Mid Air Quotes & Sayings

To improve their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained. "Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing on their heads. — Aldous Huxley

We were good reformers, but we weren't good enough. We elected a candidate and then, busy with our own affairs, we left him hanging in mid-air. Reformers are such part-time pillars of society! — Margaret Case Harriman

Mr. and Mrs. Boffin sat staring at mid-air, and Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history. — Charles Dickens

What is peace? Balance three iron skewers tip to tip, one upon the other; at the summit, emplace an egg, so that it too poises static in mid-air, and there you have the condition of peace in this world of men. — Jack Vance

The big compliment came from the beer drinkers who didn't know me. They wouldn't drink or move when I sang. If they had their glasses in mid-air, the glasses wouldn't come down. — Ethel Waters

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. — Virginia Woolf

Someone has to do it. It's all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out of the cauldron? Goodie Whemper's curiosity about such things was huge and insatiable*.
* Nearly insatiable. It was probably satiated in her last flight to test whether a broomstick could survive having its bristles pulled out one by one in mid-air. According to the small black raven she had trained as a flight recorder, the answer was almost certainly no. — Terry Pratchett

Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered. — Stephen Jay Gould

Swelter's eyes meet those of his enemy, and never has there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred. Had the flesh, the fibres, and the bones of the chef and those of Mr Flay been conjured away and away down that dark corridor leaving only their four eyes suspended in mid-air outside the Earl's door, then, surely, they must have reddened to the hue of Mars, reddened and smouldered, and at last broken into flame, so intense was their hatred - broken into flame and circled about one another in ever-narrowing gyres and in swifter and yet swifter flight until, merged into one sizzling globe of ire they must surely have fled, the four in one, leaving a trail of blood behind them in the cold grey air of the corridor, until, screaming as they fly beneath innumerable arches and down the endless passageways of Gormenghast, they found their eyeless bodies once again, and reentrenched themselves in startled sockets. — Mervyn Peake

What exactly is "midair"? Is there some other part of air besides the "mid" part? — George Carlin

The lion landed in the snow well below the outcrop, at least thirty feet below where he'd been lying on the tree branch. The same as jumping from the roof of a three-story building. I saw him just as he hit, disappearing in an explosion of soft snow. Before I could picture how broken he would be, he erupted from the snow in another leap that covered twenty feet, straight down the side of the hill we'd toiled up. His body began to ball up in mid-air and he crashed down into the snow again, only to reappear a moment later, stretched out and bounding. In a few seconds he was into the bottom of the draw and out of sight. — Pete Fromm

The night lifted, leaving behind it a grayish light the color of stagnant water. Soon there was only a tattered fragment of darkness, hanging in mid-air, the other side of the window. Fear caught my throat. The tattered fragment of darkness had a face. The face was my own. — Elie Wiesel

I studied his face, and as I did, I realized that he was studying me, our thoughts tangling in mid-air for a moment. — Kate White

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. — Stephen Jay Gould

No swamp dragon could ever terrorise a kingdom, except by accident. Vimes wondered how many had been killed by enterprising heroes. It was terribly cruel to do something like that to creatures whose only crime was to blow themselves absent-mindedly to pieces in mid-air, which was not something any individual dragon made a habit of. A race of, of whittles, that's what dragons were. Born to lose. Live fast, die wide. — Terry Pratchett

Of course, the wind sort of swept up and the music was flying around in mid air and they were trying to play off it. You had to be there. It was quite funny. — Roy Wood

Breath; but the dead air seemed to shrivel his lungs, and he dropped his head and dozed till the house was reached. Every effort of will was torture, yet he was called upon continually to make efforts of will. He gave the black he had ridden a nip of trade-gin. Viaburi, the house-boy, brought him corrosive sublimate and water, and he took a thorough antiseptic wash. He dosed himself with chlorodyne, took his own pulse, smoked a thermometer, and lay back on the couch with a suppressed groan. It was mid-afternoon, and he had completed his third round that day. He called the house-boy. "Take um big fella look along Jessie," he commanded. The boy carried the long telescope out on — Jack London

