Gold Sand Quotes & Sayings

The day had begun sombrely in grey cloud and mist, but had ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the harbour were amber deeps and crystalline shadows, with the fire of sunset below. The north was a mackerel sky of little, fiery golden clouds. The red light flamed on the white sails of a vessel gliding down the channel, bound to a Southern port in a land of palms. Beyond her, it smote upon and incarnadined the shining, white, grassless faces of the sand-dunes. — L.M. Montgomery

These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold. — Leo Tolstoy

Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had learned on the radio, but their knowledge was far older than that and they played too the music that was native to the place, or that the people of the place were native to. Just the names of the tunes were a kind of music; they cal l back the music to my mind still, after so many years: "Sand Riffle," "Last Gold Dollar," "Billy in the Low Ground," "Gate to Go Through," and a lot of others. "A fiddle, now, is an atmospheric thing," said Burley Coulter. The music was another element filling the room and pouring out through the cracks. When at last they'd had their fill and had gone away, the shop felt empty, the silence larger than before. — Wendell Berry

The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. — Agatha Christie

Cress?"
"It's beautiful out there."
A hesitation, before, "Could you be more specific?"
"The sky is gorgeous, intense blue color." She pressed her fingers to the glass and traced the wavy hills on the horizon.
"Oh, good. You've really narrowed it down for me."
"I'm sorry, it's just ... " She tried to stamp down the rush of emotion. "I think we're in a desert."
"Cactuses and tumbleweeds?"
"No just a lot of sand. It's kind of orangish-gold, with hints of pink, and I can see tiny clouds of it floating above the ground, like ... like smoke."
"Piles up in lots of hills?"
"Yes, exactly! And it's beautiful."
Thorne snorted. "If this is how you feel about a desert, I can't wait until you see your first real tree. Your mind will explode. — Marissa Meyer

To be oneself on a basis of gold
is no better than founding one's house on the sand.
For your watch, and your ring, and the rest of your trappings
the good people fawn on you, grovelling to earth;
they lift their hats to your jewelled breast-pin;
but your ring and your breast-pin are not your person.- — Henrik Ibsen

The photograph is in my hand. It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at an amusement park, in 1959. [ ... ] I'm tired of looking at the photograph now. I open my fingers. It falls to the sand at my feet. I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us ... All we ever see of stars are their old photographs. [ ... ] It's October, 1985. I'm basking in the two-million-year-old light of Andromeda. I can see the supernova that Ernst Hartwig discovered in 1885, a century ago. It scintillates, a wink intended for the Trilobites, all long dead. Supernovas are where gold forms; the only place. All gold comes from supernovas. — Alan Moore

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future. — Lord Acton

For a second it looked like a mortal horse. The next it was pure sand. Shifting from bright gold to violent red, fire and sun in a windswept desert. — Alwyn Hamilton

Do not consider that to be wealth which is hoarded away, for how is it better than sand gathered from the nearest heap? Nor that which comes in from men who groan at their taxes: for the gold that is wrung from tears is of base alloy and black. — Apollonius Of Tyana

The children themselves repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only the griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold. — Leo Tolstoy

As we drove back to Enugu, I laughed loudly,above Fela's stringent singing. I laughed because Nsukka's untarred roads coat cars with dust in the harmattan and with sticky mud in the rainy season. Because the tarred roads spring potholes like surprise presents and the air smells of hills and history and the sunlight scatters the sand and turns it into gold dust. Because Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as freedom song. As laughter.(299) — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My Father Still Sleeping After Surgery
In spite of himself,
my father loved me. In spite
of the hands that beat me, in spite
of the mouth that kept silent, in spite
of the face that turned cruel
as a gold Chinese king,
he could not control the love
that came out of him.
The body is monumental, a colossus
through which he breathes.
His hands crawl over his stomach
jerkily as sand crabs on five legs;
he makes a fist
like the fist of a newborn. — Toi Derricotte

The little queen all golden
Flew hissing at the sea.
To stop each wave
Her clutch to save
She ventured bravely.

