Quotes & Sayings About Lamps

By the time I had gathered my wits sufficiently to press the point the lamps had guttered out and Brisbane was sleeping heavily fatigued by his effortshighly successful efforts I must confessto divert me from the investigation. I lay awake physically satisfied but deeply annoyed. Even after nine months of marriage I was still not entirely comfortable with my responses to his physical overtures. The merest touch from him and all reasonable though seemed to fly out of my head. It was most disconcerting and more so because he apparently knew it I thought irritable. — Deanna Raybourn

A Porsche will always look like a Porsche. My grandfather took these shapes from nature, so the head lamps of the 911 maybe look a little like the eyes of a frog, but it comes from nature, and the best shapes are from nature, so why change? — Ferdinand Alexander Porsche

The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost. — Thomas Pynchon

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It is unnecessary to understand electromagnetic theory before wiring a lamp or to study physics in order to repair a pump. We count on our fingers and give no heed to the proliferating implications of the act. — James R Newman

That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. — F Scott Fitzgerald

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors; Amid these earthly damps What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Gonzo narrows his eyes. 'How often do you clean that thing?' 'Every night,' the waitress answers. Her smile is strained. 'That's it? Do you know how long it takes for Listeria to grow under those hot lamps, even with ice?' Here we go. 'It can happen in just five hours. Five hours and you've got the salad bar of death!' The waitress looks confused. 'From Listerine? — Libba Bray

Our hearts are lamps for ever burning ... — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The road was wet with rain, black and shiny like oilskin. The reflection of the street lamps wallowed like yellow jelly-fish. A bus was approaching - a bus to Piccadilly, a bus to the never-never land - a bus to death or glory.
I found neither. I found something which haunts me still.
The great bus swayed as it sped. The black street gleamed. Through the window a hundred faces fluttered by as though the leaves of a dark book were being flicked over. And I sat there, with a sixpenny ticket in my hand. What was I doing! Where was I going?
("Same Time, Same Place") — Mervyn Peake

Soon only the street lamps rose clear and shone down on a mass that devoured everything, people and houses, we could not see more than three meters in front of us. The lights around us were hard to make out and Jesper stayed where he was; stretching out his arms like a blind man he said:
'This is what it must have been like when the Man from Danzig was shipwrecked. He must have been frightened. He thought he knew where everything was, and then it was all sheer chaos. Put your hand in front of your eyes, Sistermine, and spin around three times, then tell me which is the way home.'
I did as he said, I spun around so I almost fell down, I opened my eyes and peered in all directions.
'I don't know.'
'Then anything can happen. — Per Petterson

Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind. — Dan Chaon

The storm had caused the power to go out; the streets were buried in a liquid darkness speckled here and there with the light cast by oil lamps or candles from balconies and doors. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I trimmed my lamp, consumed the midnight oil. — William Shenstone

God is the electricity and we are the lamps. — Marianne Williamson

Do me a favor ... Stand up, walk to wherever the nearest window is, and just look outside. You may not know this, but there's an entire planets-worth of summers, friends, sunsets, street lamps, songs, late nights, great films, and night skies waiting for you. Your life is as amazing as you want it to be, but first, you have to let it be that way. — Backseat Goodbye

I spend far too much time on eBay buying lamps and upholstery remnants. — Heidi Julavits

In oratory affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn. — Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert Of Cherbury

Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in our books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who, either now or after I am dead, shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height. — Gautama Buddha

Please listen to me - you are not paying attention. I am talking to you about the Holy Scriptures, and you are looking at the lamps and the people lighting them. It is very frivolous to be more interested in what the lamplighters are doing ... After all, I am lighting a lamp too - the lamp of God's Word. — Saint John Chrysostom

We should be shining lamps, giving light to all around us. — Catherine McAuley

I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple! — C. G. Jung

The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour. — Walter Savage Landor

Men are just like unlit lamps: in themselves they are no good for anything, but, when lit, they can be handy to have around the house. — Moderata Fonte

Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns Its fragrant lamps, and turns Into a royal court with green festoons The banks of dark lagoons. — Henry Timrod