The history of early-medieval Arabia is nearly all legend. Like Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and other founders of patriarchal religions, Mohammed lacks real verification. There is no reliable information about his life or teachings. Most stories about him are as apocryphal as the story that his coffin hangs forever in mid-air "between heaven and earth," like the bodies of ancient sacred kings. — Barbara G. Walker

I smile because I listen to the OTHER and I believe the OTHER. I am a marionette pulled by the unskilled fingers, pulled apart, inharmoniously dislocated, one arm dead, the other rhapsodising in mid-air. I laugh, not when it fits into my talk, but when it fits into the undercurrents of my talk. — Anais Nin

On the wings of fancy, gentle readers, bear yourselves into the mid-air, where by imagination you may form a large stupendous castle. — Sarah Fielding

And I felt a sudden whirl in my head, knowing this leap was inevitable, that I wasn't just standing on the cliff, toes poking over, but already in mid-air. — Sarah Dessen

There is only so much negotiating and maneuvering that can be done while the aircraft is under siege in mid-air. Therefore, the best way to put a stop to hijacking is by having high levels of security implemented by qualified and trained personnel both on the ground and in the air. — Isaac Yeffet

I often regret the fact that you can't rub out words in mid-air like you can on paper, that there isn't a special pen that you can wave in front of you to remove the clumsy words before anyone can hear them. — Delphine De Vigan

The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air.
It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies.
Its clear tones resound in the placid silence of the winter day, and echo long into the silver-blue serenity of night.
The bell can only be seen at the turning of the year, when the days wind down into nothing, and get ready to march out again.
When you hear the bell, you feel a tug at your heart.
It is your immortal inspiration. — Vera Nazarian

He was surprised by this absence of reproaches. He stood there all bewildered, the glass globe held arrested in mid-air. He did not understand this quiet sweetness. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

But suddenly Jonas had noticed, following the path of the apple through the air with his eyes, that the piece of fruit had - well, this was the part that he couldn't adequately understand - the apple had changed. Just for an instant. It had changed in mid-air, he remembered. Then it was in his hand, and he looked at it carefully, but it was the same apple. Unchanged. The same size and shape: a perfect sphere. The same nondescript shade, about the same shade as his own tunic. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about that apple. He had tossed it back and forth between his hands a few times, then thrown it again to Asher. And again - in the air, for an instant only - it had changed. — Lois Lowry

The door opened after a few moments. Sherlock was looking slightly upwards, expecting Amyus Crowe to be standing inside the doorway, and for a moment he was confused by the empty space. His gaze droped, and he felt his heart stutter as it came to rest on the face of a girl at the same level as his own. Her cloths were dark, and in the shadows of the hall her face seemed to be floating in mid-air. — Andy Lane

But when at long last he had got his head out over the side of the bed, in mid-air, he became afraid of continuing in this manner, for if he were to fall like that it would take a miracle for him not to sustain a head injury. And consciousness was the last thing he wanted to lose at the present time; he would rather stay in bed. — Franz Kafka

Resultant SCP-658 measures 45 by 45 by 20 cm. Upper half of object occupied by a single video screen, which constantly displays shaky, colorless footage of an unmoving human figure suspended in mid-air within a featureless room (tentatively identified as [DATA EXPUNGED]). — Anonymous

Friendship true is a vow of care.
A warm embrace when in despair.
A loving presence waiting there
to lift a heart, its burdens bear.

Friendship true is an earnest prayer.
A tongue of praise for one's welfare.
A smile 'mid laughs as light as air,
and thoughtfulness most kind and rare. — Richelle E. Goodrich

In the lounge, the air seems to still. Husbands drinking their whiskeys stop in mid-sip, spotting this pink thing at the door. It takes a second for the image to register. They stare, but don't see, not yet. But as it turns real
real skin, real cleavage, perhaps not-so-real blond hair
their faces slowly light up. They all seem to be thinking the same thing
Finally ... But — Anonymous

He extended his hand: It seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. "I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. — H.G.Wells

