Quotes & Sayings About Fires And Life

If God but cares for our inward and eternal life, if by all the experiences of this life He is reducing it and preparing for its disclosure, nothing can befall us but prosperity. Every sorrow shall be but the setting of some luminous jewel of joy. Our very morning shall be but the enamel around the diamond; our very hardships but the metallic rim that holds the opal, glancing with strange interior fires. — Henry Ward Beecher

We say that there ought to be no sorrow, but thereis sorrow, and we have to accept and receive ourselves in its fires. If we try to evade sorrow, refusing to deal with it, we are foolish. Sorrow is one of the biggest facts in life, and there is no use in saying it should not be. Sin, sorrow, and suffering are, and it is not for us to say that God has made a mistake in allowing them. — Oswald Chambers

Out of the fires of refinement, come the praise of His magnificence, the brilliance of His glory, and the honor of His precious Son, Jesus Christ. — Robin Bertram

Trials come. Tribulation comes. Fires of refinement come. The purpose of refinement is to bring to light the things hidden in darkness and then remove them — Robin Bertram

I was working at the 'New York Times,' ruing every second of my life, thinking how was I ever going to get out of here, and thinking that one could only do it the way newspaper people have always done it. I needed a scoop, and I would go out and I would dream upon coming upon fires or the sky falling in front of me or anything. — Michael Wolf

Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins - all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, waste space. The first real event since the long interruption was this vertiginous home-coming by train, in the knowledge that his home was still safe, still existing somewhere, with every smallest stone in it dear to him. This was the point of life, this was experience, this was the quest of adventure seekers and what artists had in mind - this coming home to your family, to yourself, this renewal of life. — Boris Pasternak

Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance. — Koren Zailckas

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. — Joan Didion

In times of life crisis, whether wild fires or smoldering stress, the first thing I do is go back to basics ... am I eating right, am I getting enough sleep, am I getting some physical and mental exercise everyday. — Edward Albert

Here is part of the problem, girls: we've been sold a bill of goods. Back in the day, women didn't run themselves ragged trying to achieve some impressively developed life in eight different categories. No one constructed fairy-tale childhoods for their spawn, developed an innate set of personal talents, fostered a stimulating and world-changing career, created stunning homes and yardscapes, provided homemade food for every meal (locally sourced, of course), kept all marriage fires burning, sustained meaningful relationships in various environments, carved out plenty of time for "self care," served neighbors/church/world, and maintained a fulfilling, active relationship with Jesus our Lord and Savior. You can't balance that job description. Listen to me: No one can pull this off. No one is pulling this off. The women who seem to ride this unicorn only display the best parts of their stories. Trust me. No one can fragment her time and attention into this many segments. — Jen Hatmaker

Let the fires of truth burn away your false life and your excuses, fears, blaming, doubts and illusions of insignificance. — Bryant McGill

Least total darkness should by Night regaine Her old possession, and extinguish life In Nature and all things, which these soft fires Not only enlighten, but with kindly heate Of various influence foment and warme, Temper or nourish, or in part shed down Thir stellar vertue on all kinds that grow On Earth, made hereby apter to receive Perfection from the Suns more potent Ray. — John Milton

When J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord's entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord's effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: "The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one's life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself. — Timothy J. Keller

She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection. — Mark Twain

Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.
Cotsakis crushed a can of Diet Pepsi and threw it at a garbage pail. — Don DeLillo

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power. — Andrew Marvell

Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from "problems", but from his own inner torment and fire. It's a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart! — Emil M. Cioran

Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats. — Nick Harkaway

There was once a bunny who lived by the ocean. Every day he would stroll along the sandy beach and pick up thoughts which had washed ashore. He would find them in shells, under rocks, and sometimes even tangled up in seaweed. "Oh, this is a good one," he would say, "We see chaos, but if we look carefully, if we look beneath the chaos, we find perfection." And into his bucket the thought would go. When the bunny had reached a ripe old age he gathered all the thoughts together and placed them carefully into a large silver cauldron heated by the fires of life. Using a straw broom, he stirred them thoroughly, and as he was stirring he listened carefully. Much to his surprise he heard the ocean singing a wordless song of incomparable beauty. The bunny closed his eyes and said, "Ah, it was all worth it."