Light that is One though the lamps be many. — Robin Williamson

It's easy, once the lamps are lit, to scoff at shadows. — Adrian Tchaikovsky

Most of us, myself included, have forgotten what real darkness is like. We live in a world where light is inescapable. It comes from street lamps, headlights, security floodlights, and even the faint glow of our alarm clocks. — Jake Halpern

Wolf's fur was speckled with drops of blood that had beaded on it like rain. The gravel in the alley shone in the half-light from the distant street lamps. The wolf's muzzle, a little shorter and broader than I had seen on Wild Kingdom, was drawn back, black lips from fangs striped white and red like peppermints. Its eyes were blue, rather than any proper lupine shade, and gleamed with a sort of demented awareness. — Jim Butcher

A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books. — Frank Gehry

Flammflorbs, archypodsplays, clinker crabs, dorsaldorydabbs, mingslakks, linglimes, occocobbers, firgengobblers, smitesnides, orkusta shelled bunkbarnacles, balootabinks, jorgentua jellyfish, tungol widders, teleosti chimaras, and things stranger, yet to be named, Klubbe and his crew members observed through their portholes, lit by the lamps of their submarine's lanterns. — Philip Dodd

It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Nights marvels. — Edith Wharton

What's happened? screamed Mrs. Twit. They stood in the middle of the room, looking up. All the furniture, the big table, the chairs, the sofa, the lamps, the little side tables, the cabinet with bottles of beer in it, the ornaments, the electric heater, the carpet, everything was stuck upside down to the ceiling. The pictures were upside down on the walls. And the floor they were standing on was absolutely bare. What's more, it had been painted white to look like the ceiling. — Roald Dahl

Be like a servant waiting for the return of the master, says Jesus. The servant does not know at what hour the master is going to come. So he stays awake, alert, poised, still, lest he miss the master's arrival. In another parable, Jesus speaks of the five careless (unconscious) women who do not have enough oil (consciousness) to keep their lamps burning (stay present) and so miss the bridegroom (the Now) and don't get to the wedding feast (enlightenment). These five stand in contrast to the five wise women who have enough oil (stay conscious). — Eckhart Tolle

If thou indeed derive thy light from Heaven,
Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light,
Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content:
The stars pre-eminent in magnitude,
And they that from the zenith dart their beams,
(Visible though they be to half the earth,
Though half a sphere be conscious of their brightness)
Are yet of no diviner origin,
No purer essence, than the one that burns,
Like an untended watch-fire on the ridge
Of some dark mountain; or than those which seem
Humbly to hang, like twinkling winter lamps,
Among the branches of the leafless trees.
All are the undying offspring of one Sire:
Then, to the measure of the light vouchsafed,
Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content. — William Wordsworth

And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The toads bellowed mournfully, and the twilight was enrobing the professor. Here it was ... the night. Moscow ... white lamps turning on somewhere outside ... Lost and miserable, Pankrat stood fearfully at attention, arms at his sides ... — Mikhail Bulgakov

When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition. — Marcel Proust

We are all such a waste of our potential, like three-way lamps using one-way bulbs. — Mignon McLaughlin

He went to his own dark house and lighted the lamps and set fire in the stove. The clock wound by Elizabeth still ticked, storing in its spring the pressure of her hand, and the wool socks she had hung to dry over the stove screen were still damp. These were vital parts of Elizabeth that were not dead yet. Joseph pondered slowly over it. Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. — John Steinbeck

It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o'clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down. If you tried to pull out the plug there was an alarming crackling sound and sparks flew between the outlet and the plug, preventing the circuit from being broken. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

I am a Hindu because of sculptured cones of red kumkum powder and baskets of yellow turmeric nuggets, because of garlands of flowers and pieces of broken coconut, because of the clanging of bells to announce one's arrival to God, because of the whine of the reedy nadaswaram and the beating of drums, because of the patter of bare feet against stone floors down dark corridors pierced by shafts of sunlight, because of the fragrance of incense, because of flames of arati lamps circling in the darkness, because of bhajans being sweetly sung, because of elephants standing around to bless, because of colourful murals telling colourful stories, because of foreheads carrying, variously signified, the same word - faith. — Yann Martel

Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors' graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch's Fingers, four long talons of sand that lay in the mouth of the river. Rumour had it that, on stormy nights a century ago, they used to reach out, gouge holes in passing ships, and drag them down. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried in that glistening silt. The city's black heart had beaten strongly even then. There was one funeral director, supposedly, who used to put lamps out on the Fingers and lure ships to their doom. — Rupert Thomson

Consult with the assembly of righteous,

For the Prophet 1ft was also ordered to do that.

