Wolf's Rain Quotes

Grace: I picked up my sweater from the floor and crawled back into bed. Shoving my pillow aside, I balled up the sweater to use instead. I fell asleep to the scent of my wolf. Pine needles, cold rain, earthy perfume, coarse bristles on my face. It was almost like he was there.

No wolf falters before the bite, so strike. No hawk wavers before the dive, so swing. No sun pauses before the set, just strike. No rain delays before the fall, just swing.

Why? Why do humans always look to the sky? Why do you try so hard to fly when you don't have any wings? We'll run on our own legs.

I fell asleep to the scent of my wolf. Pine needles, cold rain, earthy perfume, coarse bristles on my face.

When a client is driven to the utmost extremity, it is warmth and food and ease from pain he wants. Peace and justice come afterward. Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunch-backed makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed form kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries' vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers, heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters' sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etiolated lacquerers; mottle-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men's wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night's rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.

Everyone’s gonna die. It’s a natural part of life. But if life has no purpose, you’re dead already." -Kiba

much discomfort was based on human expectations. As a man, I expected to be warm and dry when I chose to be. Animals did not harbor any such beliefs. So it was raining. That part of me that was wolf could accept that. Rain meant being cold and wet. Once I acknowledged that and stopped comparing it to what I wished it to be, the conditions were far more tolerable.

Even after it all, would you dance with me again in the eye of the storm?” “I'd dance with you until the end of forever.

You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them

Where's the king? Gent. Contending with the fretful elements; Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea, Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main, That things might change or cease; tears his white hair, Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage, Catch in their fury and make nothing of; Strives in his little world of man to outscorn The to-and-fro-conflicting wind and rain. This night, wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, The lion and the belly-pinched wolf Keep their fur dry, unbonneted he runs, And bids what will take all.

Every ray of sunshine, every drop of rain, every tear that falls, you are with me for I carry you in my heart forever.

A beautiful Wolf?" cheesy smile then a wink. "Is your eye twitching?" -Kiba, Wolf's Rain.

The Mississippi Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.

The world where you will go hand in hand with the Flower Maiden has neither perfect happiness, nor joy, nor life. This is because it also does not contain perfect sadness, nor misery, nor death..." -Lord Darcia

...you can be talented as a wolf is breathtakingly fierce...silver and gray, like smoke in the trees - but what do you do with terrible beauty?...

The world where you would go hand in hand with the flower maiden has neither perfect happiness nor joy nor life. This is because it also does not contain perfect sadness nor misery nor death. What lies in waiting is a paradise for wolves alone, the unclean humans are no more...come with me Cheza, it is time.

RAINS CAME MUSHROOMS UP—and he returned out of curiosity and took the mushrooms, just as Leary had, and discovered the Management and gave up all, all the TV BBC game and dedicated himself to The Life

The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain—the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives?

Do you fear the force of the wind, The slash of the rain? Go face them and fight them, Be savage again. Go hungry and cold like the wolf, Go wade like the crane: The palms of your hands will thicken, The skin of your cheek will tan, You'll grow ragged and weary and swarthy, But you'll walk like a man!

Rain symbolizes mercy and sunlight charity, but rain and sunlight are better than mercy and charity. Otherwise they would degrade the things they symbolize.

i loved this book the wolfs rain it inspierd me very much thank u

Don’t nobody ever want it to rain,” the nearest of the sellers of beasts remarked philosophically, “but everybody wants to go on eatin’.

Those without a roof over their heads could escape with Wolfe, Kafka, or Robert Louis Stevenson and have shelter from the heat and the cold, the rain and the pain.

Paths of the mirror" I And above all else, to look with innocence. As if nothing was happening, which is true. II But you, I want to look at you until your face escapes from my fear like a bird from the sharp edge of the night. III Like a girl made of pink chalk on a very old wall that is suddenly washed away by the rain. IV Like when a flower blooms and reveals the heart that isn’t there. V Every gesture of my body and my voice to make myself into the offering, the bouquet that is abandoned by the wind on the porch. VI Cover the memory of your face with the mask of who you will be and scare the girl you once were. VII The night of us both scattered with the fog. It’s the season of cold foods. VIII And the thirst, my memory is of the thirst, me underneath, at the bottom, in the hole, I drank, I remember. IX To fall like a wounded animal in a place that was meant to be for revelations. X As if it meant nothing. No thing. Mouth zipped. Eyelids sewn. I forgot. Inside, the wind. Everything closed and the wind inside. XI Under the black sun of the silence the words burned slowly. XII But the silence is true. That’s why I write. I’m alone and I write. No, I’m not alone. There’s somebody here shivering. XIII Even if I say sun and moon and star I’m talking about things that happen to me. And what did I wish for? I wished for a perfect silence. That’s why I speak. XIV The night is shaped like a wolf’s scream. XV Delight of losing one-self in the presaged image. I rose from my corpse, I went looking for who I am. Migrant of myself, I’ve gone towards the one who sleeps in a country of wind. XVI My endless falling into my endless falling where nobody waited for me –because when I saw who was waiting for me I saw no one but myself. XVII Something was falling in the silence. My last word was “I” but I was talking about the luminiscent dawn. XVIII Yellow flowers constellate a circle of blue earth. The water trembles full of wind. XIX The blinding of day, yellow birds in the morning. A hand untangles the darkness, a hand drags the hair of a drowned woman that never stops going through the mirror. To return to the memory of the body, I have to return to my mourning bones, I have to understand what my voice is saying.

The day Glenn Gregg's daddy got back from New Orleans was the same day Lady Sally Anne Montberclair decided to park her big white Cadillac out in front of Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro. and leave the motor running and scoot inside, out of the first drops of rain, on an errand. Glenn's daddy was named Solon.

I drank from the crisp mountain stream, tasting filtered sky with a mossy undertone. I’ve never understood how being loved fully could change your entire perspective of the world. I only ever understood the wistfulness of it, and the longing and the frothy, violent bits. The mixed up, rained on parts. The escaped bits that smudge and bleed through. Slowly, I am coming to terms with how vulnerable I am to you, flat on my back like a submissive wolf pup. Daisy petals line your eyelashes, juice of a nectarine flavors your tongue. The side of your mouth twitches, hazy dreamscapes overtaking your mind while we bathe in the glorious autumn devastation.

It’s raining wolfs and panthers out there so we decided to put off exploring until tomorrow. Do you have any board games?

I would take an oath that I smelled Agilus’s blood on the rain-washed air before his head banged into the basket.

It was a chorus! A rain of garbage! A Rigoletto from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx!

I will lead an exodus with my lips, and soothe the hearts of my lovers with my tongue. I will never cry wolf, trust me.