Slowly he lifted his hands in the darkness and held them in mid-air, the fingers spread weakly open. If he reached out with his hands, and if his hands were electric wires, and if his heart were a battery giving life and fire to those hands, and if he reached out with his hands and touched other people, reached out through these stone walls and felt other hands connected with other hearts
if he did that, would there be a reply, a shock? — Richard Wright

At the top of the cellar steps Broadman knelt down and fumbled in his tinderbox. It turned out to be damp.
'I'll kill that bloody cat,' he muttered, and groped for the spare box that was normally on the ledge by the door. It was missing. Broadman said a bad word. A lighted taper appeared in mid-air, right beside him.
HERE, TAKE THIS.
'Thanks,' said Broadman.
DON'T MENTION IT.
Broadman went to throw the taper down the steps. His hand paused in mid-air. He looked at the taper, his brow furrowing. Then he turned around and held the taper up to illuminate the scene. It didn't shed much light, but it did give the darkness a shape ...
'Oh, no - ' he breathed.
BUT YES, said Death. — Terry Pratchett

Corey was hanging out down by the port one afternoon with Karl and Jacques when a bus-load of american tourists drove by, and in a moment of clarity Corey suddenly perceived Karl in the light of reality rather than through the kaleidoscope of fashion: the tourists were staring open-mouthed through the bus windows, ice creams held in mid-air, gawping at the apparition that was Karl. Jacques was driving the mobylette and Karl sat behind riding side-saddle dressed in hot pants, long strands of pearls and dark glasses; he was wielding a raw frankfurter straight from the packet in one hand and a bottle of coca-cola in the other. I remember thinking "I am with this total freak," says Corey. — Alicia Drake

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall. — Raoul Vaneigem

Answer to Job : 601 was an anticipation in the grand manner, but everything still hung in mid air as mere revelation that never came down to earth. In view of these facts one cannot, with the best will in the world, see how Christianity, as we hear over and over again, is supposed to have burst upon world history as an absolute novelty. If ever anything had been historically prepared, and sustained and supported by the existing Weltanschauung, Christianity would be a classic example. XII — C. G. Jung

Tag stopped, his spoon paused in mid-air. I watched as a Cheerio made a desperate dive for freedom, plopping back in the bowl, safe for another few seconds. — Amy Harmon

There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur ... the pure murmuring of life. — Juan Rulfo

In mid-September Soufan talked to an al-Qaeda prisoner named Ramzi Binalshibh, who was chained naked to the floor in a CIA black prison at the Bagram air base outside Kabul. He said he was starting to obtain "valuable actionable intelligence" before CIA officers ordered him to stop talking forty-five minutes later. On September 17, they flew their prisoner to a second black site in Morocco, then on to Poland; under extreme duress he described plots to crash airplanes into Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London. He was also diagnosed as a schizophrenic. — Tim Weiner

because pollutants released by cars in the morning are converted into ozone later in the day. What researchers discovered about daily shifts in air quality during the 17 days of the Games was remarkable: Even though it was humid and sticky and temperatures hovered in the mid-80s, ozone dropped by 27 percent — Linda Marsa

Well ... things are beginning to stack up a little," said Gordo. It was the same old sod-hut drawl. He sounded like the airline pilot who, having just slipped two seemingly certain mid-air collisions and finding himself in the midst of a radar fuse-out and control-tower dysarthria, says over the intercom: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be busy up here in the cockpit making our final approach into Pittsburgh, and so we want to take this opportunity to thank you for flying American and we hope we'll see you again real soon." It was second-generation Yeager, now coming from earth orbit. Cooper was having a good time. He knew everybody was in a sweat down below. But this was what he and the boys had wanted all along, wasn't it? — Tom Wolfe

The rig work can be rewarding to pull off, a really good rig in a set of wires where you're throwing yourself up walls and doing moves mid-air. That's just fun. — Dustin Clare

But I have burned already down to bone.
There is a fire that burns beyond the names
Of sludge and filth of which this world is made.
Agony sears the dark flesh of the body,
And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise
Above the earth, above the sacrifice;
Until my soul flares outward like a blue
Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air:
Free of the body's work of twisted iron. — James Wright

Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle. — Jared Diamond

If oceans of time
could grant
heart one simple
desire
We would be
lovers afloat
on trained trapeze
high wire
Pleasurably bound by
invisible chords
of rapture
Harnessed in mid air
embraced foiled
skilled arms of capture — Zuky Rose Leigh

To the sight of the swallows dying in mid air, Alessandro was finally able to add his own benediction. "Dear God, I beg of you only one thing. Let me join the ones I love. Carry me to them, unite me with them, let me see them, let me touch them." And then it all ran together, like a song. — Mark Helprin

You are so high in the tree.
If you jump
you will live a full life
while falling.
You will get married
to a hummingbird
and raise beautiful part-
hummingbirds.
You will die of cancer
in mid-air.
I will not lie. It will be painful.
You are a brave little boy
or girl. — Zachary Schomburg

("I knew it," Conor grumbled. "These kinds of stories always have stupid princes falling in love." He started walking back to the house. "I thought this was going to be good.")
(With one swift movement, the monster grabbed Conor's ankles in a long, strong hand and flipped him upside down, holding him in mid-air so his T-shirt rucked up and his heartbeat thudded in his head.)
(As I was saying, said the monster.) — Patrick Ness

I wish I could run away," Rudger told Jersey as they both rushed in and out of various patients' rooms, darting around like little ants. "I can't leave and be on my own though, not right now, anyway."
"Why?" asked Jersey, waving her flashlight in mid-air.
Rudger froze for a second, a regretful haze emanating from his eyes. "It'd break her heart if I left."
"Ain't that normal? For parents to have mixed feelings about their kids growin' up?"
"Not for me, it isn't."
Jersey made a pitying face in his direction. "So, you wanna keep bein' towed around with your mom, livin' in a gross town like Danvers?"
"Is there a choice?"
"Yeah, there sure is. You can run away and try to be a whole person before it's too late, or you can live with mommy dearest forever and turn into Norman Bates. — Rebecca McNutt

Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere. — Thomas Hardy

The way a good rod first flexes and then extends its muscles as the line quickens, tightens, rises off the water and does figure eights in mid-air is one of the miracles of humanly applied dynamics. — John Hillaby

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection. — W. Somerset Maugham

You need to understand something, Krissy," he began, taking careful steps towards me. "Whenever I drop the words 'gonna shower', it means, we're gonna shower. I expect to see you sliding the doors open and stepping in under that shower with me, no more than a minute later. Aroused, eager, and impatient to be fucked under the spraying shower and against the tiles."

When he reached me, he took the cup of coffee still suspended mid-air from my hand and set it down on the table. Then he bent and slid one arm beneath my thighs, the other around my waist, and lifted my inert body up off the chair. "If I don't want you to join me, I won't tell you I'm gonna shower. 'Cause, then, what would be the fucking point? — S. Ann Cole

Suddenly he thought he saw a trait of soul-less habit in her dear coarse face, something mechanical and unmysterious in her friendly smile, something unworthy of him. His gesture froze in mid-air; the smile froze on his face. Was he still in love with her, did he really still desire her? No, he had been there too often. All too often he had seen this selfsame smile and smiled back without a prompting from his heart. What had still been all right yesterday was suddenly no longer possible today. — Hermann Hesse

Better use of space, improving the insulation, getting more daylight into the buildings, reducing the energy consumption of the air conditioning and heating systems, making sure that the internal air quality is good, that we have increased natural ventilation opportunities in the mid seasons. You know these are some of the things we can do to become environmentally friendly. — Ken Yeang

I'd looked around my room at the ribbons and sashes and rosettes hanging from the walls, at the photos of my ponies clearing the highest fences with me crouched in the saddle, a look of utter determination on my face. I'd made myself look hard at the pictures, at my legs swinging backwards over the fences, at my body lying low over my pony's neck, my hands grasping at the reins as I turned them in mid-air. At the way that Teddy's eyes were bulging as I pulled him around a tight turn, at the way the veins popped out on Buck's lathered neck, at Springbok's open mouth, dripping with foam.
I'd looked hard at them all, and I hadn't liked what I'd seen. — Kate Lattey

I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going. And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight. And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you're going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you. — C. JoyBell C.

