Tolling Quotes & Sayings

Nobody likes paying tolls. It's difficult to explain the concept of dynamic tolling, where the price varies to maintain the flow of traffic. And it's difficult to explain why highway widenings don't wind up helping commuters in the long run. — Robert James Thomson

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, Of thee, from the hill-top looking down; And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm, Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm; The sexton tolling the bell at noon, Dreams not that great Napoleon Sto — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales for the disrobed faceless forms of no position. Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts - all down in taken-for-granted situations. Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute, and the mistreated mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute, for the misdemeanor outlaw, chained an' cheated by pursuit. And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing. — Bob Dylan

I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth. — Anais Nin

The bell tolling not for us, it's time for bluebells. — Lara Biyuts

Once more their weird laughter of the loons comes to my ear, the distance lends it a musical, melancholy sound. For a dangerous ledge off the lighthouse island floats in on the still air the gentle trolling of a warning bell as it swings on the rocking buoy; it might be tolling for the passing of summer and sweet weather with that persistent, pensive chime. — Celia Thaxter

To the east, the night grew a faggot of luminous grey, then seashell opalescence that dimmed the stars. There came the long, bell-tolling movement of dawn striking across a broken horizon. — Frank Herbert

Will read a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh at his grandmother's funeral.

"Pondering the joys we had, listen & keep very still. If the lowing from the hill or the tolling of the bell do not
serve to break the spell, listen: you may be allowed to hear my laughter from a cloud. — Lynne Branard

Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. — Cormac McCarthy

We'd made the wise choice, done the right thing. I had to believe that logic would bring comfort in time. Tonight, there was just this too-quiet room, the ache of loss, knowledge deep and final as the tolling of a bell: Something good has gone. — Leigh Bardugo

She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, 'All are shadows! - all are passing! - all is past! — Elizabeth Gaskell

The dull gray days of the preceding winter and spring, so uneventless and monotonous, seemed more associated with what she cared for now above all price. She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time, and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show life seemed! How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting! It was as if from some aerial belfry, high up above the stir and jar of the earth, there was a bell continually tolling, "All are shadows! All are passing! All is past!" And when the morning dawned, cool and gray, like many a happier morning before ... it seemed as if the terrible night were unreal as a dream; it, too, was a shadow. It, too, was past. — Elizabeth Gaskell

For many of us who are still adjusting to the very real way that our friends becoming mothers often means 'losing' them as friends, yet another announcement can feel like a bell tolling on that friendship. We've heard our friends say to us, 'It's not going to change anything,' and we know that they mean it at the time, but they're probably going to move towards a new circle of friends who are mothers, and that's how it needs to be. And we're not mothers. — Jody Day

Tolling ... has a place. We're not going to toll our way to prosperity as a country. It is a tool that can be used in some instances, for example, to add capacity and to pay for that capacity privately. But I don't think it is a complete solution to how we deal with our surface transportation issues. — Anthony Foxx

Echo and Shadow

A room
and a room. And between them

she leans in the doorway
to say something,

lintel bright above her face,
threshold dark beneath her feet,

her hands behind her head gathering
her hair to tie and tuck at the nape.

A world and a world.

Dying and not dying.
And between them
the curtains blowing
and the shadows they make on her body,

a shadow of birds, a single flock,
a myriad body of wings and cries
turning and diving in complex unison.
Shadow of bells,

or the shadow of the sound
they make in the air, mornings, evenings,
everywhere I wait for her,

as even now her voice
seems a lasting echo
of my heart's calling me home, its story
an ocean beyond my human beginning,

each wave tolling the whole note
of my outcome and belonging. — Li-Young Lee

Why the delay? Why does God let evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive, on this planet? ... He holds back for our sakes. Re-creation involves us; we are, in fact, at the center of his plan ... the motive behind all human history, is to develop us, not God. Our very existence announces to the powers in the universe that restoration is under way. Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, and a faith like Job's reverberates throughout the universe. — Philip Yancey

The mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time's flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Blessed be they whose lives do not taste of evil
but if some god shakes your house
ruin arrives
ruin does not leave
it comes tolling over the generations
it comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor
and all your thrashed coasts groan — Anne Carson