Beckey's fame spread through word of mouth. There were stories about his wolf howl, a blood-chilling sound, which Beckey would use to scare tourists away from his favorite campsites.

If you try to sell honey to bees, they will laugh at you. If you try to sell perfume to flowers, they will chuckle at you. If you try to sell fruit to trees, they will jeer at you. If you try to sell rain to clouds, they will scoff at you. If you try to sell fear to wolves, they will howl at you. If you try to sell terror to lions, they will roar at you.

His stories were not always new, but there was in the telling of them a special kind of magic. His voice could roll like thunder or hush down into a zepherlike whisper. He could imitate the voices of a dozen men at once; whistle so like a bird that the birds themselves would come to him to hear what he had to say; and when when he imitated the howl of a wolf, the sound could raise the hair on the backs of his listeners' necks and strike a chill into their hearts like the depths of a Drasnian winter. He could make the sound of rain and of wind and even, most miraculously, the sound of snow falling.

A woman connected with her Wild Woman is one with the vibrations experienced from the energy of the earth as it slips between her toes. She spins rainbows with her mind and releases rain with her tears. She dances with the music of the wind in the trees and the rush of the water in a racing river. She howls like the she wolf under the full moon. The magic of her dreams moving forth from her and expanding like the galaxies of a trillion stars.

1 You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’. Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands Tended it. By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. At the hour Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped, Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance. Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods, Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men, Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing. Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions; Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears … You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop. 2 Or did you mean another kind of heathenry? Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth, Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm. Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound; But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods, Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand, Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them; For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last, And every man of decent blood is on the losing side. Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits Who walked back into burning houses to die with men, Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim. Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs; You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

You must be a myth that your lover can't grasp and you must chase the moon like a wolf in the night, as if it will show you something only you can understand. Everything you do is a ritual that can mean something more and you must connect and create bonds with the spirits both outer and inner. Seek the strange and mysterious, otherworldly explanations for yourself and things around. There is always more. Always more. Nothing is ordinary, and you must make love to him like his touch is your salvation. You must dare to love and lose and hear your heart break into a million little pieces, glittering like diamonds in the night. Don’t run into hiding when the rain hits us like planets shot down to see who wants to survive the most for you want to survive the most and you must not hide from madness. You must love and live and write like you're obsessed and possessed. Go mad for what you believe in.

Liall realized that this was the first time he had really been alone with Scarlet. He stood up and held out his hand. The blanket dropped from his shoulders. "Come here." Scarlet reached out to him tentatively and Liall quickly dragged him into his arms. He fits there perfectly, Liall thought, snug if not a little small. Scarlet did not respond at first, as if he would pull away, and for a moment Liall believed he had made a huge mistake. Then, surprisingly, Scarlet sighed and his arms went around Liall's back. Scarlet turned his head to rest his cheek against Liall's bare chest as hey listened to the rain batten on the roof. "Thank you for saving my life." Liall murmured.

. . . to my surprise I began to know what The Language was about, not just the part we were singing now but the whole poem. It began with the praise and joy in all creation, copying the voice of the wind and the sea. It described sun and moon, stars and clouds, birth and death, winter and spring, the essence of fish, bird, animal, and man. It spoke in what seemed to be the language of each creature. . . . It spoke of well, spring, and stream, of the seed that comes from the loins of a male creature and of the embryo that grows in the womb of the female. It pictured the dry seed deep in the dark earth, feeling the rain and the warmth seeping down to it. It sang of the green shoot and of the tawny heads of harvest grain standing out in the field under the great moon. It described the chrysalis that turns into a golden butterfly, the eggs that break to let out the fluffy bird life within, the birth pangs of woman and of beast. It went on to speak of the dark ferocity of the creatures that pounce upon their prey and plunge their teeth into it--it spoke in the muffled voice of bear and wolf--it sang the song of the great hawks and eagles and owls until their wild faces seemed to be staring into mine, and I knew myself as wild as they. It sang the minor chords of pain and sickness, of injury and old age; for a few moments I felt I was an old woman with age heavy upon me.

Spleen Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux, Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes, S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes. Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau, Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette. Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu De son être extirper l'élément corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé // I'm like the king of a rain-country, rich but sterile, young but with an old wolf's itch, one who escapes his tutor's monologues, and kills the day in boredom with his dogs; nothing cheers him, darts, tennis, falconry, his people dying by the balcony; the bawdry of the pet hermaphrodite no longer gets him through a single night; his bed of fleur-de-lys becomes a tomb; even the ladies of the court, for whom all kings are beautiful, cannot put on shameful enough dresses for this skeleton; the scholar who makes his gold cannot invent washes to cleanse the poisoned element; even in baths of blood, Rome's legacy, our tyrants' solace in senility, he cannot warm up his shot corpse, whose food is syrup-green Lethean ooze, not blood. — Robert Lowell, from Marthiel & Jackson Matthews, eds., The Flowers of Evil (NY: New Directions, 1963)

Outside the wind rushed through the mountains, and thunder cracked. The dark clouds burst, and rain pelted down in sheets. Out of the trees loped a huge black wolf with pale, burning eyes. As he approached the small porch, the powerful body contorted, stretched, shape-shifted into a heavily muscled man with wide shoulders, long dark hair, and slashing silver eyes. He stepped onto the porch out of the pouring rain and regarded the two men facing him. The tension was tangible between Mikhail and Byron. Mikhail, as always, was inscrutable. Byron looked like a thundercloud. The newcomer’s eyebrows went up, and he leaned close to Byron. “The last time someone got Mikhail seriously angry, it was not a pretty sight. I do not wish to attempt to replace major organs in your body, so go take a walk and cool off.” The voice was beautiful, with a singsong cadence—compelling, soothing even, yet it clearly commanded. It was a voice so hypnotic, so mesmerizing, even those of their kind were drawn into its power.

YORK. She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France, Whose tongue more poisons than the adder's tooth, How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex To triumph, like an Amazonian trull, Upon their woes whom fortune captivates! But that thy face is, vizard-like, unchanging, Made impudent with use of evil deeds, I would assay, proud queen, to make thee blush. To tell thee whence thou cam'st, of whom deriv'd, Were shame enough to shame thee, wert thou not shameless. Thy father bears the type of King of Naples, Of both the Sicils and Jerusalem, Yet not so wealthy as an English yeoman. Hath that poor monarch taught thee to insult? It needs not, nor it boots thee not, proud queen; Unless the adage must be verified, That beggars mounted run their horse to death. 'T is beauty that doth oft make women proud; But, God he knows, thy share thereof is small. 'T is virtue that doth make them most admir'd; The contrary doth make thee wond'red at. 'T is government that makes them seem divine; The want thereof makes thee abominable. Thou art as opposite to every good As the Antipodes are unto us, Or as the south to the Septentrion. O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide! How couldst thou drain the life-blood of the child, To bid the father wipe his eyes withal, And yet be seen to bear a woman's face? Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible; Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless. Bid'st thou me rage? why, now thou hast thy wish: Wouldst have me weep? why, now thou hast thy will; For raging wind blows up incessant showers, And when the rage allays the rain begins. These tears are my sweet Rutland's obsequies, And every drop cries vengeance for his death, 'Gainst thee, fell Clifford, and thee, false Frenchwoman.

