The Long Valley Quotes & Sayings

I came, one evening before sunset, down into a valley, where I was to rest. In the course of my descent to it, by the winding track along the mountain-side, from which I saw it shining far below, I think some long-unwonted sense of beauty and tranquillity, some softening influence awakened by its peace, moved faintly in my breast. I remember pausing once, with a kind of sorrow that was not all oppressive, not quite despairing. I remember almost hoping that some better change was possible within me. I came into the valley, as the evening sun was — Charles Dickens

He kept coming back to the silence. It was so big. And surprising. Even when a donkey brayed somewhere in the same valley - loud, long and loaded with loneliness - it did not change the silence, it enhanced it. Like jewels around a beautiful neck. Ed smiled. You can be at the poshest hotel in the country, on the planet even, but a farmer can still put a lonely donkey in the field next door.
In the same way he couldn't control what arose in his mind - or appears in the world around him - but he could give it space. — Matt Padwick

Because of this genuine love for horses, the beautiful wild-horse panorama beneath Pan swelled his heart. He gazed and gazed. From near to far the bands dotted the green-gray valley. Far away this valley floor shaded into blue. Near at hand the colors were easily distinguishable. Blacks and bays, whites and chestnuts, pintos that resembled zebras dotted this wild pasture land. The closest band to where Pan and Blinky stood could not have been more than a mile distant, in a straight line. A shiny black stallion was the leader of this herd. He was acting strangely, too, trotting forward and halting, tossing his head and long black mane. — Zane Grey

A valley that had some of the characteristics of a canyon yawned beneath, so deep and wide that it appeared like a blue lake, so long that he could only see the north end, which notched under a rugged mountain slope, green and black and golden and white according to the successive steps toward the heights. The height upon which he stood was the last of the ridges, for the elevation that lay directly across was a noble range of foothills, timbered, canyoned, apparently insurmountable for horses. Gray cliffs stood out of the green, crags of yellow rock mounted like castles. — Zane Grey

To a Poet"

Let verse of yours be flexible, but strong,
Strong as a poplar under valley's cover,
Strong as the earth under a plough, long,
Strong as a girl, who never knew a lover.

Reliably preserve severity at length,
Your verse need not be fluttering or booming,
Although the Muse has very easy steps,
She's not a dancer, but a goddess, ruling.

Frolicsome din of interrupted rhymes --
Temptation for decline, so free and so easy --
Just leave for use by jokers in a dance
On city streets for people who aren't busy.

And going out on the sacred paths,
Bring to melodiousness your chosen damnation.
You know, she's a mistress of the mass,
She craves embraces, as a dearth -- donations. — Nikolay Gumilev

Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there. — Gary Snyder

What you knew, felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had always perhaps been there, though to a lesser extent. — Meg Wolitzer

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth's ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. — Brad Leithauser

Once upon a valley
There came down
From some goldenblue mountains
A handsome young prince
Who was riding a dawncolored horse
Names Lordsburg.

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

In the valley
There was a beautiful maiden
Whom the prince drifted into love with
Like a New Mexico made from apple thunder and long
glass beds.

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

The prince enchanted
The maiden
And they rode off
On the dawncolored horse
Named Lordsburg
Toward the goldenblue mountains.

I love you
You're my breathing castle
Gentle so gentle
We'll live forever

They would have lived
happily ever after
if the horse hadn't had
a flat tire
In front of a dragon's
House. — Richard Brautigan

Fire
Fire In The Heavens

Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,
and fire made solid in the flinty stone,
thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fills
the breathless hour that lives in fire alone.

This valley, long ago the patient bed
of floods that carv'd its antient amplitude,
in stillness of the Egyptian crypt outspread,
endures to drown in noon-day's tyrant mood.

