Blaze Up Quotes & Sayings

The road to success is not a path you find, but a trail you blaze. — Robert Breault

Had I guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm.

I had run him up from the quarter deck to trade with his own yard-arm;

I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,

And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;

I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark,

I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;

I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil,

And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil;

I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasseled his beard in the mesh,

And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh. — Rudyard Kipling

It is a base thing for a man to wax old in careless self-neglect before he has lifted up his eyes and seen what manner of man he was made to be, in the full perfection of bodily strength and beauty. But these glories are withheld from him who is guilty of self-neglect, for they are not wont to blaze forth unbidden. — Socrates

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there. — Michael Chabon

Elizabeth's fingers slipped around my arm. She stepped forward, her fangs flashing. My breath caught, but not in fear.
Damn Tiffany and her vampire-bite addiction. I shoved the reaction away just in time for Elizabeth's fangs to break skin.
Warmth rushed up my arm, the blaze filling my body, my mind. On my other side, Tatius's hand on my arm was like a cool oasis. I groped for his fingers, locking mine around his, pressing the long side of my body along his, and the fire in my body calmed enough I could still see, still think.
Cool. — Kalayna Price

The territorial anger lit his chest up like a bonfire, teeing off a blaze of power that roared in his body. — J.R. Ward

If we try to prohibit encryption or discourage it or make it more difficult to use, we're going to suffer the consequences that will be far reaching and very difficult to reverse, and we seem to have realized that in the wake of the September 11th attacks. To the extent there is any reason to be hopeful, perhaps that's where we'll end up here. — Matt Blaze

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life. — James Wright

Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again. — Cesare Pavese

Wizards? Do you mean they do things a different way?"
"No, just the way we do,"Merlin replied.With a flick of his finger he lit the soggy heap of kindling that Arthur had gathered ( ... ) A blaze leapt up on the instant. Merlin then opened his hands and produced some food out of thin air. — Deepak Chopra

We're involved with flower, fruit, grapevine.
They speak more than the language of the year.
Out of the darkness a blaze of colors appears,
and one perhaps that has the jealous shine
Of the dead, those who strengthen the earth.
What do we know of the part they assume?
It's long been their habit to marrow the loam
with their own free marrow through and through.
Now the one question: Is it done gladly?
The work of sullen slaves, does this fruit
thrust up, clenched, toward us, its masters?
Sleeping with roots, granting us only
out of their surplus this hybrid made of mute
strength and kisses - are they the masters? — Rainer Maria Rilke

They talked about the incubators for a while, which he told her that he'd built himself. Then he showed her an ancient motorcycle with a few shiny new parts, and explained shyly that it was a Harley Super Glide, and he was restoring it. He'd brought her up to the loft, where there was a breathtaking view of the ranch spread and the horse fields. Then they sat in the gorgeous horse-drawn carriage that Mr. Thatcher always brought to town events and talked about school, life on the ranch, everything and anything. — Morgan Blaze

I believed then, and continue to believe now, that the benefits to our security and freedom of widely available cryptography far, far outweigh the inevitable damage that comes from its use by criminals and terrorists ... I believed, and continue to believe, that the arguments against widely available cryptography, while certainly advanced by people of good will, did not hold up against the cold light of reason and were inconsistent with the most basic American values. — Matt Blaze

People are much like those stars up there. Some burn faintly for millions of years, barely visible to us on earth. They're there, but you'd hardly know it. They blend in, like a speck on a canvas. But others blaze with such intensity, they light up the sky. You can't help but notice them, marvel at them. Those are the ones that never last long. They can't. They use up all their energy quickly — Sarah Jio

A ball of fire rolled through my stomach, catching on the wings of the butterflies darting around in there and setting them up in a blaze. I bristled as Carter's grin brushed mine, lips just barely touching.

