Goes Before Us Verse Quotes & Sayings

Oh to break loose like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall ...
Time to grub up and junk the year's
output, a dead wood of dry verse:
dim confession, coy revelation,
liftings, listless self-imitation,
whole days when I could hardly speak,
came pluming home unshaven, weak
and willing to read anyone
things done before and better done ... — Robert Lowell

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age. — Dave Beard

Being the head of the home isn't the same as controlling," David said. "It means being the spiritual leader. The Scripture you may have heard is from Ephesians: 'Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.' But for whatever reason, most people don't read the verse before it that says, 'Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ,' and the one after it, 'Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. — Beth Wiseman

But at some point it becomes obvious that, ultimately, the adventure of faith is the most sensible thing to do, and in fact the only thing worth doing. As Sam says toward the end of The Two Towers, no one remembers the tales in which the characters give up and turn back. Great and heroic deeds remain undone if no one leaps into the dark to do them. That's true when it comes to faith, too. You can't play a meaningful role in the great story by playing it safe. Once you hit the road, there is no going back to life as it was before. When Jesus asks His disciples if they will leave him to, Peter says, "Lord to whom will we go?" (verse 68). It's either walk with Jesus, unsafe as it seems sometimes, or go home. — Sarah Arthur

He started skipping, but then caught himself and returned to deliberately pacing out his steps with his sheathed sword. People might ignore a tiny Japanese man in an orange porkpie hat and socks, with a sword, but if you went around expressing unrestrained joy, they would have you in a straightjacket before you could belt out a verse of Zippity Do-Dah. — Christopher Moore

A sound of laughter was heard-they turned sharply. Vera Claythorne was standing in the yard. She cried out in a high shrill voice, shaken with wild bursts of laughter:
"Do they keep bees on this island? Tell me that. Where do we go for honey? Ha! ha!"
They stared at her uncomprehendingly. It was as though the sane well-balanced girl had gone mad right before their eyes. She went on in that high unnatural voice:
"Don't stare like that! As though you thought I was mad. It's sane enough what I'm asking. Bees, hives, bees! Oh, don't you understand? Haven't you read that idiotic rhyme? It's up in all of your bedrooms-put it there for you to study! We might have come here straightaway if we'd had sense. Seven little soldiers chopping up sticks. And the next verse, I know the whole thing by heart, I tell you! Six little soldier boys playing with a hive. And that's why I'm asking-do they keep bees on this island- isn't it damned funny ... ? — Agatha Christie

Here was a man who was trapped in a thicket of fear and confusion, powerless to escape. Dante's verse captured the feeling of my own depression and anxiety precisely. Wild animals blocked the man's path at every turn. Suddenly the shade of a great poet of antiquity, Virgil, appears before the man and promises to show him the hard road to a good place - but first the man has to trust him. — Rod Dreher

I don't quite recollect how many tumblers of whiskey toddy each man drank after supper; but this I know, that about one o'clock in the morning, the baillie's grown-up son became insensible while attempting the first verse of 'Willie brewed a peck o' maut'; and he having been, for half an hour before, the only other man visible above the mahogany, it occurred to my uncle that it was almost time to think about going. — Charles Dickens

The skeins are tangled. Some butterfly shaman up in the north beats his puny fucking wings and the storm gathers before you know it. Chaos gathers, like a bad poet's verse. We run damage control, but the rules of engagement have changed. You think we're any happier about it than you? We've got our balls to the wall here, hero. We're fighting half blind, nothing works, not the way it should, not anymore. Which — Richard K. Morgan

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal. — John Millington Synge

Sitting makes us think of standing
Our current stance keeps on demanding
We wish to fly without the wings
Puppets move before pulling the strings — Munia Khan

All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times...