As she attacked the sea in rage
A holderman came nigh
Along the sand
Fishnet in hand
And saw the queen midsky.

He stared at her in wonder
For often he'd been told
That such as she
Could never be
Who hovered there, bright gold.

He saw her plight and quickly
He looked up the cliff he faced
And saw a cave
Above the wave
In which her eggs he placed.

The little queen all golden
Upon his shoulder stood
Her eyes all blue
Glowed of her true
Undying gratitude. — Anne McCaffrey

In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she — Algernon Charles Swinburne

I don't feel at home where I am,
or where I spend time; only where,
beyond counting, there's freedom and calm,
that is, waves, that is, space where, when there,
you consist of pure freedom, which, seen,
turns that Gorgon, the crowd, to stone,
to pebbles and sand . . . where life's mean-
ing lies buried, that never let one
come within cannon shot yet.
From cloud-covered wells untold
pour color and light, a fete
of cupids and Ledas in gold.
That is, silk and honey and sheen.
That is, boon and quiver and call.
That is, all that lives to be free,
needing no words at all. — Regina Derieva

When does gold ore become gold? When it is put through a process of fire. So the human being during the training becomes as pure as gold through suffering. It is the burning away of the dross. Suffering has a great redeeming quality. As a drop of water failing on the desert sand is sucked up immediately, so we must become nothing and nowhere ... we must disappear. — Bhai Sahib Singh

He turned away and I turned to him in vivid heat to look on the sun-dried world. The groves and towers were gone. The Word was gone. The sea had shrunk away leaving only the blue mist of after-rain. Ignorant of alchemy they put their faith in technology and turned the whole world into gold. The dead sand shone. — Jeanette Winterson

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand but lets the gold go free
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live. — G.K. Chesterton

We need only take our heads out of the sand to see clearly that interventionism not only has failed to provide the promised something-for-nothing, but has led to all sorts of undesirable consequences. Indeed, many are just beginning to realize that we are moving towards disaster even though we have been on a wrong heading for decades. — Leonard Read

She is mine own, And I as rich in having such a jewel As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl, The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold. — William Shakespeare

Good night," whispered the creature, grasping sand out of his way, but the players were in their beds far away from the desert. Only a little crimson and gold blaze gaped and breathed by the bush behind the neck of the dragon. — J.M.K. Walkow

Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold. — Leo Tolstoy

The wind stilled a bit and he blinked the sand out of his eyes. Before him stood nothing less than the god of the Scrape. It had to be a god. He was huge, muscled, hung like an elephant, and sandy gold, just like his domain. — Erin Kellison

And Will knew what it was to see his daemon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra's fingers putting the fruit between his lips under the gold-and-silver trees; her warm mouth pressing against his; his daemon being torn from his unsuspecting breast as they entered the world of the dead; and the sweet rightfulness of her coming back to him at the edge of the moonlight dunes. — Philip Pullman

Apothegms are in history, the same as pearls in the sand, or gold in the mine. — Desiderius Erasmus

The Long March The Red Army is not afraid of hardship on the march, the long march. Ten thousand waters and a thousand mountains are nothing. The Five Sierras meander like small waves, the summits of Wumeng pour on the plain like balls of clay. Cliffs under clouds are warm and washed below by the River Gold Sand. Iron chains are cold, reaching over the Tatu River. The far snows of Minshan only make us happy and when the army pushes through, we all laugh. October 1935 — Mao Zedong

Bastian had climbed a dune of purplish-red sand and all around him he saw nothing but hill after hill of every imaginable color. Each hill revealed a shade or tint that occured in no other. The nearest was cobalt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve, turquoise blue, lilac, moss green, ruby red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, vermillion, lapis lazuli, and so on from horizon to horizon. And between the hill, separating color from color, flowed streams of gold and silver sand. — Michael Ende

