Clearing Quotes (page 39)
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On the beach, at dawn:
Four small stones clearly
Hugging each other.
How many kinds of love
Might there be in the world,
And how many formations might they make
And who am I ever
To imagine I could know
Such a marvelous business?
When the sun broke
It poured willingly its light
Over the stones
That did not move, not at all,
Just as, to its always generous term,
It shed its light on me,
My own body that loves,
Equally, to hug another body.
Mary Oliver
Since then your sere Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is...
Martin Luther
When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The...
John McPhee
I saw more clearly than ever, that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was, to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not, how much I might serve the Lord, how I might glorify the Lord; but how I might get my soul into a happy state, and how my inner man may be nourished...I saw that the most important thing I had to do was to give myself to the reading of the Word of God and to meditation on it.
George Muller
forests of monsterous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannible devils; mound like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion...insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.
H. P. Lovecraft
Walter from Microsoft catches my eye. Here's a young guy with perfect teeth and clear skin and the kind of job you bother to write the alumni magazine about getting. You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren't divorced, his father was never home, and here he's looking at me with half my face clean shaved and half a leering bruise hidden in the dark. Blood shining on my lips. And maybe Walter's thinking about a meatless, pain-free potluck he went to last weekend...
Chuck Palahniuk
In Dwimordene, in Lorien. Seldom have walked the feet of Men, Few mortal eyes have seen the light. That lies there ever, long and bright. Galadriel! Galadriel! Clear is the water of your well; White is the star in your white hand; Unmarred, unstained is leaf and land In Dwimordene, in Lorien. More fair than thoughts of Mortal Men.
J. R. R. Tolkien
He now clearly perceived the truth which was henceforth to be the centre of his life, namely, that while she was there, while he had her near him, he would need nothing except for her sake and fear nothing except on her account. He was not even conscious of feeling extremely cold, having taken off his coat to cover her.
Victor Hugo
Softly the breezes from the forest came, Softly they blew aside the taper's flame; Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower; Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower; Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone; Lovely the moon in ether, all alone: Sweet too, the converse of these happy mortals, As that of busy spirits when the portals. Are closing in the west; or that soft humming. We hear around when Hesperus is coming. Sweet be their sleep.
John Keats
Thank you from the bottom of my heart, but I don’t want my boy starting out with something like this over his head. Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open. Let the county come and bring sandwiches. I don’t want him growing up with a whisper about him, I don’t want anybody saying, ‘Jem Finch… his daddy paid a mint to get him out of that.
Harper Lee
Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one, in the night, when anxiety does not let me sleep, I only know this one. And what is devilish in it seems to me quite clear. It is the vanity and the craving for enjoyment, which is forever whirring around oneself or even around someone else...and enjoying it. The wish that a naive person sometimes has: "I would like to die and watch others crying over me," is what such a writer constantly experiences: he dies (or he does not...
Franz Kafka