After The Snow Quotes & Sayings

Never will she be mine; never. I never brought a flush to her cheek, and it is not I who now have made it so chalk-white. And never will she slip across the street in the night, with anxiety in her heart and a letter to me.
Life has passed me by.
[..] I have got new curtains for my study; pure white. When I awoke this morning, I first thought it had been snowing. In my room the light was exactly as it is after the first fall of snow. I even fancied I caught the scent of snow freshly fallen. And soon it will come, the snow. One feels it in the air.
It will be welcome. Let it come. Let it fall. — Hjalmar Soderberg

A Farewell For a while I shall still be leaving, Looking back at you as you slip away Into the magic islands of the mind. But for a while now all alive, believing That in a single poignant hour We did say all that we could ever say In a great flowing out of radiant power. It was like seeing and then going blind. After a while we shall be cut in two Between real islands where you live And a far shore where I'll no longer keep The haunting image of your eyes, and you, As pupils widen, widen to deep black And I am able neither to love or grieve Between fulfillment and heartbreak. The time will come when I can go to sleep. But for a while still, centered at last, Contemplate a brief amazing union, Then watch you leave and then let you go. I must not go back to the murderous past Nor force a passage through to some safe landing, But float upon this moment of communion Entranced, astonished by pure understanding - Passionate love dissolved like summer snow. — May Sarton

I divined and chose a distant place to dwell
T'ien-t'ai; what more is there to say?

Monkeys cry where valley mists are cold,
My grass gate blends with the color of the crags,
I pick leaves to thatch a hut among the pines,
Scoop out a pond and lead a runnel from the spring.

By now I am used to doing without the world,
Picking ferns, I pass the years that are left.
The trail to Cold Mountain is faint
the banks of Cold Stream are a jungle

birds constantly chatter away
I hear no sound of people
gusts of wind lash my face

flurries of snow bury my body
day after day, no sun
year after year no spring. — Hanshan

Neither Blane nor I are your happily-ever-after princess. Blane will break your heart, and I'm the guy your mom warned you about. Don't kid yourself about that. — Tiffany Snow

The snow came after two o' clock. It fell faintly in the cones of lamplight, descending like fleets or fairies through the cold sky. I was awake - the only one in town, I was sure - and I was sure those miniature fallen sylphs were for me and my personal delectation. They came for me, because nature likes a saint. They settled on my window sill, they collected on the dark grass of my lawn, they danced and whirled in the wind gusts before my eyes. I put my hand to the windowpane to greet it, the first snow. By the time I woke in the morning, I saw that after the snow had come to me, it had visited everyone. — Joshua Gaylord

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up. — Cormac McCarthy

Ordinarily it ends in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason, right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph, insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a swamp. — Victor Hugo

Every day, soon after lunch, at a time when most people stayed indoors, enjoying a siesta, a dapper little old man stepped out on the balcony on the other side of the street. He had a soldierly bearing, very erect, and affected a military style of dressing; his snow-white hair was always brushed to perfect smoothness. Leaning over the balcony he would call: — Albert Camus

All the boundaries of the world disappeared after a good snow. Nathan had always noticed that. The seemingly sturdy, dependable dividing lines between his yard and his neighbor's yard, or the sidewalk and the street, simply disappeared. Erased by white.
As if the world were advising him not to put too much faith in such markings. That perhaps these lines had never been entirely real to begin with. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

It's unknown to the common human being that most of the characters in fairy tales are real immortals living among us. Some of them know who they are and some of them don't. Living too long can make you forget who you really are and what you were meant to be.They lived before you were born, and will continue to live after you die. That is why they are carved in the inner skeletons of your soul like a birthmark. The fact that you have been introduced to them in books does not mean they didn't exist in your dreams since long ago. — Cameron Jace

He pushes his hair, soaked from the snow, out of his eyes. "So what are we going to do, break a window? Look for a back door?"
"I'm just going to walk in," I say. "I'm her son."
"You also betrayed her and left the city when she forbade anyone from doing that," he says, "and she sent people after you to stop you. People with guns."
"You can stay here if you want," I say.
"Where the serum goes, I go," he says. "But if you get shot at, I'm going to grab it and run."
"I don't expect anything more."
He is a strange sort of person. — Veronica Roth

