, that you can hear doves whispering as they rest their wings in the rafters your silent sanctuary
Kate Mullane Robertson
DoveWing (talking to LoinBlaze): You got somthing wrong, what you said to ToadStep. You are the hero.
Erin Hunter
I used to call her, in my stupidity — for want of anything better — a dove
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Do you know when they say soulmates? Everybody uses it in personal ads. “Soul mate wanted.” It doesn’t mean too much now. But soulmates – think about it. When your soul – whatever that is anyway – something so alive when you make music or love and so mysteriously hidden most of the rest of the time, so colorful and big but without color or shape – when your soul finds another soul it can recognize even before the rest of you knows about it. The rest of you just feels sweaty and jumpy at first. And your souls get married without even meaning to – even if you can’t be together for some reason in real life, your souls just go ahead and make the wedding plans. A soul’s wedding must be too beautiful to even look at. It must be blinding. It must be like all the weddings in the world – gondolas with canopies of doves, champagne glasses shattering, wings of veils, drums beating, flutes and trumpets, showers of roses. And after that happens you know – that’s it. This is it.
Francesca Lia Block (Missing Angel Juan (Weetzie Bat, #4))
Death in Venice, The Wings of the Dove, The Aspern Papers, Don’t Look Now, Summertime, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Comfort of Strangers.
John Berendt (The City of Falling Angels)
Be like Noah's dove. She made use of her wings to fly, but trust in the ark for safety.
Thomas Watson (The Lord's Supper)
I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside...".
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.
Albert Camus
To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky.
Pablo Neruda
If in the moonlight from the silent bough Suddenly with precision speak your name The nightingale, be not assured that now His wing is limed and his wild virtue tame. Beauty beyond all feathers that have flown Is free; you shall not hood her to your wrist, Nor sting her eyes, nor have her for your own In any fashion; beauty billed and kissed Is not your turtle; tread her like a dove - She loves you not; she never heard of love.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (Collected Poems: Edna St. Vincent Millay)
Be the prettiest book I ever seen. The cover is pale blue, color a the sky. And a big white bird - a peace dove - spreads its wings from end to end.
Kathryn Stockett (The Help)
My dear young lady,' said her distinguished friend, 'isn't "to live" exactly what I'm trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
When Milly smiled it was a public event—when she didn’t it was a chapter of history. They
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
No,’ she sadly insisted—‘men don’t know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
love's heralds should be thoughts, Which ten times faster glide than the sun's beams, Driving back shadows over louring hills: Therefore do nimble-pinion'd doves draw love, And therefore hath the wind-swift Cupid wings.
William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair ... the face of a young woman, all splendidly drawn, down to the hands, and splendidly dressed ... And she was dead, dead, dead
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
And chiefly thou, O spirit, that dost prefer Before all temples the upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st. Thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like sattest brooding on the vast abyss, And madst it pregnant.
John Milton (Paradise Lost)
But the future is unknown, and stands before a man like autumnal fogs rising from the swamps; birds fly foolishly up and down in it with flapping wings, never recognizing each other, the dove seeing not the vulture, nor the vulture the dove, and no one knowing how far he may be flying from destruction.
Nikolai Gogol
A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage. A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons Shudders hell thro' all its regions. A dog starv'd at his master's gate Predicts the ruin of the state. A horse misused upon the road Calls to heaven for human blood. Each outcry of the hunted hare A fibre from the brain does tear. A skylark wounded in the wing, A cherubim does cease to sing. The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight Does the rising sun affright. Every wolf's and lion's howl Raises from hell a human soul.
William Blake (The Complete Poems)
Life might prove difficult—was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each other, and that was everything.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I'm taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
There was a second scream then, from the mountains. From the Blueblood Matron, screaming for her daughter as she plummeted down to the rocks below. The other Bluebloods whirled, but they were too far away, their wyverns too slow to stop that fatal plunge. But Abraxos was not. And Manon didn't know if she gave the command or thought it, but that scream, that mother's scream she'd never heard before, made her lean in. Abraxos dove, a shooting star with his glistening wings. They dove and dove, for the broken wyvern and the still-living witch upon it.
Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
Any deep harmony that might eventually govern them would not be the result of their having much in common - having anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the other was rich.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I hold it true that thoughts are things Endowed with bodies, breath, and wings, And that we send them forth to fill The world with good results - or ill. That which we call our secret thought Speeds to the earth's remotest spot, And leaves its blessings or its woes Like tracks behind it as it goes. It is God's law. Remember it In your still chamber as you sit With thoughts you would not dare have known, And yet made comrades when alone. These thoughts have life; and they will fly And leave their impress by-and-by, Like some marsh breeze, whose poisoned breath Breathes into homes its fevered breath. And after you have quite forgot Or all outgrown some vanished thought, Back to your mind to make its home, A dove or raven, it will come. Then let your secret thoughts be fair; They have a vital part and share In shaping worlds and moulding fate -- God's system is so intricate.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Love means giving yourself to the person you love,being willing to sacrifice everything,even your pride
Elaine Barbieri (Wings of a Dove)
When we are touched by something it's as if we're being brushed by an angel's wings.
Rita Dove
That had been the real beginning—the beginning of everything else.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
It has been everything for me to see you.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Yes, one has read; but this is beyond any book.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I think I could die without its being noticed.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I don't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day—perhaps.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
She was all too sunk in the inevitable, and the abysmal.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never occur to them that they were eating one up. They did that without tasting.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it—doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I never see a ship sailing out of the channel, or a gull soaring over the sand-bar, without wishing I were on board the ship or had wings, not like a dove 'to fly away and be at rest,’ but like a gull, to sweep out into the very heart of the storm.
L.M. Montgomery (Anne's House of Dreams (Anne of Green Gables, #5))
His long looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make them most completely her possession.
Henry James
Fly your flight, my dear dove Sing your song, make it reach the ocean I want my freedom I want to live in peace I want to sing your song To have your wings To be able to fly I want my destiny to leave the path that it is taking now. The Dove—Eduardo Carrasco
Mya Robarts (The V Girl: A Coming of Age Story)
They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Why should a set of people have been put in motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside dust without a reason?
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Reyna had always pictured him as solid white with dove-like wings, but Pegasus’s coat was rich brown, mottled with red and gold around the muzzle – which Hedge claimed were the marks where the stallion had emerged from the blood and ichor of his beheaded mother, Medusa. Pegasus’s wings were the colours of an eagle’s – gold, white, brown and rust – which made him look much more handsome and regal than plain white. He was the colour of all horses, representing all his offspring.
Rick Riordan (The Blood of Olympus (The Heroes of Olympus, #5))
She never wanted the truth . . . She wanted you. She would have taken from you what you could give her, and been glad of it even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet—since it was all for tenderness—she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man—that she loves you with passion.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
His absence from her for so many weeks had had such an effect upon him that his demands, his desires had grown; and only the night before, as his ship steamed, beneath summer stars, in sight of the Irish coast, he had felt all the force of his particular necessity.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. ‘My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.’ ‘Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!’ said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: ‘Don’t tell me that—in this for instance—there are not abysses. I want abysses.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was the last word, would end with a sort of meaning.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Life had met him so, half-way, and had turned round so to walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to choose the pace.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Pearls have such a magic that they suit every one.’ ‘They would uncommonly suit you,’ he frankly returned. ‘Oh yes, I see myself!
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
typical frivolous always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
What’s a man,’ she pursued, ‘especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
you mustn't think life will be for you all hard things. You've the right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept any form in which happiness may come.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
After the sharp-eyed jay and the roaring lion, peace will come on dove's gentle wing." - Warriors,Omen of the Stars,The Fourth Apprentince
Erin Hunter (The Fourth Apprentice (Warriors: Omen of the Stars, #1))
This was immense, and they thus took final possession of it. They
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I cling to some saving romance in things.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
There were complications, there were questions; but they were so much more together than they were anything else.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
he took a cable which had been service on a blue-bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round-house, high up, so that their feet would not touch the ground. As when long-winged thrushes or doves get entangled in a snare . . . so the women's heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.
