Trick Of The Light Quotes & Sayings

So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light? — Karen Thompson Walker

Your Christ, the Church's Christ, is a god made in the image of effete men who've never had a good fuck in their lives, or if they have, who've thrashed themselves with whips to relieve their guilt. They hate their own cocks so much they'd light votive candles to make them fall off, if it would do the trick. — Michael Schiefelbein

But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach.
Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness.
Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world. — Arthur C. Clarke

A writer can't just be well-educated or good at research; to build a living, breathing world with interesting characters, you have to write from the gut. I'm not saying you have to live your life like a fantasy adventure. The trick is the ability to synthesize your own everyday experiences into your fiction. Infuse your characters with believable emotions and motivations. Infuse your world with rich sensory detail. For that you have to be in touch with your own existence and your own soul, the dark and the light of it. — Lynn Flewelling

He looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time since they'd come out to the terrace, and she was surprised by how much a man he appeared in the darkness. The light owed his face, harshening the angles of his straight nose, his strong jaw. His eyes glittered and Alex didn't know if it was a trick of the light, but she couldn't look away from him. — Sarah MacLean

The only thing you must do, flesh-child, is die. The rest is but a trick of light in the foam on the waves. — Rue

Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget or help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighborhood of light we see our own face. — Janet Frame

Failure is a trick of the light. — Matt Haig

Not every sky will be blue and not every day is springtime. So on the spiritual path a person learns to find this kind of happiness without needing nice things to happen on the outside. Rather, you find happiness by being who you really are. This isn't mystical. Young children are happy being who they are. The trick is to regain such a state when you are grown and have seen the light and dark sides of life. — Deepak Chopra

Happiness is like the rainbows of life... Rainbows aren't real. You can't walk up and touch one. It's a trick of light. That doesn't mean you've never seen one. And I bet every time it's happened, you smiled. — Terri Osburn

around to look again. There was a tabby cat standing on the corner of Privet Drive, but there wasn't a map in sight. What could he have been thinking of? It must have been a trick of the light. Mr. Dursley blinked and stared at the cat. It stared back. As Mr. Dursley drove around the corner and up the road, he watched the cat in his mirror. — J.K. Rowling

I will be thirty years old again in thirty seconds. I will take the best room in the Grand Central or the Orndorff Hotel. I will dine on oysters and palomitas and wash them down with white wine. Then I will go to the Acme or Keating's or the Big Gold Bar and sit down and draw my cards and fill an inside straight and win myself a thousand dollars. Then I will go to the Red Light or the Monte Carlo and dance the floor afire. Then I will go to a parlor house and have them top up a bathtub with French champagne and I will strip and dive into it with a bare-assed blonde and a redhead and an octoroon and the four of us will get completely presoginated and laugh and let long bubbly farts at hell and baptize each other in the name of the Trick, the Prick, and the Piper-Heidsick. — Glendon Swarthout

We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of power, but to use well the kind you've been granted. — Susan Cain

So what I'm getting at is this. Okay, maybe it's cold in the grave. Maybe you come out of the light and you think, Fuck your mother, this is bad. This is worse than anything I would have guessed. But the trick is to clench your teeth, get a running start and dive.
When I hit that other country, from whose bourne no traveller back-pedals, I'm going to be moving fast. I'm gambling that the first ten seconds or so will be the worst. — Mike Carey

So, what exactly does 'patrolling' entail?"
She shrugged. "Making sure the woods are clean of supes."
"Why would there be soup in-oh, 'supes'? Like for 'supernaturals'? Is that what you guys call us?"
Izzy didn't turn around, and it could have just been a trick of the light, but I thought the tips of her ears pinkened. "It's just something I made up," she mumbled, and I was very glad she had her back to me as a smile broke out over my face.
"I like that."
She spun around then, and I made sure my expression was deadly serious. "I mean it," I told her. "You know what we call ourselves, right? Prodigium." I made a derisive snort. "The only thing lamer and more pretentious than Latin is made-up Latin. — Rachel Hawkins

I smoothed Colton's blanket across his chest and tucked him in snug the
way he liked - and for the first time since he started talking about heaven, I
intentionally tried to trip him up. "I remember you saying you stayed with
Pop," I said. "So when it got dark and you went home with Pop, what did
you two do?"
Suddenly serious, Colton scowled at me. "It doesn't get dark in heaven,
Dad! Who told you that?"
I held my ground. "What do you mean it doesn't get dark?"
"God and Jesus light up heaven. It never gets dark. It's always bright."
The joke was on me. Not only had Colton not fallen for the "when it gets
dark in heaven" trick, but he could tell me why it didn't get dark: "The city
does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives
it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. — Todd Burpo

