Paling Quotes & Sayings

Wherever a man separates from the multitude, and goes his own way in this mood, there indeed is a fork in the road, though ordinary travelers may see only a gap in the paling. His solitary path across lots will turn out the higher way of the two. — Henry David Thoreau

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster. — Michael Medved

The economics of industrialized countries would collapse if women didn't do the work they do for free: According to economist Marilyn Waring, throughout the West it generates between 25 and 40 percent of the gross national product. — Naomi Wolf

Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird old rune-some broken dream of old memories. A slender, shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness. — L.M. Montgomery

What would things been like [in Russia] if during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there, paling with terror at every bang on the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people? — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You don't need to spend every waking moment protecting me now. I'm supposed to be your partner, not your burden, and if that's all I'm ever going to be to
you, then I don't want to be here anymore. I want you to love me. I want to look forward to coming here every fall. I want winter to be my favorite season because
I get to spend it with you. So tell me that's going to happen, Henry. Tell me things are going to be better, that you're not going to think of Persephone every time
you touch me. Tell me that you're going to love me as much as you love her, and that I won't spend the rest of eternity paling in comparison to your memories of
my sister. — Aimee Carter

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed. — Rose Macaulay

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. — Virginia Woolf

She is waiting. Each spring the hard rains come and the creek rises and quickens, and more of the bank peels off, silting the water brown ad bringing to light another layer of dark earth, Decades pass. She is patient, shelled inside the blue tarp. Each spring the water laps closer, paling roots, loosening stones, scuffing and smoothing. She is waiting and one day a bit of blue appears in the bank and then more blue. The rain pauses and the sun appears but she is ready now and the bank trembles a moment and heaves the stands of tarp unfurl and she spills into the stream and is free. Bits of bone gather in an eddy, form a brief necklace. The current moves on toward the sea. — Ron Rash

First time I told my dad I liked a girl, he slathered me in honey and sealed me in a bear den for a night. Haven't liked one since." "First time I told my mother I fancied someone, she baked me in an oven for an hour," Mona agreed, green skin paling. "I never think about boys now." "First time I liked a boy, my dad killed him." The group stopped and stared at Arachne. "Maybe Sophie just had bad parents," she said. — Soman Chainani

Sophie shouldn't even have let herself love!" Ravan shot back. "First time I told my dad I liked a girl, he slathered me in honey and sealed me in a bear den for a night. Haven't liked one since."
"First time I told my mother I fancied someone, she baked me in an oven for an hour," Mona agreed, green skin paling. "I never think about boys now."
"First time I liked a boy, my dad killed him."
The group stopped and stared at Arachne.
"Maybe Sophie just had bad parents. — Soman Chainani

The dead boy in his arms hung with his head back and those partly opened eyes beheld nothing at all out of that passing landscape of street or wall or paling sky or the figures of the children who stood blessing themselves in the gray light. This man and his burden passed on forever out of that nameless crossroads and the women stepped once more into the street and the children followed and all continued on to their appointed places which as some believe were chosen long ago even to the beginning of the world. — Cormac McCarthy

I don't even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech. — Karen Russell

O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one. — William Butler Yeats

In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone. — Susan Stewart

The worst day of loving someone is the day that you lose them. — L.J.Smith

He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God. — Cormac McCarthy

The smocked chick fingered my hair and said in her stupid voice, 'You're receding.' 'We all are,' I said. We all are. We are all receding - waving or beckoning or just kissing our fingertips, we are all fading, shrinking, paling. Life is all losing, we are all losing, losing mother, father, youth, hair, looks, teeth, friends, lovers, shape, reason, life. We are losing, losing, losing. Take life away. It's too hard, too difficult. We aren't any good at it. Try us out on something else. But shelve life. Take life off the stands. It's too fucking difficult and we aren't any good at it. — Martin Amis

Name a country, and I have probably been there. — Peter Uihlein

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back. — James Salter

I ask merely for information. — Oscar Wilde

Dickens must have first heard his famous The law is an ass quote from a woman. And she was damned right, for all the good it did her. — Moriah Densley

Politics are receiving a lot of attention because we have nothing else to interest us. No nation in the history of the world was ever sitting as pretty. If we want anything, all we have to do is go and buy it on credit. So that leaves us without any economic problem whatever, except perhaps some day to have to pay for them. But we are certainly not thinking about that this early. — Will Rogers