Sadness and love and pain, they're easy to feel- but not luck. — S.D. Crockett

So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves. — Herman Melville

I have it on good authority-from the roads department chief, Mr. Arpin-that it will not snow after the fifteenth of March. — Jean Drapeau

One morning after a beautiful fall of snow, I had reason to write a letter to an acquaintance, but I omitted to make any mention of the snow. I was delighted when she responded, 'Do you expect me to pay any attention to the words of someone so perverse that he fails to enquire how I find this snowy landscape? What deplorable insensitivity! — Yoshida Kenko

Now I know that strange things happen to your body when it meets the snow at 100 mph, no matter what the position. In the twinkling of hitting the snow I regained a proper respect for speed. If you are inattentive, as well as somewhat stupid, you may breed a contempt for big speeds, forgetting respect through the grace of being atop your skis each run. No one on his back at 100 mph will ever after have contempt for speed. — Dick Dorworth

Although Vasili Andreevich felt quite warm in his two fur coats, especially after struggling in the snow drift, a cold shiver ran down his back on realizing that he must really spend the night where they were. — Leo Tolstoy

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars. — David Guterson

I know there's a consciousness energy that operates completely independent of the physical body you inhabit, that maintains ... awareness after the body's gone. — Phoebe Snow

Let me guess - you're Grumpy?'
He let out a humpf. ' And you would be too, if you'd just spent the last hour searching the forest for your wayward charge.' He walked even faster. 'We tell you to stay inside, we tell you not to talk to strangers. But oh no, you must be out singing to the animals as if the birds didn't do a fine enough job of it. And this after Queen Neferia has already tried to kill you thrice. [ ... ] Which is why you are not to go shopping anymore, no matter how pretty the wares, remember?'
Oh, right.'
[ ... ] when you looked at it that way, Snow White had to be pretty idiotic to keep falling for the same trick. — Janette Rallison

That cat doesn't have a lick of sense,' I said, sighing.
Well, honey, he's not right in the head,' Dad said, flipping his cigarette into the front yard.
I glared at him. 'And just what do you mean by that?'
Dad counted on his fingers. 'He's cross-eyed; he jumps out of trees after birds and then doesn't land on his feet; he sleeps with his head smashed up against the wall, and the tip of his tail is crooked.'
Oh yeah? Well, how about this: he once got locked in a basement by evil Petey Scroggs in the middle of January and survived on snow and little frozen mice. When I'm cold at night he sleeps right on my face. Of that whole litter of kittens he came out of he's the only one left. One of his brothers didn't even have a butthole.'
I stand corrected. PeeDink is a survivor. — Haven Kimmel

Outside, the sky was clear, stars gleaming in its ebony vastness like celestial fireflies. It was bitterly cold, and Hywel's every breath trailed after him in pale puffs of smoke. The glazed snow crackled underfoot as he started towards the great hall. — Sharon Kay Penman

The day before last, Jon had made the mistake of wishing he had hot water for a bath.
"Cold is better," she had said at once, "if you've got someone to warm you up after. The river's only part ice yet, go on."
Jon laughed. "You'd freeze me to death."
"Are all crows afraid of gooseprickles? A little ice won't kill you. I'll jump in with you to t'prove it so."
"And ride the rest of the day with wet clothes frozen to our skins?" he objected.
"Jon Snow, you know nothing. You don't go in with clothes."
"I don't go in at all," he said firmly, just before he heard Tormund Thunderfist bellowing for him (he hadn't, but nevermind). — George R R Martin

The moon grew plump and pale as a peeled apple, waned into the passing nights, then showed itself again as a thin silver crescent in the twilit western sky. The shed of leaves became a cascade of red and gold and after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon. — James Carlos Blake

After a snowstorm is the best time to be in the woods, because all the empty beer and soda cans and candy wrappers disappear, and you don't have to try as hard to be in another time. Plus there's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. — Carol Rifka Brunt

After 'Prom Night' I did two movies where I was playing a prostitute. I gravitate towards characters that have some sort of inner turmoil or some sort of character arc. That's the great thing about acting, so many different things and being really diverse in your choices. — Brittany Snow

Friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell. — Elizabeth Alexander

Playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. It inculcates the lunch-pail state of mind that shows up for work despite rain or snow or dark of night and slugs it out day after day. — Steven Pressfield