Homer (The Odyssey)
The chance had come - it was an extraordinary one - on the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
DOVES People want you to be happy. Don’t keep serving them your pain! If you could untie your wings and free your soul of jealousy, you and everyone around you would fly up like doves. WHEN
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi (The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing)
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
Albert Camus (Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays)
The strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?" "Well, at peace with you." "Oh, 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire. "The peace of having loved." He raised his eyes to her. "Is that peace?" "Of having been loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She had had all she wanted.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
The Dove Fly your flight my dear dove Sing your song, make it reach the ocean I want my freedom I want to live in peace I want to sing your song To have your wings To be able to fly I want my destiny to leave the path that it is taking now.
Eduardo Carrasco
His full parenthesis was closed, and he was once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text, the text that, from his momentary street-corner, showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to be crowded without being ‘fine’.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
there were many things - perhaps even too many - New York could give; but this was felt to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your situation as grave.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
What did you discover about the shooter?” Jude asked as he struggled to sit upright. “Once I spotted him on the rooftop, I ran up the back stairs to follow him. He was long gone, but he left something behind,” Sussex said. “Oh?” “Yes, I’ll take it upon myself to investigate it.” Jude opened his eyes, his stare focused on the duke. “Do you need my help?” Alynwick snorted. “A soiled dove with a broken wing,” he drawled. “What use would you be?” Jude grumbled, “I’ll be fine by the morning.
Charlotte Featherstone (Seduction & Scandal (The Brethren Guardians, #1))
The famous field altar came from the Jewish firm of Moritz Mahler in Vienna, which manufactured all kinds of accessories for mass as well as religious objects like rosaries and images of saints. The altar was made up of three parts, lberally provided with sham gilt like the whole glory of the Holy Church. It was not possible without considerable ingenuity to detect what the pictures painted on these three parts actually represented. What was certain was that it was an altar which could have been used equally well by heathens in Zambesi or by the Shamans of the Buriats and Mongols. Painted in screaming colors it appeared from a distance like a coloured chart intended for colour-blind railway workers. One figure stood out prominently - a naked man with a halo and a body which was turning green, like the parson's nose of a goose which has begun to rot and is already stinking. No one was doing anything to this saint. On the contrary, he had on both sides of him two winged creatures which were supposed to represent angels. But anyone looking at them had the impression that this holy naked man was shrieking with horror at the company around him, for the angels looked like fairy-tale monsters and were a cross between a winged wild cat and the beast of the apocalypse. Opposite this was a picture which was meant to represent the Holy Trinity. By and large the painter had been unable to ruin the dove. He had painted a kind of bird which could equally well have been a pigeon or a White Wyandotte. God the Father looked like a bandit from the Wild West served up to the public in an American film thriller. The Son of God on the other hand was a gay young man with a handsome stomach draped in something like bathing drawers. Altogether he looked a sporting type. The cross which he had in his hand he held as elegantly as if it had been a tennis racquet. Seen from afar however all these details ran into each other and gave the impression of a train going into a station.
Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Švejk)
Kuljeskelen täällä. En kyllästy tähän. Eikä minun pitäisikään - tämä sopii minulle niin hyvin. Jumaloin tätä paikkaa. Minulla ei ole pienintäkään halua luopua tästä. -Teistä olisi siis mieluisaa elää täällä? -Luullakseni minusta olisi mieluisaa kuolla täällä.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Ella Wheeler Wilcox gave evidence of her understanding of the power of the subconscious mind when she wrote: "You never can tell what a thought will do In bringing you hate or love-For thoughts are things, and their airy wings Are swifter than carrier doves. They follow the law of the universe-Each thing creates its kind, And they speed O'er the track to bring you back Whatever went out from your mind.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
Why, Tea Cake? Whut good do combin’ mah hair do you? It’s mah comfortable, not yourn.” “It’s mine too. Ah ain’t been sleepin’ so good for more’n uh week cause Ah been wishin’ so bad tuh git mah hands in yo’ hair. It’s so pretty. It feels jus’ lak underneath uh dove’s wing next to mah face.
Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary beauty: "I engage myself to you forever." The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated nothing—couldn't have thought of her face as distinct from the whole joy. Yet her face had a new light. "And I pledge you—I call God to witness!—every spark of my faith; I give you every drop of my life.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
His secretary of many years’ standing, Theodora Bosanquet, was struck by this persistent aspect of the Jamesian sensibility: ‘When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenceless children of light.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
SHE COULDN’T have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection of the charm—or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state in the presence of it. The
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
Concerning this desert, Jeremiah writes: ‘I will lead my beloved into the wilderness and will speak to her in her heart’ (Hosea 2:14) . . . The prophet hungered for this desolate self-abandonment when he said: ‘Who will give me the wings of a dove that I may fly away and be at rest?’ (Psalm 55:6). Where do we find peace and rest? Only in abandonment, in the desert and in isolation from all creatures . . . Now you could say . . . if all this must be removed, then it is grievous if God allows us to remain without any support. ‘Woe to me that my exile is prolonged’ (Psalm 120:5), as the prophet says, if God prolongs my dereliction without casting his light upon me, speaking to me or working in me, as you are suggesting here. If we thus enter a state of pure nothingness, is it not better that we should do something in order to drive away the darkness and dereliction? Should we not pray or read or listen to a sermon or do something else that is virtuous in order to help ourselves? No, certainly not! The very best thing you can do is to remain still for as long as possible . . . You cannot think about or desire this preparation more swiftly than God can carry it out . . . You should know that God must pour himself into you and act upon you where he finds you prepared . . . just as the sun must pour itself forth and cannot hold itself back when the air is pure and clean. Certainly, it would be a major failing if God did not perform great works in you, pouring great goodness into you, in so far as he finds you empty and there.
Meister Eckhart (Selected Writings)
There were no ravens to be seen. Abruptly a fox burst out of the trees, running hard. Ravens poured from the branches after it. The beat of their wings almost drowned out a desperate whining from the fox. A black whirlwind dove and swirled around it. The fox’s jaws snapped at them, but they darted in, and darted away untouched, black beaks glistening wetly. The fox turned back toward the trees, seeking the safety of its den. It ran awkwardly now, head low, fur dark and bloody, and the ravens flapped around it, more and more of them at once, the fluttering mass thickening until it hid the fox completely. As suddenly as they had descended the ravens rose, wheeled, and vanished over the next rise to the south. A misshapen lump of torn fur marked what had been the fox.
Robert Jordan (The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time, #1))
Could she possibly have someone who really could love And add to her fins the wings of a dove So not only the waves could she enjoy through the day But soar 'bove the clouds, perhaps see a new way To enjoy a full life she didn't think she'd deserve Too far out of reach so far as she could observe The final decision she and she alone must make One heart is committed, but both are at stake
Ken Maxon (A Chapter Finished, a page turned, the sunset will come back...)
Thus 2t Grams confronts us with the same interpretive dilemma as the one in The Wings of the Dove: is the suicidal sacrificial gesture a true ethical act or not? In contrast to Wings, the answer here is yes: there is no narcissistic staging of one's death at work when Paul shoots himself, no manipulative strategy of using one's death as a gift destined to secretly sabotage what it appears to make possible.
