Lightning Bolt Quotes & Sayings

Elphaba concentrated on the first Oompa-Loompa on the left. "Iskviesti Zaibo!" A bolt of lightning seemed to come from everywhere and zapped the poor Dymon, who popped like a kernel of popcorn and let out a squeal.
"Did I hurt it?" But she didn't need an answer, as it pulled itself up from the snow and brushed itself off. — Abramelin Keldor

Go ahead, God, you fat, filthy motherfucker, lightning-bolt my ass into oblivion if you're so tough! — Jeri Smith-Ready

I cling to Cal, Kilorn, Shade, to saving all the newbloods I can, because I am afraid of waking up to emptiness, to a place where my friends and family are gone and I am nothing but a single bolt of lightning in the blackness of a lonely storm.
If I am a sword, I am a sword made of glass, and I feel myself begin to shatter. — Victoria Aveyard

This reasoning is based on the wishful thinking that genius can only be earned through education and hard work. It denies the time-proven truth that genius can strike like a random bolt of lightning, at any time in any place, even in a humble glover's home in a small town in Elizabethan England. — Andrea Mays

I wanted to be in love like in the storybooks and songs and ballads. Love that hits you like a lightning bolt. And I'm sorry, because yeah, I get that you think I'm ridiculous. I get that you think I'm hilarious. I know, I get that you're mocking me. I get how stupid I am, but at least I know. — Holly Black

A bolt of warmth, fierce with joy and pride and gratitude, flashed through me like sudden lightning. I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching - they are your family. And they were my heroes. — Jim Butcher

When your mother is the grave and your father is a lightning bolt it tends to make you kind of horny. And death has a way of removing one's inhibitions. — Aussiescribbler

Over the years
a great deal has to be thrown out.
The notion, for instance,
that happiness is mild and enduring,
something like a southern climate
instead of a bolt of lightning
that leaves scars
cherished a lifetime. — Hanny Michaelis

I thought that there was only one kind of love, one that developed instantaneously and struck you like a bolt of lightning, made you irrational and selfish like it did my parents. I realized too late that love took different forms and the one we had - " He cupped her face. "It was there, the first day we met, growing "gradually from friendship into what's inside my heart now."
He brought her hand to his chest. "It's there, steady, constant, making my heart beat for you, making my heart race when you're near, making my heart sing like a goddamn canary when you're happy. I never thought this kind of love existed until I had lost you. — Marian Tee

There. She had thanked Sebastian. She waited for a bolt of lightning to shoot out of the clouds and striker her dead. But nothing happened. — Cassandra Clare

Gold loves to make its way through guards, and breaks through barriers of stone more easily than the lightning's bolt. — Horace

Harry lay flat on his back, breathing hard as though he had been running. He had awoken from a vivid dream with his hands pressed over his face. The old scar on his forehead, which was shaped like a bolt of lightning, was burning beneath his fingers as though someone had just pressed a white-hot wire to his skin. He — J.K. Rowling

I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. O bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert.. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas. — Nikola Tesla

Younger love, it seemed, was mainly about the idea of potential
the illusion that magical transformations were bound to occur when the person you think you love has a miraculous impromptu awakening after some metaphorical lightning bolt, made out of your wishes and projections, suddenly brings them to their senses. On the other hand, older love is all about what you are hoping is still possible, after you have mourned the death of the idea of yourself as manufacturer of miracles. Older love starts with the unpleasant truth that expecting a person to change for the better spontaneously, simply because you wish it, makes as much sense as counting on the lottery for next month's rent. — Merrill Markoe

He fell to the ground like an olive tree, young, beautiful, strong, covered with white blossoms, suddenly shattered by a bolt of lightning in a storm. — Alessandro Baricco

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. — Barry Lopez

Reinhart rubbed his face with his hand. He could still smell her light, flowery scent, like springtime and lilacs, could still feel her in his arms, and his heart skipped a beat. Seeing her dangling from the balcony, hanging over that deep ravine, knowing she was one moment away from death, sent a bolt of lightning through his veins. Thank You, God. He had arrived in time. He — Melanie Dickerson

Dripping charnel
grounds of light -
I examine hope &
fear -
blue-black body
monster of
enlightenment -
call me Youthful
Lightning Bolt -
tired I slump -
desire's already
here - I don't
care -
my wrathful
rosary coiled
snake
on my cushion -
I close my tired
eyes -
sleep has been
troubled but
my mother's
cancer hasn't
spread -
still I
am the Cemetary
King — Marc Olmsted

