Blood Red Sun Quotes & Sayings

I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame. — Donna Tartt

I'm an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by the very thoughts of silence. I'm a gray green fallow leaf on trees and abandoned on the streets, a never-ending spring season and an eternal autumn. I'm the golden of the sun and the silver of the moon, the fog of dawn and the amber of dusk. I'm the white and the red flag , the obedient and the rebel. I am the coward in the brave, and the child in the man. I am, but a writer. — Nema Al-Araby

The horizon is touched with red: the sun is rising, a rusty colour, the colour of old blood, and I'm so filled with fear it is an agony, a shredding feeling, worse than any nightmare I've ever had. — Lauren Oliver

I watched a swatch of the sky turn red. The red spread like blood in the sea: red, red, red, and then less and less red, until there was only blue left. I squinted as the sun rose. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, my father was carrying me into the house. Sam walked beside us carrying the lawn chair, which seemed almost as big as he was. Inside the living room my father laid me on my cot. "She's gone," he said. — Cynthia Kadohata

Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of "Kill! kill! kill!" and "Blood! blood! blood! — Robert Graves

Here are the facts. He was standing and he fell. He fell and he kneeled. He kneeled and he bled. He bled and he died. He tell in a heap like any man and his blood spilled out like any blood; red as any blood, wet as any blood and reflecting the sky and the buildings and birds and trees, or your face if you'd looked into its dulling mirror
and it dried in the sun as blood dries. That's all. They spilled his blood and he bled. They cut him down and he died; the blood flowed on the walk in a pool, gleamed a while, and, after awhile, became dull then dusty, then dried. — Ralph Ellison

The sun was just coming up over the mountains--blood red and cold. I felt as if I was standing in the mightiest cathedral that had ever been built. There was no end to it, and no beginning. All I could do was look at it and worship. — Robert Specht

The dried blood from the wounds leaves dark and repulsive stains on the ground. Cleaning them up, I think of the identical nature of men: the same red blood irrigating the same organs. These organs, situated in the same places, carry out the same functions. The same remedies cure the same illnesses everywhere under the sun, whether the individual be white or black. Everything united men. Why, then, do they kill each other in ignoble wars for causes that are futile when compared with the massacre of human lives? So many devastating wars! And yet man takes himself to be a superior being. In what way is his intelligence useful to him? His intelligence begets both good and ill, more often ill than good. — Mariama Ba

I forded the Santa Fe below Fort White and headed south across the Alachua Prairie where the early Indians and Spaniards ran their cattle. To the east that early morning, strange dashes of red color shone through the blowing tops of prairie sedges where the sun touched the crowns of sandhill cranes. Their wild horn and hollow rattle drifted back on a fresh wind as the big birds drifted over the savanna. That blood-red glint of life in the brown grasslands, that long calling
why should such fleeting moments pierce the heart? And yet they do. That was what Charlie my Darling made me see. They do. — Peter Matthiessen

All I cared about then was catching a glimpse of Chairman Mao. I turned my eyes quickly away from Liu to the front of the motorcade. I spotted Mao's stalwart back, his right arm steadily waving. In an instant, he had disappeared. My heart sank. Was that all I would see of Chairman Mao? Only a fleeting glimpse of his back? The sun seemed suddenly to have turned gray. All around me the Red Guards were making a huge din. The girl standing next to me had just pierced the index finger of her right hand and was squeezing blood out of it to write something on a neatly folded handkerchief. I knew exactly the words she was going to use. It had been done many times by other Red Guards and had been publicized ad nauseam: "I am the happiest person in the world today. I have seen our Great Leader Chairman Mao!" Watching her, my despair grew. Life seemed pointless. A thought flickered into my mind: perhaps I should commit suicide? — Jung Chang

I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous infinite scream of nature. — Edvard Munch

The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash like an open wound lay low in the distant west. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I still don't know a place with lovelier Aprils. The mornings and nights are fresh and cool, and the sun pours down like spilled honey, warm without the thick wet weight of the coming summer. The damp earth is as red as flesh, or blood, and so fecund that you can almost hear the thrumming, rustling push of growth up through it. The new foliage is a thousand different shades of pink, red, gold, and green. I could not seem to stay indoors at night in that first spring; I was enraptured with the startling, ghostly white showfalls of dogwood in dusk-green woods, and with streetlights shining through new leaves. Azaleas rolled like surf through the wooded hills of the northwest. — Anne Rivers Siddons