But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. — Virginia Woolf

Caine usually woke from the recurring dream mid-air, having yet to be dashed upon the rocks, whimpering and panting like a child crying for his mother. Now he lifted his eyes to a dark, empty room in Jizan and the unusual, lingering scent of roses, and wept in his hands for his Father. — V.S. Carnes

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room, too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of the stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Though it was mid-July, the morning was brisk, the sky a gray cotton of clouds, and Puget Sound a steely, cold blue. Most of Seattle grumbled, worn with winterish weather, impatient for the elusive summer sun. With umbrellas tucked away in the trunks of cars, sunglasses lost and separated from their original purchasers, the Pacific Northwest was a bastion of misty air and pale, complaining residents. — Courtney Kirchoff

My friend and coach reminded me this week that there is a moment when the acrobat lets go of one trapeze and is completely suspended in mid-air before she catches the incoming rung. You have to let go to get there. — Danielle LaPorte

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

When the meat platter was passed to me, I didn't even know what the meat was; usually, you couldn't tell, anyway-but it was suddenly as though _don't eat any more pork_ flashed on a screen before me.
I hesitated, with the platter in mid-air; then I passed it along to the inmate waiting next to me. He began serving himself; abruptly, he stopped. I remember him turning, looking surprised at me.
I said to him, "I don't eat pork."
The platter then kept on down the table.
It was the funniest thing, the reaction, and the way that it spread. In prison, where so little breaks the monotonous routine, the smallest thing causes a commotion of talk. It was being mentioned all over the cell block by night that Satan didn't eat pork. — Malcolm X

Something is coming uphill," said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. "Get ready." The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world - the wolf checked in mid-spring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost — Rudyard Kipling

But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through the transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever. — Herman Melville

A few amber clouds floated in the sky without a breath of air to move them. The horizon was of a fine golden tint, changing gradually into a pure apple-green, and from that into the deep blue of the mid-heaven. — Washington Irving

Modern man has both feet firmly planted in mid-air — Francis Schaeffer

Starting a business is like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. In mid air, the entrepreneur begins building a parachute and hopes it opens before hitting the ground. — Robert Kiyosaki

She looked as if she were about to burst into tears, but she was wonderful at catching the ball of her own mood in mid-air. — Rebecca West

I made a date with her for the following week. Mid-week, I went for a ride in a T-28. The engine failed, the pilot slid the plane into the sand of the Mojave out near El Centro, and I slid into a hospital bed for about ten days at North Island Naval Air Station. While I was in the hospital, the CARDIV left for WestPac. I called Marguerite and told her what happened and that I wanted to see her again. I'm not sure she believed me, but agreed to another date. Unfortunately it had to be a short date because I had to head for Norton Air Force base to catch a flight for Hawaii, to meet up with the CARDIV. — W.R. Spicer

No more the mounting larks, while Daphne sings, Shall, list'ning, in mid-air suspend their wings. — Alexander Pope

He watched as Miss Turner lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips with agonizing slowness. He stared, fascinated, as her lips parted, revealing the tip of her tongue ...
"I say, Miss Turner-" Wiggins again.
Her spook paused in mid-air.
Gray crashed his fist on the table. "Christ, man! Can't you see the lady is trying to eat?" Crossing his arms, he slumped back in his chair. Its wooden joints creaked in protest.
And now everyone put down their spoons.
Gray felt their eyes on him. He kicked the table leg, frustrated with himself, with her, with his goddamned boots. They still pinched his feet. — Tessa Dare

The moon was obscured by heavy clouds. January was already past the mid-mark and the early delta spring would soon be on them. Already on the night was the faint, fresh smell of buddings and the intimacy that comes from the warm delta air trapped between slumbering earth and lowering clouds. — Leslie H. Whitten Jr.