Any closer and we'd be kissing for real, plunging straight off this knife edge we balanced on. — Apollo Blake

Each of us has to blaze our own trail and figure out the best path for our own lives. Every so often, I think it's important to stop and look around to see that we're still on the trail that we once embarked upon some time ago. If somewhere along along the way we look up and the trailhead is nowhere to be found and we seem to have gone painfully off track - that's okay too. Every single day we have a choice to get back on track and when it's all said and done, it's abundantly clear that there is more than one way to get to the finish line of a life well lived. — Chris Hill

Breathless I look up at him and find him gazing at me with a wonder that my deep-seated insecurity finds hard to believe. Then he does this thing. His fingers start moving on my face, tracing outlines. They trail along my eyebrows, the ridge of my nose, the apple of my cheeks and the line of my jaw. His touch is like feather but his eyes ... they blaze and just like that, without saying a single word, he makes me believe. — Rucy Ban

The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed. — Jane Hirshfield

Bow down and pray in fear and trembling, go way back in the dark afraid; or work harder and harder; or stumble and learn; or raise up your fist and strike-but once the idea comes into your head you'll never be the same again. Oh, test tube of life! Crucible of the South, find the right powder and you'll never be the same again-the cotton will blaze and the cabins will burn and the chains will be broken and men, all of a sudden, will shakes hands, black men and white men, like steel meeting steel! — Langston Hughes

When you cleaned out this house of anything valuable," Harry began, but Mundungus interrupted him again.
"Sirius never cared about any of the junk--"
There was the sound of pattering feet, a blaze of shining copper, an echoing clang, and a shriek of agony: Kreacher had taken a run at Mundungus and hit him over the head with a saucepan.
"Call 'im off, call 'im off, 'e should be locked up!" screamed Mundungus, cowering as Kreacher raised the heavy-bottomed pan again.
"Kreacher, no!" shouted Harry.
Kreacher's thin arms trembled with the weight of the pan, still held aloft.
"Perhaps just once more, Master Harry, for luck?"
Ron laughed.
"We need him conscious, Kreacher, but if he needs persuading you can do the honors," said Harry.
"Thank you very much, Master," said Kreacher with a bow, and he retreated a short distance, his great pale eyes still fixed upon Mundungus with loathing. — J.K. Rowling

Look up, greet sparks of fire with salted eyes,
For he's a burning atmospheric sigh:
One blaze of liquid flame on midnight sky,
Soft orbital decay, and last goodbye. — Alan James Roll

They say a man's inspiration is visual, but for a woman, it's the narrative.
Abandon both the narrative and the visual. Close your eyes, measure your breath.
Dead weight is sloughed off, dust swept away, forms dissolve into one atmosphere.
The rib cage opens, the lungs fill, the breast rises.
Waves sweep up the body on their swell, rocking it rhythmically.
Feet planted, the back arches, the pelvis reaches forward.
Oxygen kindles a flame, sprawling through the belly, and gathering in a warm blaze.
The hand reaches to meet the sensation.
Calligraphy spills from the inkwell.
Open your eyes, sharpen your focus, and exclaim:
There are no separations. — Craig Thompson

Such are the limitations of the human mind, and so thoroughly engrossing are the cares of common life, that only the few among men can discern through the glitter and dazzle of present prosperity the dark outlines of approaching disasters, even though they may have come up to our very gates, and are already within striking distance. The yawning seam and corroded bolt conceal their defects from the mariner until the storm calls all hands to the pumps. Prophets, indeed, were abundant before the war; but who cares for prophets while their predictions remain unfulfilled, and the calamities of which they tell are masked behind a blinding blaze of national prosperity? — Frederick Douglass

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. — Leslie Feinberg

As I came up from the galley, the sun was going down into the ocean in a blaze that paved the western sea with gold like the streets of Heaven. I stopped for a moment, just a moment, transfixed by the sight. It had happened many times before, but it always took me by surprise. Always in the midst of great stress, wading waist-deep in trouble and sorrow, as doctors do, I would glance out a window, open a door, look into a face, and there it would be, unexpected and unmistakable. A moment of peace. The — Diana Gabaldon

You had no right. No right to stand in front of me." He turned back now, his eyes vividly blue with temper that had gone from frigid to blaze. "No fucking right to risk yourself on my behalf"
"Oh really. Is that so?" She stalked forward until they were toe to toe. "Okay, you tell me. You keep looking me dead in the eye and you tell me you wouldn't have done the same if it was me in jeopardy."
"That's entirely different."
"Why?" Her chin came up and her finger jabbed hard into his chest. "Because you have a penis? — J.D. Robb

I am above the forest region, amongst grand rocks & such a torrent as you see in Salvator Rosa's paintings vegetation all a scrub of rhodos. with Pines below me as thick & bad to get through as our Fuegian Fagi on the hill tops, & except the towering peaks of P. S. [perpetual snow] that, here shoot up on all hands there is little difference in the mt scenery - here however the blaze of Rhod. flowers and various colored jungle proclaims a differently constituted region in a naturalist's eye & twenty species here, to one there, always are asking me the vexed question, where do we come from?
[Letter to Charles Darwin 24 Jun 1849] — Joseph Dalton Hooker