I've fallen. I must have slipped. Hit my head on something. I think I'm going to be sick. Everything is red. I can't get up. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl . . . Three for a girl. I'm stuck on three, I just can't get any further. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. Three for a girl. I can hear the magpies - they're laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. A tiding. Bad tidings. I can see them now, black against the sun. Not the birds, something else. Someone's coming. Someone is speaking to me. Now look. Now look what you made me do. — Paula Hawkins

I myself beheld the King
Charge at the head of all his Table Round,
And all his legions crying Christ and him,
And break them; and I saw him, after, stand
High on a heap of slain, from spur to plume
Red as the rising sun with heathen blood,
And seeing me, with a great voice he cried,
"They are broken, they are broken!" for the King,
However mild he seems at home, nor cares
For triumph in our mimic wars, the jousts -
For if his own knight cast him down, he laughs
Saying, his knights are better men than he -
Yet in this heathen war the fire of God
Fills him: I never saw his like: there lives
No greater leader. — Alfred Tennyson

There'd been blood in his eyes and Johnny was dying, but it was the most beautiful and frozen dawn Elisha had ever seen. He'd laid on the ground and stared through red stains at a bloody sun and bloody clouds and night's last death whisper. Even the blind remember a dawn like that. — Kendra L. Saunders

The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face. — Joseph Conrad

We need them? Is that the best reason you can come up with? He laughed, a rasping, mechanical sound. "The kings of the ocean are gone, and what is our argument for their return? We need them? We? Their murderers? The ones that made the water bitter in their mouths, and killed the food they ate? The ones that made the ocean boil red with their blood for miles around? Men need them? Those vermin? Those stringing insects? Struggling pustulent humanity--needs them? Do you think a whale cares? You might as well need the sun to rise at midnight because you're feeling a bit chilly. Yes, of course, certainly we need them, But the question is, do we deserve them? — Raphael Carter

Mary bring out your umbrella -
The sun shines down on this fine, fine day
But the ashes raining down forever
Are going to turn your hair to gray.
Mary keep your oars a-steady
Sail away on the rising flood
Keep your candle at the ready
Red tides can't be told from blood.
- "Miss Mary" (a common child's clapping game, dating from the time of the blitz), from Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play — Lauren Oliver

So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant, the sun was hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood,
by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those we are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course, the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world. — Virginia Woolf

Midsummer Night was roasting hot. The shore, of red granite, glowed with the heat; the dark blood of the earth seemed to be rising from below. There was a sharp, unbearable smell of birds, of cod, of green decaying seaweed. Through the mist the huge ruddy sun loomed nearer and nearer. And in the sea, dark blood welled up to meet it - in bloated, rearing, huge white waves.
Night. The mouth of the bay between two cliffs was like a window. A window shutting out curious eyes with a white shade-white woolly fog. And all that you could see was that behind it something red was happening. ("The North") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The boy in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor. ... He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. ... He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable. — Elaine Scarry

Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter and snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds' star, eventide Venus; and Mars- quivering, red. But in days of blood and of peace the years fly like an arrow and the thick frost of a hoary white December, season of Christmas trees, Santa Claus, joy and glittering snow, overtook the young Turbins unawares. For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them. — Mikhail Bulgakov

Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff. — Carl Sagan

The lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had never given, and would never take away. — Charles Dickens

It was what should have been a bright summer day, but the smoke
from the burning world filled the sky, through which the sun shone
murkily, a dull and lifeless orb, blood-red and ominous. — Jack London

Past the projects, the land opened up and water came into view. The breeze carried rain and salt. Jetties and barrier walls supported the shore, which was stacked with crumbling brick warehouses. Out in the channel, the Statue of Liberty stood alone on her little island, her corroding flame held high in the air as the sun set over the industrial shoreline and skyways of New Jersey. Across the narrows, the bluffs of Staten Island wavered in the smoky light of dusk that turned the Verrazano into bronze. Faint light burnished water into busy with freighters and tug boats. A lone sail boat flitted in the distance. On the near shore, on a slip of water between a jetty and the land, a blood red barge bobbed on the tide. — Andrew Cotto

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. — Cormac McCarthy

The Lost Girls

Nomad girls are Lost Ones too,
With leaves at foot and crown;
They too seek shelter in the tress,
Drink Red and Gold and Brown.