He rained upon it curses from God and High Heaven, and withered it with a heat of invective that savoured of a medieval excommunication of the Catholic Church. He ran the gamut of denunciation, rising to heights of wrath that were sublime and almost Godlike.

Suddenly, I was stopped by a quiet song . . Somebody stood, swaying slowly on the road, In the darkest shadow by a puddle, And low above it a small tree grew . . It might’ve been a wild cherry tree . . He kept singing, watching the puddle fill . . I dragged the pine through the water, And with my other hand steadied my sack, Where a bottle of red vino dangled . . He didn’t move, but kept on singing . . Should I have stopped there And joined his singing? . . Had he found The one happy tree? . . No one knows where it grows— Or what it looks like . . And who is allowed to recognize it? . . I never stood under it, Even to wait for rain to pass Or watch between the drops The silent froth appear . . Swaying, he kept on singing . . Otherwise, he would have fallen And the rain stopped . . He danced his own rain Under that tree . . I can’t do such things . . Perhaps it was a wolf? . .

In a little while they were kissing. In a little while longer, they made their slow sweet love. The iron bed sounded like a pine forest in an ice storm, like a switch track in a Memphis trainyard, like the sweet electrical thunder of habitual love and the tragical history of the constant heart. Auntee finished first, and then Uncle soon after, and their lips were touching lightly as they did. The rain was still falling and the scritch owl was still asleep and the dragonflies were hidden like jewels somewhere in deep brown wet grasses, nobody knew where. Uncle rolled away from his wife and held onto her hand, never let it go, old friend, old partner, passionate wife.

It is as if James Joyce, for his sins, had been forced to grow up in Queens; as if Sam Beckett had been mugged by Godot in a Flushing comfort station; as if Sid Caesar played the part of Moby Dick in a Roman Polanski movie shot underwater in Long Island City; as if Martin Heidegger has gone into vaudeville...Mr. Mano is Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson and Henderson the Rain King.

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

He stood looking down at her for a moment, then walked to the window and raised it. "Let's let the storm in," he said, and then it was with them, filling the half-dark room with sound and vibration. The rain-chilled air washed over her, cool and fresh on her heated skin. She sighed, the small sound drowned out by the din of thunder and rain. There by the window, with the dim grey light outlining the bulge and plane of powerful muscle, Wolf removed his wet clothing.

I checked the position the car was facing. Grover had pulled off the road directly into the brunt of the storm, facing west. I felt the dampness on my right shoulder where the rain had forced its way through the cracked weather stripping around the car windows. “Yes.” “Hnnh,” Dan said. “Waziya. There is a message.” “What do you mean?” I said, slightly disconcerted. “Waziya is not good. He is cold and cruel.” “Waziya?” “The wind from the north.” Dan was pulling a small pouch from inside his shirt. It

HOW FEAR CAME The stream is shrunk—the pool is dry, And we be comrades, thou and I; With fevered jowl and dusty flank Each jostling each along the bank; And by one drouthy fear made still, Forgoing thought of quest or kill. Now 'neath his dam the fawn may see, The lean Pack-wolf as cowed as he, And the tall buck, unflinching, note The fangs that tore his father's throat. The pools are shrunk—the streams are dry, And we be playmates, thou and I, Till yonder cloud—Good Hunting!—loose The rain that breaks our Water Truce.

Irma Nail, who lived next door to Gordon, was setting off as usual for her morning paper. She was not easily distracted from her routine, even by the apocalypse. She stepped out of her house in her purple rain boots, muttering about the freakish weather, and glanced up at the sky just as a wolf fell out of it. 'Outrageous!' She snorted as it lay stunned at her feet. 'I've heard of it raining cats and dogs, but this is ridiculous!' and she stepped over the stricken beast, putting her umbrella up in case more wolves should tumble, uninvited, from the sky.

Each of our devoted investigators has had to protest the critical importance to science and the surpassing conveniences offered by the cabin: How well the hill-and-dale floor is held together by layered patches of variegated linoleum; how nicely the roof admits starlight and yet keeps out much of the rain; how smoothly the door opens when you lift firmly on the knob; how ideally the two one-room accessory structures serve as “slave” quarters for summer assistants. And what would befall the local ward of dependent woodmice if the cabin commissary were to fail?

So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's rain had finally lifted, and a shaft of red sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we entered the ruined town. We rode straight into the light of that swollen sun which reflected from my helm that had the silver wolf on its crest, and it shone from my mail coat and from my arm rings and from the hilts of my two swords, and someone shouted that I was the king. I rode Witnere, who tossed his great head and pawed at the ground, and I was dressed in my shining war glory.

I jerked my head up, my tie with Jack severed. 7 “You’re early,” I told the Magician as Matthew and I climbed down. “Wanted to avoid the midnight-hour traffic.” When Cyclops padded over hesitantly, Finn grumbled, “Free fort, sit where you want!” He situated his crutch over his lap. “So an Empress, a horse, and a wolf walk into a fort. . . .” “If this is a dirty joke, I’ll pass.” I’d missed the Magician’s humor. Tilting my head at him, I said, “You don’t look so good, Finn.” “I feel like a bucket of fuck, but I’ll be ready,” he assured me. “Right, Matto?” “Ready Magician!” “H to the Azey. That army blows Baggers.” “Somehow she dragged me back to the fort.” “Good thing I’m dying young,” Finn continued in a nonchalant tone, “or I’d be shit out of luck with this bum leg.” “Dying young?” He wasn’t kidding. “Made peace with it.” He shrugged. “Kind of think we all should.” Have you guys gotten snow here yet?” I thought I’d spied a single flake the night I’d left Aric. “Not looking forward to that. SoCal surfer boy here, remember? Just think: if the snow comes down like the rain has . . .” “Snowmageddon!” Matthew cried, cracking both of them up. “Yeah, Matto, that groundhog came out to check for nuclear winter. But then a Bagger ate him!

