Fire Quotes (page 35)
You must know that I do not love and that I love you,
because everything alive has its two sides;
a word is one wing of silence,
fire has its cold half.
I love you in order to begin to love you,
to start infinity again
and never to stop loving you:
that’s why I do not love you yet.
I love you, and I do not love you, as if I held
keys in my hand: to a future of joy-
a wretched, muddled fate-
My love has two lives, in order to love you.
-Sonnet XLIV
Pablo Neruda
Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back! Stand beside me, Athena, fire me with daring, fierceas the day we ripped Troy's glittering crown of towers down. Stand by me - furious now as then, my bright-eyed one -and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess, with you to brace me, comrade-in-arms in battle!
Homer
There was a sudden, shocking sound that echoed through Garion's head like an explosion."What was that?" Zakath exclaimed."You heard it, too?" Garion was amazed. "You shouldn't have been able to hear it!"It shook the earth, Garion. Look there." Zakath pointed off toward the north where a huge pillar of fire was soaring up toward the murky, starless sky. "What is it?"Aunt Pol did something. She's never that clumsy..."Belgarath and Beldin were both pale and shaken, and even Durnik seemed...
David Eddings
Gripped with bitter cold, ice-locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shuffling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog - to the left, to the right, above, below - a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog - heard in the misty world as words, but here...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Because that’s really something I can’t stand — when people refer to themselves as crazy. The truly crazy are labeled so on the grounds that they see nothing wrong with their behavior. They forge ahead, lighting fires in public buildings and defecating in frying pans without the slightest notion that they are out of step with the rest of society. That, to me, is crazy.
David Sedaris
"Well then! it was the end; his ruin was complete. Even if he mended the cables and lit the fires, where would he find men? Another fortnight's strike and he would be bankrupt. And in this certainty of disaster he no longer felt any hatred of the Montsou bandits; he felt that all had a hand in it, that it was a general agelong fault. They were brutes, no doubt, but brutes who could not read, and who were dying of hunger.
Emile Zola