Quotes & Sayings About The Sky Opening Up

The meanest flowret of the vale, / The simplest note that swells the gale, / The common sun, the air, and skies, / To him are opening paradise. — Thomas Gray

Then instead of hurrying he was standing still, he was very tired and sweating under the heavy coat, and looking up he saw a white shining fan, spreading over the sky, like light from a door slowly opening, and he knew the moon was coming out of the clouds. Then he looked over the sea and there were islands it seemed, and then a great migration of birds thickened the air and he was in a rushing of wings, the wings beat so dark and fast round him he felt dizzy like falling and the moon disappeared. And then it was clear again, brilliant moonlight, and there, ahead, bright as day, were all the small islands, Cape Promise, and the bay of Mairangi, wide, still, unbelievably peaceful under the full moon. And then he did know where he was going. — Anna Kavan

The celebrated opening image of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is another case in point:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table ...
How, the reader wonders, can the evening look like an anaesthetised body? Yet the point surely lies as much in the force of this bizarre image as in its meaning. We are in a modern world in which settled correspondences or traditional affinities between things have broken down. In the arbitrary flux of modern experience, the whole idea of representation - of on thing predictably standing for another - has been plunged into crisis; and this strikingly dislocated image, one which more or less ushers in 'modern' poetry with a rebellious flourish, is a symptom of this bleak condition. — Terry Eagleton

I looked at him through swollen eyes. The light glowed around him and he looked like he was floating. He was a glowing creature from another world, opening his gossamer wings and beckoning me. I wanted to tumble into his embrace. We'd be able to fly and I wouldn't mind the sunshine or the sky if he could just hold me forever. — Heather Anastasiu

Good day to you, ma'am,' said Stephen, opening Mrs Wogan's door. 'I believe you may take some air at last. The sky is clear, the sun shines bright with a surprising warmth, and although our poop is now the scene of strange activity, the gangway remains, the windward, or weather gangway, ma'am. And we had best profit by the morning while it lasts. — Patrick O'Brian

It is a curious fact, and makes life very interesting, that, generally speaking, none of us have any expectation that things are going to happen till the very moment when they do happen. We wake up some morning with no idea that a great happiness is at hand, and before night it has come, and all the world is changed for us; or we wake bright and cheerful, with never a guess that clouds of sorrow are lowering in our sky, to put all the sunshine out for a while, and before noon all is dark. Nothing whispers of either the joy or the grief. No instinct bids us to delay or to hasten the opening of the letter or telegram, or the lifting of the latch of the door at which stands the messenger of good or ill. — Susan Coolidge

But what of Ham? It didn't matter if he told anyone about his drunken father or not, if he chided him or tried to dress him, if he lifted his struggling body back into bed, if he took his hand and told him where to place his feet, none of this changed the fact of what he'd seen. It's possible he opened a door innocently, followed the sound of Noah's voice cursing God and the sky, possible he didn't even look, that he turned away before seeing. And it's likely that Noah hadn't noticed the door opening, couldn't have told you who had come in, which son, wouldn't remember anyway. Apparently it's God's call. Ham saw his father drunken and naked, and for this he was cursed, and all of his offspring, and the races that led from these offspring, accursed forever. — Nick Flynn

I finally found him sitting on his balcony. He was leaning back against the wall with his eyes closed. Soft music played, and a cool ocean breeze blew back my hair as I stepped on to the balcony and inhaled the scent of the sea.
"May I join you?" I asked softly.
He didn't bother opening his eyes. "If you like."
The moon in the dark sky looked like a giant white plate dipping its edge into the ocean. We sat quietly for a while. I closed my eyes too and listened to him hum along in harmony with the music.
"You haven't played your guitar in a long time. I miss it," I said when the song was finished.
Ren turned away. "I fear there is no music left in me. — Colleen Houck

Magical morning lights, dreamy sky,
Smiling flowers letting us know summer is opening her eyes — Debasish Mridha

The amorous shepherd has lost his staff,
And his sheep are straying on the hillside,
And he didn't even play the flute he brought to play because he was thinking so much.
No one came to him or went away. He never found his staff again.
Others, cursing at him, gathered his sheep for him.
No one had loved him, in the end.

When he got up from the hillside and the false truth, he saw everything:
The great valleys full of the same green as always,
The great distant mountains, more real than any feeling,
All reality, with the sky and the air and the fields that exist, is present.
(And once again the air, that he'd missed for so long, entered coolly into his lungs)
And he felt that the air was opening again, but with pain, a liberty in his chest.