Each of us is born to follow a star, be it bright and shining or dark and fated. Sometimes the path of these stars will cross, bringing love or hatred. However, if you look up at the skies on a clear night, out of all the countless lights that twinkle and shine, there will come one. That star will be seen in a blaze, burning a path of light across the roof of the earth, a great comet. — Brian Jacques

It has been said that great art is the night thought of man. It may emerge without warning from the soundless depths of the unconscious, just as supernovas may blaze up suddenly in the farther reaches of void space. — Loren Eiseley

Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy. — Charles Dickens

She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient - she did not clearly know for what - to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow in coming. All the world about her seemed to be - how can one put it? - in wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what colors these gray swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no intimation whatever that the blinds would ever go up or the windows or doors be opened, or the chandeliers, that seemed to promise such a blaze of fire, unveiled and furnished and lit. Dim souls flitted about her, not only speaking but it would seem even thinking in undertones ... During — H.G.Wells

I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters. — Sue Monk Kidd

A child that has a quick temper, just blaze up and cool down, ain't never likely to be sly or deceitful. — Lucy Maud Montgomery

It was then Raiden Ulysses Miller scorched me a second time, but I didn't battle this blaze. There was no pain. But that didn't mean I didn't end up branded. — Kristen Ashley

It is very difficult to pass from pleasure to work. Accordingly more poems have been swallowed up by sorrow than ever happiness caused to blaze forth in unparalleled radiance. — Honore De Balzac

Much of what is written on the craft is biased in one way or another, so weed out what is useful to you and ignore the rest. I see the next few years as being crucial in the transformation of our culture away from the patriarchal death cults and toward the love of life, of nature, of the female principle. The craft is only one path among the many opening up for women, and many of us will blaze new trails as we explore the uncharted country of our own interiors. The heritage, the culture, the knowledge of the ancient priestesses, healers, poets, singers, and seers were nearly lost, but a seed survived the flames that will blossom in a new age into thousands of flowers. The long sleep of Mother Goddess is ended. May She awaken in each of our hearts ~~ Merry meet, merry part, and blessed be. — Starhawk

Now and then there comes a crash of thunder in a storm, and we look up with amazement when he sets the heavens on a blaze with his lightning. — Charles Spurgeon

Blaze grabbed a hammer off the front cargo bin, swiveled, and slammed the head into Jack's fingers. Jack swore and released the 4-wheeler, which suddenly lunged forward, and Blaze, with only one hand on the handlebars, accidentally pulled it sideways, and the machine hit the side, rolled, threw her off the seat, and ended up on its side, pinning her body under a tire. A few seconds later, Jack walked up, sucking on his knuckles, glaring at her. Blaze, who had been unable to push the thing off of her, and was finding it hard to breathe, just glowered up at him. Jack took the machine in one hand, lifted it, still sucking on his knuckles, and set it right-side up beside her. Scowling, he bent and offered a palm, lips still wrapped around — Sara King

I saw the Light,saw the myriad spirits flying loose up the Tunnel towards the celestial blaze, the Tunnel perfectly round and widening as they rose and for one blessed moment, one blessed tiny instant, the songs of Heaven resounded down the tunnel as if its curves were not made of wind but of something solid that could echo these ethereal songs, and their organized rhythm, their heartbreaking beauty piercing the catastrophic suffering of this place-Lestat — Anne Rice

Since fire's born of fire, why should we desire
To gather up its scattered ash.
On the appointed day we surrendered what we were
To a vaster blaze, the evening sky. — Yves Bonnefoy

I like to open new doors and blaze new trails through the jungle and all that whatnot. What keeps me goin' all these years is changin' it up. — Les Claypool

TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything
at which point, the process would start all over. — Erica Bauermeister

The rain set early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its best to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm, And kneeled and made the cheerless grate Blaze up and all the cottage warm; — Robert Browning

