Flaring Up Quotes & Sayings

A forest fire was making its way along the tinderbox ridges above them, flaring and shimmering against the overcast like the northern lights. Cold as it was he stood there a long time. The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember. — Cormac McCarthy

I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend ... I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend ... — Neil Gaiman

A Given
The drum we hear inside us now
we may not hear tomorrow.
We have such fear of what comes next. Death.
These loves are like pieces of cotton.
Throw them in the fire.
Death will be a meeting like that flaring up,
a presence you have always wanted to be with.
This body and this universe
keep us from being free.
Those of you decorating your cells
so beautifully, do you think
they won't be torn down?
The eventual demolishing of prisons
is a given. Fire-change, disaster-change,
you can trust that those will come around to you. — Rumi

Say. It." He jerked his head to her, his nostrils flaring and his face set in hard lines. "All right. You're a drough. I loathe droughs. I vowed to my family I would kill them all, especially the one responsible for their deaths. — Donna Grant

He regarded the world - objects right in front of his face - as if from a great distance. For when he moved on the earth he also moved in other realms. In certain seasons, in certain shades, memories alighted on him like sharp-taloned birds: a head turning in the foliage, lantern light flaring in a room. — Amanda Coplin

I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps, I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps, His Day is marching on. — Julia Ward Howe

She dribbled water over his neck and back. The towel didn't quite soak up all of it, and drops raced down his back, trailing the curve of his spine. She loved that curve, framed on either side by ripple after ripple of muscle, and she especially loved the way it dipped in at his waist before flaring onto his perfect, rounded backside. — Melissa Cutler

The ears were large, flaring forward, the eyes limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light: obsidian, emerald, ruby, opal, amethyst, diamond. — William S. Burroughs

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue. — Pablo Neruda

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees. — Douglas Coupland

The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking at them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring up, now vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something gladsome and mysterious to one another. — Leo Tolstoy

The thing about marriage is that it requires so much compromise. And, naturally, someone is going to come into the marriage being better at The Yield. In fact, I say a lengthy marriage requires it. Someone is always going to come in with horns down and nostrils flaring. That requires that the other person run away as quickly as possible while waving the white flag. Certainly not the red flag, because I don't want to be that poor woman who accidentally ran over her spouse sixty-five times. Someone is the bull. Someone must be the china shop. We all have important roles to play. — Jen Mann

Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern in which every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without. The people I encountered came from towns I had been to, they knew other people I had met, it was a network, and it was a tight mesh. But when I moved to Stockholm this flaring up of memories became rarer and rarer, and one day it ceased altogether. That is, I could still remember; what happened was that the memories no longer stirred anything in me. No longing, no wish to return, nothing. Just the memory, and a barely perceptible hint of an aversion to anything that was connected with it. — Karl Ove Knausgard

and the city fireworked alive all around us: flashing with neon signs and flaring with red and gold lights, buzzing with motorbikes and pumping with stereos, streaming warm wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of us, it sent its deep pulse up into the hearts of our bones, it flowed on long and strong enough to last us forever. — Tana French

The girls were flaring at me, as if I was the one who had won. And I wasn't even fighting. — Renee Carter

He was still wide awake when the morning came - the light changed imperceptibly underground, with the glowtrees flaring up brightly, and the shimmer of golden dust that remained suspended in the musty air, as if millions of butterflies had shed the scales of their wings in midair. — Ekaterina Sedia

Before, as soon as I came home from all sorts of places I would sit down and write in my journal. Now I want to write you, talk with you ... I love when you say all that happens is good, it is good. I say all that happens is wonderful. For me it is all symphonic, and I am so aroused by living - god, Henry, in you alone I have found the same swelling of enthusiasm, the same quick rising of the blood, the fullness ... Before, I almost used to think there was something wrong. Everybody else seemed to have the brakes on ... I never feel the brakes. I overflow. And when I feel your excitement about life flaring, next to mine, then it makes me dizzy. — Anais Nin

Illium was a stunning sight against the lightening sky, his wings sweeping through the air with a grace that made him seem a half-forgotten dream. When he landed in the courtyard, his wings flaring out for an instant, he was at once very much a man, physical and sexual, and an unattainable fantasy. — Nalini Singh

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country
indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky
provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut ...
... Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. — Annie Proulx

