Light It Up Fall Quotes & Sayings

I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.
Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.
Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.
The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen. — Meg Rosoff

This Stone

He went looking for a road
that doesn't lead to death.
He went looking for that road
and found it.
It was a stone road.
He walked that road
that doesn't lead to death.
He walked on it awhile
before he stopped,
having turned to stone.
Now he stands there on that road
that doesn't lead to death
not going anywhere.
He can't dance.
from his eyes stones fall.
The rainbow people pass him
crossing that road, long-legged, light-stepping,
going from the Four Houses
to the dancing in the Five Houses.
They pick up his tears.
This stone is a tear
from his eye, this stone
given me on the mountain
by one who died before my birth,
this stone, this stone. — Ursula K. Le Guin

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again. — Tan Twan Eng

As we reach the next corner, the entire block ahead of us lights up with a rich purple glow. We backpedal, hunker down in a stairwell, and squint into the light. Something's happening to those illuminated by it. They're assaulted by . . . what? A sound? A wave? A laser? Weapons fall from their hands, fingers clutch their faces, as blood sprays from all visible orifices - eyes, noses, mouths, ears. In less than a minute, everyone's dead and the glow vanishes. — Suzanne Collins

The mother eagle teaches her little ones to fly by making their nest so uncomfortable that they are forced to leave it and commit themselves to the unknown world of air outside. And just so does our God to us. He stirs up our comfortable nests, and pushes us over the edge of them, and we are forced to use our wings to save ourselves from fatal falling. Read your trials in this light, and see if you cannot begin to get a glimpse of their meaning. Your wings are being developed. — Hannah Whitall Smith

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day. — Catherynne M Valente

Autumnal
nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses ... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth
reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke. — Tom Stoppard

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor -
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a'climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now -
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
- Langston Hughes (112) — Sapphire.

You didn't inoculate yourself yesterday," I say to Peter.
"No, I didn't," Peter says.
"Why not?"
"Why should I tell you?"
I run my thumb over the vial and say, "You came with me because you know I have the memory serum, right? If you want me to give it to you, it couldn't hurt to give me a reason."
He looks at my pocket again, like he did earlier. He must have seen Christina give it to me. He says, "I'd rather just take it from you."
"Please." I lift my eyes up, to watch the snow spilling over the edges of the buildings. It's dark, but the moon provides just enough light to see by. "You might think you're pretty good at fighting, but you aren't good enough to beat me, I promise you."
Without warning he shoves me, hard, and I slip on the snowy ground and fall. My gun clatters to the ground, half buried in the snow. That'll teach me to get cocky, I think, and I scramble to my feet. — Veronica Roth

Forgetting your Self is the greatest injury; all the calamities flow from it. Take care of the most important, the lesser will take care of itself. You do not tidy up a dark room. You open the windows first. Letting in the light makes everything easy. So, let us wait with improving others until we see ourselves as we are/ and have changed. There is no need to turn round and round in endless questioning; find yourself and everything will fall into its proper place. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

As they walked, the subtle lamplight of a dirigible washed over them. Finley glanced up, watching the light grow closer, slowly descending from the sky in a whirl of propellers as the ship made its way into the London air dock just a few miles away. How amazing it must be to float so high, to travel so quickly.
Dandy followed her gaze, but they didn't stop walking. "I was up in one of them flyers once," he told her. "I climbed over the rail and hung on to one of the ropes. Freeing it was. I almost let go."
She whipped her head around to gape at him. "The fall would kill you."
He smiled ever so slightly. "Not afore I flew. Worse ways to go. — Kady Cross

Every person, young and old, has had his own personal experience with falling. Falling is what we mortals do. But as long as we are willing to rise up again and continue on the path toward the spiritual goals God has given us, we can learn something from failure and become better and happier as a result. My dear friends, no matter how many times you have slipped or fallen, rise up! Your destiny is a glorious one! Stand tall and walk in the light of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ! You are stronger than you realize. You are more capable than you can imagine. You can do it now! — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

You want to hear something really sad?' I whisper. 'You're my best friend.'
'You're right. That is really sad.' Oliver grins.
'That's not what I meant.'
'Are we still playing True Confessions?' he asks.
'Is that what we're doing?'
He reaches toward me and rubs a strand of my hair between his fingers. 'I think you're beautiful,' Oliver says. 'Inside and out.'
He leans forward from the tiniest bit and breathes in, closing his eyes, before he lets the hair fall back against my cheek. I feel it inside me, as if I've been shocked.
I don't pull away.
I don't want to pull away.
'I ... I don't know what to say,' I stammer.
Oliver's eyes light up. 'Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walk into mine,' he quotes. He moves slowly, so that I know what's coming, and kisses me. — Jodi Picoult

