Quotes & Sayings About Sediment

My wife calls me the Imelda Marcos of books. As soon as a book enters our home it is guaranteed a permanent place in our lives. Because I have never been able to part with even one, they have gradually accumulated like sediment. — Michael Moritz

We grow up hearing so often that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points that we end up thinking it is also the best way to get there. A river knows better-:it has to do with how it dissipates the energy of its flow most efficiently; and how, in its bends, the sediment deposited soon turns into marshes and swampy islands, harboring all manner of interesting life, imparting charm and character to the whole waterway. I would defy you to find a river on this planet that prefers to run straight, unless it has been taught so by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. — Thomas W. Horton

Life occurs in segments, little bursts of time setting us on a course. Our little boat floats out into vast waters, sailing along until a storm comes to knock us off course - or worse. How many people are floating around, lost? I'm not even sure I am floating anymore. It's more like I'm trying to break my boat free from years of rot after it's been filled with sediment and settled on the ocean floor. — H.M. Ward

79. A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not itself love, betrays its sediment: its dregs come up. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What, in nature," Kit asked, "is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?"
"The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. "A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land
North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler
the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name
the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location."
"You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?" I asked.
"It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?"
"The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white
redbud and dogwood."
"And you?" Giles asked Kit.
"Stars," he said. That was all. — Sena Jeter Naslund

Historians like a quiet life, and usually they get it. For the most part, history moves at a deliberate pace, working its changes subtly and incrementally. Nations and their institutions harden into shape or crumble away like sediment carried by the flow of a sluggish river. English history in particular seems the work of a temperate community, seldom shaken by convulsions. But there are moments when history is unsubtle; when change arrives in a violent rush, decisive, bloody, traumatic; as a truck-load of trouble, wiping out everything that gives a culture its bearings - custom, language, law, loyalty. 1066 was one of those moments. — Simon Schama

Consider carbon, for example. The lifetime of carbon in the combined atmosphere-ocean-biosphere, the time it takes on average before the typical carbon atom is transferred to the sediment, is less than 200,000 years. — Michael B McElroy

In every idea emanating from genius, or even in every serious human idea
born in the human brain
there always remains something
some sediment
which cannot be expressed to others, though one wrote volumes and lectured upon it for five-and-thirty years. There is always a something, a remnant, which will never come out from your brain, but will remain there with you, and you alone, for ever and ever, and you will die, perhaps, without having imparted what may be the very essence of your idea to a single living soul. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Then, just as two trees are the same age if they have the same number of tree rings, and just as two samples of glacial sediment are the same age if they have the same percentage of radioactive carbon, two locations in space are passing through the same moment in time when they have the same value of the inflaton field. That's how we set and synchronize clocks in our bubble universe. — Brian Greene

In our marriage - in every marriage? - no annoyed glance holds only the displeasure of the moment. Each one reflects all the irritated glances he's ever shot at me for all of my transgressions: for lacking discipline, for being brittle and sharp, for overreacting, for swearing all the time, even in front of Hannah, for letting my worst self porcupine out before I retract my quills. Every exasperated look Chris gives me - and there have been plenty - carries the sediment of all the displeasure that has accumulated over the past fifteen years. — Lauren Fox

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate "when the trees fall and the walls collapse ". At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow. — Salvatore Quasimodo

We can see cities during the day and at night, and we can watch rivers dump sediment into the ocean, and see hurricanes form. — Sally Ride

The finest wits have their sediment. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Conscience is the accumulated sediment of ancestral faint- heartedness — H.L. Mencken

Turkish." Vocabulary was deleted, new words added. Place-names all over the country were Turkified (for example, "Smyrna" became "Izmir"), which only added confusion and another obfuscating layer to the buildup of historical sediment. — Eric Bogosian

During zazen, brain and consciousness become pure. It's exactly like muddy water left to stand in a glass. Little by little, the sediment sinks to the bottom and the water becomes pure. — Taisen Deshimaru

There are other things I newly wake with. A sadness that is different altogether from the cloudy sediment dread bears up. It is dark and solo. I can't see the bottom of it. And another thing I don't recognise, a kind of hunger to grab another person and press them as deep into knowing as I've gone. — George R R Martin