--The Blue Monk of Niim — Various

Your life sparks fires from within your innermost temple. No one can reach there but you, it is your inner sanctum. You are your own master there, only you can reach and ignite the fire. — Rajneesh

Let us say before i go any further, that i forgive nobody. i wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come. — Samuel Beckett

I felt that the magical people must be in the hidden back roads and dusty cubby holes of life; on highways, in hostels, and in shabby, smoky cafes. These enchanting people are in trees, around fires and under hand-knit hats and street lamps reflecting gold on rain soaked pavement. They dance while others dangle; they vibrantly sing the songs that get jumbled and stuck in the subconscious of others who only wish to catch tune. They are the rare ones whose uncommon experiences touch your heart through just a wink of their eye, the stories stitched in the holes of their shoes, invoking a longing for the unknown, taking others to a place of missing what they've never even had -- they do not settle, they do not compromise. — Jackie Haze

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It") — Mark Strand

Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early
paths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and marked
lines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself. — Alexandre Dumas

Life is a process of storms and rebuilding, of fires and regrowth, of loss and gain. — Lisa Wingate

We can change so many times in our lives. We're born into a family, and it's the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we're someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we've become. — Lauren DeStefano

Of all African animals, the elephant is the most difficult for man to live with, yet its passing - if this must come - seems the most tragic of all. I can watch elephants (and elephants alone) for hours at a time, for sooner or later the elephant will do something very strange such as mow grass with its toenails or draw the tusks from the rotted carcass of another elephant and carry them off into the bush. There is mystery behind that masked gray visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea. — Peter Matthiessen

For the first time in a very long time, he yearned to see tomorrow. Tomorrow and the day after that and the year after that. There was a possibility that with Megs he might have a life to look forward to. And because of that, tonight he was going to hunt down a man and assassinate him in cold blood. This act would damn his very soul but for Megs it was worth it.
For Meggie he would walk the fires of hell. — Elizabeth Hoyt

There various news I heard of love and strife,Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,The fall of favourites, projects of the great,Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:All neither wholly false, nor wholly true. — Alexander Pope

Who will you be, my Little Ones? Will you dance for the fires of your youth and run at midnight to water's edge, diving into summer's heat? Will you ride a wild mare to any thought or dream or love of your making? Will you seek the artistry of your own infatuations and explore ... — Carew Papritz

I believe it is love, but how does one tell?"
Her friend's gaze grew thoughtful. "The signs are usually recognizable. When you love a man, he becomes the center of your world. You yearn to be with him, and when you are not, he is constantly on your mind. He brightens your day. His simplest touch sparks passion in you... a tender look fires a
warmth in your heart. Life feels empty without him. — Nicole Jordan

Renunciation Suzuki Roshi said, "Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, but accepting that they go away." Everything is impermanent; sooner or later everything goes away. Renunciation is a state of nonattachment, acceptance of this going away. Impermanence is, in fact, just another name for perfection. Leaves fall; debris and garbage accumulate; out of the debris come flowers, greenery, things that we think are lovely. Destruction is necessary. A good forest fire is necessary. The way we interfere with forest fires may not be a good thing. Without destruction, there could be no new life; and the wonder of life, the constant change, could not be. We must live and die. And this process is perfection itself. — Charlotte Joko Beck

Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets. — Lewis H. Lapham

The Republic needed to be passed through chastening, purifying fires of adversity and suffering: so these came and did their work and the verdure of a new national life springs greenly, luxuriantly, from their ashes. — Horace Greeley

30. The Watchman's Dream Mr. Parker, a businessman, is leaving on a trip and stops by his office on the way to the airport, around midnight. The night watchman, Paul stops him and says, "Mr. Parker, please don't take that flight. I had a dream last night, a little after midnight, that your plane would crash and everyone would die!" The business man cancels his trip and sure enough, the plane crashes, no survivors. Mr. Parker gives Paul a $20,000 reward for saving his life, then fires him. Why? Give me a clue | Answer — Puzzleland

Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory. — James Joyce

You wanna start a fire I've got the coal, that's what history is to me. And it attracts the right person to do something with it to create the next fire. And fires are fuel and food and energy and life. — Nora Guthrie

