Quotes & Sayings About Open Fires

This poetry is utilitarian - heavy-duty, industrial strength poetry. It is meant to be read aloud and, even better, memorized and recited. It is best used in the natural world where there are starlit skies, the warmth of blazing fires, and sounds and sights of open expanse. This book is meant to be carried with you in the glove box of a pickup truck, the back pocket of a worn pair of pants, even a saddlebag. It is not made to take up space on a library shelf, squeezed between other unread volumes. Take it along; you never know when the opportunity will be just right. Nothing pleases more than to see copies of the book twice as thick as the original from continued page turning, with turned-down corners marking favorite poems, or the whole shape curved to match the owner's posterior. — Hal Cannon

Hillingham first saw the women by the dwile flonkers. He had spent the day walking around Dover's Hill, the shallow amphitheatre where the Cotswold Olimpick Games took place and had taken, he thought, some good photographs so far. The place was heaving and he had captured some of that, he hoped; the shifting bustle as people flocked from event to event and laughed and shouted and ate and drank. The sound of cymbals and mandolins and violins and guitars filled the air about the crowd, leaping around the brightly costumed figures and the smells of roasting meat and open fires.
("The Cotswold Olimpicks") — Reggie Oliver

Waiting for wisdom to open the cage, we forged in the fires of the innocent age. — Dan Fogelberg

we're going to react the way we react to things that happen to us - but that doesn't mean we have to surrender to our instincts and give up the hope that we can think and behave more rationally and humanely. There's a reason why we no longer take pleasure throwing live cats into open fires, as both kings and peasants once did. Our culture has trained us to think this is abhorrent. That's promising. — Rick Shenkman

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth ... The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black rock below. And instead of feeling sad like I did most mornings, I felt something else now. I found myself saying, 'Explode. Explode you mountains. Rip them down you fuckers. Take this stinking dirt and leave this land with hatred and death. — Scott McClanahan

I needed to pay attention, to be ready to step through and descend into it, whatever it was. It felt archetypal. Something in me was being slain in the fires of pain so that some new thing could be born. I knew it and went with it, and in the alchemy of my pain, like flowers whose seeds open only in the presence of fire, tendrils of something new began to sprout. Pain for me was a Trojan horse, penetrating the protective walls I'd erected around my heart, bearing within it hints of a future I might never have awakened to had I tried to numb myself with busyness. — Jane Fonda

The lust for chaos wrenched reason from my mind. She wanted the power I'd called before. She wanted to burn it all; to slice open the veil and summon the fires of hell to dance for her. She burned for it, and so did I." ~ Muse — Pippa DaCosta

Nature intended in her design a hearty life of toil, open fires and plump old age attended by a brood of sun-touched brats. — Nick Harkaway

Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early
paths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and marked
lines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself. — Alexandre Dumas

There were periods when I sometimes made fires in a large, open fireplace that lasted about two weeks, which was how long it took to burn my compositions. So there has been an awful lot that I have destroyed. — Alan Hovhaness

I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it. — Rex Stout

Dogfish
I wanted
The past to go away, I wanted
To leave it, like another country; I wanted
My life to close, and open
Like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
Where it falls
Down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
Whoever I was, I was
Alive
For a little while.
... mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
Or mean,
For a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
Swim through the fires to stay in
This world. — Mary Oliver

This first hour of arrival before one was again pierced by knives and arrows - this strange animal feeling, this breath reaching far and coming from afar, this breeze, without emotion yet, along the streets of the heart, past the dull fires of facts, past the nail-studded cross of bygone days and past the barbed hooks of the future, this caesura, the silence within oscillation, the moment of pause, most open and most secret form of being, the unemphatic beat of eternity in the very transitoriness of the world — Erich Maria Remarque

Why did people shrink away from winter, he wondered, safe in their blankets, hiding by their fires?
If they knew how beautiful winter really was, they would walk out naked into the snow, walk and walk, until their frozen hearts split open with joy. — Lena Coakley