In her dreams the Hawk would be waiting for her by the sea's edge; her kilt-clad, magnificent Scottish laird. He would smile and his eyes would crinkle, then turn dark with
smoldering passion.
She would take his hand and lay it gently on her swelling abdomen, and his face would blaze with happiness and
pride. Then he would take her gently, there on the cliff's edge, in tempo with the pounding of the ocean. He would
make fierce and possessive love to her and she would hold on to him as tightly as she could. But before dawn, he would melt right through her fingers. And she would wake up, her cheeks wet with tears and her hands clutching nothing but a bit of quilt or pillow. — Karen Marie Moning

Light up the fire of love inside and blaze the thoughts away. — Rumi

As the campfire radiated warmth in the opening of the lean-to, Red Macalister crouched before the burning logs. He added more wood to the blaze, then rocked back on his boot heels, studying the flames, and decided the fire would do for the next few hours to ward off the cold winter night. He glanced up at the black sky dotted with diamonds. A clear night. — Debra Holland

Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd. — Richard Russo

Below her, fall was just starting to work its magic on the foliage, creating a blaze of rust and amber stretching into the foothills and up the mountains. It was her favorite time of the year and normally she loved this view. Today, it only reminded her of how much she had to lose. — Kate Fargo

God dropped a spark down into everyone, And if we find and fan it to a blaze, It'll spring up and glow, like
like the sun, And light the wandering out of stony ways. — John Masefield

This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green,
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes,
Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between
Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration
Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze
Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration,
Faces of people streaming across my gaze. — D.H. Lawrence

And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything. — Rainer Maria Rilke

COLORED LIGHTS FROM BLAZE'S truck streaked through the night and the sound of the siren pierced the air. I couldn't help wondering if stealth on our part might have been a better way to go. Why does law enforcement always have to warn the world they are coming? Doesn't that give the bad guys time to pack up and mosey out? — Deb Baker

Look, dude, you've sampled your life, mixed those sounds with a funk precedent, and established a sixteen-bar system of government for the entire rhythm nation. Set the Dj up as the executive, the legislative, and judicial branches. I mean, after listening to your beat, anything I've heard on the pop radio in the last five years feels like a violation of my civil rights. — Paul Beatty

The Everglades are on fire on my final drive down to the Keys. On the curve of the turnpike where the pineapple groves end and marshland begins, I watch the green horizon burn with helicopters bobbing overhead, fighting the flames. It's too late in the season to be a wildfire. The radio says some thrill-torcher is responsible.

I don't believe in omens. I believe we choose our own signs, so I take this one as my own: with this blaze, I leave my old life up here on the mainland in ashes. — Patricia Engel

A working woman, rising before dawn to spin and needing light in her cottage room, piles brushwood on a smoldering log, and the whole heap kindled by the little brand goes up in a mighty blaze. Such was the fire of Love, stealthy but all-consuming, that swept through Medea's heart. In the turmoil of her soul, her soft cheeks turned from rose to white and white to rose. — Apollonius Of Rhodes

Thereafter were the stars persuaded to depict compasses and quadrants, stripped of their names, given numbers, all but regimented into a grid, before they had had enough and reverted to their old subjects: dogs, dragons, herdsmen, bears. Take heed, worldly fashion - someone may trust you up to a point, but if you push him too far you will lose all the power you ever had over him and he will blaze up and turn into a bear. — Amy Leach

The light which we have gained, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitering of a bishop, and the removing hum from the Presbyterian shoulders that will make us a happy nation; no, if other things as great in the Church, and in the rule of life both economical and political, be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin have beaconed up to us, that we are stark blind. — John Milton

But it was the figure you cut as an employee, on an employee's footing with the girls, in work clothes, and being of that tin-tough, creaking, jazzy bazaar of hardware, glassware, chocolate, chickenfeed, jewelry, drygoods, oilcloth, and song hits
that was the big thing; and even being the Atlases of it, under the floor, hearing how the floor bore up under the ambling weight of hundreds, with the fanning, breathing movie organ next door and the rumble descending from the trolleys on Chicago Avenue
the bloody-rinded Saturday gloom of wind-bourne ash, and blackened forms of five-story buildings rising up to a blind Northern dimness from the Christmas blaze of shops. — Saul Bellow

The truth is that I understood very little of what she was saying. Before Alex, what thrills I'd experienced I'd found in my imagination, the result of burying myself in book after book. I depended, I mean, on escape for my various joys. It had never occurred to me that real life might offer the smallest portion of the happiness I found in reading, the ordinary scaffolding of my day to day a thing I'd made a habit of burying under a thousand imagined lives, each more inviting than the last. And then she came along and it was as though life were a Christmas tree and I'd discovered the hidden switch, the whole thing lighting up in a blaze of color. — Aria Beth Sloss