I had hated him, but I wouldn't have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn't a person ... — Naomi Novik

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction. — Henri Matisse

Your shadow stealthily leaves nothing of where you go, like a poisoned needle that sews together my footsteps. Your light pliantly strikes the water tower, like a lightning bolt that severs the source of my life. -Soifon — Tite Kubo

Each of us is like a wave in the ocean, a gust of wind, a lightning bolt - unique, yet at the same time part of a pattern of forces. — P.Z. Myers

Martin Luther King's 1963 'I have a dream' speech was a thrilling milestone in the civil rights movement, so enduring that we tend to attribute its searing power to a kind of magic. But Gary Younge's meditative retrospection on its significance reminds us of all the micro-moments of transformation behind the scenes
the thought and preparation, vision and revision
whose currency fed that magnificent lightning bolt in history. — Patricia J. Williams

The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time. — G. Willow Wilson

Fooling around with alternating currents is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever. It's too dangerous ... it could kill a man as quick as a bolt of lightning. Direct current is safe. — Thomas A. Edison

Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn't roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn't bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn't like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

Finding the book was like kissing a lightning bolt. — Karen Miller

The way my luck is at the moment," said Polly, "I probably will get a tiny bit of money back, and as I leave the bank after picking it up, a bolt of lightning will come out of the sky and set it on fire. Then a piano will fall on my head and knock me down a manhole. — Jenny Colgan

Where's Shelley?" I ask, scanning the room.
"Playing checkers, as usual," Georgia says, pointing to the corner. Shelley isn't facing me, but I recognize the back of her head and her wheelchair.
She's squealing, a hint that she won the game.
As I get closer to her, I catch a glimpse of who's playing against her. The dark hair should have been a clue that my life is about to be turned upside down, but it doesn't fully register. I freeze.
It can't be. My imagination must be going berserk.
But when he turns around and those familiar dark eyes pierce mine, reality zings up my spine like a lightning bolt.
Alex is here. Ten steps away from me. Oh, God, every feeling I've ever had for him comes rushing back like a tidal wave. I don't know what to do or say. I turn back to Georgia, wondering if she knew Alex was here. One look at her hopeful face tells me she did. — Simone Elkeles

People always seemed to think that you stopped believing things in a single, lightning-bolt moment, an instantaneous revelation of loss. For her, at least, the process of disenchantment had been achingly slow. — Zoe Heller

Then a lightning bolt shot straight through my skivvies. Sha-ZAM! — Megan McCafferty

A renaissance man or woman in purpose of deed is the reflection of a person filled with a myriad of inventions.
That is noteworthy to a society at large in need of them from the ordinary to the extraordinary array of activities that may be sourced from them. An inventor is the lightning bolt to Zeus own right hand of creation. — Ivan Alexander Pozo-Illas

He stared up at me, and I stared back, panting. I hadn't even known those words were in me to be spoken; I hadn't known they were in me to be felt. I would never have thought of speaking so to my lord, the Dragon: I had hated him, but I wouldn't have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn't a person, he was a lord and a wizard, a strange creature on another plane entirely, as far removed as storms and pestilence.
But he had stepped down from that plane; he had given me real kindness. He'd let his magic mingle with my own again, that strange breathtaking intimacy, all to save Kasia with me. I suppose it might seem strange that I should thank him by shouting at him, but it meant more than thanks: I wanted him to be human. — Naomi Novik

The only thing Harry liked about his own appearance was a very thin scar on his forehead that was shaped like a bolt of lightning. — J.K. Rowling

A bolt of lightning crackled out of the sky and fried a Laistrygonian giant to ashes, and I knew Thalia must be doing her 'daughter of Zeus' thing. — Rick Riordan

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree. — Robert Moor

Whether it's a painter finding his way each morning to the easel, or a medical researcher returning daily to the laboratory, the routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightning bolt of inspiration, maybe more. — Twyla Tharp

He said, I always thought the woman I'd marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain. — Aimee Bender

There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power. — Norman Mailer

at man's height the mouth utters its cries, tosses forth its oracles, gives vent to its puns. To allow words to come to life, bare themselves, and show us by chance, for the space of a lightning bolt bony with dice, a few of our reasons for living and dying — Michel Leiris