Fire What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight can douse the flames almost as surely as a pail of water would. So building fires requires attention to the spaces in between, as much as the wood. When we are able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel, and absence of the fuel together, that make fire possible. We only need lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there, with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. 12 Judy Brown — Peter Scazzero

The wild splash of red that was her hair tumbled over the vivid green of the bedspread. Shadows from the candle shifted over her face, reminding him of the impression he'd first had of her-the Gypsy-open fires,weeping violins. Her eyes were dark, pure gray,and waiting.
"We MacGregors," he murmured, "have ways of ... dealing with Campbells."
His mouth lowered but paused a whisper from hers.He saw that her lids had fluttered down yet hadn't closed. She watched him through her lashes while her breath came quickly.Slowly he shifted his head to nibble along her jawline. — Nora Roberts

They came out into the open, and it was the grimy backwaters of Jersey City now. Tall factory stacks, and fires burning, and spreads of stagnant stinking water.
On and on the ride went. On and on and on.
They turned north soon and left the big city and all its little satellites behind them, and after a while even the rusty glow on the horizon died down and was gone. Then trees began, and little lumpy hills, and there was nothing but the darkness and the night and the fear. ("The Number's Up") — Cornell Woolrich

In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth Which is already flesh, fur and faeces, Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf. — T. S. Eliot

I declare it well befits me to thank our God for simpler pleasures than these, than teak or gold or India cloth. Daily, in my youth, should not I have fallen upon my knees and thanked Him who died for us upon the Cross for the warmth of kindled fires, for the freedom to swing my hands in the air? Should I not have praised Him for the liberty to open doors and pass through them, for the escape from drudgery, and most, my mother's hand to hold? — M T Anderson

His brow is seamed with line and scar;
His cheek is red and dark as wine;
The fires as of a Northern star
Beneath his cap of sable shine.
His right hand, bared of leathern glove,
Hangs open like an iron gin,
You stoop to see his pulses move,
To hear the blood sweep out and in.
He looks some king, so solitary
In earnest thought he seems to stand,
As if across a lonely sea
He gazed impatient of the land.
Out of the noisy centuries
The foolish and the fearful fade;
Yet burn unquenched these warrior eyes,
Time hath not dimmed, nor death dismayed. — Walter De La Mare

My eyes are open," said Milo warmly, "and I see exactly what I expect to see. I see a man who is terribly wounded - because he has dared to pass through the fires of truth to the other side, which we have never seen. And then he has come back again - to tell us about the other side. — Kurt Vonnegut

Life is a strange thing. Why this longing for life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard and to suffer sore, till old age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live. In pain the babe sucks his first breath, in pain the old man gasps his last, and all his days are full of trouble and sorrow; yet he goes down to the open arms of death, stumbling, falling, with head turned backward, fighting to the last. And death is kind. It is only life and the things of life that hurt. Yet we love life and we hate death. It is very strange. — Jack London

In open range fires it is about picking a spot and hoping it is the right location. At the head of the fire you have to worry about wind and humidity and a number of other factors. — John Glover

Nineteen months ago, he mourned, partridges were here. Nineteen months ago the open pine forest was compassionate. What rare concentrated tragedies will have occurred within another nineteen months - not here, for this place has bred a tragedy greater than any recorded in the Nation's past - but elsewhere, all over the South, through back roads and on wharves and in legislative rooms, in foundries which rust because the fires have gone out? — MacKinlay Kantor

When there was a summer of bad bush fires, all that was left of the house was the brick recess that had held the stove and open fire. Lush rains followed, and with the earth nourished by the ashes, a pine near the front, surviving the holocaust, gave birth to a grove of deep green trees, turning the old tumbledown house into an oasis, causing the travelers to exclaim at the beauty and watch with excitement for the village coming up, perhaps as a peaceful and pretty as the trees. — Olga Masters