(7/10/1930) — Alberto Caeiro

The God who looked on you with joy when you were small and racing across His gift of green grass on His gift of feet beneath His gift of sky watched by His gift of a mother with His gift of love in His gift of her eyes, is the same God who will look on you as that race finally ends. He is the same, but we have changed, between our opening lines and our final page. (163) — N.D. Wilson

In the distant golden sunset sky, a magnificent rainbow is opening wings to fly. — Debasish Mridha

... it charms
mere eyesight to believe
The nearest thing not trees
Is the sky, into which
The trees reach, opening
their luminous new leaves ...
and thought finds rest
beneath a brightened tree
In which, unseen, a warbler
feeds and sings. His song's
Small shapely melody
Comes down irregularly,
as all light's givings come.
Sabbaths 1999 III — Wendell Berry

My wife and I tend to overgift to our kids at Christmas. We laugh and feel foolish when a kid is so distracted with one toy that we must force them into opening the next, or when something grand goes completely unnoticed in a corner. How consumerist, right? How crassly American. How like God. We are all that overwhelmed kid, not even noticing our heartbeats, not even noticing our breathing, not even noticing that our fingertips can feel and pick things up, that pie smells like pie and that our hangnails heal and that honey-crisp apples are real and that dogs wag their tails and that awe perpetually awaits us in the sky. The real yearning, the solomonic state of mind, is caused by too much gift, by too many things to love in too short a time. Because the more we are given, the more we feel the loss as we are all made poor and sent back to our dust. — N.D. Wilson

It's like there is a huge balance scale in the sky, weighing the relative strength of two opposing fields of Influence. One side represents those opening to a higher personal spirituality, and thus acting to lift others into that consciousness. The other side of the scale represents those who are still stuck in fear and anger, who are acting to pull people down into a simmering, untruthful fear and rage. The statement hit me hard. That meant there was a contagion from both sides, and the balance shifted daily depending on how consistently those in Alignment could hold their truth with others. — James Redfield

The Mozart sonata Dad picked out begins to play. When we hear the first note, we open the sacks and the ladybugs escape through the opening, taking flight. It's as if someone has dumped rubies from heaven. Soon they will land on the plants in search of bollworm eggs. But right now they are magic-red ribbons flying over our heads, weaving against the pink sky, dancing up there with Mozart. — Kimberly Willis Holt

In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I'd built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city -- a calm, sparkling city near the ocean, a place like Vancouver. I put myself there, and that's where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbour. I ate pancakes drizzled in syrup and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn't longing, and it wasn't insanity. It was relief. It got me through. — Amanda Lindhout

On a morning like this, fear is a blue sky emptied of birds. — Fran Wilde

He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe. — Victor Hugo

To find happiness, it is not quite difficult thing. It is just enough to distinguish the blue of the sky from the pink of peach flowers which are opening out. — Che Lan Vien

You may then wonder where they have gone, those other dim dots that were you; you in the flesh swimming in a swift river, swinging a bat on the first pitch, opening a footlocker with a screwdriver, inking and painting clowns on cellluloid, stepping out of a revolving door into the swift crowd on a sidewalk, being kissed and kissing till your brain grew smooth, stepping out of the cold woods into a warm field of crows, or lying awake in bed aware of your legs and suddenly aware of all of it, that ceiling above you was under the sky - in what country, what town? — Annie Dillard

I can't help but watch his lips as they cover the opening of the bottle that my lips were just touching.
We're practically kissing. — Colleen Hoover

God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with color ... only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business. — Bryce Courtenay

Grace surrounds us and holds us like the sky holds everything in it ... and as soon as I find a way to let go of my story, I keep seeing over and over again that grace is always here and it includes the forgetting and the remembering. The practice is the opening of the hand to catch the raindrops, which are always falling. If you don't open your hand, you get wet, but you don't get much to drink. — Krishna Das

How can anyone say there is no God?" Hugh asks as he places his hands on his hip and stares at the beautiful night sky. "Just look at the heavens so full of wonder and awe. This is not the result of some random explosion. Oh no! This," he proclaims, opening his arms wide, "was thoughtfully designed by a brilliant creator with absolute precision and order. — Tracy Del Campo

Well morning came, and it dressed the sky in a lovely yellow gown. Shopping malls are opening in that narrow hallway of downtown, filled with people who are shopping for their lovers and their friends, singing I won't ever be lonely again — Conor Oberst

This time when she picked up her paints, she didn't think, she just painted. It was like opening the door onto a storm. The canvas was her doorway and the paint all the thunder and lightning, the wild pain-filled sky caught inside her. — Michelle Frost

The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles. — Ayn Rand

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky.
But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind. — Barbara Kingsolver

The old house had a thousand doors in it.

All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured angles of wall meeting wall; fireplaces grown chill with unused years. Archways with unseen contours you can trace with a finger in the cracks as brick grinds against brick in settling walls. Some nights, and some houses are doorways entire, silhouettes against the evening's last light black on black like an opening into a darker sky. You just have to look. An eye-corner glance will do, if you don't turn and stare and explain it away. — Michael Montoure

