Beneath Clouds Quotes & Sayings

As the sun dipped beneath the horizon, the clouds overhead blushed cotton-candy pink. Their reflections gleamed on the crystalline waters of Lake Lyn. The horses whinnied, the birds chirped, and Simon and Isabelle crunched their peanut brittle and popcorn. This, Simon thought, was the sound of happiness. — Cassandra Clare

The Storms of This Life
Watching the distant clouds building and growing forevermore
The harsh wind begins rushing thru the leaves with the branches bending to and fro
In the attempts to not give in again I'm standing firm on all that I know
And extending out my hand reaching beyond the heavens above
Grasping for His strength to hold on, along with the endurance to make it thru
Praying that the ground beneath me will not erode nor engulf all that I love — Christine Upton

Everything had become song. The curve of the road beneath the clouds here, and there the strokes of dark earth, the green and the gray, the torn pink of clay and gravel under fingertips. The consonance was above all that of the muffled shadow and grass to the depths of sky, where a flutter of cheerful feathers quivered.

In these dreams there are also black walnut trees, and then a forest that opens in a breeze. Nothing. Nothing more than the obstinate sound of wind. — Deborah Heissler

Painful sunlight spilled into Darcy's bedroom. He groaned and buried his head beneath his pillow.

"Good morning, Master Darcy," called Niles's cheerful voice. "Nice day out; just a few clouds. Might have some rain later today. What would you like for your breakfast?"

"Darkness," Darcy growled into his pillow. "And more sleep."

Niles clicked his tongue and walked over to his master's bed. "You've got a town to rule and a castle to mope around. And it's a bright, beautiful day! — Emma Clifton

She longed to touch it, to stroke her fingers through that atmosphere, cleaving white billowing clouds and glittering salty seas, until she felt the hard scabbed crust beneath them. — Alastair Reynolds

Beneath the sun's rays our shadow is our comrade;
When clouds obscure the sun our shadow flees.
So Fortune's smiles the fickle crowd pursues,
But swift is gone whenever she veils her face. — Ovid

THE OPENING OF EYES After R. S. Thomas That day I saw beneath dark clouds, the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out, I knew then, as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing, speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. — David Whyte

And the voice spoke even more deliberately: ' ... but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.'
And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar quality in my eyes. All that gentleness became a trap. In my mind's eye I saw that vast white trap laid out, right under my feet. Beneath it reigned neither the restlessness of men nor the living tumult and motion of cities, as one might have thought, but a silence that was even more absolute, a more final peace. That viscous whiteness was turning before my eyes into the boundary between the real and the unreal, between the known and the unknowable. And I was already beginning to sense that a spectacle has no meaning except when seen through a culture, a civilization, a professional craft. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

At This Moment Of Time

Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes
Are haunted by water

Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That "no man is happy," but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow's friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight — Delmore Schwartz

After a time, he felt a deeper rhythm, the rhythm of the stone and water, not the rhythm of his words and heartbeat. He breathed into this deeper rhythm, let it teach him a new mantra, a wordless mantra that waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed, moon and stars and clouds, river and sun, the wordless singing of the earth beneath it all like the world's own heartbeat. He laid his palms flat on the stone beneath him and listened in quiet rapture to the mantra of the world's praying. — Katherine Addison

If you get a drill and drill down 5km beneath the ground, it's teeming with life - millions of tiny living fossils. They resemble the earliest life forms and suggest that life started under the Ground. The bible talks of Eden as a sunny parkland with white fluffy clouds, but it probably ascended from the region that we now associate with Hell. — Paul Davies

The city lay cool and dim beneath a vaulting sky of high-scudding gray clouds. A gray shroud that covered the corpses of buildings, stiff in brick-and-steel rigor mortis, pale in their eternity of sooty death. — Harlan Ellison

We're at 103,000 feet. Looking out over a very beautiful, beautiful world ... a hostile sky. As you look up the sky looks beautiful but hostile. As you sit here you realize that Man will never conquer space. He will learn to live with it, but he will never conquer it. Can see for over 400 miles. Beneath me I can see the clouds ... They are beautiful ... looking through my mirror the sky is absolutely black. Void of anything ... I can see the beautiful blue of the sky and above that it goes into a deep, deep, dark, indescribable blue which no artist can ever duplicate. It's fantastic. — Joseph Kittinger

