Headlong Quotes
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One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke....
H. G. Wells
Tie your heart at night to mine, love, and both will defeat the darknesslike twin drums beating in the forestagainst the heavy wall of wet leaves. Night crossing: black coal of dreamthat cuts the thread of earthly orbswith the punctuality of a headlong trainthat pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly. Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement, to the grip on life that beats in your breast, with the wings of a submerged swan, So that our dream might replyto the sky's questioning starswith...
Pablo Neruda
My dear fellow,' Burlingame said, 'we sit here on a blind rock careening through space; we are all of us rushing headlong to the grave. Think you the worms will care, when anon they make a meal of you, whether you spent your moment sighing wigless in your chamber, or sacked the golden towns of Montezuma? Lookee, the day's nigh spent; 'tis gone careening into time forever. Not a tale's length past we lined our bowels with dinner, and already they growl for more. We are dying men, Ebenezer:...
John Barth
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me; Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all. Bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers, Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence. Worse than Abiram's. Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice. Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgement, in a fleshy tomb, am. Buried above ground.
William Cowper
She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me? and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this 'must'. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony,...
Yevgeny Zamyatin
when the years have all passed, there will gape the uncomfortable and unpredictable dark void of death, and into this I shall at last fall headlong, down and down and down, and the prospect of that fall, that uprooting, that rending apart of body and spirit, that taking off into so blank an unknown, drowns me in mortal fear and mortal grief. After all, life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and of...
Rose Macaulay
I cannot tell if what the world considers ‘happiness’ is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.
Zhuangzi
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's to late.
Frank Herbert
When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.
Annie Dillard
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