The Towering Sky Quotes & Sayings

That's what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization. — Jasper Johns

Reclaimed by the small-time day-to-day, pretending life is Back To Normal, wrapping herself shivering against contingency's winter in some threadbare blanket of first-quarter expenses, school committees, cable-bill irregularities, a workday jittering with low-life fantasies for which "fraud" is often too elegant a term, upstairs neighbors to whom bathtub caulking is an alien concept, symptoms upper-respiratory and lower-intestinal, all in the quaint belief that change will always be gradual enough to manage, with insurance, with safety equipment, with healthy diets and regular exercise, and that evil never comes roaring out of the sky to explode into anybody's towering delusions about being exempt. . . — Thomas Pynchon

It wounded him to think that he would never be but a shy guest at the feast of the world's culture. — James Joyce

The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No colour at all, save for the neighbouring trees and grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colourless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick. — Erin Morgenstern

Ask Jeeves! Who ever used that thing? College freshmen to find out who Goethe was - that's it. — Walter Kirn

The oak ... has not the efficacy of the fir , nor the cypress that of the elm . — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. — Karen Blixen

I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself - actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! — Eugene O'Neill

The test of any relationship lies in rewarding vulnerability instead of punishing it. — Gayle Peterson

We should see money in terms of the expenditure of energy and how we are going to transmute that energy into a proper use. — Chogyam Trungpa

And somewhere in that crimson-colored never-never land where i pirouetted madly, in a wild and crazy effort to exhaust myself into insensibility, i saw that man, shadowy and distant, half-hidden behind towering white columns that rose clear up to a purple sky. In a passionate pas de deux he danced with me, forever apart, no matter how hard i sought to draw nearer and leap into his arms, where i could feel them protective about me, supporting me ... and with him i'd find, at last, a safe place to live and love. — V.C. Andrews

The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass? Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle. — Anonymous

What does one plant who plants a tree? One plants the friend of sun and sky; One plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty towering high. — Henry Cuyler Bunner

Me dad planted that tree,' she said absently, pointing out through the old cracked window.
The great beech filled at least half the sky and shook shadows all over the house.
Its roots clutched the slope like a giant hand, holding the hill in place. Its trunk writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels. I had thought such trees to be as old as the earth, I never dreamed that a man could make them. Yet it was Granny Trill's dad who had planted this tree, had thrust in the seed with his finger. How old must he have been to leave such a mark? Think of Granny's age, and add his on top, and you were back at the beginning of the world. — Laurie Lee

There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space ... then there's a race - between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up. Sometimes, you can make your own space. — Terry Pratchett

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind. — Alan Brien

I grew up in those years when the Old West was passing and the New West was emerging. It was a time when we still heard echoes and already saw shadows, on moonlit nights when the coyotes yapped on the hilltops, and on hot summer afternoons when mirages shimmered, dust devils spun across the flats, and towering cumulus clouds sailed like galleons across the vast blueness of the sky. Echoes of remembrance of what men once did there, and visions of what they would do together. — Hal Borland

I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and - But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic. — Mark Twain

People who've never traveled on the ocean have no idea how scary it is to be on a little boat out there with no land in sight, waves towering over you while you do into the valley of a swell with nothing to see except water... water and sky, no other boas anywhere, no semblance of any kinds of firm reality at all. The main thing one shouldn't do is imagine things. One shouldn't think about the boat tipping over, just falling over and rolling under. Things like that happen all of a sudden. A gigantic three story high wave could whollop the boat broadside. Splash! Whoops! You're gone! No hint of a boat in about three minutes! If you don't get sucked under with it, then where are you? — Cookie Mueller

One day a man came to watch him work on a painting he was doing of Jesus and his disciples. The man sat there all day, and Leonardo only made one stroke the whole time. 'You stood there all day and only made one stroke,' the man said. Leonardo just looked at him. 'Yeah, but it was the right stroke,' he said." Dan sat quietly for a second. I was not sure if he was angry or if he didn't see the relevance of the analogy. Then, all of a sudden, he burst out laughing. "That's pretty good, Nerburn," he said. He reached over and pushed me playfully. "What was that guy's name?" "Leonardo da Vinci." "I've got to remember that. Leonardo Duvishhi. You sure he wasn't an Indian?" "Might have been Wapashaw's long-lost uncle," I said. Dan laughed heartily. "This is a good day, Nerburn. I'm glad you came to visit me." The hawk cut great arcs against the towering sky. The eastern horizon was filling with pinks and lavenders. "So am I, Dan," I said. "It's been too long. — Kent Nerburn

What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants the friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
The shaft of beauty, towering high, he plants a home to heaven anigh.
For song and mother-croon of bird, in hushed and happy twilight heard -
The treble of heaven's harmony.
These things he plants who plants a tree. — Henry Cuyler Bunner

I met Picasso when I was a kid. I turned one of his drawings down which would be worth £37 million now. My dad wouldn't talk to me for a fortnight. — Brian Blessed

The undulating terrain was cloaked in lush abundance, the vineyards like garlands of deep green and yellow, orchards and farms sprouting here and there, hillocks of dry golden grass crowned by beautiful sun-gilt houses, barns and silos. And overhead was the bluest sky she'd ever seen, as bright and hard polished as marble.
There was something about the landscape that caught at her emotions. It was both lush and intimidating, its beauty so abundant. Far from the bustle of the city, she was a complete stranger here, like Dorothy stepping out of her whirling house into the land of Oz. Farm stands overflowing with local produce marked the long driveways into farms with whimsical names- Almost Paradise, One Bad Apple, Toad Hollow. Boxes and bushels were displayed on long, weathered tables. Between the farms, brushy tangles of berries and towering old oak trees lined the roadway. — Susan Wiggs

In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The vision of this massive body of water with towering monoliths jutting straight upward to the heavens, stole our ability to think.Colors that made the wildflowers look dull, streaked up and down across the great pillars of hardened rock. The clouds and sky were mirrored in the glassy surface of the deep expanse of lake. — Danielle Rohr

The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo. — Terry Pratchett

Pilgrims from all over the world were making their way to the place deemed the pearl of the Middle East. The city was reminiscent of a modern-day Persepolis. Its buildings, like towering pillars, tested the sky's limit. The evenly paved roads belched with the smell of new tarmac, as if a million masons woke up every morning and by hand lay asphalt one grain at a time. People of all colors, ethnicities, creed and social statuses came bearing money, knowledge or experience in order to build their legacies in the new kingdom, sprouting out of the desert.
Dubai had arrived. — Soroosh Shahrivar

Suddenly,I could picture Tinker on the back of a horse somewhere: at the edge of the treeline under a towering sky ... at his college roommate's ranch, perhaps ... where rhey hunted deer with antique rifles and with dogs that were better bred than me. — Amor Towles

In every character that you play ... I mean, I don't think I'll ever be the type of actor or performer per se who transforms, you know? Like Claire Danes transforms into Temple Grandin - I'm not gonna do that. — Ilana Glazer

Do you love him? — Richelle Mead

Fail often and fail cheap. — Paul Sloane