Quotes & Sayings About Moonshine

For youth, the moon is a promise of all those tremendous things which await it, for older people a memento that the promise was never kept, a reminder of all that broke and went to pieces ...
And what is moonshine? Secondhand sunshine. Diluted, counterfeit. — Hjalmar Soderberg

So, what were you doing that was such a secret?"
"Making moonshine."
I stared. "You're kidding me."
"Nope."
"Moonshine? As in rednecks and brown jugs and prohibition?"
Ida Belle drew herself up straight.
"It hasn't been illegal in quite some time. We're hardly rednecks, and we put all of our moonshine into pretty pink cough syrup bottles. — Jana Deleon

Men talk glibly enough about moonshine, as if they knew its qualities very well, and despised them; as owls might talk of sunshine,
none of your sunshine!
but this word commonly means merely something which they do not understand,
which they are abed and asleep to, however much it may be worth their while to be up and awake to it. — Henry David Thoreau

And who shall you be once you don your grand disguise?"
"La luna," she said with a smile.
"Then I shall be la notte to your moon" Archer lifted the hard black mask he held and slipped it over his thinner silk one — Kristen Callihan

A man who does not see stuff and nonsense in a moonshine will blow his life to bits. — Anyaele Sam Chiyson

I could be the ceaseless mist that fogs your colourless eyes when you're lost in your universes. — Moonshine Noire

We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic of all secondary lights. — Alice Meynell

Just to love! She did not ask to be loved. It was rapture enough just to sit there beside him in silence, alone in the summer night in the white splendor of moonshine, with the wind blowing down on them out of the pine woods. — L.M. Montgomery

What's the idea with Moonshine joining the team?"
Cate leaned forward. "It's politics, Connor," she said. "Pure politics. When Barbarro persuaded Molucco to loan us out, he insisted that Moonshine come, too. He's under the impression it will be character building for him!"
"Character building?" Connor exclaimed. "Are you sure that Barbarro isn't secretly hoping a Vampirate will do us all a favor and finish him off?"
Bart laughed. — Justin Somper

A nix who kept changing her appearance was selling something she called moonshine — Elliott James

Well, between Scotch and nothin', I suppose I'd take Scotch. It's the nearest thing to good moonshine I can find. — William Faulkner

...few truly understood how disheartening it was to be cut off from worlds so strange and distant they remained to us fantasies rather than distant realities, too surreal and foreign to be touched. Their minds were fixated on what they knew to be real, unable to create the atmospheres of the nebulous realms that lay just beyond our reach, just beyond the dimming horizon, our celestial limits. — Moonshine Noire

If the [Vestiges] be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa were works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts! — Adam Sedgwick

This revolution will be noted. It will be successful and above all, it will be in words. — Moonshine Noire

The locals died and shrivelled with the autumnal leaves as their plastic, seasonal smiles faded with the last of the holidaymakers. — Moonshine Noire

You can tell it's good if you light it and a blue flame comes up; that means it's good moonshine and it won't make you go blind. — Johnny Knoxville

Beware of the hound He's never been tamed Like cursive writing With a long last name Always hungry Scratchin' at fleas Beware of the dog Wont'cha please Beware of the cat He's a little neurotic Like a moonshine high On antibiotics Always climbing In an old oak tree Beware of the cat Wont'cha please Beware of the snake He's a little greasy Like Delta Blues Or the Ole Big Easy Always crawlin' Ain't got no knees Beware of the snake Wont'cha please Beware of the rabbit He's always listenin' Like a nosey neighbor Or a normal Christian Always eager Ill at ease Beware of the rabbit Wont'cha please Beware of the man Born too rich Like the Bubonic plague He's a son of a bitch Always selling Filled with greed Beware of the man Wont'cha please — K.W. Peery

I fight against the gluttony of time with so many very amusing weapons with gestures and with three attitudes and with charming phrases; with tears and with tinsel, and with sugar-coated pills, and with platitudes slightly regilded. Yes, and I fight him also with little mirrors wherein gleam confusedly the corruptions of lust, and ruddy loyalty, and a bit of moonshine, and the pure diamond of the heart's desire, and the opal cloudings of human compromise: but, above all, I fight that ravening dotard with the strength of my own folly. — James Branch Cabell