He looked all Negro to me: he was rich chocolate with flaring nostrils and beautiful teeth. Sometimes he would skip happily , and the Negro woman tugged his hand to make him stop. — Harper Lee

Why isn't it enough that I'm willing to submit to you?' Poppy asked, her own temper flaring. 'Why must I be eager to lie with you, when you're not the husband I wanted? — Lisa Kleypas

I don't believe this," Emma said, temper flaring. "I came all this way to help you and you're scolding me like a child!" "I've got half a mind to take you over my knee and paddle you." He took another swallow of the whiskey and made a lusty sound of satisfaction as it went down. "You wouldn't dare." Steven flinched as the needle made its first pass through his skin. "Ask Joellen Lenahan about that." Emma — Linda Lael Miller

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

Something was shining on Damon's face. She reached toward it, touched it, and lifted her fingers away in wonder.
"Don't be sad," she told him, feeling the cool wetness on her fingertips. But a pang of worry disturbed her. Who was there to understand Damon now? Who would be there to push him, to try to see what was really inside him? "You have to take care of each other," she said, realizing it. A little strength came back to her, like a candle flaring in the wind. "Stefan, will you promise? Promise to take care of each other? — L.J.Smith

He dismounts his albino steed, the horse's pinked nostrils flaring, dirty mane matted with ice. — Blake Crouch

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once. — Lauren Oliver

He smiled. "You're into me, I can tell."
"I'm not into you," I said hotly. Hotly, because as soon as the words left my lips, sparklers erupted on top of my head.
Hudson looked at them, and a grin spread across his face. The baby cooed and reached out, trying to grab the flaring light. Hudson moved farther away. "Don't touch. Just look at Mommy's pretty liar hat."
He was enjoying this way too much. "Okay," I said. "Maybe I like you a little."
The sparklers dimmed, but didn't go out.
Hudson raised an eyebrow.
"All right," I said, nervously eyeing the area to make sure no one saw us. "I'm into you."
The sparklers died, but I didn't wait around for more commentary. I headed to the inn. Behind me I heard Hudson still talking to the baby. "Yes, we like Mommy's flaming hairdo, don't we? — Janette Rallison

Laughter! I remember laughter. I did laughter a lot, he thought. These colours spinning around them are matching their mirth, changing from moment to moment, flaring out as they run and throw and catch. There are silver joy-waves rippling about them — Esme Ellis

It wasn't that her dress was revealing, not by current standards, but the fitted bodice and flaring skirt played with a man's imagination in a maddening way. It would be easy access to put her over his knee, flip up the skirt and warm her luscious ass with the palm of his hand. — Sweden Reese

But I don't really care for directors flaring up and trying to humble some actor, which they would do to try and make an example out of them so everybody else would stay on the ball - and David wasn't anything like that. — Richard Farnsworth

...Heard the rushing wind, saw through his tears: red and blue flaring light, and then he shut up and looked for it but found nothing. — Jason Heller

Frontal lobes includes suppressing impulses from the parietal lobes, which are curious and capricious and, as the lobes most intimately involved with touch, want to explore everything tactilely. So when certain parts of the frontal lobe go kaput, the brain can no longer tamp down these parietal impulses, and the hand begins to flail and grab. (Neurologically, this flaring up of suppressed impulses resembles the "release" of the snout reflex in kuru victims.) And because the grasping impulse springs from the subconscious, the conscious brain can't always interrupt it and break the hand's grip. Hand-to-hand combat - with — Sam Kean

Brancheau was smiling, her long ponytail flaring out behind her. It was an endearing site: Man — Tim Zimmermann

Hours later, Adam proped himself up on an elbow and stared down at Gabrielle, pondering what made beauty. He thought he was beginning to understand. It wasn't symmetry of features; it wasn't perfection. It was uniqueness. That which one person had that no other possessed. That which was only their own. Perhaps Gabrielle's nose was like a thousand others, but they weren't on her face, with her eyes, with her cheekbones and hair. Nor were those noses graced with her many expressions, crinkling so charmingly when she laughed, flaring so haughtily when she was irritated. — Karen Marie Moning

Aye. He wills that I work his work in this place. Indeed. I am left behind to labor. Right
'And one day he may show his face beneath his damnable clouds to tell me what that work might be; what's worth so many tears; what's so important in his sight that is needs to be done this way ...
'O my sons!'Chauntecleer suddenly wailed at the top of his lungs, a light flaring before it goes out: 'How much I want you with me! — Walter Wangerin Jr.