No breath, no sound, except at times the muffled cracking of stones being reduced to sand and cold, came to disturb the solitude that surrounded Janine. After a moment, however, it seemed to her that a king of slow gyration was sweeping the sky above her. In the depths of the dry, cold night thousands of stars were formed unceasingly and their sparkling icicles, no sooner detached, began to slip imperceptibly towards the horizon. Janine could not tear herself away from the contemplation of these shifting fires. She turned with them, and the same stationary progression reunited her little by little with her deepest being, where cold and desire now collided. Before her, the stars were falling one by one, then extinguishing themselves in the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living and dying. — Albert Camus

Bedu notice everything and forget nothing. Garrulous by nature, they reminisce endlessly, whiling away with the chatter the long marching hours, and talking late into the night round their camp fires. Their life is at all times desperately hard, and they are merciless critics of those who fall short in patience, good humour, generosity, loyalty, or courage. They make no allowance for the stranger. Whoever lives with the Bedu must accept Bedu conventions, and conform to Bedu standards. Only those who have journeyed with them them can appreciate the strain of such a life. — Wilfred Thesiger

Though the fire and water tried to overtake me, I have come out to a place of great abundance. I know that the fires of refinement, although hard, dark, and difficult, brought me to a better and richer place in God. — Robin Bertram

To fall in love for any reason does cause fires of emotion. When we are in love, we ride on a positive energy as compared to not being in love. When we are love, we transcend conditional love to that of unconditional and we are now flowering in consciousness. Love is a very important element of consciousness as it becomes purer with Source union even as our consciousness is expanded further. Consciousness is love that is light. — Nandhiji

Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! - Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts to sea alone, in the darkness of night, beneath a firmament illumined no longer by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

The lamps are lit, the fires burn bright. The house is full of life and light. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word - all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities - it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Don't let the urgent take the place of the important in your life ... When you and I were putting out the fires of the urgent, the important was again left in a holding pattern. — Charles Hummel

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me. — Pablo Neruda

The fires of refinement will shine the light of Christ into the dark places of our hearts, burn off the chaff, and restore us to a state of greater purity. — Robin Bertram

They wanted you to grow up into some helpless combination of old person and infant. They wanted you to have a house and a family and a refrigerator and a TV, and not know how any of it worked. They wanted you to spend your life working on something that was never concrete, never anything you could see or hold in your hands, and if you didn't do that they wanted to put you in jail. Cutting down forests, poisoning the earth - it was a country driven by stupid, blind impulse. It was a country where nobody knew where their food came from or where their garbage went, they just flushed the bowl, kept eating it and throwing it away, building bombs and computers, cars and TVs, sending people off to Vietnam so they could set it on fire. It was a country that had turned against everyone he knew, cast them out like garbage, and all they could do was smile to themselves at all they'd learned and wait patiently for the fires to start here at home. — Zachary Lazar

A wave of yet more tender joy escaped from his heart, and went coursing in warm flood along his arteries. Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of, or would ever know of, broke upon and illumined his memory.. — James Joyce

Dogfish
I wanted
The past to go away, I wanted
To leave it, like another country; I wanted
My life to close, and open
Like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
Where it falls
Down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
Whoever I was, I was
Alive
For a little while.
... mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
Or mean,
For a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
Swim through the fires to stay in
This world. — Mary Oliver

Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services. — Rodney Stark

But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races. — Willa Cather

The less you rely on smoke and mirrors, the less you'll need to put out fires. — Gavin Mills

This (Earth) is hell.
There are no fires, no burning pits of torment, no levels or rings or rivers of lava. When we die, we get put right back on earth to live our miserable existences over and over and over for all eternity. — Larissa Ione

Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name. — Anonymous

[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in this one thing thou shouldst have had little trust in me I vehemently grieved and was ashamed. For I (God [knows]) would without hesitation precede or follow thee to the Vulcanian fires according to thy word. For not with me was my heart, but with thee. But now, more than ever, if it be not with thee, it is nowhere. For without thee it cannot anywhere exist. — Heloise D'Argenteuil

