Tolled Quotes & Sayings

With every new manoeuvre, the light was growing dimmer
fading by numbers as well as strength
and the sound could no longer be heard, but only the pulse of it
seen going out in the darkness
losing its edges
caving in at its centre
webbing, now, as if a spider was spinning against the rain
until the last few strands of brightness fell
and were extinguished
silenced and removed from life and from all that lives forever.
And the bell tolled
but the ark, as ever, was adamant. Its shape had taken on a voice. And the voice said: no. — Timothy Findley

After dinner, I become afraid despite myself. I know I should be joyous, for this reunion is the proof that love can still be ours, but I know the bell has tolled this evening. The sun has long since set and the thief is about to come, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. So I stare at her and wait and live a lifetime in these last remaining moments. — Nicholas Sparks

...great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery. — H.P. Lovecraft

As a boy, I had two small aquaria in our backyard in which I watched, each spring, the nest building and other fascinating behaviours of sticklebacks. — Nikolaas Tinbergen

On the hill opposite, Joachim tolled the midday bell, announcing lunch to the workers in the fields. Klaus listened a moment, then said, "I thought it would be a bleaker scene."
Dietrich turned to him, "What would be?"
"This day. I thought it would be marked by terrible signs - lowering clouds, ominous winds, a crack of thunder. Twilight. Yet, it is so ordinary a morning that I grow frightened."
"Only now frightened."
"Ja. Portents would mean a Divine Mover, however mysterious His moves; and the wrath of an angry God may be turned away by prayer and penance. But it simply happened. Everard grew sick and fell down. There were no signs; so it may be a natural thing, as you have always said. And against nature, we have no recourse. — Michael Flynn

You're alone in your ideas, because you're the only one who knows what's possible. — Bethenny Frankel

he jumped in under the running water, squeaked as if in ecstasy, bent his legs to get deeper, and whirred his wings like an egg beater in high gear. The spray flew several meters, soaking the floor and counters near the sink. Then he jumped out dripping wet and fluttered back into the cage to shake vigorously and preen until dry. — Bernd Heinrich

For the time of towns is tolled from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Time: the word tolled like the bells of a church. Fonny was doing: time. In six months time, our baby would be here. Somewhere, in time, Fonny and I had met: somewhere, in time, we had loved; somewhere, no longer in time, but, now, totally, at time's mercy, we loved. — James Baldwin

I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change. — Junot Diaz

As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the "gentleman and soldier."
However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism - an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves. — Wendell Berry

And I find perfect beauty excessively boring, don't you? — Gail Carriger

I opened the doors of my heart.
And behold,
There was music within and a song,
And echoes did feed on the sweetness, repeating it long.
I opened the doors of my heart. And behold,
There was music that played itself out in aeolian notes:
Then was heard, as a far-away bell at long intervals tolled. — Jean Ingelow

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens - four dowager and three regnant - and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Perhaps there is no more important component of character than steadfast resolution. — Theodore Roosevelt

The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds
the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. — Cormac McCarthy

One thing all the stories agreed on: King Robert was dead. The bells in the seven towers of the Great Sept of Baelor had tolled for a day and a night, the thunder of their grief rolling across the city in a bronze tide. They only rang the bells like that for the death of a king, a tanner's boy told Arya. — George R R Martin

No, he repeated, and this time the word tolled in another voice, a king's voice ... whose grief was not for what he did not have, but for what he could not give. — Peter S. Beagle

He kisses her and wants to beg her and the others to never give up on him. Ever. But he gets a feeling that he would be preaching to the converted — Melina Marchetta

You've never had a job that you thought was secure. You don't think the Tonight Show is risk free. Especially when you saw what happened with your buddy Conan O'Brien. There is always a Plan B.I am ready to apply to the post office. — Jimmy Fallon

The girl had taken a few restless turns to and fro - closely watched meanwhile by her hidden observer - when the heavy bell of St. Paul's tolled for the death of another day. Midnight had come upon the crowded city. The palace, the night-cellar,* the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all. — Charles Dickens

Self-Portrait at Twenty"

I stood inside myself
like a dead tree or a tower.
I pulled the rope
of braided hair
and high above me
a bell of leaves tolled.

Because my hand
stabbed its brother,
I said: Make it stone.

Because my tongue
spoke harshly, I said:
Make it dust.
And yet
it was not death, but
her body in its green dress
I longed for. That's why
I stood for days in the field
until the grass turned black
and the rain came. — Gregory Orr