Oh. You have a magic boy. Why didn't you say so?" The priest scratched his forehead beneath the white silk blindfold that covered his eyes. "Magnificent. I'll plant him in the fucking ground and grow a vine to an enchanted land beyond the clouds. — Scott Lynch

You drive the landscape like a herd of clouds Moving against your horizontal tower Of steadfast speed. All England lies beneath you like a woman With limbs ravished By one glance carrying all these eyes. — Stephen Spender

Today I walked on the lion-coloured hills with only cypresses for company, until the sunset caught me, turned the brush to copper set the clouds to one great roof of flame above the earth, so that I walk through fire, beneath fire, and all in beauty. Being alone I could not be alone, but felt (closer than flesh) the presence of those who once had burned in such transfigurations. My happiness ran through the centuries in one continual brightness. Looking down, I saw the earth beneath me like a rose petaled with mountains, fragrant with deep peace. — Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth

He was special friend to Coyote Kachina, who taught him the secret of shape shifting." "Grandfather blessed this earth with his presence for ninety-eight years. He had the courage to survive and left this world a better place than he found it. We shall all miss him." She blew a kiss at Grandfather. "Goodbye, Governor. You are my sun beneath the earth, my heart above the clouds, and my prayer for a better life. I will see you every morning when the sun rises. I shall miss you when the sun sets. I will yearn for you on a cloudy day. Do not forget me." She threw a silver locket with her picture into the grave. — Belinda Vasquez Garcia

Aye. He wills that I work his work in this place. Indeed. I am left behind to labor. Right
'And one day he may show his face beneath his damnable clouds to tell me what that work might be; what's worth so many tears; what's so important in his sight that is needs to be done this way ...
'O my sons!'Chauntecleer suddenly wailed at the top of his lungs, a light flaring before it goes out: 'How much I want you with me! — Walter Wangerin Jr.

For I was reared in the great city, pent with cloisters dim,and saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shall thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and al things in himselfGreat universal teacher! He shall moldThy spirit and by giving , make it ask. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Then overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night, in the presence of that impenetrable darkness, in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the breeze, under the clouds, under that vast diffusion of force, under that mysterious firmament of wings, of stars, of gulfs, having around him and beneath him the ocean above him the constellations, under the great unfathomable deep, he sank, gave up the struggle, lay down upon the rock, his face towards the stars, humble, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible depths, he cried aloud, Have mercy. — Victor Hugo

The sun dropped beneath the horizon and then detonated, torching the racks of clouds stacked up above the downtown skyline. Wyatt had forgotten how quickly, in the vast empty sky of the southern plains, the ordinary could turn so flamboyant. — Lou Berney

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

I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me. — Vladimir Nabokov

Colors shift like smoke within the branch beneath our feet. Sprites jump from leaf to leaf, leaving sprinklings of glittery dust in the air behind them. Droplets of water are strung like pearls from the silver strands of a spider's web. Bluebottle glow-bugs stick to the leaves and branches, lighting up the night with their blue-green bodies. And high above us, clouds are draped like sashes of color across the sky. Amethyst, azure, jade. — Rachel Morgan

Where the sun had gone down in simple state - pure of the pomp of clouds - spread a solemn purple, burning with the light of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven. The east had its own charm or fine deep blue, and its own modest gem, a casino and solitary star: soon it would boast the moon; but she was yet beneath the horizon. — Charlotte Bronte

The late afternoon sun, trapped beneath a wall of pewter, stained the clouds a yellowish gray, making the sky unusually bright. It felt surreal, as if the horizon had disappeared beyond the hills. She was stranded in a world of glass. — Sarah J. Maas

So spoke Grenouille the Great and, while the peasantry of scent danced and celebrated beneath him, he glided with wide-stretched wings down from his golden clouds, across the nocturnal fields of his soul, and home to his heart. — Patrick Suskind

Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives. — Paul Russell

Market moralities and mentalities
fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost
yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation. — Cornel West