The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence. Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and color in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams, and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.
The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.
No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.
But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom ... — Anais Nin

The sun was up, the room already too warm. Light filtered in through the net curtains, hanging suspended in the air, sediment in a pond. My head felt like a sack of pulp. Still in my nightgown, damp from some fright I'd pushed aside like foliage, I pulled myself up and out of my tangled bed, then forced myself through the usual dawn rituals - the ceremonies we perform to make ourselves look sane and acceptable to other people. The hair must be smoothed down after whatever apparitions have made it stand on end during the night, the expression of staring disbelief washed from the eyes. The teeth brushed, such as they are. God knows what bones I'd been gnawing in my sleep. — Margaret Atwood

He wanted me to come home
to come home, as he said, and settle down, and whenever he said that I thought of the sediment at the bottom of a stagnant pond. — James Baldwin

Furthermore, both Pennsylvania and New Jersey Departments of Environmental Protection have evaluated the sediment to be dredged and also found it to be not toxic. — Robert Brady

Tens of millions of acres have been added to the federal wilderness system, environmental impact assessments are now required for all major developments, some lakes that were declared dead are living again. . . . Lead particulates have been impressively reduced in the atmosphere; DDT is no longer found in American body fat, which also contains considerably fewer polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than it once did. Mercury has virtually disappeared from Great Lakes sediment; and Strontium 90 is no longer found in either cows' milk or mothers' milk." And Dowie stressed: "What all these facts have in common is that they are the result of outright bans against the use or production of the substances in question."III, 27 — Naomi Klein

He had in those days imagined himself capable of extraordinary heroisms and endurances which would make the girl he loved forget the awkward hands and the spotty chin of adolescence. Everything had seemed possible. One could laugh at daydreams, but so long as you had the capacity to daydream there was a chance that you might develop some of the qualities of which you dreamed. It was like the religious discipline: words however emptily repeated can in time form a habit, a kind of unnoticed sediment at the bottom of the mind, until one day to your own surprise you find yourself acting on the belief you thought you didn't believe in. — Graham Greene

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later. — Peter Porter

She realized in an instant that being around him awakened her, stirring the sediment that had long ago settled at the bottom of her well. He made her feel a part of him, of something larger, and somehow more alive. — Luna Saint Claire

Coral reefs are under assault. They are rapidly being degraded by human activities. They are over-fished, bombed and poisoned. They are smothered by sediment, and choked by algae growing on nutrient-rich sewage and fertilizer run-off. They are damaged by irresponsible tourism and are being severely stressed by the warming of the world's oceans. Each of these pressures is bad enough in itself, but together, the cocktail is proving lethal. — Klaus Topfer

Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents ' freedom. — Zygmunt Bauman

In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time -- and one of the only times -- he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief and guilt. — Jessica Shattuck

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things. — Gary Snyder

The success of the suffrage movement would injure women spiritually and intellectually, for they would be assuming a burden though they knew themselves unable to bear it. It is the sediment, not the wave, of a sex. It is the antithesis of that highest and sweetest mystery - conviction by submission, and conquest by sacrifice. — John Boyle O'Reilly

The true energy of Love confidently and unwaveringly burns away all sediment that clings to story while dropping us hard into the naked and raw hum of Right Now. — Elisa Romeo

I have two moods. One is Roy, rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood. And Pam, sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs ... Sometimes the tide is in, sometimes it's out. — Carrie Fisher

...waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

His being there was stirring up a lot of memories she'd have been happier to leave as sentimental sediment. Not that they weren't good memories. That was the trouble. — Diana Killian

Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man - the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories - will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper. — Elizabeth Kolbert

For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment. — Richard Leakey

He held his hand up to his face and licked the wound. Blood. Old-tasting and rich like the sediment of a river. He looked at Jimmy. The blood on their faces meant they were part of the same stream now, bobbing in the current, borne forward effortlessly under the slowly twirling dome of the sky. — Richard Wagamese

