Cereus Night Quotes & Sayings

Each wave breaking against the cliff would believe it was dying for the good of the sea; it would never occur to it that, like thousands of waves before and after, it had only been brought into being by the wind. — Vasily Grossman

Reality's just the accumulation of ominous prophecies come to life. All you have to do is open a newspaper on any given day to weigh the good news versus the bad news, and you'll see what I mean. — Haruki Murakami

For the gentle werelibrarian, who's strictly vegetarian, there's nothing like Tofillager the MEATLESS TOFU VILLAGER — Adam Rex

Ironic," Betty Lou said at last. "The cereus insists on sunlight
that's why it must be at the end of the yard. And yet it saves its flowers for the moon. The sun never sees what it fathers."
It takes from the day," I said, "gives to the night. — Jerry Spinelli

The hook is a word or an idea spoken by one character which gives the next character something to hook onto when he responds or, like a trapeze artist, gives him something to swing from on his way to another point of view. — Preston Sturges

How does one fight a shadow?
Simple: You don't.
Just change your course and walk into the sun so the shadows fall behind you. — Julie Cassar

I would rather die fighting for what is right, than live passively amidst all that is wrong. — Suzy Kassem

And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe. — Alan Lightman

Antioch, farewell! for wisdom sees, those men blush not in actions blacker than the night, will 'schew no course to keep them from the light. One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder's as near to lust as flame to smoke. Poison and treason are the hands of sin; Ay, and the targets to put off the shame. Then, lest my life be cropped to keep you clear, By flight I'll shun the danger which I fear. — William Shakespeare

There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life. — Pam Houston

You just can't let anything or anyone get in the way of who you are. — A. J. McLean

We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water. — Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

Sulfuric ether was sweet and hot, pungent and burning to the palate. It did not smell the least, to Nardi, of turpentine, but rather of large, white, oversweet flowers, fat, fleshy, prehistoric in their size and substance. He thought of these flowers as fringed, mouthed, and pistiled with sticky aroma, with pink-tipped, translucent styles and stigmas that moved in flower throats like beckoning fingers. Lush, languorously heavy, meltingly ephemeral, an indulgence to the New World tropics or an Old World greenhouse - something akin to night-blooming cereus. Ether, to him, was the nectar of such flowers, gathered and carried in the mouths of foot-long bumblebees, its aroma as old as Egypt, as modern as white walled hospitals, as personal and familiar as his own vague euphoric befuddlement. — Judy Cuevas

And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus ... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty. — Stephen King

A dead end can never be a one way street; you can always turn around and take another road. — Bo Bennett

There are beauties of character which, like the night-blooming cereus, are closed against the glare and turbulence of every-day life, and bloom only in shade and solitude, and beneath the quiet stars. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

A closed mind stumbles over the blessings of life without recognizing them. — Napoleon Hill

Change can only begin with awareness. — Miranda J. Barrett