The minds of men are like lighted lamps,

The light of twenty lamps surely gives more light than one — Jalaluddin Rumi

I just don't think there are any rules to color. You have a small space with no windows? Put lamps in there, make it dramatic, paint the ceiling black. Do something with it. If it's dark, accentuate the darkness. — David Bromstad

As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he was, was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy - if he ever was a boy, which appeared improbable; and at the shining tables, where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old mahogany; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimming or cleaning; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their pure brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes; and at the two large coal fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of decanters, burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old port wine below; and both England and the law appeared to me to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm. — Charles Dickens

The moles came bearing their lamps and then the most ancient and magical creature that ever danced beneath the moon was lost in darkness once more. — Robin Jarvis

Another dawn flung itself across the river; a belated taxi hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white from a nights' carouse. — F Scott Fitzgerald

All darkness vanished, when I saw the Lamp within my heart. — Kabir

On woman Nature did bestow two eyes, Like Hemian's bright lamps, in matchless beauty shining, Whose beams do soonest captivate the wise And wary heads, made rare by art's refining. — Robert Greene

Happiness
a small-scale, endearing, harmonious happiness
surely dwelt here beneath the low-powered lamps in the tiny rooms of these houses. A small-scale happiness and a modest harmony: let a man cry out, let him rage, let him howl with grief with all the power of which he was capable, what more than these could he ever hope to gain in this life? — Fumiko Enchi

Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know. — Bohumil Hrabal

Today, the reason we haven't found our grail, the key to who we are as women, is because we look for it in worlds of false power, the very worlds that took it away from us in the first place. Neither men nor work can restore our lost scepter. Nothing in this world can take us home. Only the radar in our hearts can do that, and when it does, ... 'We will light up like lamps, and the world will never be the same again.' — Marianne Williamson

The city man, in his neon-and-mazda glare, knows nothing of nature's midnight. His electric lamps surround him with synthetic sunshine. They push back the dark. They defend him from the realities of the age-old night. — Edwin Way Teale

Why won't you leave me alone?" I whispered one night as he hovered behind me while I tried to work at my desk.
Long minutes passed. I didn't think he would answer. I even had time to hope he might have gone, until I felt his hand on my shoulder.
"Then I'd be alone, too," he said, and he stayed the whole night through, till the lamps burned down to nothing. — Leigh Bardugo

The definition of a musical is that the emotion is so strong that you can't talk anymore, you have to sing. The emotion isn't strong enough when you're just like, 'Let's take a second to sing about lamps!' — Rachel Bloom

The luminosity below me seemed confined directly to the area to be lighted; there was no diffusion of light upward or beyond the limits the lamps were designed to light. This was effected, I was told, by lamps designed upon principles resulting from ages of investigation of the properties of light waves and the laws governing them which permit Barsoomian scientists to confine and control light as we confine and control matter. The light waves leave the lamp, pass along a prescribed circuit and return to the lamp. There is no waste nor, strange this seemed to me, are there any dense shadows when lights are properly installed and adjusted, for the waves in passing around objects to return to the lamp, illuminate all sides of them. The — Edgar Rice Burroughs

Volnaka ... did a remarkable job of getting anyone drunk with alacrity. It also worked well as a combustible in lamps, as paint remover, was a marvelous antiseptic and was singularly effective at erasing any memory of ever having imbibed it — J.R. Hardesty

The evening of a well spent youth brings it's lamps with it. — Joseph Joubert

Many of the enchanted things in the book are lamps, carpets, sofas, gems, brass rings. It is a rather different landscape than the fairy tale landscape of the West. Though we have interiors and palaces, we don't have bustling cities, and there isn't the emphasis on the artisan making things. The ambiance from which they were written was an entirely different one. The Arabian Nights comes out of a huge world of markets and trade. Cairo, Basra, Damascus: trades and skills. — Marina Warner

The stars, that nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps with everlasting oil, give due light to the misled and lonely traveller. — John Milton

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof, a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which creeping in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers. Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, 'This is he,' or, 'This is she. — Virginia Woolf

The sleepless hum of the city was abidingly in his ears, and the lamps that dotted the misty pavements stared at him blinkingly all along the route. The tall black buildings rose up grimly into the night; the faces that flitted to and fro along the pavements, kept ever sliding past him, melting into the darkness; and the cabs and 'buses, still astir in the streets, had a ghostly air as they vanished in the gloom.

