Opalescent Quotes & Sayings

It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson. — Emmet Fox

But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that. — Ryu Murakami

Maybe sometimes we can only see the truth about ourselves if someone shows us where to look. — Michelle Hodkin

When you are free from self-doubt, you fail better. You accept criticism and listen. — Jennifer Lee

His eyes lit up and glowed red against the dark bulk of it. A moment they remained so ... then they soared up, phosphorescently opalescent, with a predominance of red, like two sinful dead planets escaping from Hell. — Jessie Douglas Kerruish

They sat talking naked so often and so long perhaps because they liked to be able to read the whole opalescent page of each other at once. — Caleb Crain

Only the candles and the soap were of German origin. They had a ghostly, opalescent similarity. The British had no way of knowing it, but the candles and the soap were made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State. So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut

Once you pledge, don't hedge. — Nikita Khrushchev

All uncleanness seems washed clean in its lonely stretches ; the life-giving sun and ardent air must still bring singular joy, the eager morning breeze, the opalescent distance, the
plaintive evening sky all will continue to tell an exquisite if inarticulate story.
That Tripoli will remain, whatever the
Powers may decree. — Mabel Loomis Todd

I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out. — Denis Diderot

To look into what will be isn't unlike self-abuse. To watch yourself march through possibilities, to follow the truth through all those twists and turns. Just a little might stunt your growth." I thought of Jane, tiny and older than Gorgoth. "Or make you go blind." His cataracts seemed opalescent in the Builder light. "And if you look too far, if you look to see what waits for us all at the end . . ." "Tell me." Father Merrin shook his head. "It burns." And for an instant I glimpsed a skinless hand holding a copper box. — Mark Lawrence

The air is part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and its soil. It has its own air; and it is to the quality of its air that is due the endless diversity of its colourings. Brown for the most part in themselves, as soon as we see them clothed in air the hills become blue. Every shade of blue, from opalescent milky-white to indigo, is there. They are most opulently blue when rain is in the air. Then the gullies are violet. Gentian and delphinium hues, with fire in them, lurk in the folds. — Nan Shepherd

All of this happened a long time ago. But not so long ago that everyone who played a part in it is dead. Some can still be met in dark old rooms with nurses in attendance. — Timothy Findley

When I go to describe something as remarkable as what I saw that day, I could only say it was a place of dreams. The water is crystalline clear, a mixture of opalescent colors and frosted with white tips. It surges forward and crashes up against the rocks below us as the sun cast a fire-like glare in the distance. Adding to my reverie is the salty smell in the air that lingers and enlivens senses that seem to have been dormant before this moment. I don't recall moving in this dream-like state but my hand moves up and cups the wind as if trying to capture it's essence. If I could have pocketed every smell and sound of this place I would have and I would defended it with my life. — Celia Mcmahon

Once various forms were signed, I was separated from my free will, led down the corridors into a room which was now to be the boundary of my existence, told to surrender my clothes, handed that comic invention, the hospital gown, and sent to bed in broad daylight like a child being stripped of her privileges. — Dorothy West

There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief. — Vladimir Nabokov

I made a record of montage sounds in '99 under the name Korena Pang, but it was never put out because it didn't do it for me. — Jeff Mangum

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies - a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. — Vladimir Nabokov

I leave a lovely opalescent ribbon: I know this. — Elizabeth Bishop

Velma eyed Kate assessingly. She swiped at her hairline with fingers decorated with several diamond-studded gold rings and long nails shellacked with opalescent pearl polish. "Kate," she said in a ominous tone, "how old are you now?"
Ah, Kate thought. Here it comes. Though Velma and Peg had spent their entire lives in Redbud, Kate knew them well from their annual trips to Dallas to see Gran, "I'm thirty-one."
"Why in the world haven't you married anyone yet?"
"Well..." I'm holding out for Prince Harry. I have cooties, so that makes it hard. Shark attack killed the last prospect. — Becky Wade

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets. It has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful. Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and benumbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy. ~Hamlin Garland, McClure's, February 1899 — Hamlin Garland

Or a saint who had spent all his years preparing for his grand entry into heaven, only to discover on his deathbed that heaven was not some blue expanse full of angelic string quartets and opalescent clouds, but an eternity granted for reliving one's happiest moments, and that he had none to remember; — Olga Grushin

I love bright words, words up and singing early;
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees, Gilded and sticky, with a little sting. — Elinor Wylie

Everyone has secret.
Like the oyster with its grain of sand, we bury it deep within, coating it with opalescent layers, as if that could heal our mortal wound. Some of us devote our entire lives to keeping our secret hidden, safe from those who might pry it from us, hoarding it like the pearl, only to discover that it escapes us when we least expect it. revealed by a flash of fear in our eyes when caught unawares, by a sudden pain, a rage or hatred, or an all-consuming shame. — C.W. Gortner

(hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed) ... — Vladimir Nabokov

Very often I suspend my musical sensibilities to enjoy music as a fan. — Billy Sheehan

My fine friends who are perfectionists, each in their own world where they are petty dictators, could write a perfect bill. Those of us who have grown up and matured ... understand that we have to work together on the big issues. — Newt Gingrich

A man glided out of the limo. He was tall, pale as a statue. Sable hair fell in tousled curls to his shoulders. He was dressed in a pair of opalescent butterfly wings that rose from his shoulders, fastened to him by some mysterious mechanism. He wore white leather gloves, their gauntlet cuffs decorated in winding silver designs, and similar designs were set around his calves, down to his sandals. At his side hung a sword, delicately made, the handle wrought as though out of glass. The only other thing he had on was a loincloth of some soft, white cloth. He had the body for it. Muscle, but not too much of it, good set of shoulders, and the pale skin wasn't darkened anywhere by hair. Hell's bells, I noticed how good he looked. — Jim Butcher

The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar. — Gregory Maguire

But there, set as in the crater of a mountain of sand, and inaccessible to mortal footstep, stands unperishing the glory of the earth. And its fragrance is drawn up to heaven, as through a wide chimney; and from its branches hangs the undying fruit, lustrous and opalescent; and in each shining globe the world and its starry system are reflected in miniature, moving westwards; but at night they glow, a cluster of tender moons.
("The Accursed Cordonnier") — Bernard Capes

She might be a little introverted, livelier of movement than of conversation, neither bashful nor forward, with a soul that seemed submerged, but in a radiant moistness. Opalescent on the surface but translucent in her depths ... — Vladimir Nabokov

Oh! Dione of Opalescent Skin Ethereal. Your oospheric containment disperses argentous streams of velvety rays that cradle recesses of soul in gossamer of beatific visions.La Luna! Your enigmatic smile. Your watery countenance stirs the imagination and bestows inspiration on those receptive to Your Sacred Gifts. — Lady Svetlana

His last night, the sky was cloudless with a full moon lighting the snowy terrain in an opalescent blue light. He remembered Yasmin telling him that the moonlight that reaches Earth is mainly the reflected light from the sun with some starlight and Earthlight thrown in. She'd told him that the light wasn't really blue, it was because of the Purkinje effect, a flaw in the human eye, that made it so. And he'd thought that what we know is filtered by our flaws, and sometimes turned more beautiful by them. — Rosamund Lupton

Big Daddy: Ignorance - of mortality - is a comfort. — Tennessee Williams

Work is easy when it's full of meaning and shared with others. — Jared Brock