[...] the quiet break of soul that comes when you realize that what looked like a rainbow was actually only a trick of the light. — Jodi Picoult

Never having been in love, this is going to be a real trick. I think of my parents. The way my father never failed to bring her gifts from the woods. The way my mother's face would light up at the sound of his boots at the door. The way she almost stopped living when he died. — Suzanne Collins

What no tourist bumf will tell you is that this inlet is suffused with an atmosphere of ineffable sadness. Partly a trick of the light and climatic factors, partly also the lingering residue of an historical tragedy which still resonates through rock and water down seven generations of fretful commemorative attempts and dissonant historical hermeneutics. Now think of grey shading towards gunmetal across an achromatic spectrum; think also of turbid cumulus clouds pouring down five centimeters of rainfall above the national average and you have some idea of the light reflected within the walls of this inlet. This is the type of light which lends itself to vitamin D deficiency, baseline serotonin levels, spluttering neurotransmitters and mild but by no means notional depression. It is the type of light wherein ghosts go their rounds at all hours of the day. — Mike McCormack

No. Merely a trick of the light. But I had the impression you were seeking something more formal than'Okay, go for it,' as Ven would say," Alaric said, a hint of a smile surfacing. "Looked pretty impressive,didn't it? It's a priest thing. — Alyssa Day

Making films is sort of like you're pulling off a magic trick. It's sort of like an illusion. It's not real but you want it to appear real, and all kinds of things go into that, from the clothes you're wearing to the make-up, to the light. — Jeff Bridges

That would be showing him a part of her soul, a part of her mind, that she's never risked showing anyone. The raw and squirming part that indifferent high-school counselor were always prying at, the part therapists tried to trick her into showing them for free, the part her parents hated her for. The light and the darkness behind her eyes. The soft places. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing.
Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What does a ship absolutely need to stay afloat? I'm not a mariner, so I can't exactly say. . . but what I can tell you is that ships don't absolutely need lighthouses - but they sure do help!

When it comes to acting on inspired ideas, it's easy to trick ourselves into thinking we don't really need to do them, but that's like a ship ignoring the beacon of light on a rocky shore. — Richie Norton

Not my mother. Just a trick. Never deal with the devil - that much he knew. Live like a king. Right. The king of a ruined world. The king of nothing. But down here, he was alive. An agent of chaos. Caca grande. The shit in the Master's soup. Gus's reverie was interrupted by footfalls in the tunnels. He went to the door and saw artificial light coming around the corner. Fet came first, Goodweather behind him. Gus had seen Fet a month or two before, but the doctor he had not seen in quite some time. Goodweather looked the worst he'd — Guillermo Del Toro

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.
It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose. — Dagobert D. Runes

Even the girl he'd danced with had thought it was some marvelous trick. She had been enveloped in real, bright fire and she had tipped back her head and laughed, the tumble of her black hair becoming a crackling waterfall of light, the heels of her shoes striking sparks like glittering leaping dust all over the floor, her skirt trailing flame as if he were following a phoenix tail. Magnus had spun and swung with her, and she'd thought he was marvelous for a single moment of bright illusion.
But, like love, fire didn't last. — Cassandra Clare

They danced in silence for several long moments, spinning together and apart, a slower version of their cadence in the ring. And then, out of nowhere, Lila asked, "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did you ask me to dance?"
He almost smiled. A ghost. A trick of the light. "So you couldn't run away again before I said hello."
"Hello," said Lila.
"Hello," said Kell. "Where have you been? — Victoria Schwab

I began to watch places with an interest so exact it might have been memory. There was that street corner, with the small newsagent which sold copies of the Irish Independent and honeycomb toffee in summer. I could imagine myself there, a child of nine, buying peppermints and walking back down by the canal, the lock brown and splintered as ever, and boys diving from it.
It became a powerful impulse, a slow intense reconstruction of a childhood which had never happened. A fragrance or a trick of light was enough. Or a house I entered which I wanted not just to appreciate but to remember, and then I would begin. — Eavan Boland

Until I had turned the car around and was on my way back up the lane. I looked back at the farmhouse in my rearview mirror, and a trick of the light made it seem as if two moons hung in the sky above it, like a pair — Neil Gaiman