("An Unexpected Journey") — J.H. Pearce

Wagon Train was on. It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country. I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door
a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness. — Bob Dylan

After Passing By
The children watch
a distant point.
Lamps go out.
Some blind girls
question the moon
and spirals of grief
rise in the air.
The mountains survey
a distant point. — Federico Garcia Lorca

The walls have ears, ears that hear each little sound you make every time you stamp, throw a lamp. — Elvis Presley

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all. — Charles Dickens

Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges unto yourselves. Take yourself no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone besides yourselves. And those, Ananda, who either now or after I am dead, Shall be a lamp unto themselves, Shall betake themselves as no external refuge, But holding fast to the truth as their lamp, Holding fast to the truth as their refuge, Shall not look for refuge to anyone else besides themselves, It is they who shall reach to the very topmost height; But they must be anxious to learn. — Gautama Buddha

He had a harder time helping her out though. He was asleep while she was doing stars. Without wings, he couldn't reach anyways. In the end though what he could give her was better than magic wands and magic frogs and magic lamps. Better and more magical. What he gave her was moral support and unconditional love. He promised to be there for her always, even times when the sky proved too vast and the night was dark because she couldn't kindle all the stars. He would light her way instead, he promised. He would be her Polaris, her celestial navigator, her astral guide. And whenever she cam back to Earth, Grumwald promised, he would be there, waiting. — Laurie Frankel

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he liked
oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!
the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. — Henry James

A noble and resolute people can safely tread a dark and fearsome path if they always shine before them the lamps of wisdom and valor. — Aleksandra Layland

The same God who directs the earth in its orbit, who feeds the burning furnace of the sun, and trims the lamps of heaven, has promised to supply thee with daily strength. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Is there a rarer being,
Is there a fairer sphere
Where the strong are not unseeing,
And the harvests are not sere;
Where, ere the seasons dwindle
They yield their due return;
Where the lamps of knowledge kindle
While the flames of youth still burn? — Edmund Clarence Stedman

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away. — Anna Akhmatova

Pythias once, scoffing at Demosthenes, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp. — Plutarch

The boy was twelve, reveling in the strange dust-smelling murk of a New Orleans library, watching motes flash gold in a beam of sun. He loved the ceiling lights on chains and the table lamps with their green glass shades. The room was as beautiful as another world. — Marly Youmans

I should have guessed you were Jace's sister," he said. "You both have the same artistic talent."
Clary paused, her foot on the lowest stair. She was taken aback. "Jace can draw?"
Nah." When Alec smiled, his eyes lit like blue lamps and Clary could see what Magnus had found so captivating about him. "I was just kidding. He can't draw a straight line. — Cassandra Clare

A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea ... [T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center. — Catherynne M Valente

He lit a lamp in broad daylight and said, as he went about, I am looking for a human . — Diogenes

One of them stepped from the crowd. It was Zeebo, the garbage collector. "Mister Jem," he said, "we're mighty glad to have you all here. Don't pay no 'tention to Lula, she's contentious because Reverend Sykes threatened to church her. She's a troublemaker from way back, got fancy ideas an' haughty ways - we're mighty glad to have you all." With that, Calpurnia led us to the church door where we were greeted by Reverend Sykes, who led us to the front pew. First Purchase was unceiled and unpainted within. Along its walls unlighted kerosense lamps hung on brass brackets; pine benches served as pews. Behind the rough oak pulpit a faded pink silk banner proclaimed God Is Love, the church's only decoration except a roto-gravure print of Hunt's The Light of the World. — Harper Lee

What could be safer than the bus center with its lamps and wheels? — William Golding

In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not one single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come from, these vortices of flame, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69) ... For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car ... It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. — Umberto Eco

I would not give much for your religion unless it can be seen. Lamps do not talk, but they do shine. — Charles Spurgeon