I love the way the rain melts the colors together, like a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. There is a moment, just after sunset, when the shops turn on their lights and steam starts to fog up the windows of the cafés. In French, this twilight time implies a hint of danger. It's called entre chien et loup, between the dog and the wolf. It was just beginning to get dark as we walked through the small garden of Palais Royal. We watched as carefully dressed children in toggled peacoats and striped woolen mittens finished the same game of improvised soccer we had seen in the Place Sainte Marthe. Behind the Palais Royal the wide avenues around the Louvre gave way to narrow streets, small boutiques, and bistros. It started to drizzle. Gwendal turned a corner, and tucked in between two storefronts, barely wider than a set of double doors, I found myself staring down a corridor of fairy lights. A series of arches stretched into the distance, topped with panes of glass, like a greenhouse, that echoed the plip-plop of the rain. It was as if we'd stepped through the witch's wardrobe, the phantom tollbooth, what have you, into another era. The Passage Vivienne was nineteenth-century Paris's answer to a shopping mall, a small interior street lined with boutiques and tearooms where ladies could browse at their leisure without wetting the bustles of their long dresses or the plumes of their new hats. It was certainly a far cry from the shopping malls of my youth, with their piped-in Muzak and neon food courts. Plaster reliefs of Greek goddesses in diaphanous tunics lined the walls. Three-pronged brass lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains. About halfway down, there was an antique store selling nothing but old kitchenware- ridged ceramic bowls for hot chocolate, burnished copper molds in the shape of fish, and a pewter mold for madeleines, so worn around the edges it might have belonged to Proust himself. At the end of the gallery, underneath a clock held aloft by two busty angels, was a bookstore. There were gold stencils on the glass door. Maison fondée en 1826.

Within a week, I understood that in the wild, time moves much more slowly. A wind is never just a wind—it’s the email system of the natural world, bringing in new information about weather patterns, animals coming into and leaving the area, potential predators. Rain isn’t a nuisance—it’s a respite from bugs and fresh water for drinking. A snowfall isn’t an inconvenience—it’s a new source for tracks and animals that might become a meal. The rustling of the trees or the song of a bird or the scrabble of a rodent is the key to your survival; being able to spot a flicker of movement through the dense block of foliage is essential. When it is a matter of life and death, the volume of nature gets turned up loud.

Think; Of a world without men. Where the sun shines, and the rain falls. Where the grass grows, nibbled by deer in the early morning. Where the unwary deer is pounced on by the wolf. Where the wolf when it dies in turn, is swallowed up by the earth. And where it's body lies the grass grows thicker...There is a balance in the natural world which no other creature can upset. But you, you have that power. Power, endless power: But not the wisdom to know where it will lead. You can reach out your hand and change the world. Change one thing, and that may change another unforeseen, and that another, and another, until the world lies about you in ruins and you stand alone in the desert wind of your shattered dreams...

I wonder where they’ll go,” Jake continued, frowning a little. “There’s wolves out there, and all sorts of beasts.” “No self-respecting wolf would dare to confront that duenna of hers, not with that umbrella she wields,” Ian snapped, but he felt a little uneasy. “Oho!” said Jake with a hearty laugh. “So that’s what she was? I thought they’d come to court you together. Personally, I’d be afraid to close my eyes with that gray-haired hag in bed next to me.” Ian was not listening. Idly he unfolded the note, knowing that Elizabeth Cameron probably wasn’t foolish enough to have written it in her own girlish, illegible scrawl. His first thought as he scanned the neat, scratchy script was that she’d gotten someone else to write it for her…but then he recognized the words, which were strangely familiar, because he’d spoken them himself: Your suggestion has merit. I’m leaving for Scotland on the first of next month and cannot delay the trip again. Would prefer the meeting take place there, in any case. A map is enclosed for direction to the cottage. Cordially-Ian. “God help that silly bastard if he ever crosses my path!” Ian said savagely. “Who d’you mean?” “Peters!” “Peters?” Jake said, gaping. “Your secretary? The one you sacked for mixin’ up all your letters?” “I should have strangled him! This is the note I meant for Dickinson Verley. He sent it to Cameron instead.” In furious disgust Ian raked his hand through his hair. As much as he wanted Elizabeth Cameron out of his sight and out of his life, he could not cause two women to spend the night in their carriage or whatever vehicle they’d brought, when it was his fault they’d come here. He nodded curtly to Jake. “Go and get them.” “Me? Why me?” “Because,” Ian said bitterly, walking over to the cabinet and putting away the gun, “it’s starting to rain, for one thing. For another, if you don’t bring them back, you’ll be doing the cooking.” “If I have to go after that woman, I want a stout glass of something fortifying first. They’re carrying a trunk, so they won’t get much ahead of me.” “On foot?” Ian asked in surprise. “How did you think they got up here?” “I was too angry to think.

Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When

In no way, said Wallace, can natural selection account for such a thing. But neither can natural selection account for man’s hairless body, especially his bare back, which makes him highly vulnerable to wind, cold, and rain. All other primates, even in Africa and the tropics, grow hides or coats of hair that protect them to the point of making them waterproof. The hair of the coats is layered at a downward angle. Rain rolls right off. Does man miss that? All the time, said Wallace. In fact, since time immemorial, men have been using animal hides and anything else they could think of to keep their backs covered.50 There you had it—an obvious case of what Darwin said couldn’t happen: injurious evolution. “A single case of this kind,” Darwin himself had said, tempting Fate, “would be fatal to [the] theory.

I believe you have my umbrella," he says, almost out of breath but wearing a grin that has too much wolf in it to be properly sheepish. Celia stares up at him in surprise. At first she wonders what on earth Chandresh's assistant is doing in Prauge, as she has never seen him outside London. Then comes the question of how he could possess such an umbrella. As she stairs at him, confused, the pieces of the puzzle begin to shift together. She remembers every encounter she had with the man now standing before her in the rain, recalling the distress he had exhibited at her audition, the years of glances and comments she had read as no more than coy flirtation. And the constant impression as though he is not really there, blending so well into the background that she would occasionally forget he was in the room.

He lay back against the crunching branches ad half shut his eyes. The rain was a soft sweet veil of silver around him. As he glanced upwards the heavens opened as if for a laser beam, and he saw the moon, the full moon, the meaningless and irrelevant full moon in all its blessed glory, floating in a wreath of clouds, against the distant stars. A deep love of all he saw settled over him-love for the splendor of the moon and the sparkling fragments of light that drifted beyond it-for the enfolding forest that sheltered him so completely, for the rain that carried the dazzling light of the skies to the shimmering bower in which he lay. A flame burned in him, a faith that a comprehending Power existed, animating all this that it had created and sustaining it with a love beyond anything that he, Reuben, could imagine.