Create lightning bolt ideas during brainstorms by causing disturbances in your atmosphere. — Ryan Lilly

The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance. — Lewis Thomas

screen that was longing to give me a lightning-bolt-thunder-roll odin-bloody headache — Robin McKinley

Obeying her silent demand, he fused their hips together in a tight, deeply satisfying grinding motion that shot through her like a bolt of lightning. She folded herself around him and purred as sweet release streaked and spread through her, until every inch of her glowed with delight. — Lisa Kleypas

Realized that people's reactions had more to do with them, more to do with who they were, than anything about me. It was like a bolt of lightning hit me, Bree. — Mia Sheridan

A bolt from the blue. I have sometimes read of an unexpected event described in this way, and now I know exactly what is meant by the phrase.
A blue sky, a sunny, mild day. The usual list of worries and troubles runs through one's mind, but nothing that cannot be overcome, nothing that will not reach a satisfactory conclusion eventually, if not today, why then, tomorrow. An ordinary day, in fact. And then lightning strikes from out of that innocent blue sky and all that remains is the smoking ruins of one's every hope and every dream. — Patrice Kindl

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. ( ... ) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert. — Julio Cortazar

Sophie at sixteen," he remembered. "Christ. She was
like a lightning bolt. And she knew it. Irritated the hell out of me. — Nora Roberts

You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. — Nora Ephron

I love like in the storybooks. I love you like in the ballads. I love you like a lightning bolt. I've loved you since the third month you came and spoke with me. I loved that you made me want to laugh. I loved the way you were kind and the way you would pause when you spoke, as though you were waiting for me to answer you. I love you and I am mocking no one when I kiss you, no one at all. — Holly Black

I am not a general or a tactician, but her reasoning is clear. I am the little lightning girl - living electricity, a lightning bolt in human form. People know my name, my face, and my abilities. I am valuable, I am powerful, and Maven will do anything to stop me from striking back. — Victoria Aveyard

In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, like she was crossing a field and bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something akin to an artistic revelation. — Haruki Murakami

I was reading that lightning is a negative charge that comes from the friction that clouds carry. And since opposites attract, I would like to think that he was so positive the moment that he died, so happy, he pulled that bolt right out of the sky. I don't know if that's possible, but that's what I believe. — Chris Colfer

In that moment, the gravity of his situation struck like a bolt of lightning. — Anonymous

He was, as Billy Name said in the acclaimed Ric Burns documentary about Andy Warhol, uninterested in being a second-tier artist. He was uninterested in being a first-tier artist! He wanted to be, you know, a god. Someone who completely changed the ... he wanted to be Zeus with the lightning bolt and nothing less would have satisfied him. — Bob Colacello

Well don't you know the sound of anger brings a dark result.
And every insult is like a lightning bolt. — Third Eye Blind

The creative process is not like a situation where you get struck by a single lightning bolt. You have ongoing discoveries, and there's ongoing creative revelations. Yes, it's really helpful to be marching toward a specific destination, but, along the way, you must allow yourself room for your ideas to blossom, take root, and grow. — Carlton Cuse

Gerry Lopez was a famous surfer back then and his board had a lightning bolt in the in the middle, so my Dad made me a surf/skateboard with a lightning bolt on it. — Christian Hosoi

There's a metal train that a mile long and at the very back end a lightning bolt struck her. How long til it reaches and kills the driver, provided that he's a good conductor? — Bo Burnham

Real love isn't something you plan or earn, it's something that just hits you -like a bolt of lightning- and changes you forever. — Chelsea Fine

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? — Ray Bradbury

I flew in on a cloud and came blitzing down from the heavens like a bolt of lightning on this kid — Alexandra Bracken

One corner of his mouth twitched. "Should I consider that a warning?"
"Just don't be surprised if you find yourself riding a bolt of lightning if you piss me off."
"I'm into kinky shit, so that works. — Larissa Ione

Delirium: You use that word so much. Responsibilities. Do you ever think about what that means? I mean, what does it mean to you? In your head?
Dream: Well, I use it to refer that area of existence over which I exert a certain amount of control or influence. In my case, the realm and action of dreaming.
Delirium: Hump. It's more than that. The things we do make echoes. S'pose, f'rinstance, you stop on a street corner and admire a brilliant fork of lightning
ZAP! Well for ages after people and things will stop on that very same corner, stare up at the sky. They wouldn't even know what they were looking for. Some of them might see a ghost bolt of lightning in the street. Some of them might even be killed by it. Our existence deforms the universe. THAT'S responsibility. — Neil Gaiman