Ultimately, musicians of the world must come realise the potential of their calling.
Like the shamans, we may serve as healers, metaphysicians, inciters, exciters,
spiritual guides and sources of inspiration.
If the musician is illuminated from within,
he becomes a lamp that lights other lamps.
Then he is serving planet and its people,
healing what ails us. Such music is truly important.
It is said that "only one who obeys can truly command."
When the artist is immersed in a services,
giving himself up over and over again, another paradox occurs:
He is being seen by all others as a master. — Kenny Werner

I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded. — Henry David Thoreau

The Taxi
When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night? — Amy Lowell

Life in God should be a daring adventure of love - a continuous journey of putting aside our securities to enter more profoundly into the uncharted depths of God. Too often, however, we settle for mediocrity. We follow the rules and practices of prayer but we are unwilling or, for various reasons, unable to give ourselves totally to God. To settle on the plain of mediocrity is really to settle for something less than God that leaves the heart restless and unfulfilled. A story from the desert fathers reminds us that giving oneself wholly to God can make a difference: Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?" Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."15 — Ilia Delio

Better beware of the newly dead

Of the white-handed ghost

And the brightness of these lamps . . .

wrote Luc Berimont in 1940, in Reign of Darkness.

I've always felt the greatest reluctance to go anywhere near, to touch, a fresh corpse. For me, it's an unseemly thing. Useless. Hostile. Cunning. Dangerous. The 'presence' is much stronger, more perceptible one hour after death than one hour before. By my observation, this was not the case with Heisserer.

He was entirely absent from his head, his hands,his quivering body. He was gone instantly, unburdened of his absurd life, released. — Jacques Yonnet

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. — E. M. Forster

Moths swarmed around the parking lot lamps, banging into the glass with a steady tap-tap-tap, and I wondered if they welcomed the dawn. At dawn, they could stop slamming their heads into the thing that forever kept them from the light. People don't have a dawn. We just keep slamming away until it kills us. — Robert Crais

Again, after a blank moment, there would be a flickering taper-gleam in his eyeballs. It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed to be a forlorn inhabitant. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Back in the sitting room, Wylan was lighting the lamps. "Are you hungry?"
"Famished," said Jesper. "But Da's asleep. I'm not sure we're allowed to ring for food." He cocked his head to one side, peering at Wylan. "Did you have her make you better-looking?"
Wylan pinked. "Maybe you forgot how handsome I am."
Jesper raised a brow.
"Okay, maybe a little. — Leigh Bardugo

Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. — Rumi

Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights. — Hu Shih

The twelfth-century poet Abraham ibn Ezra, whom you encountered in high school as Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra (may his tribe increase), limpidly described the shlimazl's lot when he wrote: If I sold lamps, The sun, In spite, Would shine at night. — Leo Rosten

If he died now, Grainier probably wouldn't know it until they came into the light of the gas lamps either side of the doctor's house. After they'd moved along for nearly an hour without conversation, listening only to the creaking wagon and the sound of the nearby river and the clop of the mares, it grew dark. — Denis Johnson

The room was a library. Not a public library, but a private library; that is, a collection of books belonging to Justice Strauss. There were shelves and shelves of them, on every wall from the floor to the ceiling, and separate shelves of them in the middle of the room. The only place were there weren't books was in one corner, where there were some large, comfortable-looking chairs and a wooden table with lamps hanging over them, perfect for reading. Although it was not as big as their parents library, it was cozy, and the Baudelaire children were thrilled. — Lemony Snicket

We treat racism in this country like it's a style that America went through. Like flared legs and lava lamps. Oh, that crazy thing we did. We were hanging black people. We treat it like a fad instead of a disease that eradicates millions of people. You've got to get it at a lab, and study it, and see its origins, and see what it's immune to and what breaks it down. — Chris Rock

Some of the parables that Matthew records and that Jesus delivered as part of his Olivet Discourse-such as the ten virgins and their lamps or the servants and the talents they were given-are some of the best known of Jesus' teachings. Reading them in the context of his prophecies about the end of the world, however, makes them clearly parables of preparation. To be on his right hand with his "sheep" rather than at his left hand with the "goats" at his return, we must prepare ourselves now. — Eric D. Huntsman

Lamps are different, but light is the same. — Rumi