Pearls, because your skin is as smooth and luminescent as one, and because the first time my lips caressed your throat I thought your flesh as opulent and lush
as one. Gold," he whispered, moving closer, "because it reminded me of how your hair looked in the dying
candlelight, how it burned and glistened, and how badly I want to lie in bed, in our chamber, and watch you at your dressing table, unpinning it for me. I will have that, Lucy, the
rights of a husband to enter his wife's room, to see her at her toilette, to watch what no other man will ever be
granted. You do understand that? That I won't settle for less?"
"You have made your line in the sand very clear."
He grinned. "You can cross it anytime you wish, you know. You might even like it on my side. — Charlotte Featherstone

I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises.
Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was,
I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat.
I was never convinced of what I believed in.
I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through.
Words were my only truth.
When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been. — Fernando Pessoa

It is hard to know what other way men can come at truth, to lay hold of it, if they do not dig and search for it as for gold and hid treasure; but he that
does so must have much earth and rubbish before he gets the pure metal; sand, and pebbles, and dross usually lie blended with it, but the gold is nevertheless gold, and will enrich the man that employs his pains to seek and separate it. — John Locke

Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore. — Dorothy Bryant

Each piece of the set was on a winch and pulley, bag-dropped, counterbalanced by nests of fifty-pound bags of sand. The setup was called a "Fairbanks," for the reason that when a stagehand so wanted, he could stand upon a knot on the rope, untie as few or as many bags of sand as he wanted, and ride nearly to the rafters like Zorro as the scenery lowered.
There was no particular reason to ride that way, but because Carter allowed it, the team of men did so all night long, trading places at the top, jumping onto the ropes and riding back down later. With the mighty Egyptian set descending in its many pieces, the audience was deprived of a behind-the-scenes tableau of beauty: Carter's team swiftly riding ropes up to the catwalk and down to the stage again, simply because they could. — Glen David Gold

The magic of property turns sand to gold. — Arthur Young

I shall never be able to express clearly whence comes this pleasure men take from aridity, but always and everywhere I have seen men attach themselves more stubbornly to barren lands than any other. Men will die for a calcined, leafless, stony mountain. The nomads will defend to the death their great store of sand as if it were a treasure of gold dust. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

In years since he has rarely gone back to those old memories. As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he's startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. It's not plain to Daniel why these impressions have stayed, while others, which seemed as or more important to him at the time they happened, have gone away. But if the gold-panning similitude is faithful, it means that these memories matter more than the ones that have flown. For gold stays in the pan's center because of its density; it has more matter (whatever that means) in a given extent than anything else. — Neal Stephenson

Sure enough, a few moments later, an enormous blue-green SeaWing emerged from the water, shaking her wings vigorously. She was powerfully built, as big as Morrowseer, with broad shoulders and gleaming teeth and a healing burn scar on her neck, and she had a trident longer than Deathbringer strapped to her back. Holy mother of lava, Deathbringer thought. I'm supposed to kill THAT? Commander Tempest was followed by two more SeaWings: a big green male dragon with dark green eyes and gold bands around his ankles, and a wiry female with small eyes and dark gray-blue scales. Behind them, keeping their scales in the water as they eyed the troops on the beach, were about twenty other SeaWing soldiers. "Blister!" Commander Tempest shouted, stamping one foot in the sand. "We're here! Let's get this over with!" The — Tui T. Sutherland

A blessed hands touches sand and it becomes gold and a curse hand touches gold and it become sand.
with Jesus Christ in you,you are blessed. — Peter Irabor

Nothing in this world is hidden forever. The gold which has lain for centuries unsuspected in the ground, reveals itself one day on the surface. Sand turns traitor, and betrays the footstep that has passed over it; water gives back to the tell-tale surface the body that has been drowned. Fire itself leaves the confession, in ashes, of the substance consumed in it. Hate breaks its prison-secrecy in the thoughts, through the doorway of the eyes; and Love finds the Judas who betrays it by a kiss. Look where we will, the inevitable law of revelation is one of the laws of nature: the lasting preservation of a secret is a miracle which the world has never yet seen. — Wilkie Collins

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes. — Charles Baudelaire