Sere Quotes & Sayings

HERE IS THE MOST CHILLING WAY I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, "waterboarding" was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict. — Christopher Hitchens

Since then your sere Majesty and your Lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, neither horned nor toothed. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.
(Reply to the Diet of Worms, April 18, 1521) — Martin Luther

Either way, the view stabbed its way into his chest, as if it were trying to finish him off before he even landed. — Sere Prince Halverson

One Sunday evening when it was very hot and breathlessly still we sere sitting here in this room in the dusk. He switched on the record player. Liszt. We sat. As I say, here. In this very room. We listened to the piece. Neither of us said a word. That's when he took my hand and we went out into the garden. In a quiet voice he said that I wasn't like any other person in the world and that some people wouldn't understand that. They wouldn't want me to be the way I was. They'd want to change me. They'd try to order me about and make me into the kind of person they wanted me to be. Since I was still a child there would be little I could do except stay alone, stay out of trouble, and make myself very small in the world. — Laird Koenig

... that same hardware and tackle shop his dad got lost in for hours while Kache waited in the truck, writing lyrics on the backs of old envelopes his mom kept in the glove compartment for blotting her lipstick. Kache had written around the red blooms of her lip prints. — Sere Prince Halverson

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forced fingers rude Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. — John Milton

This is our part in spiritual war. We proclaim Christ's truth by praying it, speaking it and (undoubtedly most importantly) by demonstrating it. We are not to accept with sere pious resignation the evil aspects of our world as "coming from a father's hand." Rather, following the example of our Lord and Savior, and going forth with the confidence that he has in principle already defeated his (and our) foes, we are to revolt against the evil aspects of our world as coming from the devil's hand. Our revolt is to be broad
as broad as the evil we seek to confront, and as broad as the work of the cross we seek to proclaim. Wherever there is destruction, hated, apathy, injustice, pain or hopelessness, whether it concerns God's creation, a structural feature of society, or the physical, psychological or spiritual aspect of an individual, we are in word and deed to proclaim to the evil powers that be, "You are defeated." As Jesus did, we proclaim this by demonstrating it. — Gregory A. Boyd

The color of the land fades gradually from dark jungle green to pale green and then a sere reddish-brown as the tail extends from the fat center of the island out to the end, and the soil becomes dryer. — Neal Stephenson

Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere crust on her limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers. — Lionel Shriver

During those times, only under piles of blankets did she feel substantial enough not to drift away; they kept her weighted down and a part of the world. But eventually her dog's persistence and her own strong will would win over, and she'd drag herself up from the thick bog and go back to her chores and her books, carving the missing days into the wall so they did not escape entirely. — Sere Prince Halverson

Death have we hated, knowing not what it meant; Life we have loved, through green leaf and through sere, Though still the less we knew of its intent. — William Morris

With all her finesse for cleaning, Snag sometimes felt that her biggest contribution to mankind was making a mess of things. — Sere Prince Halverson

He that plays the king shall be welcome- his Majesty shall
have tribute of me; the adventurous knight shall use his foil and
target; the lover shall not sigh gratis; the humorous man shall
end his part in peace; the clown shall make those laugh whose
lungs are tickle o' th' sere; and the lady shall say her mind
freely, or the blank verse shall halt fort. — William Shakespeare

Mostly, though, I prefer to believe that God has no grace to give. Because the alternative is that He gives grace capriciously or, even worse, that He plays favorites. Some desolate valleys become places of springs, and others wither until they are sere beyond hope, and if God is the one who chooses which is which then I would rather live in a universe lucky enough to have escaped His notice. — Joel Derfner

No need to get a rumor heading through town that would end up like one of the salmon on the conveyor belt down at the cannery, the head and tail of the story cut off and the middle butchered up until it became something unrecognizable. — Sere Prince Halverson

Used" is such an odd word, so much stranger than "secondhand." A prefix for condoms, and there's a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those. "Used books," as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn't the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There's no such thing as a used book. Or there's no such thing as a book if it's not being used. I — Deborah Meyler

If you are a baby, your family will sere you in your underwear many times, and there's no use being embarrassed about it — Lemony Snicket

He leaned down, far enough that the dark ends of his hair brushed feather-light against her face, caught in her lashes, She had just enough time to take in a breath, to blink, to part her lips before he took them with his own.
Time froze. Her heart ceased to beat. Her eyes fluttered shut.
The cool slip of the small metal loop pressed into her skin as he kissed her.
Urgent.
Gentle.
So slow.
Sweet, soft demolition.
He tasted of cloves and coffee. And of something else. A farawat essence, familiar and yet somehow foreign, too. Something sere and arid.
A little like some.
A little like decay
Ash. — Kelly Creagh

This was the part of the road he knew best, the part his old blue Schwinn had known so well that at one time, the bike might have found its way back home without anyone riding it. — Sere Prince Halverson