LETTING IN THE JUNGLE Veil them, cover them, wall them round— Blossom, and creeper, and weed— Let us forget the sight and the sound, The smell and the touch of the breed! Fat black ash by the altar-stone, Here is the white-foot rain, And the does bring forth in the fields unsown, And none shall affright them again; And the blind walls crumble, unknown, o'erthrown And none shall inhabit again! You will remember that after Mowgli had pinned Shere Khan's hide to the Council Rock, he told as many as were left of the Seeonee Pack that henceforward he would hunt in the Jungle alone; and the four children of Mother and Father Wolf said that they would hunt with him. But it is not easy to change one's life all in a minute—particularly in the Jungle. The first thing Mowgli did, when the disorderly Pack had slunk off, was to go to the home-cave, and sleep for a day and a night.

Darwin’s Bestiary PROLOGUE Animals tame and animals feral prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral: the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile, rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile. Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride—every peril was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural, while Courage, Devotion, Thrift—every bright laurel crowned a creature in some mythological mural. Scientists think there is something immoral in singular brutes having meat that is plural: beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral. Yet between the lines there’s an implicit demurral; the habit stays with us, albeit it’s puerile: when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel. 1. THE ANT The ant, Darwin reminded us, defies all simple-mindedness: Take nothing (says the ant) on faith, and never trust a simple truth. The PR men of bestiaries eulogized for centuries this busy little paragon, nature’s proletarian— but look here, Darwin said: some ants make slaves of smaller ants, and end exploiting in their peonages the sweating brows of their tiny drudges. Thus the ant speaks out of both sides of its mealy little mouth: its example is extolled to the workers of the world, but its habits also preach the virtues of the idle rich. 2. THE WORM Eyeless in Gaza, earless in Britain, lower than a rattlesnake’s belly-button, deaf as a judge and dumb as an audit: nobody gave the worm much credit till Darwin looked a little closer at this spaghetti-torsoed loser. Look, he said, a worm can feel and taste and touch and learn and smell; and ounce for ounce, they’re tough as wrestlers, and love can turn them into hustlers, and as to work, their labors are mythic, small devotees of the Protestant Ethic: they’ll go anywhere, to mountains or grassland, south to the rain forests, north to Iceland, fifty thousand to every acre guzzling earth like a drunk on liquor, churning the soil and making it fertile, earning the thanks of every mortal: proud Homo sapiens, with legs and arms— his whole existence depends on worms. So, History, no longer let the worm’s be an ignoble lot unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Moral: even a worm can turn. 3. THE RABBIT a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent, but social as teacups: no hare is an island. (Moral: silence is golden—or anyway harmless; rabbits may run, but never for Congress.) b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit, kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit. (Moral: to thine own self be true—or as true as you can; a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.) c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors, but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors. (Moral: to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles; to understand purity, ponder your freckles.) d. Survival developed these small furry tutors; the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters. (Conclusion: you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.) 4. THE GOSSAMER Sixty miles from land the gentle trades that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay sift a million gossamers, like tides of fluff above the menace of the sea. These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean; the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging, small aeronauts on some elusive mission. The Megatherium, done to extinction by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson: for survival, it’s the little things that count.

GOD I am ready for you to come back. Whether in a train full of dying criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again. The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain. On this one the wet is driving people mad—the bankers all baying in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers to spit mouthfuls here and there as his daughter’s lungs seize shut from the pollen. There is a flat logic to neglect. Sweet nothings sour in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep. I live on the skull of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing through the dirt, though even this you ignore. The mind wants what it wants: daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. The work I’ve been doing is a kind of erasing. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers while they applaud and sip their scotch. A body can cause almost anything to happen. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor, turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing cannot happen without you. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. It was only mist and dumb want. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel will simply stop swimming long before it starves. Wounded wolves will pad away from their pack to die lonely and cold. Do you not know how scary it can get here? The talons that dropped me left long scars around my neck that still burn in the wind. I was promised epiphany, earth- honey, and a flood of milk, but I will settle for anything that brings you now, you still-hungry mongrel, you glut of bone, you, scentless as gold.

I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.

He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun’s coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it. II

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors. Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagodas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges. Gulls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats; over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers; heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerel on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials milking taxes; etoliated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; filching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineherds; swindlers; lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heard-it-all creditors tightening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men’s wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wed daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautiful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners; cutlers; carters of night-soil; gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses; perjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator; and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle from last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight. This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Can't sleep so you put on his grey boots -- nothing else -- & step inside the rain. Even though he's gone, you think, I still want to be clean. If only the rain were gasoline, your tongue a lit match, & you can change without disappearing. If only he dies the second his name becomes a tooth in your mouth. But he doesn't. He dies when they wheel him away & the priest ushers you out the room, your palms two puddles of rain. He dies as your heart beats faster, as another war coppers the sky. He dies each night you close your eyes & hear his slow exhale. Your fist choking the dark. Your fist through the bathroom mirror. He dies at the party where everyone laughs & all you want is to go into the kitchen & make seven omelets before burning down the house. All you want is to run into the woods & beg the wolf to fuck you up. He dies when you wake & it's November forever. A Hendrix record melted on a rusted needle. He dies the morning he kisses you for two minutes too long, when he says Wait followed by I have something to say & you quickly grab your favorite pink pillow & smother him as he cries into the soft & darkening fabric. You hold still until he's very quiet, until the walls dissolve & you're both standing in the crowded train again. Look how it rocks you back & forth like a slow dance seen from the distance of years. You're still a freshman. You're still but he smiles anyway. His teeth reflected in the window reflecting your lips as you mouth Hello -- your tongue a lit match.