Milton does it so well in the Fourth Book of Paradise Lost that I defy any man of a sane understanding to read the whole of that book before going to bed and not to wake up next morning as though he had been on a journey. — Hilaire Belloc

Chaos is Peace ... Blackness, blackness intolerable, before the beginning of the light. This is the first verse of Genesis. Holy art thou, Chaos, Chaos, Eternity, all contradictions in terms! — Aleister Crowley

It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn't last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live. — Shannon L. Alder

A verse came to mind, one that has comforted Kari before. It was the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept. If he cried over Jerusalem, if he cried over the death of Lazarus, surely he was crying now over the death of her dreams, the death of her marriage. — Karen Kingsbury

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,
Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;
This it is, and nothing more. — Edgar Allan Poe

Now, go, wirte it before them in a table and note it in a book, that it may be fore the time to come for ever and ever. Isiah 30:8 — Isiah From The Bible

At this juncture it is important to say something about Exodus 12:7. This verse implies that we are dealing with a ritual that did not involve atoning for sin, but rather was a rite of protection for God's people, a different though not unrelated matter. It involved a blood ritual to avoid God's last blow against the firstborn. Thus Passover and atonement were not originally associated, though apparently by Jesus' day there were some such associations. Notice that nothing at all is said or suggested here about Israel's sin, or about forgiveness. This ceremony is more like an insurance policy. Yes, the blood is to avert divine wrath, but it is not wrath against Israel's particular sins. In this case they simply happened to be too close to the danger zone, or in the line of fire. We must assume that this blood ritual arose before there even was a fully formed priesthood, for it is highly unusual to have such a ritual without any mention of involvement of priests. — Ben Witherington III

We worked the medley on side two of "Abbey Road" out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine. — George Harrison

God is gracious to always give a warning before He sends judgment. — Jim George

When He spoke, "I am he" (v. 6), a designation He had used before to declare Himself God (8:28, 58; cf. 6:35; 8:12; 10:7, 9, 11, 14; 11:25; 14:6; 15:1, 5), they were jolted backward and to the ground (v. 6). This power display and the authoritative demand not to take the disciples were of immense significance, as the next verse indicates. — Anonymous

The first Sunday after my coming to the plantation, he called them together, and began to read the twelfth chapter of Luke. When he came to the 47th verse, he looked deliberately around him, and continued - "And that servant which knew his lord's will," - here he paused, looking around more deliberately than before, and again proceeded - "which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself" - here was another pause - "prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes." "D'ye hear that?" demanded Peter, emphatically. "Stripes," he repeated, slowly and distinctly, taking off his spectacles, preparatory to making a few remarks. "That nigger that don't take care - that don't obey his lord - that's his master - d'ye see? - that 'ere nigger shall be beaten with many stripes. Now, 'many' signifies a great many - forty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty lashes. That's Scripter! — Solomon Northup

If you took 1 Corinthians, chapter
thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity',
the chapter had ten times as much meaning as before. — George Orwell

And speaking of this wonderful machine:
[840] I'm puzzled by the difference between
Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,
A testing of performing words, while he
Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,
The other kind, much more decorous, when
He's in his study writing with a pen. In method B the hand supports the thought,
The abstract battle is concretely fought.
The pen stops in mid-air, then swoops to bar
[850] A canceled sunset or restore a star,
And thus it physically guides the phrase
Toward faint daylight through the inky maze.
But method A is agony! The brain
Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain.
A muse in overalls directs the drill Which grinds and which no effort of the will
Can interrupt, while the automaton
Is taking off what he has just put on Or walking briskly to the corner store [860] To buy the paper he has read before. — Vladimir Nabokov

But Jesus wanted the crowd to know, look, 'John's (the baptist) the one who got this whole thing started.' In verse ten He says, 'This is the one about whom it is written, 'I'll send my messenger ahead of you who will prepare Your way before You.' Jesus says, 'If it wasn't for John, I wouldn't even be here performing these miracles.' — Steven Furtick

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets who you happen to admire. — Ezra Pound

Thus even though Christians are already saved, they still await the fullness of their salvation. Paul sees our salvation as both present and future, as both a now and a not-yet experience. In short, whatever blessings we have here and now will multiply when the fullness of time finally arrives and God brings the plan (mystery, verses 9, 10) that He developed "before the foundation of the world" (verse 4) to its climax. The problems that we face as Christians here on earth will not always be. No wonder Paul refers to the Second Advent as the "blessed hope" (Titus 2:13). — George R. Knight

The Verse-Refrain form starts with a context before the topic that the Refrain is talking about happens. — Ryan Cayabyab

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Before John could even get through the first verse, who bursts through the door and jumps right into the fray, lips a'kissin' and hips a'wigglin'? That's right, kids, everbody's favorite zombie hunter. Mick Jagger strode right up to John, raised his arms to the sky, and said, 'O zombie Lennon! It ends here. — Alan Goldsher