Sere grass grew in tufts out of a pale, sandy soil, no richer for the thousands of souls planted there. Red-brown moss clumped amidst blankets of lichens of pale lavender-gray. Dark, twisted shrubs prickled rising above a knobby hillock, sharp, tiny leaves turning bronze or bright red and yellow with the advancing autumn. A wrought-iron gate guarded deep shadow inside a crypt, illustrated the silence of the grave, he thought. — Antonio Dias

The desert sharpened the sweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and clean slant of light. — Jon Krakauer

I have lived long enough. My way of life is to fall into the sere, the yellow leaf, and that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of friends I must not look to have. — William Shakespeare

Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak, And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier, Our words are sobs, our cry or praise a tear: We are the smitten mortal, we the weak. We see a spirit on earth's loftiest peak Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear: See a great Tree of Life that never sere Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak; Such ending is not death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart, - to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters raising heads When Song is muck from springs of turbid source. - G EORGE M EREDITH. — Robert Browning

I came with many knots in my heart,
like the magician's rope.
You undid them all at once.
I see now the splendor of the student
and that of the teacher's art.
Love and this body sit inside your presence,
one demolished, the other drunk.
We smile. We weep, tree limbs
turning sere, then light green. — Rumi

I've lived to bury my desires
and see my dreams corrode with rust
now all that's left are fruitless fires
that burn my empty heart to dust.
Struck by the clouds of cruel fate
My crown of Summer bloom is sere
Alone and sad, I watch and wait
And wonder if the end is near.
As conquered by the last cold air
When Winter whistles in the wind
Alone upon a branch that's bare
A trembling leaf is left behind. — Alexander Pushkin

It had always been a breathtaking view, the kind that made him inhale and forget to exhale . . . — Sere Prince Halverson

Is there a rarer being,
Is there a fairer sphere
Where the strong are not unseeing,
And the harvests are not sere;
Where, ere the seasons dwindle
They yield their due return;
Where the lamps of knowledge kindle
While the flames of youth still burn? — Edmund Clarence Stedman

I hide away in stillness, and the world spins on. I have wasted much. — Sere Prince Halverson

Smoke rose straight up from the chimney, as if the house raised its hand. As if the house knew the answer. — Sere Prince Halverson

Kache did not know how to rewind his life, how to undo the one thing that had undone him. His world was indeed flat, and he'd fallen off the edge and landed stretched out on a sofa, on pause, while the television pictures moved and the voices instructed him on everything he needed to know about everything--except how to bring his mom and his dad and Denny back from the dead. — Sere Prince Halverson

...but he saw how in the end, maybe it wasn't the actual person who helped you across whatever you needed to cross over. Maybe it was simply your love for that person. — Sere Prince Halverson

Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere -
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year -
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber -
(Though once we had journeyed down here) -
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. — Edgar Allan Poe

Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions, that around us arerushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all break the surface into this life already howling the cries of our ancestors, bearing their DNA, their eye colors and their scars, their glory and their shame. It is theirs; it is ours. It is the underside of joy. — Sere Prince Halverson

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make Man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of Light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson) — Aidan Chambers

Now you are burnt-out husks, your spirits haggard, sere, always breeding over your wanderings long and hard, your hearts never lifting with any joy - you've suffered far too much. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Used books, as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn't the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There's no such thing as a used book. Or there's no such thing as a book if it's not being used. — Deborah Meyler

The whole glittering nebula of shapes was framed by midnight colors - black, bruised blue, indigo, all textured into intricacy by clouds and the reachless vaults between them. Here, darkness was not simple; it hinted at structures and meanings, hidden activity and watchful eyes. Beacons flickered, miles away, then disappeared behind fog banks. Half-glimpsed ropes twisted and contorted their way up, down, and to every side, synapses reaching to contact the outlier towns and factories of Sere's hinterland. One or two of those ropes, if you followed them far enough, would emerge into sunlight at other nations' borders. — Karl Schroeder

The TV shouted an old black-and-white film he didn't recognize, wheelchairs facing it like church pews. — Sere Prince Halverson

He is deformed, crooked, old and sere, Ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere; Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind; Stigmatical in making, worse in mind. — William Shakespeare

With his coming are the dread fires born again. The hills burn, and the land turns sere. The tides of men run out, and the hours dwindle. The wall is pierced, and the veil of parting raised. Storms rumble beyond the horizon, and the fires of heaven purge the earth. There is no salvation without destruction, no hope this side of death.
-fragment from The Prophecies of the Drqagon believed translated by N'Delia Basolaine First Maid and Swordfast to Raidhen of Hol Cuchone (circa 400 AB) — Robert Jordan

Age overtakes us all; Our temples first; then on o'er cheek and chin, Slowly and surely, creep the frosts of Time. Up and do somewhat, ere thy limbs are sere. — Theocritus

The Autumn is old; The sere leaves are flying; He hath gather'd up gold, And now he is dying;- Old age, begin sighing! — Thomas Hood

I know now that the most genuine happiness is kept afloat by an underlying sorrow. — Sere Prince Halverson