...there is beauty that hits the eye like a bolt of lightning, that burns and sears and blinds. It is more disaster than pleasure. But yours, yours is a beauty that lulls one into comfort, into not protecting one's eyes from the light, then one night you realise that the moon, too, has its beauty. — Laurell K. Hamilton

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four. — Gloria Naylor

To harden the earth the rocks took charge: instantly they grew wings: the rocks that soared: the survivors flew up the lightning bolt, screamed in the night, a watermark, a violet sword, a meteor. The succulent sky had not only clouds, not only space smelling of oxygen, but an earthly stone flashing here and there changed into a dove, changed into a bell, into immensity, into a piercing wind: into a phosphorescent arrow, into salt of the sky. — Pablo Neruda

I was raised as a Catholic, but I got up to go to church because I thought I'd be hit by a bolt of lightning if I didn't. — Chuck Feeney

They will never have this, will they? They might not ever know the feeling of cozying up to a lightning bolt, what it feels like to look at someone's face and see your heart there. — Alexandra Bracken

Lightning Bolt and Hella are two bands I listen to, and there's a lot of finger tapping going on there. — Marnie Stern

Under a tuft of jet-black hair over his forehead they could see a curiously shaped cut, like a bolt of lightning. — J.K. Rowling

Truth be told, there wasn't a single one of them who didn't deserve a lightning bolt from the Almighty. Everything else was straight mercy. — Mike Duran

Once there was a gypsy queen who wore on her wrist a chain of six lucky charms - a golden crown, a silver horse, a butterfly caught in amber, a cat's eye shell, a bolt of lightning forged from the heart of a falling star, and the flower of the rue plant, herb of grace. The queen gave each of her six children one of the charms as their lucky talisman, but ever since the chain of charms was broken, the gypsies had been dogged with misfortune. — Kate Forsyth

Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian - the mythology resides deep in my bones - and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn't see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, "I am not a Christian," a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky. — Derrick Jensen

You know what's worse than being in rehab? Being in rehab over the holidays. You know what's worse than that? Being in a rehab that doesn't allow smoking. I mean, what the fuck? Addicts smoke. If we can't drink, we can't shoot up, and we can't ride the lightning bolt, at least we can smoke. — Darrell Hammond

And those who, like you and me, dear reader, go there to die, must get there solely and compulsorily via arrest.
Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity?
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest"
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bolt; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life. I would not wish such a love on anyone, man or woman, for it can make your life a paradise, or it can destroy you utterly. — Juliet Marillier

I may as well shackle my wrist to a bolt of lightning as attach myself to a mortal. — Jessica Khoury

Kammy jerked upright. It was as though the trees had parted beneath the pressure of the storm and a bolt of lightning had struck her. She had never entered the mouth for it had always been much too small. Yet, she had never seen anything else enter it either. The thought alone made her feel sick with excitement and fear. A small voice told Kammy that such a reaction was ridiculous, it was just a squirrel. But warmth spread to the tips of Kammy's fingers as they stretched forward. She could see now that it was not a burrow at all, but a tunnel large enough for her to fit through. She was quite sure that she would not even have to bend her head. The same small voice tried to speak again but Kammy could not hear it through the rush of blood in her ears.
Kammy stepped inside the mouth of the forest and felt herself flipped upside down. — Natalie Crown

Crystal-clear revelation struck Zane like a bolt of summer lightning, sizzling through the chill of February air. — Abigail Roux

As he shook off his servant's grip and staggered heavily to his feet, the sunlight streaming through the outside door struck him full in the face.

Samantha gasped.