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles. — Holly Black

Guesstimate = better than a guess but not as guaranteed as an estimate ...
i.e. It's simply a calculated forecast based on probability, historical trends, observations, analytical research, politics, studies of human nature and good ol' common sense (the latter 2 of which usually cause a toxic sediment when mixed, LOL) ... — A.A. Bell

When I think about the past and how blind I was in that life, I compare it to being a god and losing everything when being cast out. I had the unlimited power to destroy myself and everything around me. It's like having been in a cave for years and I'm finally out of the cave. The sun burns my eyes and skin. I don't recognize my surroundings. No one looks authentic, and now I'm on the hunt for people that have the pieces to my puzzle that will help me on my quest. I have no cave to hide in, and I'm just left with the sediment of a previous life and my own mortality. — Phil Volatile

the sky's sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words 'I am' dissolved into blue peace. He said it. 'The ocean.' You — David Mitchell

Death is the beginning of life as life is the beginning of death, and all floods start a movement that cycle from scouring to sediment building. The same sediments that build also bury. — Paul H. Yarbrough

In A Glass of Cider
It seemed I was a mite of sediment
That waited for the bottom to ferment
So I could catch a bubble in ascent.
I rode up on one till the bubble burst,
And when that left me to sink back reversed
I was no worse off than I was at first.
I'd catch another bubble if I waited.
The thing was to get now and then elated. — Robert Frost

It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea. — Don DeLillo

In some odd way that you don't understand and can't begin to articulate you feel and acquaintance with it--a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at a species level--perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level--and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance. — Bill Bryson

Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes. — Anais Nin

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. — George Santayana

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble 'came' from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American. — James Caskey

The word that most perfectly describes the city of Cuzco is evocative. Intangible dust of another era settles on its streets, rising like the disturbed sediment of a muddy lake when you touch its bottom. — Che Guevara

What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full of floating froth and refuse? No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops and dead flies. And at its centre, pondering forever the Problem of Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul. — Logan Pearsall Smith

Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun. — Cormac McCarthy

At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. — Salvatore Quasimodo

Such uncanny serenity actually frightened him, making him think that perhaps this was a surface impression left behind after any amount of unspeakable viciousness had been digested, or else settled down inside her as a kind of sediment. — Han Kang

And I ultimately not only addressed it, I named my two moods Roy and Pam. Roy is Rollicking Roy, the wild ride of a mood, and Pam is Sediment Pam, who stands on the shore and sobs. (Pam stands for "piss and moan.") One mood is the meal, and the next mood is the check. — Carrie Fisher

slash that cuts through the countryside, winding beside a twin artery separated by tangles of scrub. Here and there the sediment that covers the road breaks and Zoey sees ghostly lines of yellow and white. Her face stings from the constant wind and she's slightly chilled, but she can't help — Joe Hart

I'm not doing anything that is going to destroy my. Stillm there is something quiet left behind. Like sediment in a bottle of wine. — Haruki Murakami

I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to metropolitan America, if you will. Sports, in particularly baseball then 'cause of its rich sediment of numbers, was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on - that is, you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did. — George Will

Her father had once told her that water has a memory; that every rock, every stone, every grain of muddy sediment leaves something of a fingerprint in the water that flows over it. Grace liked this idea, imagining the water of the great lakes and oceans of the world to echo with the memories of the places, people, and events it had passed on its journey. — Hazel Gaynor

And there, in the background, the brite spring sky's sediment had sunk to a dark band of blue. Ah, it mesmerized me ... like the snow had done. All the woe of the words, "I am" seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.
Hae-Joo announced, "The Ocean. — David Mitchell

Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all. — Doris Lessing

Anywhere people lived memory collected like sediment on the bed of a river, dropping from the flow of time to become fixed in the places time ran over — Adam Haslett

Uncertain about an aspect of training? Read, consult others and experiment. In the end, though, listen to the body and the Voice Inside. Instead of dousing it with music, podcasts or talk radio, let the Voice Inside play out and wind past rumination to rich sediment that informs what drives and scares you. — Gina Greenlee

Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. The cup is small, it is smeared with grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste. The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch deep. This goes down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way, and produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and coughing for an hour. — Mark Twain