Flickering Candle Quotes & Sayings

A candle is a living, flickering light. It can easily be blown out. As we watch a candle burn we see the wax diminish. It melts away - a symbol for life. [ ... ]
Candles have long been central to worship.
By lighting them we announce that we are entering into a different sense of time.
Not the usual ticktock time of daily living, but sacred time, a timeless time. — Gunilla Brodde Norris

Even beyond my craving for sex was my longing for intimacy. Matty advertised intimacy. He dangled it in front of my face and jerked it away the second my arm shifted to reach for it. The moment my interest weaned, he'd dangle it again. The scraps of attention Matty tossed me was merely a flickering candle on the other end of a cold dungeon. I couldn't escape incarceration, but I was certain that its flames would thaw my frostbite. — Maggie Young

When his flock thronged into the midnight service, there was wonder on every face at the newly hung greens and the softly flickering candles on each windowsill. To the simple beauty of the historic church was added fresh, green hope, the lush scent of flowers in winter, and candle flame that cast its flickering shadows over the congregation like a shawl. — Jan Karon

When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing - just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park? — Ralph Marston

...but that very thought, that she might become his wife, had for some reason entered his head the very first time she sat in his study at a little round table, diligently taking down in shorthand the words he dictated in his muffled voice - and he had been purposely dry and sharp with her that day, so she would not feel the power she had already gained over him, but when, as he dictated to her, he imagined himself kneeling before her beneath the flickering light of a nearly spent candle and kissing her feet, with her unable to leave because she was his wife, and about to blow out the candle so they could plunge into the passionate, exquisite swim, then his voice became hoarse and he shut his eyes to blot out the sight of this little girl, as he purposely tried to picture her to help restrain his imagination, girl students being as untouchable as postulants... — Leonid Tsypkin

But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out — Alice Sebold

When at even-tide the child of want lies down, dirty and hungry, in his squalid home, and hears of prince and princess and fabled gold, then in the dark hovel lighted by its dim flickering candle, his mind springs free from its bonds of poverty and misery and walks in fresh beauty and glowing raiment, strong beyond all fear of hindrance, through that fairy realm where all is possible. — Rabindranath Tagore

Maybe it's just not the right time for us to be married. I don't want to be a bounty hunter for the rest of my life, but I certainly don't want to be a housewife right now. And I really don't want to be married to someone who gives me ultimatums.
And maybe Joe needs to examine what he wants from a wife. He was raised in a traditional Italian household with a stay-at-home mother and domineering father. If he wants a wife who will fit into that mold, I'm not for him. I might be a stay-at-home mother someday, but I'll always be trying to fly off the garage roof. That's just who I am. — Janet Evanovich

Life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever. — David Wong

There's an old Southern saying that if you're worried about your weight, clothes, or getting old, then you don't have any real problems. — Amy Hill Hearth

Who you talk to is just as important as what questions you ask and what you pull away from it. — Emmett Shear

Call me jaded, but I didn't see then and I don't see now how hugging, and counting and focusing on a flickering candle or, God help me, a favorite stuffed animal, can possibly make you forget the nine pounds of wriggling human forcing its way out of you the same way it got into you nine months-and nine pounds-ago.

As the scientific theory goes, what goes in must come out. Eventually. Somehow. And the coming-out part is never as much fun as the going in part. — Wendy Markham

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out. — Malcolm Gladwell

Right and left; the hothouse and the street. The Right can only live and work hermetically, in the hothouse of the past, while outside the Left prosecute their affairs in the streets manipulated by mob violence. And cannot live but in the dreamscape of the future. — Thomas Pynchon

LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why all that pain. again. and you, such a fighter you fought me over and over with tears and words and promises. you fought for me with honesty and a light so bright it hurts my heart. sweet lorna. at peace now finally no more battles, just light from within a flickering candle in the dark burns with you. — Wallace Stevens

Nothing is more satisfying to me than sitting in a dank room, hunched over a single flickering candle like Ebenezer Scrooge, and watching my ledgers fill themselves with ink. — Michael Ian Black

Say I Am You
I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.
I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove, and surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark of a stone, a flickering in metal.
Both candle and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy,
the evolutionary intelligence, the lift,
and the falling away. What is, and what isn't.
You who know Jelaluddin, You the one in all,
say who I am. Say I am You. — Rumi

Whatever that spark is that makes each one of us alive and unique ... mine had gone. Stolen like paintings on the wall. The flickering flame responsible for lighting me up from the inside, making me glow; keeping me warm... my candle had been blown out. I was shut down. I was tired. I was afraid. Small. Quiet. — Shonda Rhimes

