Across Quotes (page 27)
The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.
Cormac McCarthy
My writing, on the other hand, is always done with my readers in mind. I never write for my own amusement. I always try to put across an idea that I feel is important, in the most easily readable form I can manage. This has annoyed some of my academic colleagues, who feel that I am oversimplifying my subject, but I argue that at least my writings are widely read, while theirs stay firmly within the confines of their academic ivory towers. And I always work with one special rule in mind:...
Desmond Morris
Warm are the still and lucky miles, White shores of longing stretch away, A light of recognition fills. The whole great day, and bright. The tiny world of lovers' arms. Silence invades the breathing wood. Where drowsy limbs a treasure keep, Now greenly falls the learned shade. Across the sleeping brows. And stirs their secret to a smile. Restored! Returned! The lost are borne. On seas of shipwreck home at last: See! In a fire of praising burns. The dry dumb past, and we. Our life-day long...
W. H. Auden
Virginia Wolf wrote, 'Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword.' On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, 'all is confusion.' Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman,...
Elizabeth Gilbert
But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover—I undress her, I bathe...
J. M. Coetzee
As though she had entered a fable, as though she were no more than words crawling along a dry page, or as though she were becoming that page itself, that surface on which her story would be written and across which there blew a hot and merciless wind, turning her body to papyrus, her skin to parchment, her soul to paper.
Salman Rushdie