The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs dwindling beneath the blubber of the giant cetaceans. They saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. As the spinning galactic clouds hurl stars and worlds across the night, so life, equally impelled by the centrifugal powers lurking in the germ cell, scatters the splintered radiance of consciousness and sends it prowling and contending through the thickets of the world. — Loren Eiseley

I live as if perched on the very tip of a rock, with the great foaming of the waves and all the great clouds of the sky beneath my window. I inhabit this immense dream of the ocean and slowly I become a sleepwalker of the sea. Faced with those prodigious sights and that enormous living thought in which I lose myself, there is soon nothing left of me but a sort of witness of God. — Victor Hugo

When he turns inland he sees two moving white columns in the sky. At first glance he thinks they are emissions of smoke. The two encroaching formations ripple into funnels and then spread out beneath the labyrinthine coral of clouds into fans. His vision blurs for a moment. Then he realises he is witnessing two perfectly synchronised flocks of birds. The abstract shapes they form are flawless. He stands with his hands in his pockets as the birds taper into a long undulating line, which gently vanishes behind the surface of things. The same thing has happened to his father. He has vanished behind the surface of things. — Glenn Haybittle

I walked until the water lapped against my chest, and then I kept walking until it kissed the underside of my jaw. I was surprised how cold it was. I closed my eyes and ducked beneath the surface. Thee was the wind and the clouds and the pure pool and the boy beneath its unsettled surface, and the blood, the boy's and monster's, defiling the pool. — Rick Yancey

The weather was still cold, but I was not. The blood thrummed near the surface of my skin, and I felt heat rise in my palms. I reached a hand out to the pine that stood by me, drops of water trembling on each needle, its bark black with wet. I breathed its scent and let the water touch my skin, cool as vapor. The rain fell in shushing stillness all around me, dampening my clothes 'til they clung to me softly, like clouds upon the mountain. Jamie had told me once that he must live on a mountain, and I knew now why this was so - though I could in no wise have put the notion into words. All my scattered thoughts receded, as I listened for the voice of rocks and trees - and heard the bell of the mountain strike once, somewhere deep beneath my feet. — Diana Gabaldon

I leave to children exclusively, but only for the life of their childhood, all and every the dandelions of the fields and the daisies thereof, with the right to play among them freely, according to the custom of children, warning them at the same time against the thistles. And I devise to children the yellow shores of creeks and the golden sands beneath the water thereof, with the dragon flies that skim the surface of said waters, and and the odors of the willows that dip into said waters, and the white clouds that float on high above the giant trees. — Williston Fish

A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. — Walter Benjamin

If we imagine an observer to approach our planet from outer space, and, pushing aside the belts of red-brown clouds which obscure our atmosphere, to gaze for a whole day on the surface of the earth as it rotates beneath him, the feature, beyond all others most likely to arrest his attention would be the wedge-like outlines of the continents as they narrow away to the South. — Eduard Suess

Laments of an Icarus The paramours of courtesans Are well and satisfied, content. But as for me my limbs are rent Because I clasped the clouds as mine. I owe it to the peerless stars Which flame in the remotest sky That I see only with spent eyes Remembered suns I knew before. In vain I had at heart to find The center and the end of space. Beneath some burning, unknown gaze I feel my very wings unpinned And, burned because I beauty loved, I shall not know the highest bliss, And give my name to the abyss Which waits to claim me as its own. — Charles Baudelaire

All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dreamlike business he'd ever witnessed waking - the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world. — Denis Johnson

If you had swum across the furthest ocean
And seen the vastness of infinity
Though dread of death might seize you, you'd still see
The rolling waves in never-ceasing motion
You'd still see something: Schools of dolphins swimming
Across the green and placid waters, skimming
The clouds, the sun and the moon, stars overhead -
You will see nothing in that void all round
You will not hear your footsteps where you tread
Beneath your feet, you'll feel no solid ground — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's rain had finally lifted, and a shaft of red sunlight came from beneath the western clouds as we entered the ruined town. We rode straight into the light of that swollen sun which reflected from my helm that had the silver wolf on its crest, and it shone from my mail coat and from my arm rings and from the hilts of my two swords, and someone shouted that I was the king. I rode Witnere, who tossed his great head and pawed at the ground, and I was dressed in my shining war glory. — Bernard Cornwell

But if they ever saw a sunrise on a mountain morning/Watched those cotton candy clouds roll by/They'd know why I live beneath these Western Skies. — Chris LeDoux

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon. — Rick Yancey

Ravens and crows. Rats Mists and clouds. Insects and corruption. Strange events and odd occurrences. The ordinary twisted and strange. Wonders!

