Embankment Quotes & Sayings

During that year by the railroad embankment, at the time of my father's complete disaster, distance meant for us not only some faraway lyrical splendor but also the exceedingly utilitarian idea of running away, the deliverance from fear and hunger. — Danilo Kis

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. — Virginia Woolf

Bailing the center of a spot and not having an embankment is not the only way to flirt. So soon, so left without a spoon, so august and so strange and taller than every other, it is not astonishing that someone is older. — Gertrude Stein

Before being taken to the Morgue, the body is left for a while on the embankment so they can try reviving it. A massive crowd gathers round the body. Those unable to see because they are at the back jostle those in front as best they can. Each thinks: "I wouldn't be drowning myself, not I." They pity the young suicide, admire him, but do not imitate him. He, however, found it quite natural to give himself death, deeming nothing on earth able to content him, and aspiring higher. — Comte De Lautreamont

If you're a teenaged babysitter caring for a mute toddler in a remote Maine cabin during a once-in-a-century blizzard while and escaped killers (bearing a strange resemblance to the handicapped boy you and your friends bulled of an embankment and left for dead all those years ago) roams the woods, you're probably in a horror movie. — Seth Grahame-Smith

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women. — Tim Winton

Nothing could be more dangerous than following the popular maxim whereby it is the spirit of the law that must be consulted. This is an embankment that, once broken, gives way to a torrent of opinions. — Cesare Beccaria

ADIEU
The glimmer farther away than the head
The heart-skip
On the slope where the air rolls its voice
The spokes of the wheel
the sun in the rut
At the crossroads
near the embankment
a prayer
Some words that are not heard
Nearer the sky
And on its steps
the last square of light
("Adieu") — Pierre Reverdy

He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country. — G.K. Chesterton

Peter - do please be happy. I mean, you've always been the comfortable sort of person that nothing could touch. Don't alter, will you?" That was the second time Wimsey had been asked not to alter himself; the first time, the request had exalted him; this time, it terrified him. As the taxi lurched along the rainy Embankment, he felt for the first time the dull and angry helplessness which is the first warning stroke of the triumph of mutability. Like the poisoned Athulf in the Fool's Tragedy, he could have cried, "Oh, I am changing, changing, fearfully changing." Whether his present enterprise failed or succeeded, things would never be the same again. — Dorothy L. Sayers

It was as if an embankment had been swept away and I (Neel ) were floundering in a flood , trying not to drown in my grief. — Amitav Ghosh

I could buy myself paper, a pen, a pencil and a brush and could create pictures whenever and wherever I wanted ... That evening, in the spring of 1947, on the embankment of the Seine in Paris, at the age of thirty, I saw that it was possible to live and work in the world, and that I could participate in the exchange of ideas that was taking place all around, bound to no country. — Peter Weiss

I should like to understand what really goes on in the souls of plongeurs and tramps and Embankment sleepers. At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. — George Orwell

Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions. — John Le Carre

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be
right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once). — Michael J. Fox

As for agility, a biologist at the National Bison Range in Montana once observed a 2,000-pound bull leap up a six-foot embankment from a standing start!13 — Michael Punke

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

So how are we getting over to that?" Lyssa asked from where she was sitting on a cement embankment. Eric glanced across the waterline and nodded to the south. "There's a marina. We'll steal a boat." "Commandeer." "Excuse me?" "I'm a police officer, I don't steal boats," she told him simply. "I commandeer them." Eric snorted but nodded as he gestured. "Whatever you say, Officer. — Evan Currie

To cause pain was a disease. As a child I imagined tiny, almost invisible animals that arrived in the neighborhood at night, they came from the ponds, from the abandoned train cars beyond the embankment, from the stinking grasses called fetienti, from the frogs, the salamanders, the flies, the rocks, the dust, and entered the water and the food and the air, making our mothers, our grandmothers as angry as starving dogs. — Elena Ferrante

But the story of leukemia
the story of cancer
isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship
qualities often ascribed to great physicians
are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road. — E. M. Forster

Will drive you." Her car, he knew, was parked on the other side of the Seine. It seemed far to walk. But he just nodded numbly. "All right," he said. She was in no rush. They strolled arm in arm, like lovers, along the embankment. They passed the houseboat restaurants tied up to the side, brightly lit, still busy with guests. Above them, on the other side of the river, rose Notre Dame, brilliantly lit. For a while, this slow walk, with her head on his shoulder, the soft words she spoke to him, made him feel better. But soon he stumbled, feeling a kind of clumsy weakness coursing through his body. His mouth was very dry. His jaw felt stiff. It was difficult to speak. She did not seem to notice. They had moved past — Michael Crichton

Suddenly, a car zoomed out of a side street to their right, slamming into the side of the car with a loud metallic crash. Tires screeched. The passenger window shattered, showering glass over Pam as the other car's momentum pushed them towards the opposite side of the road. Pam shrieked as the car tumbled over the edge of the road into the embankment. The car rolled until it came to a rest in the bottom of the ditch with creaks and groans. Neither Pam nor her mother stirred. — C.B. Cook

A man and his young son crouched in the woods just before sunset, out where Palm Beach County meets the Everglades. Their eyes focused on the train tracks a few yards away, a tight bend just past the clearing where Pratt & Whitney tests its jet engines. A shiny new Lincoln penny sat on one of the rails. "Why are we doing this, Daddy?" "To get a flat penny." "What for?" "Because it's fun!" A train whistle blew in the distance. "Here she comes! Get down!" The pair crouched and waited, the train growing closer. It was in sight before they knew it, nothing but a blur as it entered the bend and hit the penny. There was a harsh grinding of metal. The father and son watched in astonishment as The Silver Stingray jumped the tracks and twenty cars jackknifed down the embankment toward the swamp. "Daddy? Did we do that?" "How'd you like some ice cream? — Tim Dorsey

I POINT OUT the embankment leading down to the water's edge. "All the way down to that walking trail," I say to Ringer. "And don't wait for me." She shakes her head, frowning. I lean in, keeping my expression as serious as I can. "I thought I had you with the zombie remark. One of these days, I'm going to get a smile out of you, Private." Very much not smiling. "I don't think so, sir." "You have something against smiling?" "It was the first thing to go." Then the snow and the dark swallow her. The rest of the squad follows. I can hear Teacup whimpering beneath her breath as Dumbo leads her off, going, "Run hard when it goes, Cup, okay? — Rick Yancey

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship. — E. M. Forster

I object," said the man emphatically. He stopped work again and studied Elnora. Even the watching mother could not blame him. Against the embankment, in the shade of the bridge Elnora's bright head, and her lavender dress made a picture worthy of much contemplation.
I object!" repeated the man. — Gene Stratton-Porter

As I was coming out of the closet, our car was hurtling over an embankment. — Lance Loud

For his part, the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour - disdaining even to wear a watch - he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention. — Amor Towles