If a season like the Great Rebellion ever came to him again, he feared, it could never be in that same personal, random array of picaresque acts he was to recall and celebrate in later years at best furious and nostalgic; but rather with a logic that chilled the comfortable perversity of the heart, that substituted capability for character, deliberate scheme for political epiphany (so incomparably African); and for Sarah, the sjambok, the dances of death between Warmbad and Keetmanshoop, the taut haunches of his Firelily, the black corpse impaled on a thorn tree in a river swollen with sudden rain, for these the dearest canvases in his soul's gallery, it was to substitute the bleak, abstracted and for him rather meaningless hanging on which he now turned his back, but which was to backdrop his retreat until he reached the Other Wall, the engineering design for a world he knew with numb leeriness nothing could now keep from becoming reality, a world whose full despair he, at the vantage of eighteen years later, couldn't even find adequate parables for, but a design whose first fumbling sketches he thought must have been done the year after Jacob Marengo died, on that terrible coast, where the beach between Luderitzbucht and the cemetery was actually littered each morning with a score of identical female corpses, an agglomeration no more substantial-looking than seaweed against the unhealthy yellow sand; where the soul's passage was more a mass migration across that choppy fetch of Atlantic the wind never left alone, from an island of low cloud, like an anchored prison ship, to simple integration with the unimaginable mass of their continent; where the single line of track still edged toward a Keetmanshoop that could in no conceivable iconology be any part of the Kingdom of Death; where, finally, humanity was reduced, out of a necessity which in his loonier moments he could almost believe was only Deutsch-Sudwestafrika's (actually he knew better), out of a confrontation the young of one's contemporaries, God help them, had yet to make, humanity was reduced to a nervous, disquieted, forever inadequate but indissoluble Popular Front against deceptively unpolitical and apparently minor enemies, enemies that would be with him to the grave: a sun with no shape, a beach alien as the moon's antarctic, restless concubines in barbed wire, salt mists, alkaline earth, the Benguela Current that would never cease bringing sand to raise the harbor floor, the inertia of rock, the frailty of flesh, the structural unreliability of thorns; the unheard whimper of a dying woman; the frightening but necessary cry of the strand wolf in the fog.

Rain comes,” said Eveneye. “Yes,” said Whiteclaw. They fastened the sacs around their necks and began to make their way back home, through the forest. Again, a wolf howled in the distance, closer though. Twigs and branches snapped under the bears’ paws and the wind whipped through their fur. It became harder and harder to see where they were going as the moonlight became obscured by rainclouds. Fortunately, Eveneye and Whiteclaw could have walked the path home with their eyes closed. The two bears had encountered far worse than rain and darkness in these woods. When they were younger, they had been caught in the woods during a blizzard and were forced to take shelter as it passed. They had made a shelter from a couple of fallen trees and huddled underneath them for fifteen hours before the storm had finally gone. When they had emerged again, they recognized nothing of the forest and it had taken them almost two days to find their way home. There had also been a time when human hunters had ambushed the two bears on their trail home. Eveneye and Whiteclaw were fully grown bears and they had dispatched the humans rather quickly, but not before suffering wounds from the humans’ spears. They could spend a night telling tales of their forays into the forest and often did. The woods were dense and had a layer of underbrush, not found in all forests. The canopy was high and wide; it was a very old forest. It was said, in the lore of the bear, that the elder bears did not choose this forest to build their kingdom, but that the forest chose them to be its protectors. This was passed down as birthright to all bears. Respect the forest; protect the forest. It was mother to them all. Lightning flashed, thunder rumbled and it began to rain. Whiteclaw grumbled and Eveneye chuckled. “What’s the matter? We were already wet from the stream.” “That was by choice,” replied Whiteclaw. Both bears laughed heartily as lightning flashed across the night sky. Eveneye stopped laughing and perked his ears. “Do you hear that?” “Hear what? The rain?

Grandpa, I haven't remembered all your stories, but I've written a few of my own adn as soon as the rain stops I'll read them to you. I got the idea from Nena Fatima, I got Grandpa Rafik's voice, I got the veins on your son's upper arms, he's painting coconuts now, I got my mother's melencholy. But still I don't have all the things i'd need to tell my story as one of us: I don't have the courage of the river Drina, or the voice of the hawk, or the rock hard backbone of our mountains, or Walrus's infalibility, or the enthusiasum of the man who misses, honorably. And I don't have Armin the stationmaster, Cika Hasan and Cika Sead in their eternal argument, Kiko's leg, Edin who forgets he's imitating a wolf and takes fright at the sound of his own voice, Cauliflower, the names of trees, a stomache for schnapps, the goals scored in the school yard. But most of all I miss the truth, the truth in which we are no longer listeners or storytellers, but we give and forgive.

It is the coldest time of the night in the silent countries of the north. It is a ghostly and utterly horrifying moment. It is the moment when spirits roam free, and people are hiding under the comforting veil of their dreams, unaware of the dangers revealed by the shadows of the night. It is the moment of the wolf, Edward.

dived through the rain across the sidewalk, found

The traffic was heavy, carriages, cabs, wagons, carts of every description passing by, splashing the water out of the gutters, wheels hissing on the wet road, horses dripping, sodden hides dark. Drivers sat hunched with collars up and hats down in a futile attempt to keep the cold rain from running down their necks, hands clenched on the reins.

The crossing sweeper, a boy of about eight or nine years, was still busily pushing manure out of the way to make a clean path for any pedestrian who wished to reach the other side. He seemed to be one of those cheerful souls willing to make the best out of any situation. His skimpy trousers stuck to his legs, his coat was too long for him and gaped around the neck, but his enormous cap seemed to keep most of the rain off his head, except for

wolf’s fur was speckled with drops of blood that had beaded on it like rain. The gravel in the alley shone in the half-light from the distant street lamps. The wolf’s muzzle, a little shorter and broader than I had seen on Wild Kingdom, was drawn back, black lips from fangs striped white and red like peppermints. Its eyes were blue, rather than any proper lupine shade, and gleamed with a sort of demented awareness.

Distorted, clawed hands hung the bag of precious herbs around the thick, muscular neck of the wolf, and then the animal took off in a dead run, racing the climbing sun as it burned away the thick cloud covering. Fur began to smoke, and blisters rose beneath the thick pelt. Thunder cracked unexpectedly. Thick black clouds, heavy with rain, blew across the sky, providing Mikhail with dense cover from the sun. The storm rolled in over the forest fast, with wild winds kicking up leaves and swaying branches. A bolt of lightning sizzled across the sky in a fiery whip of dancing light. The sky darkened to an ominous cauldron of boiling clouds. Mikhail bounded into the cave and raced along the narrow maze of passages toward the main chamber, shape-shifting as he ran. Gregori’s cool silver gaze slid over him as Mikhail relinquished the herbs. “It is a wonder you have been able to tie your shoes without me all of these centuries.” Mikhail sank down beside his brother, one hand over his burning eyes. “It is more of a wonder you have stayed alive with your ostentatious displays. Remind me to remove my impressionable brother from your disrespectful presence before your winning ways rub off on him.

Poruszyła się na pięcie, odkryła dokładnie tego, którego się spodziewała. Hawke. Jasne oczy wilka alfa była jeszcze bardziej uderzające, a jego włosy wyjątkowo srebrno-złote. Utrzymując jego spojrzenie, podniosła dłoń. Memory stała w bezruchu, jej serce waliło, ale nie wzdrygnęła się, kiedy ujął jej policzek. Głęboki zapach akceptacji, pierwotna opiekuńczość , dzikie uczucie, wpływało do jej duszy. Właśnie dlatego był alfą. Ponieważ miał zdolność do trzymania każdego członka sfory w swoim sercu. „Jesteś teraz jedną z moich”- powiedział, odgarniając jej włosy drugą ręką zanim pochylił się, by pocałować ją w policzek. „Dzika, ocalała, wojowniczka, sprawiasz, że całe stado będzie dumne.” Oczy piekły ją z niesamowitej siły akceptacji. Memory przytuliła go.

