A Distant Mirror Quotes

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Almondine

To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.

He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.

Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he'd waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn't acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world ~ David Wroblewski

The drums staggered toward the distant street. Moving away from us, the dancers romped and rolled on the rhythm, their swaying heads like a field of wildflowers weaving back and forth on waves of wind. As the music dwindled to an echo in our minds, the day-to-day and minute-to-minute of slum life slowly reclaimed the lanes. We gave ourselves to our routines, our needs, and our harmless, hopeful scheming. And for a while, a little while, ours was a better world because the hearts and smiles that ruled it were almost as pure and clean as the flower petals fluttering from our hair, and clinging to our faces like still, white tears. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Here is the easiest way to explain the genius of Johnny Cash: Singing from the perspective of a convicted muderer in the song "Folsom Prison Blues,: Cash is struck by pangs of regret when he sits in his cell and hears a distant train whistle. This is because people on that train are "probably drinkin' coffee." And this is also why Cash seems completely credible as a felon: He doesn't want freedom or friendship or Jesus or a new lawyer. He wants coffee. Within the mind of a killer, complex feeling are eerily simple. This is why killers can shoot men in Reno just to watch them die, and the rest of us usually can't. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Behind her, Annabelle heard Daisy say to Lillian accusingly, "I thought you said that no one ever comes to this meadow!"
"That's what I was told," Lillian replied, her voice muffled as she stepped into the circle of her gown and bent to jerk it upward.
The earl, who had been mute until that point, spoke with his gaze trained studiously on the distant scenery. "Your information was correct, Miss Bowman," he said in a controlled manner. "This field is usually unfrequented."
"Well, then, why are you here?" Lillian demanded accusingly, as if she, and not Westcliff, was the owner of the estate.
The question caused the earl's head to whip around. He gave the American girl an incredulous glance before he dragged his gaze away once more. "Our presence here is purely coincidental," he said coldly. "I wished to have a look at the northwest section of my estate today." He gave the word my a subtle but distinct emphasis. "While Mr. Hunt and I were traveling along the lane, we heard your screaming. We thought it best to investigate, and came with the intention of rendering aid, if necessary. Little did I realize that you would be using this field for…for…"
"Rounders-in-knickers," Lillian supplied helpfully, sliding her arms into her sleeves.
The earl seemed incapable of repeating the ridiculous phrase. He turned his horse away and spoke curtly over his shoulder. "I plan to develop a case of amnesia within the next five minutes. Before I do so, I would s ~ Lisa Kleypas

They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds ... .
...
Now Tomas laughed. "You're blind!"
"I see very well. You are the one who does not see. ~ Ray Bradbury

James Potter sat up in his bed, stifling a gasp. He listened very intently, peering around the darkened sleeping chamber. All around him were the small sounds of sleeping Gryffindors. Ted rolled over and snorted, muttering in his sleep. James held his breath. He'd awakened a few minutes earlier with the sound of his own name in his ears. It had been like a voice in a dream: distant and whispered, as if blown on smoke down a long, dark tunnel. He had just about convinced himself that it had, in fact, been the tail of a dream and drifted back to sleep when he'd heard it again. It seemed to come out of the walls themselves, a faraway sound, still somehow right next to him, like a chorus of whispers saying his full name. ~ G. Norman Lippert

We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our saloons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Love is not just tolerance. It's not just distant appreciation. It's a warm sense of, 'I am enjoying the fact that you are you.' ~ N. T. Wright

In other words, the idea is the there's a fourth level of parallel universes that's vastly larger than the three we've encountered so far, corresponding to different mathematical structures. The first three levels correspond to noncommunicating parallel universes within the same mathematical structure: Level I simply means distant regions from which light hasn't yet had time to reach us, Level II covers regions that are forever unreachable because of the cosmological inflation of intervening space, and Level III, Everett's "Many Worlds," involves noncommunicating parts of the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics. Whereas all the parallel universes at Levels I, II and III obey the same fundamental mathematical equations (describing quantum mechanics, inflation, etc.), Level IV parallel universes dance to the tunes of different equations, corresponding to different mathematical structures. Figure 12.2 illustrates this four-level multiverse hierarchy, one of the core ideas of this book. ~ Max Tegmark

Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history because they are in a sense immortal. While individual hawks of different species die, the species themselves remain unchanged. There are no breed or varieties, because hawks were never domesticated. The birds we fly today are identical to those of five thousand years ago. Civilisations rise and fall, but hawks stay the same. This gives falconry birds the ability to feel like relics from the distant past. You take a hawk onto your fist. You imagine the falconer of the past doing the same. It is hard not to feel it is the same hawk. ~ Helen Macdonald

Evil is not a distant demon. It works its destruction close to us, with us, within us. He was right. He told us Evil does not come from down below and devour us. Instead, we help Evil destroy our lives. ~ Anonymous

In the midnight of a soul's unsleeping, hear the waterfall of women weeping. Hear the distant noise of traffic stalling, hear the prostituted children calling. ~ Pete Townshend

Madoka: Won't anyone notice that Mami-san is dead?
Homura: Mami Tomoe's only relatives are distant relations. It will be quite some time before anyone files a missing persons report. When one dies on that side of the wards, not even a body is left behind. She'll wind up forever a "missing person" ... That is what happens to magical girls in the end.
Madoka: ... That's too cruel! Mami-san has been fighting all alone for a long time for everyone's sake! For no one to even notice that she's gone ... That's just too lonely a fate ...
Homura: It is just that kind of contract that gives us the power in the first place. It isn't for anyone else's sake. We fight on for the sake of our own prayer. So for no one to notice ... for the world to forget us ... That is just something we have to accept. ~ Magica Quartet

Occupation prevents you from managing your affairs in your own way. It interferes in every aspect of life and death; it interferes with longing and anger and desire and walking in the street. It interferes with going anywhere and coming back, with going to market, the emergency hospital, the beach, the bedroom, or a distant capital. ~ Mourid Barghouti

There's a bitter cold in me, a cold which comes from a distant land. And nothing ever really makes it warm. You knew of this cold. You tried a thousand times to melt it, and transform it to something more brilliant, but you never succeeded. ~ Anne Rice

The shattered glass
Of soundproof walls
That can block the night no more
Is scattered, alas,
On the broken stillness
Of a distant, darkened shore. ~ L.S. Hartfield

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile. It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music, the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart. And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art's nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the soul. This is real religion. This is real worship ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

A "free spirit" - this cool expression does good in every condition, it almost warms. One no longer lives, in the fetters of love and hatred, without Yea, without Nay, voluntarily near, voluntarily distant, preferring to escape, to turn aside, to flutter forth, to fly up and away; one is fastidious like everyone who has once seen an immense variety beneath him, - and one has become the opposite of those who trouble themselves about things which do not concern them. In fact, it is nothing but things which now concern the free spirit, - and how many things! - which no longer trouble him! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

For years, walking round London, I had been aware of the actual land, lying concealed but not entirely changed or destroyed, beneath the surface of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century city. It has been said that 'God made the country and man made the town', but that is not true: the town is simply disguised countryside. Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood. Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes, still cause trouble in the foundations of neighbouring buildings and become a local focus for winter mists. Garden walls follow the line of hedgerows; the very street-patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords, parcels of land some of which can be traced back to the Norman Conquest. The situation of specific buildings - pubs, churches, institutions - often dates from long distant decisions and actions on the part of men whose names have vanished from any record. ~ Gillian Tindall

A major push is under way to figure out the molecular basis of those "critical" or "sensitive" periods, to figure out how the brain changes as certain learning abilities come and go. In some, if not all, of those mammals that have the alternating stripes in the visual cortex known as ocular dominance columns, those columns can be adjusted early in development, but not in adulthood. A juvenile monkey that has one eye covered for an extended period of time can gradually readjust its brain wiring to favor the open eye; an adult monkey cannot adjust its wiring. At the end of a critical period, a set of sticky sugar-protein hybrids known as proteoglycans condenses into a tight net around the dendrites and cell bodies of some of the relevant neurons, and in so doing those proteoglycans appear to impede axons that would otherwise be wriggling around as part of the process of readjusting the ocular dominance columns; no wriggling, no learning. In a 2002 study with rats, Italian neuroscientist Tommaso Pizzorusso and his colleagues dissolved the excess proteoglycans with an antiproteoglycan enzyme known as "chABC," and in so doing managed to reopen the critical period. After the chABC treatment, even adult rats could recalibrate their ocular dominance columns. ChABC probably won't help us learn second languages anytime soon, but its antiproteoglycan function may have important medical implications in the not-too-distant future. Another 2002 study, also with rats, showed that chABC can ~ Gary F. Marcus

Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless, complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illuminate good and evil, would have thought, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above, changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way to more distant heavens, the last ... but there is no last, for spirit tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever upward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever greater freedom. ~ Allen Wheelis

You see, writing down your meanderings gets something started deep in the recesses of your brain. That distant part of your mind knows that you want to write stories or poems or plays and not endless jabber, and it will get to work. It may take a while. You may have to write this stuff for hours or days or weeks, but eventually that subterranean part of your brain will come through and begin to send you ideas. ~ Gail Carson Levine

It is a different world and they [the Supreme Court] should speak for justice, not prejudice ... I seek justice, not in some distant tomorrow, not in some study commission, but now while I Iive. ~ Martha Griffiths

It'll be a blunder to 'transplant' those you should leave at their distant habitat of acquaintance to the vicinity of friendship. If you naively embrace a slimy, slippery, serpent, you will nonetheless get bitten. ~ Vincent Okay Nwachukwu

The air was cool and fresh and smelled of the kelp and salt that streamed in off the bay at the full of the tide. The sun was high in the tender vault of the sky, and the thunderheads that would sweep in late in the day were still only white marble puffs at the margins of the sky, solid and silver-lined. There was a blue clarity about the horizon and the distant hills that spoke of a weather change but not for another day or two. Along the meadows' edges, as we drove past, I saw pink clover and purple lupine, hawkweed and wild daylilies. Brilliant pink wild azaleas, called lambkill here, flickered like wildfire in the birch groves. Daisies, buttercups, wild columbine, and the purple flags of wild iris starred the roadside. Behind them all was the eternal dark of the pines and firs and spruce thickets and, between those, the glittering indigo of the bay. ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; the object is a 'fact' which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. ~ Edward Said

It was not her dream that chilled him, but that she did not weep as she told it. As a hero, he understood weeping women and knew how to make them stop crying
generally you killed something
but her calm terror confused and unmanned him, while the shape of her face crumbled the distant dignity he had been so pleased at maintaining. When he spoke again, his voice was young and stumbling. ~ Peter S. Beagle

We are a blessed people and, with God s guidance, our smiles might even become laughter in the not too distant future. ~ John Kufuor

I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music, and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection. ~ Lewis Thomas

To live a distant, withdrawn, and secluded life is diametrically opposed to spirituality as Jesus Christ taught it. The true test of our spirituality occurs when we come up against injustice, degradation, ingratitude, and turmoil, all of which have the tendency to make us spiritually lazy. While being tested, we want to use prayer and Bible reading for the purpose of finding a quiet retreat. We use God only for the sake of getting peace and joy. We seek only our enjoyment of Jesus Christ, not a true realization of Him. This is the first step in the wrong direction. All these things we are seeking are simply effects, and yet we try to make them causes. ~ Oswald Chambers

...Analyses of globalization may also include statistics on poverty and human development indicators such as health, life expectancy, education, and infant mortality. While such statistics are important and can provide powerful statements about reality, perspectives based mainly or exclusively on aggredate data remove us from the lives of real, embodied human beings. A shortcoming of these kinds of distant analyses is that they often miss or gloss over how peopple experience capitalist globalization in and on their bodies, and how embodied subjects in marginalized communities, both in the Global North and South, have challenged and resisted such powerful social forces (38). ~ Barbara Sutton

Inspiration is a message-in-a-bo ttle from the distant shore, a window into the other world, a tap of the muse's finger, the grace of the gods. It comes when you least expect it ... ~ Phil Cousineau