Come inside."
Shelby tilted her head just enough to rest it briefly on his shoulder as they walked to the door. "I'm relying on your word that I'll walk out again in one piece at the end of the weekend."
He only grinned. "I told you my stand on playing the mediator."
"Thanks a lot." She glanced up at the door, noting the heavy brass crest that served as a door knocker. The MacGregor lion stared coolly at her with its Gaelic motto over its crowned head. "Your father isn't one to hide his light under a bushel,is he?"
"Let's just say he has a strong sense of family pride." Alan lifted the knocker, then let it fall heavily against the thick door. Shelby imagined the sound would vibrate into every nook and cranny in the house. "The Clan MacGregor," Alan began in a low rolling burr, "is one of the few permitted to use the crown in their crest.Good blood. Strong stock. — Nora Roberts

Then I get up and turn on the light. (Did anyone notice I was in here in the dark? Did they see the lack of light under the crack and notice it like a roach? Did Nia see?) Then I look in the mirror. I look so normal. I look like I've always looked, like I did before the fall of last year. Dark hair and dark eyes and one snaggled tooth. Big eyebrows that meet in the middle. A long nose, sort of twisted. Pupils that are naturally large - it's not the pot - which blend into the dark brown to make two big saucer eyes, holes in me. Wisps of hair above my upper lip. This is Craig. — Ned Vizzini

I lay my fantasy in the backseat of Isa's car and slide in next to her. She snuggles up, using me as her personal pillow, her blond curls sprawled over my crotch. I close my eyes for a second, trying to get the image out of my head. And I don't know what to do with my hands. My right one is on the door armrest. My left one hovers over Brittany.
I hesitate. Who am I kidding? I'm not a virgin. I'm an eighteen-year-old guy who can deal with having a hot, passed-out girl next to me. Why am I afraid of putting my arm where it's comfortable, right over her midsection?
I hold my breath as I settle my arm on her. She cuddles closer and I'm feeling weird and light-headed. Either it's the aftereffects from the joint or . . . I don't want to think about the "or." Her long hair is wrapped around my thigh. Without thinking, I weave my hands in her hair and watch as the silky strands slowly fall through the V's between my fingers. — Simone Elkeles

Thank you, NASA, for keeping watch and realizing that our universe will never be anything but light-years new. I want to understand that, and I am so comforted by the fact that I can't. It only proves that some things won't allow themselves to be understood. They aren't for us to know and there's rapture in that, don't you think? Are you happy there, with your eyes glued to the heavens? You know so much, like why the ocean doesn't fall out of the sky, and that there is no upside down. There is no up. — Mary-Louise Parker

Brynn," he whispers, "I've come alive since I met you. My world before you came into it was cold and dark, and then you showed up and brought light into it. Every day, I find a new reason to fall more in love with you. I know we're still young, but I want so much to have the honor of calling you my wife. Will you marry me? — Colleen Masters

Now, Friends, deal plainly with yourselves, and let the eternal Light search you, and try you, for the good of your souls. For this will deal plainly with you. It will rip you up, and lay you open, and make all manifest which lodges in you; the secret subtlety of the enemy of your souls, this eternal searcher and trier will make manifest. Therefore all to this come, and by this be searched, and judged, and led and guided. For to this you must stand or fall. — Margaret Fell

I can fairly say it was the first time in my new life that I really wished I wasn't supernatural: if I had been human the pain would have stopped because I would be dead. II can only describe it as what a person would feel if he somehow, by some terrible miracle, survived the fall off a skyscraper. It was the feeling of every single nerve, bone, sinew, and cell breaking and howling in agony at the same time. A person might have one second of conscious agony before he saw the white light, one brief insight into what the word "disintegrated" really meant. But I had to sit, blinking at her while this happened. I couldn't get up or down or scream or vomit the way a visibly injured person might. I sat there. — Candice Raquel Lee

Bringing a novel to light - revealing the form and cadence, shadows and demeanor of a protagonist constructed from thin air - linking scenes and synchronicity across translucent time - holding up a glass brimming with chilled, never-tasted liquid, then sipping from it with intoxicated focus - allowing lovers to make a perilous mess of things, fall apart and nakedly come back together again - looking through conjured windows deep into someone else's snow-bound solitude, feeling utterly alone yet being all-connected: this is not writing. It's world-creating.