It me birthday and nobody came ... Bigfoot decide do something nice for self for big day and sneak in they house at night and pick out own present and blow out flickering candle of life in they brains. Make a wish, jerks.
— Graham Roumieu

The fifty-six hours of weekend that rolled out before us seemed endless. At sunrise we planned to declare ourselves the rightful inheritors of everything in the departmental refrigerator, but beyond that we had nothing scheduled. Maybe we would pick the lock to the machine shop and gawk at the huge saws, drills, and welding tools, treating it as our own personal museum. Maybe we would stage a private showing of The Seventh Seal using the projection system in the main auditorium. And maybe there was someone somewhere in the world who was happier than I was during that year, but on nights like that I certainly couldn't imagine it. — Hope Jahren

As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full of himself, concerned with what he would write and with his early (and, later, perennial) hatred of Ireland and the Irish. When he had still written only a few poems, he asked his brother Stanislaus: "Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift." When he was older his comparisons may have been less eucharistic and more modest, but he was always convinced of the extreme importance of his work, even before it existed. — Javier Marias

You know you've got my support", Reid told him. "Whatever difficult decisions you need to make. All I would ask is that you be alert to ... " For a moment he seemed at a loss.
"To what?" Louis said impatiently.
Reid picked up a votive candle from the dresser top and observed its flickering light. "The shimmer of things," he said. "The spirit and not the letter. — Paul Russell

Maybe there is another who sees life not as a flickering candle but as a torch that can illuminate an undiscovered world. — Jimmy Buffett

In the candle's flickering light, the library's thousands of books emerged from the shadows, and for a moment Nicholas could not help admiring them again. During free time he had almost never looked up from the pages he was reading, but now he saw the books anew, from without rather than from within, and was reminded of how beautiful they were simply as objects. The geometrical wonder of them all, each book on its own and all the books together, row upon row, the infinite patterns and possibilities they presented. They were truly lovely. — Trenton Lee Stewart

My life is now nothing more than a flickering candle. The wax is melting and the flame is a small, quivering spark. Soon it'll simply vanish, and I'll finally collapse into the black hole of eternal peace. — Margaret McHeyzer

If you have been afraid that your love of beautiful flowers and the flickering flame of the candle is somehow less spiritual than living in starkness and ugliness, remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and the sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation. — Edith Schaeffer

That is all about the raising of Lazarus, she whispered severely and abruptly, and turning away she stood motionless, not daring to raise her eyes to him. She still trembled feverishly. The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candle-stick, dimly lighting up the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book. Five minutes or more passed. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What they had between them was still as fragile as flickering candle flame, as delicate as eggshell - and he knew that if it shattered, if he somehow let it break and be destroyed, something inside him would shatter too, something that could never be fixed. — Cassandra Clare

Suppose
Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head. — E. E. Cummings

A feeble orange light was flickering in the allotments, low down near the ground. Laura looked hopefully towards it. It was a huge pumpkin, its flesh brick-red, its mouth cut into a crude gash, candle- flame dancing through slits for eyes. There was no sign of Autumn. — Sanjida Kay

We only have the past that we have. Not all of our deeds were incorrect. — Henning Mankell

Regard this fleeting world like this:
Like stars fading and vanishing at dawn,
like bubbles on a fast-moving stream,
like morning dewdrops evaporating on blades of grass,
like a candle flickering in a strong wind ...
echoes, mirages, and phantoms, hallucinations,
and like a dream. — Gautama Buddha

As he wrote, the candle in the window kept flickering, and despite his desk lamp the flickering distracted him. He sat back in the old wooden school chair he'd had since college and heard the reassuring squeak of the wood under him. At the firm he was failing to even register what was needed of him. Daily now he faced column after of column of meaningless numbers he was supposed to make square with company claims. He was making mistakes with a frequency that was frightening, and he feared, more than he had in the first days following my disappearance, that he would not be able to support his remaining children.

~pgs 135-136; Susie's father on death — Alice Sebold

The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men
Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.
Hark! There's the big bombardment on our right
Rumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glare
Of flickering horror in the sectors where
We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,
Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.
"What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"
Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:
Why did he do it? ... Starlight overhead
Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead. — Siegfried Sassoon

If we learn not humility, we learn nothing. — John Jewel

Every moment age is creeping up stealthily,
but life, life is melting down
like a candle that is flickering around. — Suman Pokhrel