Each time Nate saw her, Elisa's beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they'd broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost aggressive good health. The power of her beauty, Nate had once decided, came from its ability to constantly reconfigure itself. When he thought he'd accounted for it, filed it away as a dead fact - pretty girl - she turned her head or bit her lip, and like a children's toy you shake to reset, her prettiness changed shape, its coordinates altered: now it flashed from the elegant contours of her sloping brow and flaring cheekbone, now from her shyly smiling lips. — Adelle Waldman

A New York casting director, who shall remain nameless, once said to me, 'Marcia, you have what I call the flaring-nostril look, and until you get something done about it, you will never, ever work.' — Marcia Gay Harden

Out of the night you burn, Manhattan, In a vesture of gold
Spun of innumerable arcs, Flaring and multiplying
Gold at the uttermost circles fading Into the tenderest hint of jade, Or fusing in tremulous twilight blues, Robing the far-flung offices, Scintillant-storied, forking flame, Or soaring to luminous amethyst Over the steeples aureoled. — Lola Ridge

I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty. — Pablo Neruda

She was still staring at him, eyes wide, nostrils flaring. Honky — Stephen King

Yet, sluggard, wake, and gull thy soul no more With earth's false pleasures, and the world's delight, Whose fruit is fair and pleasing to the sight, But sour in taste, false as the putrid core: Thy flaring glass is gems at her half light; She makes thee seeming rich, but truly poor: She boasts a kernel, and bestows a shell; Performs an inch of her fair-promis'd ell: Her words protest a heav'n; her works produce a hell. — Francis Quarles

Rumors are like lightning on summer tinder, producing flames that dance in flickering brilliance from person to person, sometimes flaring in great conflagrations of exaggeration before finally extinguishing themselves in the cold waters of fact. — Stephen Leigh

In the dog days, when Altair and Deneb
set toward western waters, Vega
flaring in their starry wake, the choir
of peepers and crickets melds liquid
to languid; the first maple leaves ripen
and curl to red fists; pine needles spread
gold scripture across the water;
nuthatch feet circle tree trunks--
gentle scriveners
scribing the dawn of dying days. — Ken Craft

Was that - did she just grin at me? To me? A moment of stillness in this moment of pause. Without speaking, we let our gazes wander slow, groping to confirm relief in the other. There's a subdued excitement for the oncoming sharing of whatever's waiting for us behind that heavy iron door, exclusive - two solitary embers, isolated in their separate pits, far away but fanned by the same wind, the same night, alone with the night, their respective camps all gone to sleep, flaring softly cradled calling, out against the great dark backdrop of the great unknown. — Patrick Bryant

You can close your eyes and think of England, if you like."
"I've never even been to England," she said, but she shut her eyelids. She could feel the dank heaviness of her clothes, cold and itchy against her skin, and the cloying sweet air of the cave, colder yet, and the weight of Jace's hands on her shoulders, the only things that were warm. And then he kissed her.
She felt the brush of his lips, light at first, and her own opened automatically beneath the pressure. Almost against her will she felt herself go fluid and pliant, stretching upward to twine her arms around his neck the way that a sunflower twists toward light. His arms slid around her, his hands knotting in her hair, and the kiss stopped being gentle and became fierce, all in a single moment like tinder flaring into a blaze. — Cassandra Clare

He lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply, the tip flaring an angry red. Isn't love a beautiful goddamn liar? — Paula McLain

She stood straight and still, her arms at her side. Her eyebrows had the graceful arch of a raptor's wings in flight. Her green eyes came unafraid to his. The connection was so intense that it threatened to drain his sense of self. He felt that he had always known her, that she had always been a part of him, that her needs were his needs. She held him with her gaze as surely as a grip of iron would, searching his eyes as if searching his soul, seeking an answer to something. I am here to help you, he said in his mind. He meant it more than any thought he had ever had.
The intensity of her gaze relaxed, loosening its hold on him. In her eyes he saw something that attracted him more than anything else. Intelligence. He saw it flaring there, burning in her, and through it all he felt an overriding sense of her integrity. Richard felt safe. — Terry Goodkind