It's raw, exposed dreaming. It's humbling. At first too personal and intimate to share, it evolves like a child into a life of its own until I have no say in what comes next.

It's what I wake at 4am to say Yes to, the spinning possibility of a new story relentlessly commanding me to write it down so it can whirl in your experience. — Laurie Perez

I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding ...
Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again. — Philip Schultz

The rain began to fall harder, and it distracted him, but he tried to pull himself back because he felt on the verge of understanding something large and important. It seemed to him that this moment - the light and wind, the sweep of fields, the falling rain, the lowing cows, Leah's form as it twisted to one side and then another - captured a sort of life that he longed for, a life of order and harsh beauty, and although this was his farm and his vision, it did not seem to be his life. It seemed instead to be the thing for which he must daily give up his life, an act of submission to something he could not name and only rarely, in moments such as these, have a sense of. Life during these moments seemed neither lost nor ruined but a power to be shared, as the grass shares its power with the living things that devour it. — Robert Boswell

Does he make you tremble with a touch?" He ran the tips of his fingers up my bare arm, his touch feather light, yet it lit a fire inside me. I closed my eyes, my entire body trembling. He lifted hair from my neck, lowered his head, and pressed a kiss on my exposed neck. Warmth pulsed through me. "Is he the first person you think about when you wake up in the morning and the last one you think about before you fall asleep? — Ednah Walters

I keep quiet and look out the window. The light is weak and watery-looking, like the sun hast just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. The shadows are as sharp and pointed as needles. I watch three black crows take off simultaneausly from a telephone wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane, folding and compressing into itself like an origami figure, until everything is flat and brightly colored - until the world is like a drawing of itself — Lauren Oliver

Magic comes from freedom, from openness, from willingness. Play burbles up from the yes that lives in the dark space, the now, the gimme, the yearning urge to be and belong and become.
Our joy lives in the dizzying impulse we all learn to stifle as we grow - the voice of yes that tells us to close our eyes on the swings so we can feel the earth fall away beneath us, to lie in the grass with the sun warming our faces until we're certain that it's spinning, it's really spinning, and we're all spinning with it.
I told Cal that the dark space is light, and it is, but it is also play. To be at play is to release the light. — Mary Ann Rivers

No one's ever going to hurt you again, Taya. Not on my watch." There was no defense in the world that could protect her heart from him when he said things like that. Angling her head up, she cupped the back of his head and lifted up to give him a soft, lingering kiss. Just being near him made her feel safe, stronger. He reminded her of how hard she'd fought to live, how hard she'd battled to take back control over her life.
"You're making it really hard for me not to fall for you," she murmured against his lips. One side of his mouth kicked up as he lifted his head, his eyes glowing with a possessive light that thrilled her.
"Good," was all he said. — Kaylea Cross

Back in the cabin I light the fire and sit sighing and there are leaves skittering on the tin roof, it's August in Big Sur
I fall asleep in the chair and when I wake up I'm facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door and I suddenly remember them from long ago — Jack Kerouac

Entering by a wide gateway, but without gates, into an inner court,
surrounded on all sides by great marble pillars supporting galleries
above, I saw a large fountain of porphyry in the middle, throwing
up a lofty column of water, which fell, with a noise as of the fusion
of all sweet sounds, into a basin beneath; overflowing which, it ran
into a single channel towards the interior of the building. Although
the moon was by this time so low in the west, that not a ray of her
light fell into the court, over the height of the surrounding buildings; yet was the court lighted by a second reflex from the sun of
other lands. For the top of the column of water, just as it spread to
fall, caught the moonbeams, and like a great pale lamp, hung high
in the night air, threw a dim memory of light (as it were) over the
court below. — George MacDonald

Watching the animals come and go, and feeling the land swell up to meet them and then feeling it grow still at their departure, I came to think of the migrations as breath, as the land breathing. In spring a great inhalation of light and animals. The long-bated breath of summer. And an exhalation that propelled them all south in the fall. — Barry Lopez