But

Knud Ulfson did not like those words; but he knew that Harald Sigurdson never spoke unless he meant what he said. Indeed, along the fjord there was a fire-saying which went: ‘Thunder threatens but may not strike; Rain threatens but may blow over; Wolf snarls but may not bite; When Harald snarls, your life is over.

Ages before men had lived on the earth, there had been the creatures of the wilderness, and the holes of the rocks and the nests of the trees, and rain, frost, heat, dew, sunlight, and night, storm and calm, the honey of the wild flower and the instinct of the bee-all the beautiful and multiple forms of life with their inscrutable design. To know something of them and to love them was to be close to the kingdom of earth-perhaps to the greater kingdom of heaven. For whatever breathed and moved was a part of that creation. The coo of the dove, the lichen on the mossy rock, the mourn of a hunting wolf, and the murmur of the waterfall, the ever-green and growing tips of the spruces and the thunderbolts along the battlements of the heights-these one and all must be actuated by the Great Spirit-that incalculable thing in the universe that had produced man and soul.

Valholl contained 540 doors. From each there emerged simultaneously 800 warriors who spent their days fighting one another, but the dead and wounded found their lives and health restored every evening. They then dined together, eating the flesh of the wild boar Saehrimnir, which always grew back, and drinking the mead served them by the Valkyries. This would continue until the Twilight of the Powers (Ragnarok), which Wagner immortalized under the name of Twilight of the Gods. At this time, three cocks would crow in Hel; the wolf Fenris would become free; the earth would convulse; Yggdrasil the World Tree would tremble; the sun and moon would vanish; the stars would go out; the Midgard Serpent would leave the sea; the giants would set sail on Naglfar; Surt, the fire giant, would advance by rain-bow; and, at the sides of the gods, the Unique Warriors would engage in their ultimate battle, a combat that would culminate with the conflagration of the world.

I should have felt a loneliness close to despair, there, in the night, in the rain, a thousand miles from home. What I felt instead was uncommon joy. What was there to long for, where all I wanted was what I suddenly had?—to be fully part of the night, joined by a song, by a simple shared song, to the loon, to the wolf, to the keening of all humankind, all of us together in this one infinite night, all of us floating in the same darkness, each of us, as we howl our loneliness, finding that we are not alone after all.

Etymologically, paroikia (a compound word from para and oikos) literally means “next to” or “alongside of the house” and, in a technical sense, meant a group of resident aliens. This sense of “parish” carried a theological context into the life of the Early Church and meant a “Christian society of strangers or aliens whose true state or citizenship is in heaven.” So whether one’s flock consists of fifty people in a church which can financially sustain a priest or if it is merely a few people in a living room whose priest must find secular employment, it is a parish. This original meaning of parish also implies the kind of evangelism that accompanies the call of a true parish priest. A parish is a geographical distinction rather than a member-oriented distinction. A priest’s duties do not pertain only to the people who fill the pews of his church on a Sunday morning. He is a priest to everyone who fills the houses in the “cure” where God as placed him. This ministry might not look like choir rehearsals, rector’s meetings, midweek “extreme” youth nights, or Saturday weddings. Instead, it looks like helping a battered wife find shelter from her abusive husband, discretely paying a poor neighbor’s heating oil bill when their tank runs empty in the middle of a bitter snow storm, providing an extra set of hands to a farmer who needs to get all of his freshly-baled hay in the barn before it rains that night, taking food from his own pantry or freezer to help feed a neighbor’s family, or offering his home for emergency foster care. This kind of “parochial” ministry was best modeled by the old Russian staretzi (holy men) who found every opportunity to incarnate the hands and feet of Christ to the communities where they lived. Perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer caught a glimpse of the true nature of parish life through his introduction of the “Parson” in the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. Note how the issues of sacrifice, humility, and community mentioned above characterize this Parson’s cure even when opportunities were available for “greater” things: "There was a good man of religion, a poor Parson, but rich in holy thought and deed. He was also a learned man, a clerk, and would faithfully preach Christ’s gospel and devoutly instruct his parishioners. He was benign, wonderfully diligent, and patient in adversity, as he was often tested. He was loath to excommunicate for unpaid tithes, but rather would give to his poor parishioners out of the church alms and also of his own substance; in little he found sufficiency. His parish was wide and the houses far apart, but not even for thunder or rain did he neglect to visit the farthest, great or small, in sickness or misfortune, going on foot, a staff in his hand… He would not farm out his benefice, nor leave his sheep stuck fast in the mire, while he ran to London to St. Paul’s, to get an easy appointment as a chantry-priest, or to be retained by some guild, but dwelled at home and guarded his fold well, so that the wolf would not make it miscarry… There was nowhere a better priest than he. He looked for no pomp and reverence, nor yet was his conscience too particular; but the teaching of Christ and his apostles he taught, and first he followed it himself." As we can see, the distinction between the work of worship and the work of ministry becomes clear. We worship God via the Eucharist. We serve God via our ministry to others. Large congregations make it possible for clergy and congregation to worship anonymously (even with strangers) while often omitting ministry altogether. No wonder Satan wants to discredit house churches and make them “odd things”! Thus, while the actual house church may only boast a membership in the single digits, the house church parish is much larger—perhaps into the hundreds as is the case with my own—and the overall ministry is more like that of Christ’s own—feeding, healing, forgiving, engaging in all the cycles of community life, whether the people attend