Ronnie James Dio died the other day, quietly succumbed to a relatively sudden onset of stomach cancer and up and left the planet in a blaze of stage fire, dragonsmoke and general metal awesomeness. Maybe you heard. — Mark Morford

But, if you think that by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement - the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil and live in want and misery - the wage slaves - expect salvation - if this is your opinion, then hang us! Here you will tread upon a spark, but there, and there, and behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. — August Spies

I think it's interesting because the 1990s ended with the government pretty much giving up. There was a recognition that encryption was important. In 2000, the government considerably loosened the export controls on encryption technology and really went about actively encouraging the use of encryption rather than discouraging it. — Matt Blaze

As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire. — Virginia Woolf

I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: living & dying, we feed the fire. — Clive Barker

Then my gaze slid over the people to the blaze of green beyond the diaphanous
curtains, and I felt as if I were sitting in the window of an enormous department store. The figures around me weren't people, but shop dummies, painted to resemble people and propped up in attitudes counterfeiting life. — Sylvia Plath

I didn't hear you," I spoke directly into his ear, hoping my voice was husky and alluring, but most likely wind-whipped and warbled.
"I said, when I kiss you, I want you to be completely wrapped up in my touch." He paused before adding, "The way you touched Nikolai last night wasn't something I wanted to see. It was hot and sexy, and I don't know where I stand." Slowing down, he muttered, "When I kiss you, I want to see desire blaze in your eyes. I want you to need me to kiss you so much you have no choice but to yield. — Jade Hart

There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes back again on gold tiptoes like an angel out for an airing, and it lies down on its little bed of violets in the heart where it came from. — Josh Billings

By the 1970s, pornography had caught up with The Block, where performers were totally in the nude. I wasn't going to do that, and I certainly wasn't about to let my girls do it. After all, I'm religious, and if my mother knew I was performing in the nude, she would have had a heart attack. — Blaze Starr

We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy, we've all tried to start a fire, and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own. In the meantime, she is the one today among us most able to bear the idea of her own beauty ... — Tony Hoagland

I wouldn't pick you as the kind of man who'd care to die nicely."
He leant forward, lacing his hands together. "How do you think I'd like to die?"
"In a blaze of ice and fury." He was from Pirenti, after all.
The corner of his mouth hitched up at that, but it was a humourless expression, one filled with chipped edges and painted regrets. "And you?" he asked. " How would you like to die, Avery of Kaya?"
I picked up the oars and started to row.
"I'm already dead, Ambrose. — Charlotte McConaghy

It's a simple choice! We can all be good boys and wear our letter sweaters around and get our little degrees and find some nice girl to settle, you know, down with ... Take up what a friend of ours calls the hearty challenges of lawn care ... Or we can blaze! Become legends in our own time, strike fear in the hearts of mediocre talent everywhere! We can scald dogs, put records out of reach! Make the stands gasp as we blow into an unearthly kick from three hundred yards out! We can become God's own messengers delivering the dreaded scrolls! We can race satan himslef till he wheezes fiery cinders down the back straight away ... They'll speak our names in hushed tones, 'those guys are animals' they'll say! We can lay it on the line, bust a guy, show them a clean pair of heels. We can sprint the turn on a spring breeze and feel the winter leave our feet! We can, by god, let out demons loose and just wail on! — John L. Parker Jr.

Suddenly, Blaze appears, alone. "She's in the middle of something really important. What do I tell her?"

Jen groans. "Tell her she gets to hack into the CIA's system. She won't be able to pass that up. — C.B. Cook

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. — William S. Burroughs

"I ... I still - "
"Can't believe it?" Rafe shrugged. "I'm guessing a regular person wouldn't have survived. But we're part cat so maybe falls aren't so bad. I think I lost one of my nine lives though." He twisted to look at the stab wound. "Maybe two."
I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him, and when I did, I knew he was real - the heat of him, the smell of him, the feel of him, the taste of him so incredibly real that it surpassed anything my memory could conjure up. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed me back, and it was like every other amazing kiss he'd given me, multiplied ten-fold. I kissed him until I couldn't breathe, and then I kissed him a little more, until I had to pull back, gasping.
"I have got to die more often," he said. And he grinned, that incredible blaze of a grin that made me kiss him again. — Kelley Armstrong