Antient Quotes & Sayings

One of the cool, chaste countries - Canada or Sweden. — John Updike

Fire
Fire In The Heavens

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
and fire made solid in the flinty stone,
thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fills
the breathless hour that lives in fire alone.

This valley, long ago the patient bed
of floods that carv'd its antient amplitude,
in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,
endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.

Behind the veil of burning silence bound,
vast life's innumerous busy littleness
is hush'd in vague-conjectured blur of sound
that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless

some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng
in the cicada's torture-point of song. — Christopher John Brennan

The mage pulled my knife out of his side and looked at it. "Nice knife." The voice was deep but female.
I threw my second knife. The blade bit into the mage's chest. Shit. Missed the neck. "Here, have another one. — Ilona Andrews

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm. — Marina Warner

Moreover, you couldn't get animal sex and tight leather and sex toys along with something warm and comforting and meaningful. — Lacey Alexander

Oh, good. Okay, I'd like to get more sleep before I have to figure out how we find a Sith Lord in Washington. — Gini Koch

Mind over matter, will make the Pooh unfatter. — A.A. Milne

These days it seems that physical truth can easily be rearranged, rethought, or re-created outright. Any image can be made pristine, all the warts can be removed. But returning to the source of a thing - the real source - means the photographer has to watch, dig, listen for voices, sniff the smells, and have many doubts. My life in photography has been lived as a skeptic. — Jerome Liebling

People, like water, will run downhill, seeking their lowest level unless something interdicts them. — Cal Thomas

I considered 4 of these bills [of the revised code of Virginia] as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican. — Thomas Jefferson

It was like passing the scene of a highway accident and being relieved to learn that nobody had been seriously injured. — Martin Cruz Smith

The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science. — Adam Leith Gollner

Imperfection is my ticket, perfection is my pursuit — Paul Travis

The Indians , whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion. And if it be not so in this civiliz'd part of the world, we must impute it to a neglect in education, which has not yet reform'd this antient piece of barbarity amongst us. — John Locke

There's nothing in the world like buried treasure-and people hungry and obsessed enough to risk their lives for it. Pirate Hunters isn't just a good story-it's a true one. Searching for the souls of its explorers, it takes you to the far tip of the plank and plunges you deep to the bottom of the ocean. — Brad Meltzer

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love. — George Eliot