About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of miles out at sea to the southeast of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats at once hurried towards the alarm. The adventuresome occupants of the boat, a seaman, a curate, and two schoolboys, had actually seen the monsters passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating, five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep, rolling over and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the southeast. — H.G.Wells

You! You tricked me! I never want to see you or that bottle of liquid arsenic again!"
I chucked the empty moonshine jug at him. Or tried to. It missed him by a dozen feet.
He picked it up in astonishment. "You drank the whole bloody thing? You were only supposed to have a few sips!"
"Did you say that? Did you?" He reached me just as I felt the ground tip. "Didn't say anything. I've got those names, so that's all that matters, but you men ... you're all alike. Alive, dead, undead - all perverts! I had a drunken pervert in my pants! Do you know how unsanitary that is?"
Bones held me upright. I would have protested, but I couldn't remember how to. "What are you saying?"
"Winston poltergeisted my panties, that's what!" I announced with a loud hiccup.
"Why, you scurvy, lecherous spook!" Bones yelled in the direction of the cemetery. "If my pipes still worked, I'd go right back there and piss on your grave! — Jeaniene Frost

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. — Vladimir Nabokov

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types
the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. — G.K. Chesterton

My playground is full of moonshine, mason jars, beer bottles, and bonfires. — Big Smo

Begin. Keep on beginning. Nibble on everything.
Take a hike. Teach yourself to whistle. Lie.
The older you get the more they'll want your stories.
Make them up. Talk to stones. Short-out electric
fences. Swim with the sea turtle into the moon. Learn
how to die. Eat moonshine pie. Drink wild geranium
tea. Run naked in the rain. Everything that happens
will happen and none of us will be safe from it.
Pull up anchors. Sit close to the god of night.
Lie still in a stream and breathe water. Climb to the
top of the highest tree until you come to the branch
where the blue heron sleeps. Eat poems for breakfast.
Wear them on your forehead. Lick the mountain's
bare shoulder. Measure the color of days
around your mother's death. Put your hands over
your face and listen to what they tell you. — Ellen Kort

The problem with the Tea Party is they're all ignorant hillbillies who drink moonshine and ride around on mules. And they believe in stereotypes too. — Jon Stewart

Ray, I've run my last run of moonshine, I'm not gonna do it anymore, I'm just getting too old to be doing this stuff. — Popcorn Sutton

In December 1790, with other options foreclosed, Hamilton revived a proposal he had floated in his Report on Public Credit: an excise tax on whiskey and other domestic spirits. He knew the measure would be loathed in rural areas that thrived on moonshine, but he thought this might be more palatable to farmers than a land tax. Hamilton confessed to Washington an ulterior political motive for this liquor tax: he wanted to lay "hold of so valuable a resource of revenue before it was generally preoccupied by the state governments." As with assumption, he wanted to starve the states of revenue and shore up the federal government. Jefferson did not exaggerate Hamilton's canny capacity to clothe political objectives in technical garb. There were hidden agendas buried inside Hamilton's economic program, agendas that he tended to share with high-level colleagues but not always with the public. To — Ron Chernow

All talk of women's rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them. — Victoria Woodhull

The worst stories usually make you think: 'but nobody had to die'.
These are called true stories. — Moonshine Noire

But there is an influence in the light of the morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

in its early days the film industry made more than four hundred silent movies exploiting the nation's fascination with Appalachian feuds and moonshine making. — Dwight B. Billings

The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine. — Ernest Rutherford

Refrigerators are good for keeping homemade moonshine less gross. Freezers are good for keeping rattlesnakes less angry. Garages are good to hide in when your wife finds either. — Jenny Lawson

Read this and thought of you:
Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote.
Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote.
Through good report and through ill report, I wrote.
Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote.
What I wrote it is unnecessary to say.
~ Edgar Allen Poe — Edgar Allan Poe