All finite things reveal infinitude: The mountain with its singular bright shade Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow, The after-light upon ice-burdened pines; Odor of basswood upon a mountain slope, A scene beloved of bees; Silence of water above a sunken tree: The pure serene of memory of one man,- A ripple widening from a single stone Winding around the waters of the world. — Theodore Roethke

I was sick of immigrants not getting the credit they deserved. I was sick of the Jean-Georges of the world making a killing on our ingredients and flavors because we were too stupid to package it the right way. I was sick of seeing other Asian kids like myself walking to school with their heads down. I was sick of seeing them picking snow peas in the dining room after school and I was sick of not having a voice in America...My main objective with Baohus was to become a voice for Asian Americans. (264) — Eddie Huang

Birds arrived. Gulls landed within weeks of the island's emergence, depositing the guano that built a richer soil. Fulmars and guillemots were the first to nest. Snow buntings and graylag geese came, almost ninety bird species in all, and twenty-one species of butterfly and moth. The first bush - a willow - came fifteen years after creation, and five years after the willows, seals were breeding on the young island. The descriptions make Surtsey sound like an orchestra, one instrument after another joining until there was the symphony that is an ecosystem. — Rebecca Solnit

After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken. — Margaret Atwood

In winter, the air is clear enough to drink, and your eyes can travel many hundreds of miles until they reach the green of the near hills, the blue-gray beyond them, and then the snow peaks far away, which rise in the sky with the sun, and remain suspended there, higher than imaginable, changing color and shape through the day. Every hour, they come closer, their massive flanks clearly visible, plumes of cloud smoking from their tips. After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth. — Anuradha Roy

Andersen himself believed that many of his finest stories were written after travels to Rome, Naples, Constantinople, and Athens in 1841. He returned to Copenhagen reinvigorated by the encounter with the 'Orient' and began inventing his own tales rather than relying on the folklore of his culture. Andersen believed that he had finally found his true voice, and 'The Snow Queen,' even if it does not mark a clean break with the earlier fairy tales, offers evidence of a more reflective style committed to forging new mythologies rather than producing lighthearted entertainments. — Maria Tatar

The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond. Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice. So there is magic beyond the Wall after all. — George R R Martin

Purple snow capped mountains marched off in either direction, with clouds floating around their middles like fluffy belts. In a massive valley between two of the largest peaks, a ragged wall of ice rose out of the sea, filling the entire gorge. The glacier was blue and white with streaks of black, so that it looked a hedge of dirty snow left behind on a sidewalk after a snowplow had gone by, only four million times as large. — Rick Riordan

God," said Benedict Fludd, "your God, that is, strides in and out of my life with no warning. One day he seems impossible - laughable, laughable - and the next, he is imperious." He stopped. He said "It is like the phases of the moon, maybe. Or the seasons of the sphere we live on, rolling in and out of the light, skeleton trees one day, and then snow, and afterwards the bright green veil and after that the full heat and shining. Only it is neither regular nor predictable. And there are - others - who stride in, when he takes himself off. Who seem persuasive. Like Hindoo demons who are gods in their own terms. — A.S. Byatt

I was an exceptionally freaked-out child. My earliest memories are of fear, as are pretty much all the memories that come after my earliest memories.
Growing up, I was afraid not only of all the commonly recognized and legitimate childhood dangers: the dark, strangers, the deep end of the swimming pool, but I was also afraid of an extensive list of completely benign things: snow, perfectly nice babysitters, cars, playgrounds, stairs, Sesame Street, the telephone, board games, the grocery store, sharp blades of grass, any new situation whatsoever, anything that dared to move, etc., etc., etc. — Elizabeth Gilbert

After we hung up, I took the joint. If I was going to die here, in the creepy basement out of a horror movie, in an epic snowstorm that was like an icy prison, with a wife unwilling to pretend-like Bananarama to maybe save her husband's life, I should at least go out with a smile on my face. — Eric Spitznagel

Go with polar bears, I say to myself. Polar bears at the North Pole. Baby polar bears scooting along after their mothers in the snow. Polar bears drinking Coca-Cola. — Cynthia Hand

Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is that she has made of my life. — Neil Gaiman

Our story ends happily ever after. It has to. We escape Battle Creek, pile into the car, and burn a strip of rubber down the highway. Fly away west, to the promised land. Our rooms will be lit by lava lamps and Christmas lights. Our lives will glow. Consciousness will rise and minds will expand, and beautiful boys in flannel shirts will make snow angels on our floor and write love letters on our ceiling with black polish and red lipstick. We will be their muses, and they will strum their guitars beneath our window, calling to us with a siren song. Come down come away with me. We will lean out of our tower, our hair swinging like Rapunzel's, and laugh, because nothing will carry us away from each other. — Robin Wasserman