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages. — Jesmyn Ward

As life goes on, they become not two compatible beings who have learned to live together through self-suppression and patience, but one new and richer being, fused in the fires of God's love and tempered of the best of both. One by one, the veils of life's mysteries have been lifted. The flesh, they found, was too precocious to reveal its own mystery; then came the mystery of the other's inner life, disclosed in the raising of young minds and hearts in the ways of God; — Fulton J. Sheen

Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange. — Jack London

It is important to remember that life is not a dress rehearsal and that none of us should waste our time on doing things that don't spark fires within us. My golden rule for business and life is: We should all enjoy what we do and do what we enjoy. — Richard Branson

She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them. — Isabel Allende

Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment. — Jorge Luis Borges

Well I knew when I first laid eyes on her
I could never be free
One look at her and I knew right away
She should always be with me
Well the dream dried up a long time ago
Don't know where it is anymore
True to life, true to me
Was the girl from the red river shore
Well I'm wearing the cloak of misery
And I've tasted jilted love
And the frozen smile upon my face
Fits me like a glove
Well I can't escape from the memory
Of the one I'll always adore
All those nights when I lay in the arms
Of the girl from the red river shore
Well we're living in the shadows of a fading past
Trapped in the fires of time
I've tried not to ever hurt anybody
And to stay out of the life of crime
And when it's all been said and done
I never did know the score
One more day is another day away
From the girl from the red river shore. — Bob Dylan

There there is nothing like a wilderness journey for rekindling the fires of life. Simplicity is part of it. Cutting the cackle. Transportation reduced to leg - or arm - power, eating irons to one spoon. Such simplicity, together with sweat and silence, amplify the rhythms of any long journey, especially through unknown, untattered territory. And in the end such a journey can restore an understanding of how insignificant you are
and thereby set you free. — Colin Fletcher

Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back. — Jean-Christophe Valtat

Some, perhaps, would fall by the way. Some, old or sick, would drop out of the caravan and creep away into a solitary place to die; others would be picked off by gunners, defying the law for the fancied pleasure of stopping in full flight a brave and fiercely burning life; still others, perhaps, would fall in exhaustion into the sea ... In them burned one more the fever of migration, consuming with its fires all other desires and passions. — Rachel Carson

The tight little segregated life, always spent with people your own age, economic group, educational background, and culture tends to bring an ingrown, static sort of condition. Fresh ideas, reality of communication and shared experiences will be sparks to light up fires of creativity, especially if the people spending time together are a true cross-section of ages, nationalities, kindred, and tongues (p. 202). — Edith Schaeffer

And he thought about the Devil, in whom he did not believe, and he looked around at the two windows where the fires were gleaming. It seemed to him that out of those crimson eyes the Devil himself was looking at him--that unknown force that had created the mutual relation of the strong and the weak, that coarse blunder which one could never correct. That strong must hinder the weak from living--such was the law of Nature; but only in a newspaper article or in a schoolbook was that intelligible and easily accepted. In the hotchpotch which was everyday life, in the tangle of trivialities out of which human relations were woven, it was no longer a law, but a logical absurdity, when the strong and the weak were both equally victims of their mutual relations, unwillingly submitting to some directing force, unknown, standing outside life, apart from man. — Anton Chekhov

Dreadful as all these processes may seem, they are only the resolution of certain carbon-based compounds into certain other carbon-based compounds. Carbon is the element of life and death. We share it with diamonds and dandelions, with kerosene an kelp. While we may wrinkle our noses at some of its manifestations, we ought also to remember that this element comes to us from the stars, which wheel over us forever in silent, glittering array, pure fires obeying celestial laws. — William R. Maples

Tiffany got up early and lit the fires. When her mother came down, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor, very hard.
"Er ... aren't you supposed to do that sort of thing by magic, dear?" said her mother, who'd never really got the hang of what witchcraft was all about.
"No, Mum, I'm supposed not to," said Tiffany, still scrubbing.
"But can't you just wave your hand and make all the dirt fly away, then?"
"The trouble is getting the magic to understand what dirt is," said Tiffany, scrubbing hard at a stain. "I heard of a witch over in Escrow who got it wrong and ended up losing the entire floor and her sandals and nearly a toe."
Mrs. Aching backed away. "I thought you just had to wave your hands about," she mumbled nervously.
"That works," said Tiffany, "but only if you wave them about on the floor with a scrubbing brush. — Terry Pratchett

