Air Quotes (page 4)
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I sigh therefore I am . . . In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby’s first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover’s groan, unhappy lover’s lament, miser’s whine, crone’s croak, illness’s stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void.
A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
Salman Rushdie
Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.
Ernest Hemingway
A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.
Stendhal
I tried hard to forget, but there remained inside me a vague knot of air. And as time went by, the knot began to take on a clear and simpleform, a form that I am able to put into words, like this: Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It's a clich translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as wordsbut as that knot of air inside me. Death exists - in a paperweight, infour red and white balls on a pool table - and we go on living andbreathing it into our lungs like...
Haruki Murakami
There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes...
Josh Billings
Her strong enchantments failing, Her towers of fear in wreck, Her limbecks dried of poisons And the knife at her neck, The Queen of air and darkness Begins to shrill and cry,`O young man, O my slayer To-morrow you shall die.'O Queen of air and darkness I think 'tis truth you say, And I shall die to-morrow; But you shall die to-day.
A. E. Housman
I have longed to move away. From the hissing of the spent lie. And the old terrors' continual cry. Growing more terrible as the day. Goes over the hill into the deep sea; I have longed to move away. From the repetition of salutes, For there are ghosts in the air. And ghostly echoes on paper, And the thunder of calls and notes. I have longed to move away but am afraid; Some life, yet unspent, might explode. Out of the old lie burning on the ground, And, crackling into the air, leave me...
Dylan Thomas