It's a sketch of clouds moving across the sky at dusk in the form of a woman. The woman appears to be leaping or running as the sun sets in the background. Below is the sea that stirs with her movement; and the hills and mountains that fade behind her. Margot studies it, her face opening up all kinds of ways. — Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn

platform. Outside an old man in overalls was working his way along the wagons, undoing padlocks, throwing bolts, hauling the massive panel doors back along their tracks. Apart from him, no one. Could it be this simple? He didn't pause to ask himself the question a second time. Just sprang down from the opening onto the concrete siding and began walking, head lowered and limping at first, until the oxygen started flowing through his bloodstream and the muscles of his legs began to work then, as they did, quickening his pace and striding faster, lifting his head to the seamless pale blue dawn sky and tasting the breath of freedom. He found a covered overpass that seemed to connect the freight platforms with the main terminal. Took the stairs two at a time and started across the bridge towards the massive building at the other side. The station hall was a curiously romantic — Greg Wilson

A dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud. — Gary Corby

As the campfire radiated warmth in the opening of the lean-to, Red Macalister crouched before the burning logs. He added more wood to the blaze, then rocked back on his boot heels, studying the flames, and decided the fire would do for the next few hours to ward off the cold winter night. He glanced up at the black sky dotted with diamonds. A clear night. — Debra Holland

The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-"The sky is falling," cried Henny-Penny, "and a piece of it fell on my tail. — John Steinbeck

Brassa,' she whispered, 'what is the moon? Why does it grow in the sky?'
'Because the moon is the goddess Tor,' answered Brassa softly, smiling down at Larka, 'looking down on us all. As some say the fury of the sun is the hunter Fenris snarling at the Varg, so they say the moon is the wolf goddess, opening her eyes wider and wider and stroking the world with her kindness. — David Clement-Davies

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world. — Mark Nepo

Jaron stood on top of a hill, staring blankly into the distance and taking in every detail of the scene unfolding below him. To his back the sun was setting, casting its last rays over the field below and painting the sky around him in a vast array of red and gold. He shuddered slightly as a cool breeze blew gently through the tall grass of the field, nipping sharply at his cheeks which had gone numb from standing exposed to the elements for too long. It was a seemingly perfect fall day, and he couldn't help but feel that it was somewhat ironic that it was on this day life as he knew it was coming to an end. — K.R. Fajardo

To see love is to see the dawn in a moonless sky without opening your eyes. — Suenammi Richards

It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic is chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers. — Ray Bradbury

The act of imagination is the opening of the system so that it shows new connections. Every act of act of imagination is the discovery of likenesses between two things which were thought unlike. An example is Newton's thinking of the likeness between the thrown apple and moon sailing majestically in the sky. Hence, the 'discovery' of the laws of gravity. — Jacob Bronowski

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love

(all the merry little birds are
flying in the floating in the
very spirits singing in
are winging in the blossoming)

lovers go and lovers come
awandering awondering
but any two are perfectly
alone there's nobody else alive

(such a sky and such a sun
i never knew and neither did you
and everybody never breathed
quite so many kinds of yes)

not a tree can count his leaves
each herself by opening
but shining who by thousands mean
only one amazing thing

(secretly adoring shyly
tiny winging darting floating
merry in the blossoming
always joyful selves are singing)

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love — E. E. Cummings

Hey what's the matter? Are you crying?"
I shook my head, slowly opening my eyes and smiling at him again. "No, it's nothing."
But it wasn't nothing. I didn't want to ruin the moment by explaining to him, but suddenly it was like I had a zoomed-out view of this moment and I never, ever (ever) wanted it to end. I had Nutella on my face and my first real love sprawled out next to me and any minute the stars were going to sink back into the sky in preparation for a new day, and for the first time in a long time, I couldn't wait for what the day would bring.
And that was something. — Jenna Evans Welch

I looked past him, to the sea framed in the arched opening of the wall, to the line formed where the water met the sky. The world was not round, I realized. The world was a plate.
'Please,' he whispered. 'Don't.'
Unlike Rurick, Plesec did not die confused. — Rick Yancey

On the heights above the river Xzan, at the site of certain ancient ruins, Iucounu the Laughing Magician had built a manse to his private taste: an eccentric structure of steep gables, balconies, sky-walks, cupolas, together with three spiral green glass towers through which the red sunlight shone in twisted glints and peculiar colors. — Jack Vance

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves. — Stephanie Clifford

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone.
I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean licking the sand. A tracery of darkness curls into a starry sky, a solitary pipal tree making itself known by an absence of light, like a flame caught in a photographer's negative, frozen, calling me. — Mohsin Hamid

Apprehensions"

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself-
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A grey wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually:
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two grey, papery bags-
This is what i am made of, this, and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and rain of pietas.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel their heads and cry.
There is no talk of immorality among these!
Cold blanks approach us:
They move in a hurry. — Sylvia Plath

I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already. — Mary Stewart

The sea stood up before him, foaming, torn by lightning bolts, opening terrifying mouths that gobbled up the dense, hard black rains unleashed by the sky like hate. — Jean-Francois Beauchemin

The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were opening out. I feel closer to what language can't reach. With my senses, as with birds, I climb into the windy heaven ... in the ponds broken off from the sky ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreak, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.

Surely more than just the actions of people: choosing, yielding, braving, lying, understanding, being right, being deceived, being consistent, being visionary, being reckless, being cruel, being mistaken, being original, being afraid . . . — Susan Sontag