Slavoj Žižek (The Parallax View (Short Circuits))
What makes my bed seem hard seeing it is soft? Or why slips downe the Coverlet so oft? Although the nights be long, I sleepe not tho, My sides are sore with tumbling to and fro. Were Love the cause, it's like I shoulde descry him, Or lies he close, and shoots where none can spie him? T'was so, he stroke me with a slender dart, Tis cruell love turmoyles my captive hart. Yeelding or striving doe we give him might, Lets yeeld, a burden easly borne is light. I saw a brandisht fire increase in strength, Which being not shakt, I saw it die at length. Yong oxen newly yokt are beaten more, Then oxen which have drawne the plow before. And rough jades mouths with stubburn bits are tome, But managde horses heads are lightly borne, Unwilling Lovers, love doth more torment, Then such as in their bondage feele content. Loe I confesse, I am thy captive I, And hold my conquered hands for thee to tie. What needes thou warre, I sue to thee for grace, With armes to conquer armlesse men is base, Yoke VenusDoves, put Mirtle on thy haire, Vulcan will give thee Chariots rich and faire. The people thee applauding thou shalte stand, Guiding the harmelesse Pigeons with thy hand. Yong men and women, shalt thou lead as thrall, So will thy triumph seeme magnificall. I lately cought, will have a new made wound, And captive like be manacled and bound. Good meaning, shame, and such as seeke loves wrack Shall follow thee, their hands tied at their backe. Thee all shall feare and worship as a King, Jo, triumphing shall thy people sing. Smooth speeches, feare and rage shall by thee ride, Which troopes hath alwayes bin on Cupids side: Thou with these souldiers conquerest gods and men, Take these away, where is thy honor then? Thy mother shall from heaven applaud this show, And on their faces heapes of Roses strow. With beautie of thy wings, thy faire haire guilded, Ride golden Love in Chariots richly builded. Unlesse I erre, full many shalt thou burne, And give woundes infinite at everie turne. In spite of thee, forth will thy arrowes flie, A scorching flame burnes all the standers by. So having conquerd Inde, was Bacchus hew, Thee Pompous birds and him two tygres drew. Then seeing I grace thy show in following thee, Forbeare to hurt thy selfe in spoyling mee. Beholde thy kinsmans Caesars prosperous bandes, Who gardes the conquered with his conquering hands. -- ELEGIA 2 (Quodprimo Amore correptus, in triumphum duci se a Cupidine patiatur)
Christopher Marlowe
From the mountain peaks for streams descend and flow near the town; in the cascades the white water is calling, but the mistis do not hear it. On the hillsides, on the plains, on the mountaintops the yellow flowers dance in the wind, but the mistis hardly see them. At dawn, against the cold sky, beyond the edge of the mountains, the sun appears; then the larks and doves sing, fluttering their little wings; the sheep and the colts run to and fro in the grass, while the mistis sleep or watch, calculating the weight of their steers. In the evening Tayta Inti gilds the sk, gilds the earth, but they sneeze, spur their horses on the road, or drink coffee, drink hot pisco. But in the hearts of the Puquios, the valley is weeping and laughing, in their eyes the sky and the sun are alive; within them the valley sings with the voice of the morning, of the noontide, of the afternoon, of the evening.
José María Arguedas (Yawar Fiesta)
The charm turned on them a face that was cold in its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke, with an ironic smile, of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled afresh over Milly: 'Oh, the impossible romance—!' The romance for her, yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of remaining aloft in the divine, dustless air, where she would hear but the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. 'Ah, not to go down—never, never to go down!' she strangely sighed to her friend.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
It dispelled, on the spot—something, to the elder woman’s ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it—any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now for a moment swept over. ‘I’ll go anywhere else in the world you like.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
I saw the sky descending, black and white, Not blue, on Boston where the winters wore The skulls to jack-o’-lanterns on the slates, And Hunger’s skin-and-bone retrievers tore The chickadee and shrike. The thorn tree waits Its victim and tonight The worms will eat the deadwood to the foot Of Ararat: the scythers, Time and Death, Helmed locusts, move upon the tree of breath; The wild ingrafted olive and the root Are withered, and a winter drifts to where The Pepperpot, ironic rainbow, spans Charles River and its scales of scorched-earth miles. I saw my city in the Scales, the pans Of judgement rising and descending. Piles Of dead leaves char the air— And I am a red arrow on this graph Of Revelations. Every dove is sold. The Chapel’s sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold On serpent-Time, the rainbow’s epitaph. In Boston serpents whistle at the cold. The victim climbs the altar steps and sings: “Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings: I breathe the ether of my marriage feast.” At the high altar, gold And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live, The dove has brought an olive branch to eat.