A fresh scar, still red and angry, bisected the corner of his left eye and descended down his cheek in a jagged lightning bolt, drawing the skin around it taut. It had once been an angel's face with the sort of masculine beauty reserved only for princes and seraphim. — Teresa Medeiros

A new beginning done right," she said out loud, because everyone knew that saying it out loud made it true. "You hear that, karma?" She glanced upward through her slightly leaky sunroof into a dark sky, where storm clouds tumbled together like a dryer full of gray wool blankets. "This time, I'm gong to be strong." Like Katharine Hepburn. Like Ingrid Bergman ."So go torture someone else and leave me alone."
A bolt of lightning blinded her, followed by a boom of thunder that nearly had her jerking out of her skin. "Okay, so I meant pretty please leave me alone."
-Maddie — Jill Shalvis

He has the attention span of a lightning bolt. — Robert Redford

When I closed my eyes, for instance, I occasionally saw very faint bursts of light: cosmic rays - high-energy particles from some distant sun racing across the universe and striking my optic nerve like a personal lightning bolt. The flashes were right at the edge of perception, almost as if teasing me to detect them. — Chris Hadfield

Today's action hero, his skills are through technology. He can fly, he can throw a bolt of lightning, he can freeze people. — Sylvester Stallone

Tom, don't let anybody kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That's what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes? Right? And you know something? Accidents don't happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult. — Mario Puzo

Our tears prepare the ground for our future growth. Without this creative moistening, we may remain barren. We must allow the bolt of pain to strike us. Remember, this is useful pain; lightning illuminates. — Julia Cameron

He glances down at me, and a bolt of blue lightning skitters from his jaw to his temple before disappearing into his dark hair. Another bolt zigzags across the hand he rests on his sword's hilt. They're chaos lusters, visual reminders that the fae don't belong in this world, and they're beautiful, mesmerizing. With his quiet, strong confidence, he's mesmerizing. — Sandy Williams

She briefly wished she did have some sort of magic so she could shoot a bolt of lightning through his head. — Marissa Meyer

Both the 'Gregor' series and 'The Hunger Games' are what I call lightning-bolt ideas. There was a moment where the idea came to me. With 'The Hunger Games,' the lightning bolt sort of hit at a moment when I was channel surfing between reality TV and the coverage of the Iraq war. — Suzanne Collins

The power of the unknown fact hit me like a bolt of lightning, that maybe, my father did care about me after all, and I realized another true thing that day: the love of a father is invaluable; regardless of how old you become, or how many bridges you cross in life — Sara Niles

Her mind raced through the dark, throwing open doors, knocking over cabinets, searching for anything it ever remembered seeing. Then the lightning flashed again. Carolina captured it before it even struck land, a jagged scar of silver light suspended over the black chimneys of a sleeping city. She narrowed her eyes at the incomplete bolt until it shimmered and broke. With one sweeping glance, she cast the bits of light across the eastern sky as stars. Thunder roared in her ears and lightning cut the sky again. Her stars held steady over a ghostly desert. Another bolt charged down the night, but she caught it before it could turn the sand to glass, broke it into pieces, and lit the west. — Carey Wallace

What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I've seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it's just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn't picked out, Juliet wasn't picked out. You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert. — Julio Cortazar

Success is like a lightning bolt. It'll strike you when you least expect it, and you just have to keep the momentum going. You have to strike when the iron is hot. So for me, I just kept striking and striking to polish out the sword that I was making. — Michelle Phan

How, exactly, did I kill him? He died on the golf course." One minute he'd been practicing his swing, and in the next - phzzt - a freak lightning bolt had hit him right in the nine iron. His shoes were still smoking when she reached him. — Cheryl Sterling

Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful, irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first faint breath of love, so light she probably didn't notice it herself. It wasn't dramatic, like some bolt of lightning with crack of thunder following. It was more like when flint strikes steel and spark fades almost too fast for to you to see. But still, you know it's there, downs where you can't see, kindling. — Patrick Rothfuss

For the first time, I understood the ancients' need to find explanations for why things happen. It's a quintessential human imperative. Random is not emotionally satisfying. Therefore, lightning was the bolt from an angry god. Crop failure was punishment for failing to honor the gods with a fatted calf. The plague happened because you took the Lord's name in vain or coveted your neighbor's wife. Going to church regularly and praying could forestall illness. And on and on. — Alanna Mitchell

Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt. — Mary Renault

Question (from a reader) : Will the Wise Goddess Athena overthrow Zeus and become the ruler of Olympus?
Athena's answer : What an interesting idea ... No, just kidding, Dad. Put away the lightning bolt. — Rick Riordan

They stood by the open window of their hotel room with the rain sweeping into their faces. A bolt of lightning lit up the Grand Canal. Struck it out of the darkness in a searing eloquent flash. The expectation was that the night to come would be no less bracing, no less eloquent. — Glenn Haybittle