Fynn, I love you.' When Anna said that, every word was shattered with the fullness of meaning she packed into it. Her 'I' was a totality. Whatever this 'I' was for Anna it was packed tight with being. Like the light that didn't fray, Anna's 'I' didn't fray either; it was pure and all of one piece. Her use of the word 'love' was not sentimental or mushy, it was impelling and full of courage and encouragement. For Anna, 'love' meant the recognition of perfectibility in another. Anna 'saw' a person in every part. Anna 'saw' a 'you'. Now that is something to experience, to be seen as a 'you', clearly and definitely, with no parts hidden. Wonderful and frightening. I'd always understood that it was Mister God who saw you clearly and in your entirety but then all Anna's efforts were directed to being like Mister God, so perhaps the trick is catching if only you try hard enough. — Fynn

How about a little teaser from CROWN OF ICE?

Thyra Winther, the current Snow Queen speaks about her "home":

At night the palace's crystal halls are tinged sapphire. One of the first bits of magic that Voss taught me was to set the carved walls alight so that I'm not forced to walk the halls in darkness. I conjure a cold light that glows within the thick walls without melting the ice. I mastered this trick quickly once I knew what those shadows held. If I leave an area in darkness, they come - the girls who reigned as Snow Queen before me.
"I must find it." Their hollow words wind about me like a shroud. "The last piece. I must place it. Give it to me. — Vicki L. Weavil

I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings. — Albert Hofmann

The voice came first, then the chill across her skin. A moment later, Noah Czerny joined her, dressed as always in his navy Aglionby sweater. Joined was perhaps the wrong verb. Manifested was better. The phrase trick of the light was even more superior. Trick of the mind was the best. Because it was rare that Blue noticed the moment Noah actually appeared. It wasn't that he gently resolved into being. It was that somehow her brain rewrote the minute before to pretend that Noah had been slouching beside her all along. — Maggie Stiefvater

And as I sit and talk to you I see your face go white
This shadow hanging over me
Is no trick of the light
The spectre on my back will soon be free
The dead have come to claim a debt from thee — Shane MacGowan

Edith's clothes were flung in disarray on the floor beside the bed, the covers of which had been thrown back carelessly; she lay naked and glistening under the light on the white unwrinkled sheet. Her body was lax and wanton in its naked sprawl, and it shone like pale gold. William came nearer the bed. She was fast asleep, but in a trick of the light her slightly opened mouth seemed to shape the soundless words of passion and love. He stood looking at her for a long time. He felt a distant pity and reluctant friendship and familiar respect; and he felt also a weary sadness, for he knew that he would never again be moved as he had once been moved by her presence. The sadness lessened, and he covered her gently, turned out the light, and got in bed beside her. — John Edward Williams

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

The moon is a trick of light suggested to us by the seas, the house thought. — Joseph Fink

I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light. — Janette Turner Hospital

Alex's T-shirt is red, and for a second I think it's a trick of the light, but then I realise he's drenched, soaked in blood: blood seeping across his chest, like the stain seeping up the sky, bringing another day to the world. Behind him is that insect army of men, all running toward him at once, guns drawn. The guards are coming too, reaching for him from both sides ... The helicopter has him fixed in it's spotlight. He is standing white and still and frozen in its beam, and I don't think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him. — Lauren Oliver

I haven't felt the excitement for so many years. I feel guilty beyond words about these things. When we're back-stage and the lights go out, and the manic roar of the crowd begins, it does not affect me. The fact is, I can't fool you. It isn't fair to you or to me. The worst crime I can think of is to trick people by faking it, and pretending to be having 100% fun. — Robert Hilburn

Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic ... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with. — Bob Dylan

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. — Viktor E. Frankl

Little brats yellin 'Trick or Treat' all through my screen door,
When y'all should be at home sleep,
Instead of at my front porch 15 deep.
The jack o' lantern came in handy ...
I can turn my porch light out like I ain't got no candy.
But ain't that somethin?
You buy a Halloween costume and a pumpkin,
Almost gave your children a heart attack.
It's a tradition, but who the hell started that? — Kam

We all have at least two sides. The world we live in is a world of opposites. And the trick is to reconcile those opposing things. I've always liked both sides. In order to appreciate one you have to know the other. The more darkness you can gather up, the more light you can see too. — David Lynch

Yes, the world was very strange. But you had to walk through. That was the trick. You had to keep walking through, always, with your chin held high, the way she had passed through the tunnels of the underworld, with only the dim light of the lumpen to guide her. That was the other trick, the other truth: Light would come to you from unexpected places. — Lauren Oliver

