Burned Out Lights Quotes & Sayings

As we become this one global culture, in some ways it's things like the weather and nature that still hold our culture as unique to where we are. — Kate Bush

That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Rita Vargas caught her breath - the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars.
She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she'd ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if the could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen what she saw, they might have stayed home. — Luis Alberto Urrea

The sky above them was an intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the great stars burned like street-lamps. From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag, and disappear; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness, trailing a shower of sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours - red, copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten gray. — Rudyard Kipling

Anyone looking up from the dock saw only beauty, on a monumental scale, while on the far side of the ship men turned black with dust as they shoveled coal - 5,690 tons in all - into the ship through openings in the hull called "side pockets." The ship burned coal at all times. Even when docked it consumed 140 tons a day to keep furnaces hot and boilers primed and to provide electricity from the ship's dynamo to power lights, elevators, and, very important, the Marconi transmitter, whose antenna stretched between its two masts. When the Lusitania was under way, its appetite for coal was enormous. Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines. — Erik Larson

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. — Barry Lopez

The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town. — Michael Connelly

You're in the lap of the gods. If people go, they go, and if they don't. — Sam Mendes

Following Emporer Nero's command, "Let the Christians be exterminated!:" ... they [the Christians] were made the subjects of sport; they were covered with the hides of wild beasts and worried to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights. — Tacitus

All I knew was what I wasn't, and it took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad" writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hourse are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind? — Joan Didion

Smoke curls among the ruins of East London. Many of the buildings have burned to the ground or split like exploded rocks. Small lights bloom like a sea of candles. Even this rain will never put them all out. — John Owen Theobald

Love in the Daytime

My lover
Shines like the sun.
I may be burned
Black as a frying pan,
Sweating buckets
And keeling over
With vertigo,
But why worry?
My lover
Shines like the sun.
She pours over my body
And breathes into my soul.
It feels so good
When she lights
My love on fire
Like dry wood.

Translated from Tigrinya by Charles Cantalupo with Ghirmai Negash — Reesom Haile

Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects. — George Eliot

The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity. — Emile Zola

The black fabric of the tent roof was above him and yet he could see through it to the sky, which was the shaded blue of day, and bright, but black as well because he could see through that easy blueness, and beyond was a darkness more profound than that inside the tent, a darkness where the scattered suns burned, tiny firefly lights in the cold black empty deserts of the night. A — Iain M. Banks

Patriotism means to stand by the people, not to stand by the party. — Sumit Agarwal

Tell it, Fanny. About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky. Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desire that stir in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane, like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with questions. He will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps, understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes. — Ben Hecht

Did you know that the light from our nearest star takes four years to reach us? Which means when we see it- when we see any star- we are really seeing what it looks like in the past. All those twinkling lights, every star in the sky, could have burned out years ago- the entire sky could be empty this very minute, and we wouldn't even know it. — Ali Benjamin

Let's see, the last guy I dated - is there a word for someone who's sexually attracted to Muppets? Andrea's elegant persona was destroyed as she laughed so hard martini shot out of her nose. — Molly Harper

He barely managed not to choke it into free fall, atomized. Thick, green, herbal, sweet as syrup - he nearly gagged on the sweetness - perhaps sixty percent pure ethanol. But what was the rest of it? It burned down his esophagus, making him feel suddenly like an animated display of the digestive system, with all the different parts picked out in colored lights. Respectfully, he wiped the mouthpiece on his sleeve and handed the bottle to its owner, who tucked it back under his arm. "Thanks," Miles gasped. Mayhew nodded. "So how," Miles aspirated, then cleared his throat to a more normal tone, "what are you planning to do next? What are you demanding? — Lois McMaster Bujold

It is said of Muad'Dib that once when he saw a weed trying to grow between two rocks, he moved one of the rocks. Later, when the weed was seen to be flourishing, he covered it with the remaining rock. "That was its fate," he explained. — Frank Herbert

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise. — Sean O Faolain

If adults want to take such chances (with marijuana) that is their business — Ronald Reagan

Freshly sprung from my monogamous LTR, I had no idea how vulnerable I would be to the onslaught of chemicals your brain releases when you're attracted to someone. These chemicals are responsible for every single people-in-love-are-crazy-fools song, movie plot, and Shakespearean drama ever written. They stimulate the same area of the brain that lights up when you snort a fat rail of cocaine. This state of mind, limerence, is a biological relative of obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you are an addict, or perhaps have the sort of low-dopamine, low-serotonin brain soup best served with a side of SSRIs, you are perhaps more sensitive to the mind-altering power of limerence. And if you are a romantic, you are perhaps more likely to label this heady, overwhelming sensation love. Being a low-serotonin addict with romantic tendencies, I had to experience many crashed-and-burned affairs to understand that for me, love really was a drug. — Michelle Tea

A ghost curled like a blue snail inside her chest, and it was so tiny! It burned through the lace of her old-fashioned dress like a second heart. A musical staff wound in a thorny crown around the Spiritist's forehead, so that notes ran down her cheeks in a loose mask of song. Her eyelids were blacked out
and I saw this again and again in nightmares about my sister. Her eyelids had the polish of acorns. But her ears: that was the truly scary part. Great fantails of indigo and violet lights spiraled into her earlobes in an ethereal funnel
what the book called the Inverted Borealis. The caption read: 'A ghost sings its way deeply inside the Spiritist. — Karen Russell

The psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on — Charles Bukowski

C gives the programmer what the programmer wants; few restrictions, few complaints... C++ maintains the original spirit of C, that the programmer not the language is in charge. — Herbert Schildt

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season's rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn't work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn't affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement ... — Jonathan Franzen