The dead are beginning to walk and some see them. Others do not, but more and more, we all fear the night.

These have been our days. They rain upon us beneath a dead sky, crushing us with their fury, until as one we beg: "Let it begin!"

-Journal of the Unknown Scholar, entry for The Feast of Freia, 1000 NE — Brandon Sanderson

Clouds hid the peaks and only their flanks were visible beneath a murky ceiling. — Joe Simpson

Bears, dragons, tempestuous on mountain and river, Startle the forest and make the heights tremble. Clouds darken beneath the darkness of rain, streams pale with a pallor of mist. The gods of Thunder and Lightning Shatter the whole range. — Li Bai

In the twilight of dawn, when his ears are still fresh to the day's first sounds, he can hear clearer than at any other time of day. He turns his head back and forth, cocking his ears to each direction. Sometimes, he closes his eyes to listen better. He hears the branches cracking from the frost, the groan of the snow beneath his feet, the rumbling of the lake ice, the timber in the house shrinking and shifting, sometimes he thinks he can even hear the clouds sliding across the sky. — Shandi Mitchell

There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods-violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret. — John Galsworthy

I walked slowly, my eyes focused on the gravel beneath me. I didn't know where I was going, not that I cared. I just needed to get away. Soon enough, I'd find my way home. I had to believe that.
There was a loud crackling noise in the sky as the thunder rolled through the clouds. I threw my head back, admiring the storm above. The sky was dark with flashes of white sparking throughout with each bolt of lightening following behind the thunder. It was beautiful. "After the storm, you will find peace." I smiled as the sound boomed through the quiet neighborhood. And in that moment I felt at one with the storm as the pain inside of me slowly began to seep out. — Nicole Sobon

Hannah searches the clouds, the gulls, the sun. She wants to leave and she wants to stay. She wants to raise her hand to the heavens and command that everything top, that time stills, that the rules and the laws retract their grip so nature can have her way. Hannah wants to sit up off her towel and look across her friend's lined-up bodies, frozen in time beneath the sky, and she wants to pull Baker out of their midst, out of time, and walk with her along the shoreline, following the infinite ocean, nothing moving on the whole green earth except for the two of them and the water and the sky. — Kelly Quindlen

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appears, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds - the invisible shared out in endless abundance. — Denise Levertov

Statements made by distant church bells remind me it is Sunday. Today the sky has become cloudy. I have been watching the clouds and it occurs to me that I have never done this in my life before, simply sit and watch clouds. As a child I would have been far too anxious to 'waste time' in this way. And my mother would have stopped me. As I write this I am sitting on my plot of grass behind the house where I have put a chair, cushions, rugs. It is evening. Thick lumpy slate-blue clouds, their bulges lit up to a lighter blue, move slowly across a sky of muddy and yet brilliant gold, a sort of dulled gilt effect. At the horizon there is a light glittering slightly jagged silver line, like modern jewellery. Beneath it the sea is a live choppy lyrical goldeny-brown, jumping with white flecks. The air is warm. Another happy day. ('Whatever will you do down there?' they asked.)
In a quiet surreptitious way I am feeling very pleased with myself. — Iris Murdoch

Love, be
mystical

as the flickering
blue flame
of night

as the fully-awoken
moon

beneath cobwebs
of passing clouds

amidst chanting
high-tides

fuzzy,
as my blanket

big enough
to illuminate a hundred
thousand billion galaxies

and just small enough to fit
into my embrace. — Sanober Khan

Since I have spread my wings to purpose high,
The more beneath my feet the clouds I see,
The more I give the winds my pinions free,
Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky. — Giordano Bruno