We'd been drinking for something like fourteen hours straight when the moment had come, the bell, so to speak, was tolling, and it was time for me to leave Oslo behind. — Loren Niva

The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air.
It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies.
Its clear tones resound in the placid silence of the winter day, and echo long into the silver-blue serenity of night.
The bell can only be seen at the turning of the year, when the days wind down into nothing, and get ready to march out again.
When you hear the bell, you feel a tug at your heart.
It is your immortal inspiration. — Vera Nazarian

You would get longer livelier and more frequent letters from me, if it weren't for the Christian religion. How that bell tolling at the end of the garden, dum dum, dum dum, annoys me! Why is Christianity so insistent and so sad? — Virginia Woolf

Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance. — Steve Erickson

Doom. Doom. You sound like a funeral bell tolling,' said Grandfather. 'Talk like that is worse than swearing. I won't wash out your mouth with soap, however. A thimbleful of dandelion wine is indicated. Here, now, swig it down What's it taste like?'
'I'm a fire-eater! Whoosh!'
'Now upstairs, run three times around the block, do five somersets, six pushups, climb two trees, and you'll be concertmaster instead of chief mourner. Get!'
On his way, running, Douglas thought, 'Four pushups, one tree and two somersets will do it — Ray Bradbury

Like the silence that surrounds the tolling of the bell allows you to hear the bell. — Joyce Carol Oates

She mounted the steps and took hold of the heavydoor knocker. It was shaped like a pair of angel's wings, and when she let it fall, she could hear the sound of echoing like the tolling of a huge bell. A moment later the door was yanked open, and Isabelle Lightwood stood on the threshlod, her eyes wide with shock.
"Clary?"
Clary smiled weakly. "Hi Isabelle."
Isabelle leaned against the doorjamb, her expression dismal. "Oh, crap. — Cassandra Clare

Dropping toward the watershed, the sun filled the place with evening light and kindled the windows and the western flanks of cupolas and steeples and many belfries, darkening the eastern walls with shadow; and as we gazed, one of them began to strike the hour and another took up the challenge, followed by a third and soon enormous tonnages of sectarian bronze were tolling their ancient rivalries into the dusk. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

Sonnet III: Black Coffin opened wide for all to See

Black Coffin opened wide for all to See,
The lifeless form of one I loved so dear.
O, listen! mournful knells that soon shall be
All night long tolling for the folk to hear.
The lanterns overlight the old churchyard
To watch the coffin lowered into the ground;
Soon Frost shall grasp the turf already hard,
Decay ye have to face without a sound.
But years have pass'd herein do I relate
My dear sweet mother's form within my mind.
Still happiness fills all my heart and state,
As I see my small family so kind.
Love cannot be withheld by death or grave,
It stays alive within the heart so brave. — Timothy Salter

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory's mind was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air of Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Even as I begin to realize the magnitude of what I'm doing, a thought occurs to me. Somewhere in the city of rebirth, Paul is lifting himself out of bed, staring out his window, and waiting. There are pigeons cooing on rooftops, cathedral bells tolling from towers in the distance. We are sitting here, continents apart, the same way we always did: at the edges of our mattresses, together. On the ceilings where I am going there will be saints and gods and flights of angels. Everywhere I walk there will be reminders of all that time can't touch. My heart is a bird in a cage, ruffling its wings with the ache of expectation.
In Italy, the sun is rising. — Dustin Thomason

The name of a successor is like the tolling of my own death-bell! — Elizabeth I

Tolling plan is a wonderful opportunity for political pandering, and some candidates are taking full advantage of it. — Robert James Thomson

On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes. — A. N. Wilson

Margaret herself hadn't known her body was a parish bell tolling at every heartbreak she heard of, and that night with Pete calmly sitting on the edge of her favorite chair, invading her private room with words this room was sealed from, she felt it just as a bell would. It struck her right inside, until her bronze skin rang out the news. Not of Pete's story, which had not even made him cry, but some other story she'd been trying not to tell herself. So she sat stiffly there and wept, clanging and clanging like a thing that tested its own breaking. — Andrew Sean Greer