You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
(from, Dogfish) — Mary Oliver

Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all. — Peter Brook

I stood on the old ferry dock and watched the icy sludge slide by. Patches of white ice slipped through, but mostly it was grey slush, sluggish and heavy looking. The air was sharp and clear, one of the few benefits of the evacuation and reducing temperature, the centuries-old odour of industry and modern life frozen and discarded, leaving a crispness previously only found among the peaks of mountain ranges. On the far bank stood the ruins of Birkenhead, where the riots had been particularly bad and the fires that followed were allowed to rage out of control. It had taken weeks for the conflagration to finally die, leaving behind soot-blackened husks of buildings, grotesque sculptures of melted glass and metal and more dead than anyone ever cared to count. — Neil Davies

LIFE IN ALEXANDRA was exhilarating and precarious. Its atmosphere was alive, its spirit adventurous, its people resourceful. Although the township did boast some handsome buildings, it could fairly be described as a slum, living testimony to the neglect of the authorities. The roads were unpaved and dirty, and filled with hungry, undernourished children scampering around half-naked. The air was thick with the smoke from coal fires in tin braziers and stoves. A single water tap served several houses. Pools of stinking, stagnant water full of maggots collected by the side of the road. Alexandra was known as "Dark City" for its complete absence of electricity. Walking home at night was perilous, for there were no lights, the silence pierced by yells, laughter, and occasional gunfire. So different from the darkness of the Transkei, which seemed to envelop one in a welcome embrace. — Nelson Mandela

Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge, for I am opening the flood-gates myself, against my will. Ah! but my courage fails me and my heart is sick within me!
Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!
(A Rebours, final words) — Joris-Karl Huysmans

You can't run, you can't hide, and the idea that you have no control at all just gets into your head and it sticks there. In my time in the Navy, I was never so scared in my life. Bombs and smoke everywhere, fires on the deck. Meanwhile, the guns are booming and the noise is like nothing you've ever heard. Thunder times ten, maybe, but that doesn't describe it. In the big battles, Japanese Zeros strafed the deck continually, the shots ricocheting all over the place. — Nicholas Sparks

Talleyrand said that two things are essential in life: to give good dinners and to keep on fair terms with women. As the years pass and fires cool, it can become unimportant to stay always on fair terms either with women or one's fellows, but a wide and sensitive appreciation of fine flavours can still abide with us, to warm our hearts. — M.F.K. Fisher

Pride was his life force; for us it was a live nerve that he could teach us to brush. One stroke, a good practice, and we could tingle for days ... First, he found the pride in each of us, then he taught us how good it could feel. What he was ultimately after was for every one of us to learn to light our own fires and glow our brightest. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

I know a lot of us feel like that. We come to a place where we're walking through the fires and trials of life, and we don't know where to turn. What we need is a fresh start. We need our story to go in a new direction. What we need is a comeback of our own. — Louie Giglio

As water downs ships but upholds leaves,
and as fires burn cities but refines gold,
so do life's troubles propel the meek to greatness
and the proud to ruin. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Fill ev'ry glass, for wine inspires us,
And fires us
With courage, love and joy.
Women and wine should life employ.
Is there ought else on earth desirous? — John Gay

Touch the stone,' said Beliah, 'and you will touch "reality", or what the ignorant of all ages think "reality" is. That kind of truth will kill you, man. You won't see morning! I have kept you all your life from such things as remorse, terror, pity. Touch the stone, and those same angels will change you into an old poor pathetic deluded dying creature. Hubert, a nurse has to shave you, your hand shakes so much. You know that don't you? You dribble at every orifice, Hubert. You've begun to smell this past year or two...' He suddenly howled as if I had actually touched the stone,'YOU WILL BE RAVAGED IN FIRES OF GRACE!'
I heard Nurse McGregor in the next ward. 'Good evening,' came her cheerful voice to the looney who had strangled his sweetheart and then buried her in his garden. 'Is it cocoa tonight, or tea, or milk?"
Beliah was weeping. Outside the eaves dripped. The whole earth was drenched with the grief of Beliah. He wept inside me. I felt his marvellous tears on my face. — George Mackay Brown