On a distant hilltop, twinkling like an early evening star, a white light was flashing.
Blouse lowered his telescope. 'They're repeating "CQ",' he said. 'And I believe those longer pauses are when they're aiming their tube in different directions. They're looking for their spies. "Seek You", see? Private Igor?'
'Thur?'
'You know how that tube works, don't you?'
'Oh, yeth, thur. You jutht light a flare in the box, and then it'th just point and click.'
'You're not going to answer it, are you, sir?' said Jackrum, horrified.
'I am indeed, sergeant,' said Blouse briskly. 'Private Carborundum, please assemble the tube. Manickle, please bring the lantern. I shall need to read the code book.'
'But that'll give away our position!' said Jackrum.
'No, sergeant, because although this term may be unfamiliar to you I intend to what we call "lie",' said Blouse. 'Igor, I'm sure you have some scissors, although I'd rather you didn't attempt to repeat the word.'
'I have thome of the appliantheth you mention, thur,' said Igorina stiffly. ~ Terry Pratchett

I remember looking out the window of the little maid's room where we had been installed, seeing the lights of the Palisades across the way, and thinking, There! There it is! There's New York, this wonderful city, I'll go live there someday. Even being in New York, the actual place, I found the idea of New York so wonderful that I could only imagine it as some other place, greater than any place that would let me sleep in it
a distant constellation of lights I had not yet been allowed to visit. I had arrived in Oz only to think, Well, you don't LIVE in Oz, do you? ~ Adam Gopnik

I don't particularly like being pregnant. I like the baby at the end. Pregnancy is a very distant thing for me. I can't seem to believe there's really a baby there. It's such a miracle. ~ Mary Beth Whitehead

Death finally comes, usually in the evening, when something in the raconteur fades out for good and in the midst of his story his eyes fix on the horizon and he trails off into silence, thinking of nothing. For this reason the Phaeacians consider silence an act of kindness, as sacred as guest friendship, a grant of repose to a distant stranger. ~ Zachary Mason

The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in my first unhappy time. Then, I would say to her, "Biddy, I think you once liked me very well, when my errant heart, even while it strayed away from you, was quieter and better with you than it ever has been since. If you can like me only half as well once more, if you can take me with all my faults and disappointments on my head, if you can receive me like a forgiven child (and indeed I am so sorry, Biddy, and have as much need of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I hope I am a little worthier of you than I was --not much, but a little. And Biddy, it shall rest with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with Joe, or whether I shall try for any different occupation down in this country, or whether we shall go away to a distant place where an opportunity awaits me, which I set aside when it was offered, until I knew your answer. And now, dear Biddy, if you can tell me that you will go through the world with me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you. ~ Charles Dickens

The Wood did strange things to humans, especially humans who had a distant touch of the fae within. It turned them from ordinary people into mad hermits, cannibals who ate children thinking they were made of gingerbread, and people who swore they had been asleep for one hundred years. ~ Kate Danley

I guess I can call myself a pragmatist with a conservative perspective. It would be hard for me to explain this, but I always take realities of today, lessons from the distant and recent past into consideration. ~ Vladimir Putin

If Beethoven and Bach hooked up with Mozart and made a band, they could be a distant runner up to The D. ~ Jack Black

The Creator sat upon the throne, thinking. Behind him stretched the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in a glory of light and color; before him rose the black night of Space, like a wall. His mighty bulk towered rugged and mountain-like into the zenith, and His divine head blazed there like a distant sun. At His feet stood three colossal figures, diminished to extinction, almost, by contrast
archangels
their heads level with His ankle-bone. When the Creator had finished thinking, He said, "I have thought. Behold!" He lifted His hand, and from it burst a fountain-spray of fire, a million stupendous suns, which clove the blackness and soared, away and away and away, diminishing in magnitude and intensity as they pierced the far frontiers of Space, until at last they were but as diamond nail heads sparkling under the domed vast roof of the universe. ~ Mark Twain

Ultimately I wanted to be a pioneer swimmer, a distant descendant of Scott, Amundsen and Hillary, except that I would be an explorer of the water. ~ Lewis Gordon