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. — Joseph Conrad

Fairies, black, grey, green, and white,
You moonshine revellers, and shades of night,
You orphan heirs of fixed destiny,
Attend your office and your quality.
William Shakespeare — William Shakespeare

I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and - But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic. — Mark Twain

Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight. — G.K. Chesterton

(...) pick up your axe, start at the roots

don't miss the trunk, never forget:

to end life truly and finally

start at the roots or end there. — Moonshine Noire

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war ... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage. — H.L. Mencken

A seamlessly told and scrupulously detailed history of the Hartsoe clan of Haw County, North Carolina, Love and Lament is that rare novel that brings the gritty, rural past to vivid life. I could very nearly smell the moonshine (the moonshiners too!). Pass a few hours with Mary Bet Hartsoe and family. You won't regret it. — T. R. Pearson

Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was. I cherished hope, it is true, but it vanished when I beheld my person reflected in water or my shadow in the moonshine, even as that frail image and that inconstant shade. — Mary Shelley

It would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine — L.M. Montgomery

Doo never actually made moonshine, but he hauled about an ocean of it. — Loretta Lynn

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. — William Tecumseh Sherman

Her younger son, twenty, was assigned to a factory that made railroad equipment, but since it provided no salary he was actually paying his workplace three dollars per month so he could stay home to help his mother with the pigs and moonshine. — Barbara Demick

I scratch down happiness, I
want my ink to do happy dances,
to careen across the pages staggering
like a drunken fellow, giddy
on moonshine or sunset. — Bryana Johnson

I could be that tenebrous enigma that floods out your words with sighs and frustration. — Moonshine Noire

In my mind I'm going to Carolina. Can't you see the sunshine, can't you just feel the moonshine? Ain't it just like a friend of mine, to hit me from behind, and I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind. — James Taylor

I am no earthling. I drink moonshine on Mars
and mistake meteors for stars 'cause I can't hold
my liquor. But I can hold my breath and ascend
like wind to the black hole and play galaxophones
on the fire escape of your soul. — Saul Williams

Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea. — Dylan Thomas

A radiant full moon of silver hangs in the black sky, between the veils of misty clouds. — Moonshine Noire

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. — H.L. Mencken

we got plenty of moonshine to celebrate with. It's not legal yet in Florida, but from where we come from it's like mother's milk, straight from the teat." He smiled wide, and I noticed he had more than a few teeth missing. — Amanda Carlson

I could be the drumbeat in your chest like madness before a storm swirling restlessly. — Moonshine Noire

War is at best barbarism. Its glory is all moonshine ... War is hell. — William Tecumseh Sherman

We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart. — Walter Scott

you're the fly on the wall hearing all, seeing all

ears of a wall hearing all the secrets

perhaps you're the vines creeping over

the old abandoned mansion walls

dusty, soulless and dead

bringing a certain curious life to rubble

and I think you're the jewel-eyed gecko

sneaking around the warm summer walls

between jasmine and olive branches

sticky pad toes, clinging to the walls

peeking in at lonely summer spicy love-making

through silk curtains from the bright orient

breathing in incense and tasting decadence

climbing the sharply barbed walls

the smooth cemented white-washed walls

because walls breathe too — Moonshine Noire

The happiness of life consists, like the day, not in single flashes (of light), but in one continuous mild serenity. The most beautiful period of the heart's existence is in this calm equable light, even although it be only moonshine or twilight. Now the mind alone can obtain for us this heavenly cheerfulness and peace. — Jean Paul

I hear it was the fact that the Brennans had a hellfireanddamnation preacher runnin' their family back in Prohibition days and you Gallaghers were runnin' moonshine to get by and got caught. Your family blamed the Brennans for rattin' you out, and that started a feud," Rosalie said. — Carolyn Brown

Anoint the saucepan with a touch of sunflower seed oil. Grease its scars, and as soon as the oils heats up, sprinkle with flour, pour on the bouillon and the moonshine strong as the hearts of the village man who knows not how to love with his words, only with his actions, and ass the chopped apple. — Vladimir Lorchenkov