Dimitri must have grown tired of waiting for me. He leapt out, hand again going for my neck. And again I evaded, letting my shoulder take the brunt of the hit. This time he held on to my shoulder. He jerked me toward him, triumph flaring in those red eyes. In the sort of space we were in, this was probably all he needed to kill me. He had what he wanted.
Apparently, though, he wasn't the only one who wanted me. Another Strigoi, maybe thinking he'd help Dimitri, pushed toward us and reached for me. Dimitri bared his fangs, giving the other Strigoi a look of pure hatred and fury.
"Mine!" Dimitri hissed. — Richelle Mead

You've changed, Fitz.'
'It's been eight years. Everyone changes.'
'I haven't changed.'
The insight came to him like a match flaring. 'I can see how you've tried to remain the same. But no, you have changed, too. Once you thrilled to new horizons. Now all you want is to live in a monument to the way things might have been. — Sherry Thomas

The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else's suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your misery? Their tears are real, but they are not for you. — Christian Wiman

Mrs. Sol Schwimmer is suing me because I made her bridge as I felt it and not to fit her ridiculous mouth! That's right! I can't work to order like a common tradesman! I decided her bridge should be enormous and billowing, with wild, explosive teeth flaring up in every direction like fire! Now she is upset because it won't fit in her mouth! She is so bourgeois and stupid. I want to smash her! I tried forcing the false plate in but it sticks out like a star burst chandelier. Still, I find it beautiful. — Woody Allen

Fanning Court. God forbid. Teddy could no longer sit in the chair. He could no longer leave the bed, no longer do anything. He was approaching the end of his twilight, entering into the final darkness. Viola imagined the synapses in her father's brain flaring and dimming like the slow death of a star. Soon Teddy would burn out completely and implode and become a black hole. Viola was hazy on the subject of astrophysics, but she liked the image. — Kate Atkinson

It was nothing I hadn't thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn't sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light — Tartt

There was a single window that tapered into a funnel, with eerie moonlight passing through it, reflecting directly off the globe like a mirror. For a moment, as I rose I saw something glimmering within. Dumbly, with feverish whispers assailing me, I realized it was the center of one of the distant galaxies, flaring after some unknown cataclysm. Its radiance was such that it burst from its prison. It met the moonlight halfway. It created kaleidoscopic colours on the walls. Then, in answer, the reliefs transformed from majestic art into something approaching divine, alive, plays from Egyptian memory, given the spark of life from space. I saw animal-headed gods move. They stepped from the walls to take their place around the altar. All stared at the globe. Each raised their arms in silent supplication. And such was their toxic ecstasy that I wished to join them, to forget my dreadful experiences and revel in something truly wondrous. — Tim Reed

The airport in Sofia was a tiny place; I'd expected a palace of modern communism, but we descended to a modest area of tarmac and strolled across it with the other travelers. Nearly all of them were Bulgarian,
I decided, trying to catch something of their conversations. They were
handsome people, some of them strikingly so, and their faces varied
from the dark-eyed pale Slav to a Middle-Eastern bronze, a kaleidoscope
of rich hues and shaggy black eyebrows, noses long and flaring, or
aquiline, or deeply hooked, young women with curly black hair and noble
foreheads, and energetic old men with few teeth. They smiled or laughed and talked eagerly with one another; one tall man gesticulated to his companion with a folded newspaper. Their clothes were distinctly not Western, although I would have been hard put to say what it was about the cuts of suits and skirts, the heavy shoes and dark hats, that was unfamiliar to me. — Elizabeth Kostova

The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril ... It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public. — Winston Churchill

A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them ... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older. — Oscar Wilde

[The Gold] go to death not for the Vale, not for love, but for glory. We have never seen a race quite like them, nor will we again. After months surrounded by the Sons of Ares I see these Golds less as demons than falling angels. Precious, flaring so brilliantly across the sky before disappearing beyond the horizon. — Pierce Brown

His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions
gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose. — Yukio Mishima

His habitual melancholy was changing day by day into something more sinister. There were moments when he would desecrate the crumbling and mournful mask of his face with a smile more horrible than the darkest lineaments of pain. Across the stoniness of his eyes a strange light would pass for a moment, as though the moon were flaring on the gristle, and his lips would open and the gash of his mouth would widen in a dead, climbing curve — Mervyn Peake