Mohammad's face is serious. He takes another puff of his cigarette and coughs out dead air which, after leaving his lungs and hitting the outside world, takes its first breath on a journey to a fresher life. He drops his cigarette into the snow, places his foot over the burning end, twists his shoe to make sure it's out, and tells me he's trusting me. I have no idea what he's trusting me with, but whatever it is, it's so dangerous or evil he can't bring himself to speak of it out loud.
Hitler has just shared with me his plans for the final solution, and I've been subtly informed I have no choice but to come along for the ride. — Craig Stone

The trouble was, September didn't know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it was merry, she might dash after a Spoon and it would all be a grand adventure, with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party at the end with red lanterns. But if it was a serious tale, she might have to do something important, something involving with snow and arrows and enemies. — Catherynne M Valente

She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone. — William Gibson

I'm falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below. — Ashly Lorenzana

I drive a lot in the summertime, but after that, I don't drive if there's snow predicted for anywhere in 500 miles. — R.L. Stine

I think my least favorite hair color was the hair color that I had in 'Pitch Perfect 2.' They really wanted me to be dark red, and I wanted to be lighter like I was in the first movie, but they didn't want that. But I rocked some light red for a year, after it faded. — Brittany Snow

When the full moon was out the other night, it created one of the most spectacular scenes that I have seen in the Alps. The high glaciers of the Mont Blanc range were glowing an eerie bright blue-white, and they looked like huge ghost ships in the dark ocean of sky, sailing amongst black mountain valleys.

There were no clouds, and the moon was a huge and perfect disc tracking across the sky, shining on different parts of the glaciers through the night.

Looking up, I saw the black silhouette of the mid-altitude mountains below the ethereal shining high-mountain terrain, which created a weird vision: the ghostly glaciers floating, and appearing separate, contrasting sharply with the dark valleys beneath.

The Aiguille Verte especially, being so steep and isolated, seemed almost like a holographic mast with sails, plowing into the rolling waves, chasing after the Mont Blanc summit with its billowing spinnaker... — Steve Baldwin

Even so, [ ... in the silence after a winter storm has ceased to howl, in the soft whisper of a morning snowfall, in the way the moonlight sparkles over new-fallen snow, you can feel when she has been near by, ever searching. You can sense the presence of the Winter Child. — Cameron Dokey

A storm caught them on the way. The fisherman drowned, but his daughter got Stark to the Sisters before the boat went down. They say he left her with a bag of silver and a bastard in her belly. Jon Snow, she named him, after Arryn. — George R R Martin

It was the stuff of legends, the Highland Rising of 1745 in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Sebastian had heard the stories, too, from his grandmother, Hendon's mother, who had been a Grant from Glenmoriston. Stories of unarmed clansmen dragged out of crofts and slaughtered before their screaming children. Of women and children burned alive, or turned out of their villages to die in the snow. What was done to the Highlanders after Culloden would forever be a dark stain on the English soul. Everything from the pipes to the plaids to the Gaelic language itself had been forbidden, obliterating an entire culture. — C.S. Harris

You know, sometimes I do hear funny things on that side. Things you wouldn't ordinarily think have a sound. Like insect wings. Or snow hitting the ground." Perfect. Now all the attention will turn to the surgeons who fixed my deaf ear after the Games last year, and they'll have to explain why I can hear like a bat. — Suzanne Collins

[it] isn't something you just get over. You don't go back to being who you were. It's more like a snow globe. War shakes you up, and suddenly all those pieces of your life - muscles, bones, thoughts, beliefs, relationships, even your dreams - are floating in the air out of your grip. They'll come down. I'm here to tell you that, with hard work, you'll recover. But they'll never come down where they once were. You're a changed person after combat. Not better or worse, just different. — Luis Carlos Montalvan

I wasn't exactly a stranger to feeling like a princess - if you meant the princess in the first half of the fairy tale. Cinderella as a scullery maid. Snow White with the wicked stepmother. But I wasn't used to what life was like after you meet the prince, after the slipper fits, after the kiss wakes you from your slumber. It would take some getting used to. — Cara Lynn Shultz