Their circlets made of steam and rain,
Their lashes powdered ash,
They're firelight, they're fox's kill,
They're blood and sweat and scratch.

Lost Boys fly forever, and crow the rising sun.
They play all day in Neverland, their laughter mermaid-spun.
But Lost Girls live underground:
They steal from hole to hole.
They drink the shadows, wear the night,
And paint their cheeks with coal.

And when the wind turns colder,
They split a doe and climb inside.
Still-warm sinew wraps their hands,
Dead muscle soaks the light.

You'll never tell what's girl, what's beast,
Once bloody fur's been trussed-
So think your happy thoughts, Lost Boy,
Wish on your Fairy Dust. — Lauren Bird Horowitz

This month is fit for little.
The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.
A red tongue is among us.
Mother, keep out of my barnyard,
I am becoming another.
Dog-head, devourer:
Feed me the berries of dark.
The lids won't shut. Time
Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun
its endless glitter.
I must swallow it all.
Lady, who are those others in the moons' vat-
Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?
In this light the blood is black.
Tell me my name. — Sylvia Plath

As the darkness deepened, the sky was streaked with veins of red, the last low beats of a dying sun. Against this scarlet canopy the hulk of the Rust Road's twin peaks stood tall, mountains of metal, unnaturally jagged. Their sharp pinnacles pierced the sky, and Jacob could not help but wonder if that explained the blood there. — Dean F. Wilson

That night she dreamed about the King again.
She stood in a riverside meadow between greenwood and castle. Overhead the sun shone gilt in a sky like powdered lapis and struck golden sparks from the King's blood-red dragon banner. — Suzannah Rowntree

Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A red sun rises. Blood has been spilled this night. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Colored lights shone right across the northern sky, leaping and flaring, spreading in rainbow hues from horizon to zenith: blood red to rose pink, saffron yellow to delicate primrose, pale green, aquamarine to darkest indigo. Great veils of color swathed the heavens, rising and falling as light seen through cascading curtains of water. Streamers shot out in great shifting beams as if God had put his thumb across the sun. — Celia Rees

Her feelings as dark as the night sky, the moon was the only thing making her come alive
So she got some paper and pen to let the ink spill it all out because talking never seemed to work.
Blood drops fell on her little piece of paper, drowning it along with her. By the time the blood dried up it left her with nothing but red dust. Red. The same color her eyes were captivated by.
They never told her that there is no way to get over crazy, messy things in life. There's only crossing that red sea as if you're walking through the wilderniss. The sun will rise when you've gone through the depts of it all. Writing wont matter anymore. Don't you understand? You're life is not messy little girl, you're just crazy sometimes. — N

Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgement; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man's bloodshot eye. — Ralph Ellison

Tuck watched the sun bubble into the ocean. Columns of vertical cumulus clouds turned to cones of pink cotton candy, then as the sun became a red wafer on the horizon, they turned candy-apple red, with purple rays reaching out of them like searchlights. The water was neon over wet asphalt, blood-spattered gunmetal - colors from the cover of a detective novel where heroes drink hard and beauty is always treacherous. — Christopher Moore

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire. — Charles Dickens

THE SUN HAD just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise. — James Lee Burke

I look out again at the sun-my first full gaze. It is blood-red and men are walking about on rooftops. Everything above the horizon is clear to me. It is like Easter Sunday. Death is behind me and birth too. I am going to live now among the life maladies. I am going to live the spiritual life of the pygmy, the secret life of the little man in the wilderness of the bush. Inner and outer have changed places. Equilibrium is no longer the goal-the scales must be destroyed. Let me hear you promise again all those sunny things you carry inside you. Let me try to believe for one day, while I rest in the open, that the sun brings good tidings. Let me rot in splendor while the sun bursts in your womb. I believe all your lies implicitly. I take you as the personification of evil, as the destroyer of the soul, as the maharanee of the night. Tack your womb up on my wall, so that I may remember you. We must get going. Tomorrow, tomorrow ... — Henry Miller