It's just a trickle at first, dark hallways, empty rooms, but then Angela sees a face. Eyes wide, nostrils flaring, a little girl's mouth covered with taut rope. The room is damp and cold and simple, a chair in the middle of it all. That's where the girl sits in a yellow dress, hands bound, hair wet with sweat and feet dangling off the floor. The chair's much too big for her, and something's coming. Something bad. — E.M. Blomqvist

His hands grabbed my shoulders firmly and yanked me across the few feet that separated us. "Trent, you, mmmph," I managed to get out as he stole a kiss, a wild, wonderful, passionate kiss.
His lips were heavy on mine, an erotic mix of demand and softness. My hands against his shoulders were set to push him back, but I couldn't, shocked at the sudden surge of desire that burst from my core, flaring through me like flash paper.
Eyes closed, my back hit the counter.
Emotion vibrated up through me. My hands clenched on him and my eyes opened. Heart thudding in my chest, I shoved him back and away. Oh God, it was a fabulous kiss. I could hardly think. — Kim Harrison

They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing. — Cormac McCarthy

October's bellowing anger breakes and cleavesThe bronzed battalions of the stricken woodIn whose lament I hear a voice that grievesFor battle's fruitless harvest, and the feudOf outrage men. Their lives are like the leavesScattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blownAlong the westering furnace flaring red.O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,The burden of your wrongs is on my head. — Siegfried Sassoon

Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives. — Anais Nin

I'm yours. Isn't that what you wanted?"
He shook his head, temper flaring. "You've given up. You aren't mine unless I make
you mine! — Pepper Winters

With little knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew, I found myself passionately defending the Jewish people. Now, half a century later, I have to defend my son. Anti-Semitism, I've seen, is like a disease that goes dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger. — Michael Douglas

Shiloh had never seen a man who was a hunter. But she saw one now. There was an intense feeling around Roan, raw and untamed, as he studied her, his nostrils flaring to catch her scent. He ruthlessly dug into her opening eyes, reading her, trying to understand where she was at within herself and what she wanted from him.
"This is your call," he said, his voice low and guttural. — Lindsay McKenna

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully
wild, generous, drastic
in an unrationed profligacy of self ... And in that split second when you understand that you finally are about to die-to uncreate the world no time to do it over no more chances
that instant when you realize your conscious existence is truly flaring nova, won't you want to have used up all-all-the splendor that you are? — Robin Morgan

Cinderella
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock. — Sylvia Plath

R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald. — David Quammen

When Ben turned, his dark eyes danced with yellow light. Already handsome, flaring took his attractiveness to a whole new level. Ben's coppery skin practically glowed in the evening light. I turned quickly, surprised by the color rising to my cheeks. — Kathy Reichs

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. ... The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe. — Charles Simic

How fortunate for you that the water obscures so much." Blackwell shifted in his chair, his knees falling wider and his nostrils flaring.
"Would Dougan Mackenzie forgive this coercion?" she challenged, doing her best to ignore the stirrings of her own body. "If you owe him as much as you claim, would he not wish you to spare my modesty?"
The spark of heat in his eyes died for a moment, before flaring brighter than ever. "When we meet in hell, I'll ask his forgiveness. — Kerrigan Byrne

That combination, perhaps, deterred me from telling Netanyahu the most difficult truth of all. Simply: that he had much in common with Obama. Both men were left-handed, both believed in the power of oratory and that they were the smartest men in the room. Both were loners, adverse to hasty decision making and susceptible to a strong woman's advice. And both saw themselves in transformative historical roles. Their similarities, perhaps as much as their differences, heightened the chances for friction between the president and Netanyahu, I could have told him. But I did not. Rather, as the prime minister descended the stairs to the tarmac that early May 20 morning, I merely said, "Welcome to Washington, sir," and extended my hand. This he gripped and pulled me toward him. With his eyes still flaring, he recalled the cable I sent him months back predicting the president's speech. "You called it right," he whispered. — Michael B. Oren

The man went to the controls, looking up at me, flaring his nostrils to my actions. His voice was like a voice under water. "We'll see what becomes of your rebellious nature when you lose your memories, Rei Lin." He punched a few buttons and turned the knob on the wall to the right. — Millicent Ashby

She looked at me, her electricity flaring to life - growing more violent, more dangerous, lighting the room like a calzone stuffed with dynamite. Uh-oh ... — Brandon Sanderson

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women. — Emile Zola

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

She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. — Don DeLillo