Robert Lowell
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out into playing fields, the factory, allotments kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men, the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan, till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf. He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw, red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth! In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me, sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink, my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake, my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night, breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem. I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf? Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws and went in search of a living bird – white dove – which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth. One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said, licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books. Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood. But then I was young – and it took ten years in the woods to tell that a mushroom stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out, season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones. I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up. Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone. Little Red-Cap
Carol Ann Duffy (The World's Wife)
Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it, in this grim breathing−space, but the practical question of life? They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been told so: she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the information, recognising it again as something in a slightly different shape familiar enough, the blessed old truth that they would live if they could. All she thus shared with them made her wish to sit in their company; which she so far did that she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair that she saw hard by and for which she would have paid, with superiority, a fee.
Henry James (The Wings of the Dove)
But love itself does not argue. At first it is seen far off, like a beautiful bird of rare plumage, among flowers, on a morning in spring; it comes nearer, it is timid, it advances, it recedes, it poises on swiftly beating wings, it soars out of sight, but suddenly it is nearer than before; it changes shapes, and grows vast and terrible, till its flight is like the rushing of the whirlwind; then all is calm again, and in the stillness a sweet voice sings the chant of peace or the melancholy dirge of an endless regret; it is no longer the dove, nor the eagle, nor the storm that leaves ruin in its track—it is everything, it is life, it is the world itself, for ever and time without end, for good or evil, for such happiness as may pass all understanding, if God will, and if not, for undying sorrow
F. Marion Crawford (Marietta)
I was a cottage maiden Hardened by sun and air, Contented with my cottage mates, Not mindful I was fair. Why did a great lord find me out, And praise my flaxen hair? Why did a great lord find me out To fill my heart with care? He lured me to his palace home— Woe's me for joy thereof— 10 To lead a shameless shameful life, His plaything and his love. He wore me like a silken knot, He changed me like a glove; So now I moan, an unclean thing, Who might have been a dove. O Lady Kate, my cousin Kate, You grew more fair than I: He saw you at your father's gate, Chose you, and cast me by. 20 He watched your steps along the lane, Your work among the rye; He lifted you from mean estate To sit with him on high. Because you were so good and pure He bound you with his ring: The neighbours call you good and pure, Call me an outcast thing. Even so I sit and howl in dust, You sit in gold and sing: 30 Now which of us has tenderer heart? You had the stronger wing. O cousin Kate, my love was true, Your love was writ in sand: If he had fooled not me but you, If you stood where I stand, He'd not have won me with his love Nor bought me with his land; I would have spit into his face And not have taken his hand. 40 Yet I've a gift you have not got, And seem not like to get: For all your clothes and wedding-ring I've little doubt you fret. My fair-haired son, my shame, my pride, Cling closer, closer yet: Your father would give lands for one To wear his coronet.
Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry))
Urgent Story" When the oracle said, ‘If you keep pigeons you will never lose home.’ I kept pigeons. They flicked their red eyes over me, a deft trampling of that humanly proud distance by which remaining aloof in it’s own fullness. I administered crumbs, broke sky with them like breaking the lemon-light of the soul's amnesia for what It wants but will neither take nor truh let go. How it revived me, to release them! And at that moment of flight to disavow the imprint, to tear their compass, out by the roots of some green meadow they might fly over on the way to an immaculate freedom, meadow in which a woman has taken off her blouse, then taken off the man's flannel shirt in their sky-drenched arc of one, then the other above each other's eyelids is a branding of daylight, the interior of its black ambush in which two joys lame the earth a while with heat and cloudwork under wing-beats. Then she was quiet with him. And he with her. The world hummed with crickets, with bees nudging the lupins. It is like that when the earth counts its riches—noisy with desire even when desire has strengthened our bodies and moved us into the soak of harmony. Her nipples in sunlight have crossed his palm wind-sweet with savor and the rest is so knelt before that when they stand upright the flight-cloud of my tamed birds shapes an arm too short for praise. Oracle, my dovecot is an over and over nearer to myself when its black eyes are empty. But by nightfall I am dark before dark if one bird is missing. Dove left open by love in a meadow, Dove commanding me not to know where it sank into the almost-night—for you I will learn to play the concertina, to write poems full of hateful jasmine and longing, to keep the dead alive, to sicken at the least separation. Dove, for whose sake I will never reach home.
Tess Gallagher (My Black Horse: New & Selected Poems)