So, O king, does the present life of man on earth seem to me, in comparison with the time which is unknown to us, as though a sparrow flew swiftly through the hall, coming in by one door and going out by the other, and you, the while, sat at meat with your captains and liegemen, in wintry weather, with a fire burning in your midst and heating the room, the storm raging out of doors and driving snow and rain before it. For the time for which he is within, the bird is sheltered from the storm, but after this short while of calm he flies out again into the cold and is seen no more. Thus the life of man is visible for a moment, but we know not what comes before it or follows after it. — Bede

They snatched the girl off her tire swing in the backyard and dragged her into the woods; her body made a shallow track in the snow, from her world to mine. I saw it happen. I didn't stop it.
It had been the longest, coldest winter of my life. Day after day under a pale, worthless sun. And the hunger- hunger that burned and gnawed, an insatiable master. — Maggie Stiefvater

I thought of the stone angel. I pictured the snow falling over it, two classes of snow rising on the top of its wings. So silent, the both of them, the angel and the snow. I pretended I was the stone angel. I close my eyes and pretended as hard as I could, and after a while I was convinced I could feel wings sprouting from my shoulders. I wanted to look, to see my wings, but I was an angel stone, so I could not move. — Jerry Spinelli

What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere ... — Timothy Findley

After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone- the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom. In the night, the stars convened, and the vast ghost of Machhapuchare radiated light, although there was no moon. — Peter Matthiessen

The table was prettily decorated with camellias from the orangery, and upon the snow-white tablecloth, amongst the clear crystal glasses, the old green wineglasses threw delicate little shadows, like the spirit of a pine forest in summer. The Prioress had on a grey taffeta frock with a very rare lace, a white lace cap with streamers, and her old diamond eardrops and brooches. The heroic strength of soul of old women, Boris thought, who with great taste and trouble make themselves beautiful - more beautiful, perhaps, than they have ever been as young women - and who still can hold no hope of awakening any desire in the hearts of men, is like a righteous man working at his good deeds even after he has abandoned his faith in a heavenly reward. — Karen Blixen

And this is the map of my heart, the landscape
after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is
a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me
tight, it's getting cold. — Richard Siken

I have heard that you should not do bed business after too much hard work, " Snow Flower told me, "but I don't believe that my mother-in-law has heard that." She looked exhausted. I felt the same way after visiting my husband's home-from the nonstop labor, from being polite, and from always being watched.
"This is the one rule my mother-in-law doesn't respect either," I commiserated. "Haven't they heard an exhausted well yields no water? — Lisa See

And when you and I are long forgot, they'll say, 'You should have heard them playing. You should have seen them marching, then.' And it'll snow again. But it'll no break 'til after the parade. And when we come back from the hill it'll be bitter cold, and a wee bit misty maybe, and pink over the roofs. I see it fine. — James Kennaway

black-cloaked monsters chased after me. I shoved helplessly through the brittle pine trees, leafless branches clawing at my flesh. Snow flooded my sneakers, soaking higher and higher on my jeans with every step I took. — Jessica Sorensen

After the dark starry night came a bright, cheerful morning. The snow melted in the sun, the horses galloped swiftly, and to right and left alike passed new and various forests, fields, villages. — Leo Tolstoy

Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being heroic, it usually means we're about to kill each other
or kill ourselves. — Orhan Pamuk

She got out and shut the door without looking back, picking her way through the snow to the black wooden door in the college wall. At least she hadn't told him not to follow. He watched as she carefully brushed the snow off the latch with her rolled umbrella before touching it with her suede gloves. She left the door half open behind her. He followed. When he reached the door he saw she had paused on the garden path leading to her hall and was doing something in the snow with the tip of her umbrella. Still not looking back, she moved on without waiting for him. When he reached the spot he saw that she had written 'I love you' in the snow. It was that night, he believed ever after, that she became pregnant. — Alan Judd

We trust in plumed procession
For such the angels go
Rank after rank, with even feet/And uniforms of snow. — Emily Dickinson

This initial numbness and denial is shock and it is a gift. Shock is a grace period. It gives a woman time to gather what she needs around her, before the exhaustion and panic set in like a heavy snow. Shock allows her time to circle her people so that she can enter the hard work of grief, which will require all of her. Shock is the window offered after the fall so a woman can prepare herself for winter. Two — Glennon Doyle Melton