Behind the veil of burning silence bound,
vast life's innumerous busy littleness
is hush'd in vague-conjectured blur of sound
that dulls the brain with slumbrous weight, unless

some dazzling puncture let the stridence throng
in the cicada's torture-point of song. — Christopher John Brennan

To move the earth like Archimedes, one needs not a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it. There is an easier way: Give a genius a beautiful remote house in a green valley where he can think calmly, and he shall move the earth with ideas! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The future wafts in and out of my world like a ghost - like a lumbering beast, begging to be tamed. For so long it sat locked in mystery, surrounding me, fickle as the wind. I see it now for the noose it is, the game that never satisfies, the warrior that always kills.
The past proved to be set in stone, the immovable rock of my existence that cast its shadow into the valley of death. But it is the future's bright light that draws me in, the blinding rays that pull me forward with bionic, magnetic, force. They row me towards my destiny with indescribable power, to a fate questionably determined - washed in the patina of hope. — Addison Moore

Silicon Valley's long-running track record of creating globally disruptive startups is the envy of the world. — Jay Samit

Aragorn looked at the pale stars, and at the moon, now sloping behind the western hills that enclosed the valley. 'This is a night as long as years', he said. 'How long will the day tarry?'
'Dawn is not far off', said Gamling, who had now climbed up beside him. 'But dawn will not help us, I fear'
'Yet dawn is ever the hope of men', said Aragorn. — J.R.R. Tolkien

He was one of the most sincere tree-lovers I ever knew. About twenty years before his death he made choice of a plot in the Yosemite cemetery on the north side of the Valley, not far from the Yosemite Fall, and selecting a dozen or so of seedling sequoias in the Mariposa grove he brought them to the Valley and planted them around the spot he had chosen for his last rest. The ground there is gravelly and dry; by careful watering he finally nursed most of the seedlings into good, thrifty trees, and doubtless they will long shade the grave of their blessed lover and friend. — John Muir

Dusk settled down into this neck of the great valley. Coyotes barked out in the open. From the heights pealed down the mournful blood-curdling, yet beautiful, bay of a wolf. The rosy afterglow of sunset lingered a long time. The place was shut in, closed about by brushy steeps, redolent of sage. A tiny stream of swift water sang faintly down over rocks. And before darkness had time to enfold hollow and slope and horizon, the moon slid up to defeat the encroaching night and blanch the hills with silvery light. — Zane Grey

Mair sat down on the bed. The ancient pink electric blanket was still stretched from corner to corner, and she thought of the weeks of her father's last illness when she had come home to the valley to nurse him, as best she could, and to keep him company. They had enjoyed long, rambling conversations about the past and the people her father had once known. — Rosie Thomas

Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a 'crime' to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn't have it all life long, he said. Then the rolling fields of the valley leading up to the hills seemed to sit in a rising mist of olive green: sunflowers, grapevines, swatches of lavender, and those squat and humble olive trees stooping like gnarled, aged scarecrows gawking through our window as we lay naked on my bed, the smell of his sweat, which was the smell of my sweat, and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was, and all around us Mafalda's chamomile-scented laundry detergent, which was the torrid afternoon world of our house. — Andre Aciman

Jews have been an ever-dying people that never died. They have experienced a continuous resurrection, like the dry bones that Ezekiel saw in the valley. This has become the sine qua non of every Jew. It is the mystery of the hidden miracle of survival in the face of overwhelming destruction. Our refusal to surrender has turned our story into one long, unending Purim tale. — Nathan Lopes Cardozo

The two men were slowly pacing the terrace in front of Dr. Raymond's house. The sun still hung above the western mountain-line, but it shone with a dull red glow that cast no shadows, and all the air was quiet; a sweet breath came from the great wood on the hillside above, and with it, at intervals, the soft murmuring call of the wild doves. Below, in the long lovely valley, the river wound in and out between the lonely hills, and, as the sun hovered and vanished into the west, a faint mist, pure white, began to rise from the hills. Dr. Raymond turned sharply to his friend. Safe? Of course it is. In itself the operation is a perfectly simple one; any surgeon could do it. — Arthur Machen