When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses, finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now. — Henry David Thoreau

To a significant degree, the commitments we make in life define us. They reveal our interests, passions and goals, and give important clues in discerning meaning and finding happiness in life. While many seem to struggle with the archetypal human question, "who am I?" one simple look at who and what you're devoted to, what takes up your time and fires your imagination can clarify your life direction. It can help you to make authentic decisions that are rooted in your deepest convictions. We are happiest when we are in harmony with our passion. — Monks Of New Skete

No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by forests - words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks - another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life. — Joseph Conrad

How could there be a stone unturned in the quest to understand your life's purpose? So many well entrenched systems already exist and some have done so for thousands of years. Still we are all inquisitive creatures by nature and I aim to feed your voracious appetite and stoke the ever-burning fires of controversy by introducing you to Life Cycles."

After all you cannot be a quiet revolutionary. — Neil Killion

Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life. — Cormac McCarthy

May 27, 1941
Sunday we encountered specimens of the rarely appearing yellow lady's slipper. This orchis is fragilely beautiful. One tends to think of it almost as a phenomenon, without any roots or place in the natural world. And yet it, too, has had its tough old ancestors which have eluded fires and drought and freezes to pass on in this lovely form the boon of existence. If a plant so delicately lovely can at the same time be so toughly persistent and resistant to all natural enemies, can we doubt that hopes for a better an more rational world may not also withstand all assaults, be bequeathed from generation to generation, and come ultimately to flower?
President Roosevelt says he has not lost faith in democracy; nor have I lost faith in the transcendent potentialities of LIFE itself. One has but to look about him to become almost wildly imbued with something of the massive, surging vitality of the earth. — Harvey Broome

Love is a holy fuel. It fires the affections, steels the courage, and carries a Christian above the love of life, and the fear of death. — Thomas Watson

Is it within us all, when the memories of war have faded, to so want to be a part of something great that we throw aside the quiet, the calm, the mundane, the peace itself? Do we collectively come to equate peace with boredom and complacency? Perhaps we hold these embers of war within us, dulled only by sharp memories of the pain and the loss, and when that smothering blanket dissipates with the passage of healing time, those fires flare again to life. — R.A. Salvatore

Let the fires go out in the boiler room of the church and the place will still look smart and clean, but it will be cold. The Prayer Room is the boiler room for its spiritual life. — Leonard Ravenhill

These fires go out but the coals don't. If this isn't ended it will be just around the corner everyday of his life. And if you don't let a boy become a man, it's no one's fault but your own when you're still wiping his ass when he should be making you grandchildren. — Brian McGreevy

Understanding the world too well, you see too many options and become as indecisive as Hamlet.
No matter how far we progress, we remain part animal, and it is the animal in us that fires our strategies, gives them life, animates us to fight. Without the desire to fight, without a capacity for the violence war churns up, we cannot deal with danger.
The prudent Odysseus types are comfortable with both sides of their nature. They plan ahead as best they can, see far and wide, but when it comes time to move ahead, they move. Knowing how to control your emotions means not repressing them completely but using them to their best effect. — Robert Greene

Realize that God uses the fires of life to purify your faith, to shape you into Christ's image, and to cause you to love Him ... even more! — Elizabeth George

Tell me we're not going to be stoking up the cook fires to build palisades through the night by their light.' I stood, turning as I spoke.
Gravely, he said, 'You're not going to be stoking the cook fires and building palisades through the night by their light.'
Something was wrong with Lupus. He had never in his life made a joke, and his eyes were not laughing; quite the reverse. — M.C. Scott

our God is not a God who just sits up in heaven watching everything from afar. Jesus is in the fire with us - standing beside us, experiencing the flames with us. He mourns with us, hurts over our sufferings with us, and celebrates our victories with us. When the fires of life begin to rage, he is with us. The hotter the flames burn, the closer he gets. — Kasey Van Norman

Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood. — Anthony Doerr

Nothing. Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life. He held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in the blackness. — Cormac McCarthy

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillars - even these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The — Henry David Thoreau