Do you love her" Wulfgar asked suddenly, and the drow was off his guard.
"Of course I do," Drizzt responded truthfully. "As I love you, and Bruenor, and Regis."
"I would not interfere-" Wulfgar started to say, but he was stopped by Drizzt's chuckle.
"The choice is neither mine nor yours," the drow explained, "but Catti-brie's. Remember, what you had, my friend, and remember what you, in your foolishness, nearly lost."
Wulfgar looked long and hard at his dear friend, determined to heed that wise advice. Catti-brie's life was Catti-brie's to decide and whatever, or whomever, she chose, Wulfgar would always be among friends.
The winter would be long and cold, thick with snow and mercifully uneventful. Things would not be the same between the friends, could never be after all they had experienced, but they would be together again, in heart and in soul. Let no man, and no fiend, ever try to separate them again! — R.A. Salvatore

The summer lasted a long long time, like verse after verse of a ballad, but when it ended, it ended like a man falling dead in the street of heart trouble. One night, all in one night, severe winter came, a white horse of snow rolling over Bountiful, snorting and rolling in its meadows, its fields. — Ardyth Kennelly

We discover a new world every time we see the earth again after it has been covered for a season with snow. — Henry David Thoreau

Let the winds blow, lad
Let fall the deep snow.
Let the stars fall, lad
We'll answer the call.
Let the dark come, lad
Ask not where it's from.
After the fight, lad
We'll see morning's light — Jennifer A. Nielsen

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go. — William Blake

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had. — Sylvia Plath

It was closing in on midnight, the kind of midnight you only get on Uranus after a three day bender. Ultramarine fog reeking of ethanol and neon and some passing whore's rosewater. Snow piled up like bodies in tbhe street. Twenty-seven moons lighting up what ought to be a respectable witching hour so you can't help but see yourself staring back in every slick glowpink skyscraper. — Catherynne M Valente

Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt's eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina. I often think of that when I hear people say they haven't time to read. — David McCullough

They gathered after mass, sang hymns and read. Everyone had grown even more serene; beneath the sisters' kerchiefs it was as if there were no faces. When they met Daryushka - it was as if they bowed down lower. She was walking in the Spirit.

Daryushka was entirely serene. She was thinking of nothing, had turned within herself, peering inside; and inside her all was smiling ever so gently.

After the storm clear days came, frosty, crackling, clear days. Snow and sky, snow and sky, and the sky was even brighter, whiter, from the snow - and the snow sparkled with blue fires from the sky.

Daryushka went down to the river with buckets, to the ice-hole. She went down to the landing alone... Snow, and sky, and brilliance...

("He Has Descended") — Zinaida Gippius

Snegiryov, fussing and bewildered, ran after the coffin in his old, short, almost summer coat, bare-headed, with his old wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand. He was in some sort of insoluble anxiety, now reaching out suddenly to support the head of the coffin, which only interfered with the bearers, then running alongside to see if he could find a place for himself. A flower fell on the snow, and he simply rushed to pick it up, as if God knows what might come from the loss of this flower. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you'll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favourite promontories — Orhan Pamuk

The reason we were with Mama that day was because it was a snow day. School was canceled, but we were too little to stay alone in our apartment while Mama went to work - which she did, through snow and sleet and probably also earthquakes and Armageddon. She muttered, stuffing us into our snowsuits and boots, that it didn't matter if she had to cross a blizzard to do it, but God forbid Ms. Mina had to spread the peanut butter on her own sandwich bread. In fact the only time I remember Mama taking time off work was twenty-five years later, when she had a double hip replacement, generously paid for by the Hallowells. She stayed home for a week, and even after that, when it didn't quite heal right and she insisted on returning to work, Mina found her tasks to do that kept her off her feet. But when I was little, during school vacations and bouts of fever and snow days like this one, Mama would take us with her on the B train downtown. Mr. — Jodi Picoult

Come on, I said, taking his hand. Clutching the afghan with the other hand, he trailed down the hall after me, a snow white giant in tiny red underwear. — Charlaine Harris

Snow ... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand. — Mark Haddon

Presently, one after another, like shyly hopping sparrows, her friends arrived, black against the snow. — Marcel Proust

Going after someone unknown in the dark and cold and almost-snow - that wasn't brave. That was exceedingly stupid. — Jodi Meadows