I go downstairs and the books blink at me from the shelves. Or stare. In a trick of the light, a row of them seems to shift very slightly, like a curtain blown by the breeze through an open window. Red is next to blue is next to cream is adjacent to beige. But when I look again, cream is next to green is next to black. A tall book shelters a small book, a huge Folio bullies a cowering line of Quartos. A child's nursery rhyme book does not have the language in which to speak to a Latin dictionary. Chaucer does not know the words in which Henry James communicates but here they are forced to live together, forever speechless. — Susan Hill

But then he saw it, then he saw what he had known he was seeing and could not accept. There in the night, amid the mist, upon the flat of the plains, the shimmer of light from Allear was not right. The grasses were too flat, the mists curled awkwardly, as if impeded by some large mass and then the glamor was gone, the trick revealed.
And before Thorin's very eyes, a mass of soldiers appeared - thousands of them - wearing black and facing his camp. Doom settled around Thorin like some shroud for a watery grave.
"Ah, bloody hell. — Clifton Hill

Nightmares are like Master Harriot's star glass. They are a trick of the light, one that makes something distant seem closer and larger than it really is." "Oh." Jack considered Matthew's response. "So even if I see a monster in my dreams, it cannot reach me?" Matthew nodded. "But I will tell you a secret. A dream is a nightmare in reverse. If you dream of someone you love, that person will seem closer, even if far away. — Deborah Harkness

Usually Jacin was there, as he'd been all her life. He would make light of it and force her to laugh about the absurdity of whatever trick her mind was playing. He would talk her through each episode with his steady rationality, leaving no room for her to doubt his words. He would hold her and let her cry, and it was during one of these embraces when Winter realized with all the force and clarity of a solar flare - She was in love with him. She had always, always been in love with him. * — Marissa Meyer

Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet. — Annie Dillard

I stared into his handsome face and let those feelings overwhelm me and in that fleeting time I felt the ghost of our emotional connection. It was just a mere whisper, like a scent on the breeze that blows past you too quickly, bringing with it a memory of something you can't quite grasp. I wasn't sure if it was a trick of the light, a flicker of something real, or something I fabricated, but it captured all of my attention. — Colleen Houck

There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars. I have heard the expression "trick of the light" applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion of illumination" . — Erin Morgenstern

Figure 36. A "trick" can be played on Nature by slowing down the light that takes shorter paths: glass of just the right thickness is inserted so that all the paths will take exactly the same time. This causes all of the arrows to point in the same direction, and to produce a whopping final arrow-lots of light! Such a piece of glass made to greatly increase the probability of light getting from a source to a single point is called a focusing lens. — Richard Feynman

Devin was the most gorgeous, unique creature Kate had ever known. She'd come out of the womb an individual, refusing to be defined by anyone. She didn't even look like anyone on either side of their families. Matt's family was so proud of their dark hair, a blue-black that had been the envy of generations, the way it caught the sun like a spiderweb. From Kate's own side of the family, there was a gene that made their eyes so green that they could trick people into thinking that even the most unattractive Morris woman was pretty. And yet here was Devin, with fine cotton-yellow hair and light blue eyes, the left of which was a lazy eye. She'd had to wear an eye patch when she was three. And she'd loved it. She loved her knotted yellow hair. She loved wearing stripes with polka dots, and tutus, and pink and green socks with orange patent-leather shoes. Devin could care less what other people thought about her. — Sarah Addison Allen

When you wait all your life for something and then you find it, it's like a miracle. All the parts inside you that've been on hold, they open up and start beating. You were okay before, you were good. You had purpose and direction and everything was just fine. But now it's more. You can't explain what the more is, but you know, if you lose it, you'll never be able to fill those empty spaces in just the same way again. Not ever. That's terrifying. I'm afraid that what's inside me is just a trick. That I'll wake up tomorrow and what's beating in here will have stopped. It'll be quiet again. I won't feel this way. I won't feel the way I've waited all my life to feel.
I can stand you not loving me back. There's always hope that you will. But I don't know if I can stand not loving you. It would be like ... like having something stolen from inside of me. I don't know if I can handle going back to the way I was. — Nora Roberts

Her head appears to be on fire but that is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies. — Jeffrey Eugenides

We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means for a start that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they're watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So, they're not seeing you and me. They're watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs
people who don't know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that's quite a trick. Any message we receive from them is likely to begin "Dear Sire," and congratulate us on the handsomness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light-years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us. — Bill Bryson