Rounding Quotes (page 21)
-
-
-
So the days slipped away, as each morning dawned bright and fair, and each evening followed cool and clear. But autumn was waning fast; slowly the golden light faded to pale silver, and the lingering leaves fell from the naked trees. A wind began to blow chill from the Misty Mountains to the east. The Hunter's Moon waxed round in the night sky, and put to flight all the lesser stars. But low in the South one star shone red. Every night, as the Moon waned again, it shone brighter and brighter....
J. R. R. Tolkien
Islands of memory begin to rise above the river of his life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight of the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new islands, touched to gold by the sun.
Romain Rolland
She thinks I've let myself down,' he was saying. 'But I haven't. I'm doing perfectly okay. Endless horizons are all very well when you're young. But get to your age, you've got to ... you've got to get some perspective. That's what kept going round in my head whenever she got unbearable about it. Perspective, she needs perspective. And I kept saying to myself, look, I'm doing okay. Look at loads of other people, people we know. Look at Ray. Look what a pig's arse he's making of his life. She...
Kazuo Ishiguro
The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail. Call no man happy till he dies, there's no milk at the bottom of the pail. God builds a church and the devil builds a chapel, like the thistles that are growing 'round the trunk of a tree. All the good in the world you could put inside a thimble, and still have room for you and me. If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always coming...
Tom Waits
Before being taken to the Morgue, the body is left for a while on the embankment so they can try reviving it. A massive crowd gathers round the body. Those unable to see because they are at the back jostle those in front as best they can. Each thinks: “I wouldn’t be drowning myself, not I.” They pity the young suicide, admire him, but do not imitate him. He, however, found it quite natural to give himself death, deeming nothing on earth able to content him, and aspiring higher.
Comte de Lautreamont
We dressed ourselves up as Gauguin pictures and careered round Crosby Hall. Mrs. Whitehead was scandalized. She said that Vanessa and I were practically naked. My mother's ghost was invoked once more...to deplore the fact that I had taken a house in Brunswick Square and had asked young men to share it...Stories began to circulate about parties at which we all undressed in public. Logan Pearsall Smith told Ethel Sands that he knew for a fact that Maynard had copulated with Vanessa on a sofa in...
Virginia Woolf
The Frenchman sat up with that strange energy which comes often as the harbinger of death. "(...) This I tell you - I, Raoul de la Roche Pierre de Bras, dying upon the field of honour. And now kiss me, sweet friend, and lay me back, for the mists closes round me and I am gone!"With tender hands the squire [Nigel] lowered his comrade's head, but even as he did so there came a choking rush of blood, and the soul had passed. So died a gallant cavalier of France, and Nigel, as he knelt in the...
Arthur Conan Doyle