There weren't really any new immigrants in Miller's Valley at all. You could tell by their last names that people who lived in the area were originally from Germany or Poland or some of the Slavic countries, but they'd been Americans long enough to have flat vowels and made-up minds. When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller's Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn't risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all. — Anna Quindlen

Free Falling
She's a good girl, loves her mama
Loves Jesus and America too
She's a good girl, crazy 'bout Elvis
Loves horses and her boyfriend too
It's a long day livin' in Reseda
There's a freeway runnin' through the yard
I'm a bad boy, 'cause I don't even miss her
I'm a bad boy for breakin' her heart
And I'm free, I'm free fallin'
All the vampires walkin' through the valley
Move west down Ventura Blvd
All the bad boys are standing in the shadows
All the good girls are home with broken hearts
And I'm free, I'm free fallin'
I wanna glide down over Mulholland
I wanna write her name in the sky
I wanna free fall out into nothin'
Gonna leave this world for a while
And I'm free, I'm free fallin — Tom Petty

This seems to have taken me a long way from detective stories, but explains, perhaps, why I have got more interest in my victims than my criminals. The more passionately alive the victim, the more glorious indignation I have on his behalf, and am full of a delighted triumph when I have delivered a near-victim out of the valley of the shadow of death. Returning — Agatha Christie

Thou art a peanut. — John Steinbeck

Your greatest growth in faith will be in moments where all hope seems gone. That's where faith is born and faith births hope. Rest assured, God knows full well what the valley experience will entail, and how long the journey will take to complete His work. — Cherie Hill

Mr. Benjamin shrugged his shoulders. "We have to live today," he said. "If you had a son, Harkavy, you'd want him to have a college education. Who's going to wait for the Messiah? They tell a story about a little town in the old country. It was out of the way, in a valley, so the Jews were afraid the Messiah would come and miss them, and they built a high tower and hired one of the town beggars to sit in it all day long. A friend of his meets this beggar and says, 'How do you like your job, Baruch?' So he says, 'It doesn't pay much, but I think it's steady work. — Saul Bellow

History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah. And in a different time and in a very different age, — Malcolm Gladwell

The Abandoned Valley
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope? — Jack Gilbert

Don't let a lack of big company names on your resume get you down, but also, don't let it feed a Silicon Valley ego. Oftentimes, the best candidates come from startups or smaller companies. It shows they are open to risk and can keep up with the long hours and occasional harsh demands. — Brit Morin

Lily Thomas lay in bed when the alarm went off on a snowy January morning in Squaw Valley. She opened her eyes for just an instant and saw the thick snow swirling beyond the windows of the house her father had rented, and for a fraction of an instant, she wanted to roll over and go back to sleep. She could hear the dynamite blasts in the distance to prevent avalanches, and just from a glance, she knew what kind of day it was. You could hardly see past the windows in the heavy blizzard, and she knew that if the mountain was open, it wouldn't be for long. But she loved the challenge of skiing in heavy snow. It would be a good workout, and she didn't want to miss a single day with one of her favorite instructors, Jason Yee. — Danielle Steel

When I turned to climb the third wave, I saw at my feet a small leaf, perhaps an inch long, pointed, withered to bright chestnut but still smooth. It was supported above the soil in the grey points of short grasses which did not bend beneath its weightlessness. It was curved in all three planes. Fibrous veins displayed its structure. It was quite still. And as I watched its stillness spread; first to me. I wanted not to move by a hair's breadth. Lest the bond between it and me should break. The stillness spread to the grass around us. It encompassed the hill. The beech wood became attendant on it. The whole valley slowly filled with it. The leaf, and I its participant, had drawn the mileswide landscape into an attentive, breathless synthesis ... there was no movement, no sound and no distinction or identifying of parts in all that had been there united. For there was no 'I' that gazed ... through that tiny gateway I became one with what was boundless. — Geoffrey Vickers

The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves.
It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain did not go together. — John Steinbeck

The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments. — Jack Kerouac

The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season.
A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley.
It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns.
A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees.
Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leved birches.
In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon.
I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy
And the visible world is all that remains. — Czeslaw Milosz

