Air Quotes (page 41)
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The dove descending breaks the air. With flame of incandescent terror. Of which the tongues declare. The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair. Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name. Behind the hands that wove. The intolerable shirt of flame. Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire. Consumed by either fire or fire.
T. S. Eliot
They met me in the day of success: and I havelearned by the perfectest report, they have more inthem than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desireto question them further, they made themselves air, into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt inthe wonder of it, came missives from the king, whoall-hailed me 'Thane of Cawdor;' by which title, before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referredme to the coming on of time, with 'Hail, king thatshalt be!' This have I thought good to...
William Shakespeare
He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend’s house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.
Ray Bradbury
If the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed, Kuwait would today be the nineteenth province of Iraq. Bosnia would be a trampled and cleansed province of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been emptied of most of its inhabitants, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. Yet nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority of those that intone the "peace movement".
Christopher Hitchens
And the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed - almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon. How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one...
Katherine Mansfield
-why had she found the story so absorbing? Of course it was quite possible she hadn't. Maybe she merely preferred a novel--any novel--to reading a newspaper or chatting with the girls she worked with all day. And maybe she always read like that--with an air of having surrendered totally to a spell.
James Hilton