During that night the blessed Antony told us this, too. 'A whole year long I prayed that the place of the righteous and of the sinners be revealed to me, and I saw a huge giant, high as the clouds and black. He had his hand stretched out to heaven, and beneath him there was a lake the size of a sea and I saw souls, flying like birds. 17. " 'Those flying above his hands and his head were being saved; they that were struck by his hands were falling into the lake. A voice came to me saying, "Those souls that you see flying above are the souls of the righteous, the ones that are being brought safely into Paradise; the others are they that are being dragged down to Hades, having followed the desires of the flesh and the remembrance of injuries." ' "* — John Wortley

There is a kind of truth in everything, even fairytales. In fact, especially in fairytales ... The King understood it as he looked out from the roof of the Temple and saw the clouds flying past and the green fields far beneath him. He knew that some things are real whether you believe in them or not ...
(The Thirteenth King) — Elizabeth Hopkinson

O days remember'd well! remember'd all!
The bitter sweet, the honey and the gall;
Those garden rambles in the silent night,
Those trees so shady, and that moon se bright,
That thickset alley by the arbor clos'd,
That woodbine seat where we at last repos'd;
And then the hopes that came and then were gone,
Quick as the clouds beneath the moon past on. — George Crabbe

The scenery beneath, first just isolated tableaux visible through rare openings in the cloud cover, was rugged and beautiful with its green islands and blue sea, its steep rock faces and snowy white plains, but gradually it was erased or toned down, as the clouds vanished, until the flat Rogaland terrain was all you could see. — Karl Ove Knausgard

The dessert course halts the conversation entirely. Globes of thinly blown sugar sit on each plate and must be broken open in order to access the clouds of cream within.
After the cacophony of shattering sugar, it does not take long for the diners to realize that, though the globes appeared identical, each of them has been presented with an entirely unique flavor.
There is much sharing of spoons. And while some are easily guessed as ginger with peach or curried coconut, others remain delicious mysteries.
Celia's is clearly honey, but with a blend of spices beneath the sweetness that no one is able to place. — Erin Morgenstern

Dream of the Tundra Swan

Dusk fell
and the cold came creeping,
cam prickling into our hearts.
As we tucked beaks
into feathers and settled for sleep,
our wings knew.

That night, we dreamed the journey:
ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight,
the sun's pale wafer,
the crisp drink of clouds.
We dreamed ourselves so far aloft
that the earth curved beneath us
and nothing sang but
a whistling vee of light.

When we woke, we were covered with snow.
We rose in a billow of white. — Joyce Sidman

The blue of daylight
fades and chills as the sun sinks
beneath clouds of fire. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Large, heavy, ragged black clouds hung like crape hammocks beneath the starry cope of the night. You would have said that they were the cobwebs of the firmament. — Victor Hugo

But what was tragic about the girl was that she had not been born ugly. She might even have been a pretty child, and the grace proper to her age was still at odds with the repulsive premature aging induced by loose living and poverty. A trace of beauty still lingered in the sixteen-year-old face, like pale sunlight fading beneath the massed clouds of a winter's dawn. — Victor Hugo

An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke. — John Updike

I can hear clouds drifting across the sky! The worms beneath my feet ... demand freedom from the darkness ... the secret hopes of humankind ... all of it trivial. I can see into other worlds ... other universes ... they're calling out to me. They've always called to me! I never knew that until now, but now I know everything. — Kirkland Ciccone

We'll ride along the river. It's a mighty pretty sight..." Puffy white clouds floated across the azure blue sky. Pine-covered mountains crowned with snowcaps folded down into foothills that ringed the valley. Beneath the clouds the play of sun and shadow cast hazy blue-green patches on the mountainsides. A distant large-winged bird rode on air currents before diving into a clump of trees. — Debra Holland

A murderer's light spilled out from the sunset. It flooded William Street with its ruddy glow and ran beneath the blue-black hail clouds and up the boulevard like hot blood. — Richard Flanagan

Twilight was coming on, and so was a storm. In the eerie light beneath the clouds, even the thoroughly modern houses along the road looked as ancient and as sinister as the weathered Pictish stone that stood a hundred feet away, guarding the crossroads it had marked for a thousand years. It seemed a good night to be inside with the shutters fastened. — Diana Gabaldon