I was ten when the Taliban came to our valley. Moniba and I had been reading the Twilight books and longed to be vampires. It seemed to us that the Taliban arrived in the night just like vampires ... These were strange-looking men with long straggly hair and beards and camouflage vests over their shalwar kamiz, which they wore with the trousers well above the ankle. They had jogging shoes or cheap plastic sandals on their feet, and sometimes stockings over their heads with holes for their eyes, and they blew their noses dirtily into the ends of their turbans ... — Malala Yousafzai

Eli: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters.He restores my soul he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me
Solara: That's beautiful, did you write that?
Eli: Yes, I did.
[chuckles]
Eli: No, no. No. No, that was around a long time before you and I got here, that's for sure. — Book Of Eli Movie

When they reached the top of the hill they turned and looked down at the valley. Moominhouse was just a blue dot, and the river a narrow ribbon of green: the swing they couldn't see at all. "We've never been such a long way from home before," said Moomintroll, and a little goose-fleshy thrill of excitement came over them at the thought. — Tove Jansson

In Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs and their backers got drunk on the overflowing optimism and abundant venture capital and threw a two-year-long party. Capital was cheap, opportunities seemed limitless, and pineapple-infused-vodka martinis were everywhere. — Brad Stone

You're no fun at all, you boys, you do nothing but worry. You need to think on the sunny side o' this. The worst that can happen is that Bethod don't show!'
'The worst?' Dogman stared at him. 'You sure? What about if Bethod does come, and his Carls kick your wall over like a pile o' turds and kill every last one of us?'
Crummock's brow furrowed. He frowned down at the ground. He squinted up at the clouds. 'True,' he said, breaking out in a smile. 'That is worse. You got a fast mind, lad.'
Dogman gave a long sigh, and stared down into the valley. — Joe Abercrombie

If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life. — Nathaniel Popper

I dreamed a place where I have come to dwell Cold Mountain says it all Monkeys scream, the valley fog is cold My door blends with the color of the peaks I gather leaves and thatch a hut among the pines Dig a pond and lead a trickle from the brook Long ago I left the world behind Eating ferns I pass the years in peace — Hanshan

Beneath Albright's office, the colliery sprawled across the hillside, red brick buildings scattered as though hurled from a great height, a hotchpotch of mismatched structures spattered on the valley floor. At the bottom stood the winding house, wheels motionless, above it, the engineering sheds and workshops, canteen and bath house. All lay empty. No buzz and hum of machinery. No voices raised in laughter or dispute. Gwyn found it unsettling: his lads had been out a month and a half and already the power had drained from the place. In the stillness, he caught the echo of footsteps. The crunch of boots on gravel. Generations of long-gone Pritchards clocking in and out. He was bound to Blackthorn by the coal that clogged his veins and by a bond of duty. The strike left him as diminished as his pit, day dragging after idle day. — Kit Habianic

According to Montagne legend, the mountain has forever been the abode of giants. Long ago a traveling pair of sorcerers, husband and wife, scaled the cliff into the valley, and the woman cured the giants' chilblains with ointments and the gift of fire. In gratitude, the giants built Chateau de Montagne out of the living rock of Ancienne, and from that castle the couple founded the kingdom of Montagne, using their magic to shield the country and its people from harm. — Catherine Gilbert Murdock

On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than fifty yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men. — Armando Valladares

Other sounds woke the hamlet: the blast of a ship's foghorn blown at the pit top to mark the start of the shift; the echo of others - 'buzzers', as they were called - from the pits in the valley below. For the deep sleepers, there was the 'knocker-up'; a human alarm clock, he used a long pole to rattle the window panes of the households that paid him a few pennies each week. — Catherine Bailey

Society is a long series of uprising ridges, which from the first to the last offer no valley of repose. Whenever you take your stand, you are looked down upon by those above you, and reviled and pelted by those below you. Every creature you see is a farthing Sisyphus, pushing his little stone up some Liliputian mole-hill. This is our world. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