In our country they do not permit any information to be X-rayed through and through, nor any discussion to encompass all the facets of a subject. All this is invariably suppressed at the very beginning, so no ray of light should fall on the naked body of truth. And then all this is piled up in one formless heap covering many years, where it languishes for whole decades, until all interest and all means of sorting out the rusty blocks from all this trash are lost. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Most of the world is either asleep or dead. The religious people are, for the most part, asleep. The irreligious are dead. Those who are asleep are divided into two classes, like the Virgins in the parable, waiting for the Bridegroom's coming. The wise have oil in their lamps. That is to say they are detached from themselves and from the cares of the world, and they are full of charity. They are indeed waiting for the Bridegroom, and they desire nothing else but His coming, even though they may fall asleep while waiting for Him to appear. But the others are not only asleep: they are full of other dreams and other desires. Their lamps are empty because they have burned themselves out in the wisdom of the flesh and in their own vanity. When He comes, it is too late for them to buy oil. They light their lamps only after He has gone. So they fall asleep again, with useless lamps, and when they wake up they trim them to investigate, once again, the matters of a dying world. — Thomas Merton

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair. — Langston Hughes

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.
I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.
The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love. — Jeanette Winterson

Crowds have one expression, cruel and fixed. You let yourself be trapped by a look. You let yourself be carried off and shut away in a place of silence. There your eyes may be ripped out, your tongue cut off, and your fingers hammered until the little bones splinter. The walls are splashed with thick clots of blood. Words are the worst kind of dog, they drag us along despite ourselves to somewhere we didn't want to go, they obsess us, they don't let us have a moment's rest, a moment's rest.

But before that? Before that is another place altogether. Memory blanks things out methodically. It has several floors, sealed off from one another and there is no passage joining them. One of them is hell. When you fall in, at the very instant you lose your footing, you forget everything, even what light is like. But once you are back in the world you retain only a faint memory of being shut up. It resonates like the dull echo of pain. — Marie Desplechin

Keep trying. You only fail if you quit."
"That's right," Bas said. "When you fall off the horse, you need to just saddle it back up."
I looked at him. "What if the saddle didn't fall off? What if only you fell?"
"Speaking of horses," Jode said.
"No horses. Go again."
Another hour went by. Bas and I started to get punchy.
"Go to the light, Jode," Bas said. "Your most precious inside light."
"Just feeeeeeel it. Feel it like you mean it."
Jode smirked. "I'm English. I don't do anything by feeeel. — Veronica Rossi

And even to me, one who likes life, it seems butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever is of their kind among human beings know most about happiness.
To see these light, foolish, delicate, sensitive little souls fluttering
that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs.
I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.
And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough, deep, somber; it was the spirit of gravity
through him all things fall.
Not by wrath does one kill, but by laughing. Up, let us kill the spirit of gravity! — Friedrich Nietzsche

You end up exhausted and spent, but later, in retrospect, you realize what it all was for. The parts fall into place, and you can see the whole picture and finally understand the role each individual part plays. The dawn comes, the sky grows light, and the colors and shapes of the roofs of houses, which you could only glimpse vaguely before, come into focus. — Haruki Murakami

The snow was dancing like cotton wool in the light of the street lamps. Aimlessly, unable to decide whether it wanted to fall up or down, just letting itself be driven by the hellish, ice-cold wind that was sweeping in from the great darkness covering the Oslo fjord. Together they swirled, wind and snow, round and round in the darkness between the warehouses on the quayside that were all shut up for the night. Until the wind got fed up and dumped it's dance partner beside the wall. And there the dry, windswept snow was settling around the shoes of the man I had just shot I the chest and the neck. — Jo Nesbo

I know you want her back, kid. And I know that people saying things like 'there are plenty more fish in the sea' is only going to make you hurt more. And I could tell you all about the science of what your brain is going through right now. How it's processing a pain as intense as hitting a nerve in your tooth, but it can't find a source for that pain, so you kind of feel it everywhere. I could tell you that when you fall for someone, the bits of your brain that light up are the same as when you're hungry or thirsty. And I could tell you that when the person you love leaves you, you starve for them, you crave them, Heartbreak is a science, like love. So trust me when I say this: you're wounded right now, but you'll heal. — Krystal Sutherland

By then, she had stopped crying. Her nose was running. She wiped it with the back of her hand. A light rain had begun to fall, and within seconds the windows and the windshield seemed covered with scratches, similar to the ones she'd inflicted on herself, the drops beading up in small diagonal lines. — Anonymous