The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. — Bede

Chilled-looking people walking along the riverside, the snow beginning, faintly, to pile up on the roofs of cars, the bare trees shaking their heads left and right, dry leaves tossing in the wind. The silver of the metal window sash sparkling coldly.
Soon after, I heard sensei call, "Mikage! Are you awake? It's snowing, look! It's snowing!"
"I'm coming!" I called out, standing up. I got dressed to begin another day. Over and over, we begin again. — Banana Yoshimoto

Nonetheless, after we've dropped off the birds and volunteered to go back to the woods to gather kindling for the evening fire, I find myself wrapped in his arms. His lips brushing the faded bruises on my neck, working their way to my mouth. Despite what I feel for Peeta, this is when I accept deep down that he'll never come back to me. Or I'll never go back to him. I'll stay in 2 until it falls, go to the Capitol and kill Snow, and then die for my trouble. And he'll die insane and hating me. So in the fading light I shut my eyes and kiss Gale to make up for all the kisses I've withheld, and because it doesn't matter any more, and because I'm so desperately lonely I can't stand it.
Gale's touch and taste and heat remind me that at least my body's still alive, and for the moment it's a welcome feeling. I empty my mind and let the sensations run through my flesh, happy to lose myself. — Suzanne Collins

Too cold even to snow - that winter presents a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowls the static like he used to prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein. A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it. There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot. Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some — Anthony Doerr

After every few steps, we huddle over our ice axes mouths agape, struggling for sufficient breath to keep our muscles going.... at a height of 8800 metres, we can no longer keep on our feet while we rest. We crumple to our knees, clutching our axes.... Every ten or fifteen steps we collapse into the snow to rest, then crawl on again. — Reinhold Messner

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action
is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let
run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can
only be dynamic. So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do. — Ray Bradbury

After the bone-grinding cold of the lands beyond the Wall, the caves were blessedly warm, and when the chill crept out of the rock the singers would light fires to drive it off again. Down here there was no wind, no snow, no ice, no dead things reaching out to grab you, only dreams and rushlight and the kisses of the ravens. And the whisperer in darkness. — George R R Martin

I walked down my snow covered street. Out of habit I turned and checked for my footsteps. When I arrived at my building I looked for my name on the buzzers. And because I know that sometimes I see things that aren't there, after dinner I called Information to ask if I was listed.(25) — Nicole Krauss

I have tasted a thrill in fellowship with God which has made anything discordant with God disgusting. This afternoon the possession of God has caught me up with such sheer joy that I thought I never had known anything like it. God was so close and so amazingly lovely that I felt like melting all over with a strange blissful contentment. Having had this experience, which comes to me now several times a week, the thrill of filth repels me, for I know its power to drag me from God. And after an hour of close friendship with God my soul feels as clean as new-fallen snow. — Frank C. Laubach

Only brooms
Know the devil
Still exists,
That the snow grows whiter
After a crow has flown over it — Charles Simic

Leaning against my car after changing the oil,
I hold my black hands out and stare into them
as if they were the faces of my children looking
at the winter moon and thinking of the snow
that will erase everything before they wake.
In the garage, my wife comes behind me
and slides her hands beneath my soiled shirt.
Pressing her face between my shoulder blades,
she mumbles something, and soon we are laughing,
wrestling like children among piles of old rags,
towels that unravel endlessly, torn sheets,
work shirts from twenty years ago when I stood
in the door of a machine shop, grease blackened,
and Kansas lay before me blazing with new snow,
a future of flat land, white skies, and sunlight.
After making love, we lie on the abandoned
mattress and stare at our pale winter bodies
sprawling in the half-light. She touches her belly,
the scar of our last child, and the black prints
of my hand along her hips and thighs. — B.H. Fairchild

When she smiles, it feels like the first warm day of March
after an eternity of snow, when you suddenly remember how summer feels on the backs of your bare calves & in the part of your hair. — Jodi Picoult

The dark and the snow are too thick for him to see beyond the first trees. He's been in there before at this time, when the dark shuts down in early winter. But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It's not a matter of one tree after another, it's all the trees together, aiding and abetting one another and weaving into one thing. A transformation, behind your back.
There's another name for the bush, and this name is stalking around in his mind, in and out of where he can almost grasp it. But not quite. It's a tall word that seems ominous but indifferent. — Alice Munro

The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. ("The Vane Sisters") — Vladimir Nabokov