In the Valley of healing dreams; beyond human imagination - there was a long quiet river. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

The Most Common Reason You Leave A Peak Too Soon Is Arrogance, Masquerading As Confidence. The Most Common Reason You Stay In A Valley Too Long Is Fear, Masquerading As Comfort. — Spencer Johnson

COME HOME, TENAR! COME HOME!"
In the deep valley, in the twilight, the apple trees were on the eve of blossoming; here and there among the shadowed boughs one flower had opened early, rose and white, like a faint star. Down the orchard aisles, in the thick, new, wet grass, the little girl ran for the joy of running; hearing the call she did not come at once, but made a long circle before she turned her face toward home. The mother waiting in the doorway of the hut, with the firelight behind her, watched the tiny figure running and bobbing like a bit of thistledown blown over the darkening grass beneath the trees. — Ursula K. Le Guin

A lofty breeze rushed by, threatening to brush him over the ridge. He looked with hardened eyes off into the East as the first sign of the sun broke the horizon with a distinct flash. He didn't flinch as the first rays of light shot at his eyes. He watched as the shadow of the valley gradually succumbed to the sweeping radiance of the long-awaited daylight. The dark of the night had had its turn. The morning sun had returned to once again claim its former glory. — Evan Grinde

This question came from Elon Musk near the very end of a long dinner we shared at a high-end seafood restaurant in Silicon Valley. I'd gotten to the restaurant first — Ashlee Vance

The men of the Ulysses had no need to stand in shame ... many had found, or were finding, that the point of no return was not necessarily the edge of the precipice: it could be the bottom of the valley, the beginning of the long climb up the far slope, and when a man had once begun that climb he never looked back to that other side. — Alistair MacLean

There's a legend that a very long time ago a meteorite fell from the sky and landed up in the mountains that surround this valley. — Jessica Sorensen

The natives of Silicon Valley learned long ago that when you share your knowledge with someone else, one plus one usually equals three. You both learn each other's ideas, and you come up with new ones. — Vivek Wadhwa

It was a long winter of deep snow, solitude, and madness. The satellite kept feeding me digital news of summer in other places. I had to come down from the White Mountain, down into the valley where flowers bloomed, where trees grew new leaves, and hot pants were on! — Robert Earl Wildwood

Fermi thought plutonium production needed an area a mile wide and two miles long for safety. Compton proposed building piles of increasing power to work up to full-scale production and was considering alternative sites in the Lake Michigan Dunes area and in the Tennessee Valley. — Richard Rhodes

He woke up frozen stiff. A cold dawn was lighting up the peaks on the other side of the valley, making them shine like giant lanterns. Above, through the broken bones of the roof, he could see the sky, clear now, a deep violet blue, waiting for the sun to breach the mountaintops. The snow clouds had gone, off to bother someone else. Where he lay was still dark, wrapped in leftover shadows. The wall, so deliciously warm when he'd fallen asleep, was like ice, sucking the heat out of him, but what had woken him were screams. Long piercing screams, over and over. — Stephen Deas

He'd been toting it, and checking it, and packing and unpacking, all the way since fate was on the river - that's how long - the Big River - Fate Marable and his riverboat caliope (Cleo seemed to recall), who hadastonished the landings between New Orleans and St. Louis with the wild, harsh, skirling Gypsy music, and left there, echoing in the young and restless even as it dies off round the bed; to linger with them thereafter, in the pelting roar of November midnights and the clickety-clack of lonesome valley freights, until they up one night and go after it in a battered bus, following the telephone wires that make a zigzag music staff against the evening sky - some variation of that basic beginning could be told for everyone who jazz has touched and altered. — John Clellon Holmes

Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That, which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant diminished view, although with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

THE SALINAS VALLEY is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay. — John Steinbeck

The untarred road wound away up the valley, innocent as yet of motor-cars, wound empty away to other villages, which lay empty too, the hot day long, waiting for the sight of a stranger. We — Laurie Lee