The State is everything; the individual, nothing. The individual has no rights that the State is bound to respect; no rights at all, in fact, except those which the State may choose to give him, subject to revocation at its own pleasure, with or without notice. There is no such thing as natural rights; the fundamental doctrine of the American Declaration of Independence, the doctrine underlying the Bill of Rights, is all moonshine. Moreover, since the State creates all rights, since the only valid and authoritative ethics are State ethics, then by obvious inference the State can do no wrong. — Albert Jay Nock

All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine. — H.L. Mencken

I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting - its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation. — William Tecumseh Sherman

The Brit's face shares a heritage with a junkyard butt-sniffing mutt. It's a hard-earned moonshine mug, dotted with a hairy mole that looks like a rat's been gnawing on it. His beard looks like a white sneeze. The teeth are jagged and out of alignment, having opened quarts at Jiffy Quick Lube for half a decade. — Brett Tate

Is it all just a psychotic dream? What is life? — Moonshine Noire

She could sense the desire pouring off the man in front of her, and to be wanted so obviously, so fiercely, went to her head like moonshine. He made her feel like a goddess.
Provided goddesses got this horny. — Christine Warren

Don't ask me to pray, instead ask me to act. — Moonshine Noire

Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead

Nay, I swim with sea-demons

no sweet summer tuned radio

over my sunless desertscape

how does it burn without the sun? — Moonshine Noire

The works of Lavoisier and his associates operated upon many of us at that time like the Sun's rising after a night of moonshine: but Chemistry is now betrothed to the Mathematics, and is in consequence grown somewhat shy of her former admirers. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If in this hell of a world one can bring a little joy and peace even for a day into the heart of a single person, that much alone is true; this I have learnt after suffering all my life; all else is mere moonshine ... — Swami Vivekananda

The ocean cradles the bloodied moon in its aquatic arms like a mother holds her crying babe. — Moonshine Noire

She loves filming and taking photographs. I can imagine her making beautiful films in France or India or somewhere with a gorgeously colourful culture. She somehow reminds me of my favourite place in the world, she and Paris I can romanticize and immortalize in ceaseless poetry for the rest of my life. — Moonshine Noire

Let's walk to the beach
Let's cast the net in the water
And catch freshness from water

Let's pick up a pebble from the ground
Feel the weight of existence

Let's not abuse moonshine if we suffer from fever
(Occasionally I have observed the moon descending during fever
And reaching the hand of the roof of heaven
I have noticed the goldfinch singing better
Sometimes the wound beneath my foot
Has taught the ups and downs of earth
Sometimes in my sickbed the dimension of the rose has multiplied
And the diameter of orange has increased, the radius of lantern too) — Sohrab Sepehri

After all, what is it?- this indescribable something which men will persist in terming "genius"? I agree with Buffon- with Hogarth- it is but diligence after all.
Look at me!- how I labored- how I toiled- how I wrote! Ye Gods, did I not write? I knew not the word "ease." By day I adhered to my desk, and at night, a pale student, I consumed the midnight oil. You should have seen me- you should. I leaned to the right. I leaned to the left. I sat forward. I sat backward. I sat tete baissee (as they have it in the Kickapoo), bowing my head close to the alabaster page. And, through all, I- wrote. Through joy and through sorrow, I-wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I-wrote. Through good report and through ill report- I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I-wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say. The style!- that was the thing. I caught it from Fatquack- whizz!- fizz!- and I am giving you a specimen of it now. — Edgar Allan Poe

It's like somebody stuffed him in a barrel full of moonshine-proof cluelessness and then left him there to get pickled in it while it fermented into malice. — Alma Alexander

I don't need rose petals and moonshine. It's three in the afternoon on a Thursday, and I will die if you don't kiss me. — Ava Gray

Comrades," he said, "I trust that every animal here appreciates the sacrifice that Comrade Napoleon has made in taking this extra labour upon himself. Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? Suppose you had decided to follow Snowball, with his moonshine of windmills - Snowball, who, as we now know, was no better than a criminal? — Anonymous

haze-brained nitwit

pickle-head froggy leg soup

murky

daunting

gone — Moonshine Noire

March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine. — L.M. Montgomery