Come out, White-Eyes,” the voice called. “I bring gifts, not bloodshed.” Henry, wearing nothing but his pants and the bandages Aunt Rachel had wrapped around his chest the night before, hopped on one foot as he dragged on a boot. By the time he reached the window, he had both boots on, laces flapping. Rachel gave him a rifle. He threw open the shutter and jerked down the skin, shoving the barrel out the opening. “What brings you here?” “The woman. I bring many horses in trade.” Loretta ran to the left window, throwing back the shutters and unfastening the membrane to peek out. The Comanche turned to meet her gaze, his dark eyes expressionless, penetrating, all the more luminous from the black graphite that outlined them. Her hands tightened on the rough sill, nails digging the wood. He looked magnificent. Even she had to admit that. Savage, frightening…but strangely beautiful. Eagle feathers waved from the crown of his head, the painted tips pointed downward, the quills fastened in the slender braid that hung in front of his left ear. His cream-colored hunting shirt enhanced the breadth of his shoulders, the chest decorated with intricate beadwork, painted animal claws, and white strips of fur. He wore two necklaces, one of bear claws, the other a flat stone medallion, both strung on strips of rawhide. His buckskin breeches were tucked into knee-high moccasins. Her gaze shifted to the strings of riderless ponies behind him. She couldn’t believe their number. Thirty? Possibly forty? Beyond the animals were at least sixty half-naked warriors on horseback. Loretta wondered why Hunter had come fully clothed in all his finery with wolf rings painted around his eyes. The others wore no shirts or feathers, and their faces were bare. “I come for the woman,” the Comanche repeated, never taking his gaze from her. “And I bring my finest horses to console her father for his loss. Fifty, all trained to ride.” His black sidestepped and whinnied. The Indian swayed easily with his mount. “Send me the woman, and have no fear. She will come to no harm walking in my footsteps, for I am strong and swift. She will never feel hunger, for I am a fine hunter. My lodge will shelter her from the winter rain, and my buffalo robes will shield her from the cold. I have spoken it.

Its appearance was so numbingly horrific that she, unlike Whitney, was unable to scream; she tried, but her voice failed her. The darkness and rain mercifully concealed many details of the mutant form, but she had an impression of a massive and misshapen head, jaws that resembled a cross between those of a wolf and a crocodile, and an abundance of deadly teeth. Shirtless and shoeless, clad only in jeans, it was a few inches taller than Eric had been, and its spine curved up into hunched and deformed shoulders. There was an immense expanse of breastbone that looked as if it might be covered with horns or spines of some sort, and with rounded knobby excrescences. Long and strangely jointed arms hung almost to its knees. The hands were surely just like the hands of demons who, in the fiery depths of hell, cracked open human souls and ate the meat of them.

forefinger. Her skin was soft, but she had acne on her forehead. His expression softened and he let go. “You did well today.” Her eyes dropped and stared through his heart. “I want you to look at me.” She did, and he saw himself at

I mean that it's like the way you feel about things,' she explained, 'when you hear the rain outside, while you're reading a book. You know what I mean? Oh, I can't put it into words! When you get a sudden feeling of life going on outside ... far away from where you sit ... over wide tracts of country ... as if you were driving in a carriage and all the things you passed were ... life itself ... parapets of bridges, with dead leaves blowing over them ... trees at crossroads ... park-railings ... lamp-lights on ponds ... I don't mean of course,' she went on, 'that philosophy is the same as life ... but—Oh! Can't you see what I mean?

Out in the frozen terrain of Antarctica, where no rain has fallen in two million years—in the land of bleached skies, of no dogs or children—Wolf Vishniac had been attempting to connect what was known about the geology of Mars to what he knew about biology on Earth, to understand whether microbes could survive the harsh conditions.

There is no such place as Paradise. Even if you search to the ends of the Earth, there's nothing at all. No matter how far you walk, it's just the same road, it just goes on and on.

Everyone's gonna die. It's a natural part of life. But if life has no purpose, you're dead already.

The world where you will go hand in hand with the Flower Maiden has neither perfect happiness, nor joy, nor life. This is because it also does not contain perfect sadness, nor misery, nor death. 

When are we born? When do we die? Why are we born? Why do we die? The world has been destroyed and reborn countless times, always resurrecting from the ashes as Paradise. It has happened before, and it will happen again. An endless cycle of life and death. The world is a Paradise that was opened by someone, but this era too is almost at an end. We have acquired the means to exceed our natural span of life, never suspecting that the world itself was finite in its existence. This knowledge has left me in despair. My fate has fallen, and scattered like the petals of a dying flower. Like the blast from a sand storm, it has been worn down and weathered away. As if to be purified, the world will be encased in ice, so that it can return to the beginning once more. Paradise is a world that is opened by someone...

The lass was sleeping and the realization made him smile. He liked that she trusted him so much. He also liked the way she cuddled into him as she did. He liked the heat of her body against his own too. And he liked her smell. Every time her hair whipped into his face, he got a whiff of wildflowers and spring rain. It made him want to duck his head and inhale her scent more fully, and when she sighed and shifted against him again, Conall did. He lowered his head until his nose brushed against her hair, inhaled deeply and closed his eyes as her aroma overwhelmed him, sweet and fresh despite the hours of travel. He wanted to run his hands through her glorious hair and bury his face in the soft tresses while continually inhaling.

Men who read are usually smart and sensitive—” “Oh, right, absolutely.” I nodded, struggling to bite back a teasing grin. “Like this guy I knew, Wolf. He was a big reader like me. Really liked the classics especially. Super-sensitive dude. Like, this one time, he caught this other guy crying on the phone, and he just”—I flicked my wrist for emphasis—“whipped the dude in the throat

Frasi inizio Bleach Volume 56 – March of the starcross – Quilge Opie L'armata marcia al suono della tromba Il ronzio nelle orecchie non si arresta, come polvere di stelle Il rombo degli stivali, come il tuono Volume 57 – OUT OF BLOOM – Byakuya Kuchiki Benché una volta sfioriti rifiorire non potremo come fiamme con leggiadria sfioriremo Volume 58 – THE FIRE – Shigekuni Genryūsai Yamamoto Arde l'anima benché scenda la pioggia Volume 59 – THE BATTLE – Retsu Unohana La battaglia è tutto. Volume 60 – EVERYTHING BUT THE RAIN – Masaki Kurosaki Nella tua innocenza, tu sei come il sole anche nella tua colpevolezza sei come il sole Volume 61 – THE LAST 9 DAYS – Vecchio Zangetsu (Manifestazione dei poteri Quincy di Ichigo) Io credo fermamente che il mondo sia saturo di pericoli e il mio desiderio di proteggerti da esso nasce proprio perché dentro di me esiste un impulso della stessa natura di quel pericolo Volume 62 – HEART OF WOLF – Sajin Komamura Continua a combattere per tutta la vita finché il tuo cuore resta armato di zanne Volume 63 – HEAR, FEAR, HERE – Äs Nödt Non vi è differenza tra il vivere e l'essere lasciato vivere Come non vi è differenza tra il morire e l'essere ucciso Volume 64 – DEATH IN VISION – Gremmy Thomeaux La bellezza è che lì non vi sia nulla Volume 65 – MARCHING OUT THE ZOMBIES – Giselle Gewelle Mi piaci. Da morire.

Anne Cromwell sits with him, as the rain falls, and writes her beginner's Latin in her copy book. By St John's Day she knows all common verbs. She is quicker than her brother and he tells her so. ‘Let me see,’ he says, holding out his hand for her book. He finds that she has written her name over and over, ‘Anne Cromwell, Anne Cromwell …