A Firefly To Steer By Quotes

Pets are almost always fatal, to oneself or to them. It
is the curse of possession or motherhood. Mothers ruin their children, choke them like ivy. Dog-lovers steal the souls of their dogs and lose something in exchange. There is an essay on this subject by (I think) Stella Benson called "A Firefly to Steer By." Everybody ought to read it. ~ T.H. White

Am like a Fire Fly, Charged to Execute my Flames to Light this World up, therefore, you have to Kill me to get out my Flame. ~ Ryan Leonard

Tonight, the moon came out, it was nearly full.
Way down here on earth, I could feel it's pull.
The weight of gravity or just the lure of life,
Made me want to leave my only home tonight.
I'm just wondering how we know where we belong
Is it in the arc of the moon, leaving shadows on the lawn
In the path of fireflies and a single bird at dawn
Singing in between here and gone ~ Mary Chapin Carpenter

Its not easy to steer life without errors; at times forced by propensity; at times by Karma; at times negligence pushes one to make mistakes ... ~ Dinesh Kumar

I must go down to the sea ... to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by ... ~ John Masefield

It doesn't sound that cool to say it, but I still get nervous for any show. But it's different degrees - playing a small basement of a club versus playing a festival like Firefly or Bonnaroo. The feeling is, 'Crap, I'm about to be blasted in the face,' and once you get started, then it's like, 'OK, I've done this before. I know what I'm doing.' ~ Josh Dun

The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career ~ Pat Conroy

Really?" I whispered.
He crossed his arms on his chest and stated, "Babe, you think I found the woman of my
dreams at forty-five years old and I'm gonna let anything happen to her, think again. That's a long fuckin' time to wait for what you want. I waited. I
found it. I'm pullin' out all the stops to take care of it. I know you feel the same for me so I'm doin' the same to keep me safe for you. So yeah, really, I
called Delgado. I made peace and asked a favor. His woman is in your posse so she wouldn't be doin' cartwheels, he said no and something went
down with you or, for you, me. And he isn't dumb, he's a man who knows to collect favors and he's a man
whose business means he often has the need to call markers. So his ear's to the ground and his eyes are open so if a cop isn't cruisin' by your
house or bakery, one of Lee's boys or one of Hawk's commandos are. Smart people pay attention to who's cruisin' around people they want to fuck
with and smart people will see cops, Nightingale's men and Delgado's crazy motherfuckers and, my hope is, they'll steer clear. So, there you go.
Now you got a full explanation of what I mean when I say you're on radar."
I heard all he said, I really did.
But I was stuck at the beginning part where he told me I was the woman of his dreams. ~ Kristen Ashley

Praise and Prayer PRAISE is devotion fit for mighty minds, The diff'ring world's agreeing sacrifice; Where Heaven divided faiths united finds: But Prayer in various discord upward flies. For Prayer the ocean is where diversely Men steer their course, each to a sev'ral coast; Where all our interests so discordant be That half beg winds by which the rest are lost. By Penitence when we ourselves forsake, 'Tis but in wise design on piteous Heaven; In Praise we nobly give what God may take, And are, without a beggar's blush, forgiven. ~ William Davenant

I wish I could blame the solar storm
that blitzed the earth with electromagnetic rays,
rerouted several commercial airlines,
and caused all the geese to mistakenly fly west,
the secret compass needles in their heads
playing spin the bottle over a rowdy Pacific.
Satellite communications were disrupted,
electric eels in Peru forgot how to sing,
and for a few seconds all the iPhones in the world
flickered to black, during which time
everyone raised their eyes and noticed
moths shivering like tiny chandeliers.
The truth is your glance shortcuts every traffic light
in my heart and now no one's in charge,
I'm accelerating down the expressway
of a tuba's gold dream. With one outburst
from your hair, I sputter like a firefly drowning
in champagne. Just imagining the charged particles
of your lips colliding with mine
and I'm watching the northern lights,
those bodies flaring across midwinter sheets of sky ~ Katherine Rauk

She pulls away - and then I see why: she's holding out her palm as a landing place for a firefly. It's easy to forget it's there when it's not glowing, until all of a sudden it comes back and surprises you; it reminds you of grief. ~ Adam Silvera

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone.
I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean licking the sand. A tracery of darkness curls into a starry sky, a solitary pipal tree making itself known by an absence of light, like a flame caught in a photographer's negative, frozen, calling me. ~ Mohsin Hamid

It has come to me with a fight. It has come to me the hard way, through tears and fog and fear and chaos, and now has landed in the palm of my hand like a firefly. There now, I have had my vision. ~ Shauna Niequist

Popularity was fickle and elusive, like trying to catch fireflies in a jar. You were either born with it or relegated to wallflower status according to your mysterious and unknowable workings of the universe. ~ Melissa De La Cruz

Jodie had taught her that the female firefly flickers the light under her tail to signal to the male that she's ready to mate. Each species of firefly has its own language of flashes. As Kya watched, some females signed dot, dot, dot, dash, flying a zigzag dance, while others flashed dash, dash, dot in a different dance pattern. The males, of course, knew the signals of their species and flew only to those females. Then, as Jodie had put it, they rubbed their bottoms together like most things did, so they could produce young.

Suddenly Kya sat up and paid attention: one of the females had changed her code. First she flashed the proper sequence of dashes and dots, attracting a male of her species, and they mated. Then she flickered a different signal, and a male of a different species flew to her. Reading her message, the second male was convinced he'd found a willing female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate. But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings.

Kya watched others. The females all got what they wanted – first a mate, then a meal – just by changing their signals.

Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light. ~ Delia Owens

It is impossible to grasp another human's inner world. But even in the darkness of the densest forest, there can always be the light of a firefly. ~ Krupakar

...You are a little boy. You want the moon to drink from as a golden cup; and so, it is very likely that you will become a great man -- if only you remain a little child. All the world'sgreat have been little boys who wanted the moon; running and climbing, they sometimes catch a firefly. But if one grow to a man's mind, that mind must see that it cannot have the moon and would not want it if it could -- and so, it catches no fireflies.' [Merlin] ~ John Steinbeck

There where hundreds of graves. There where hundreds of women. There were hundreds of daughters. There were hundreds of sons. And hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of candles. The whole graveyard was one swarm of candleshine as if a population of fireflies had heard of a Grand Conglomeration and had flown here to settle in and flame upon the stones and light the brown faces and the dark eyes and the black hair. ~ Ray Bradbury

And it is true that we are warmed by being called by our names. We all know people who hardly ever do it, who only do it when they absolutely must. They manage to steer conversations along, ask questions, respond, without ever using a first name. And they chill others with their apparent detachment, those others who can never understand that it is diffidence which keeps them from committing themselves to the use of names. They might get the names wrong, or use them too often, be claiming an intimacy to which they have no right, be forward, pushy, presumptuous. ~ Ruth Rendell

'Firefly' was and always will be such a positive thing for me. I hold a lot of really good memories associated to that show. ~ Jewel Staite

But it ain't our feelings we have to steer by through life
no, no, we'd make shipwreck mighty often if we did that. There's only the one safe compass and we've got to set our course by that
what it's right to do. ~ L.M. Montgomery

We have to steer our true life's course. Whatever your calling is in life! The whole purpose of being here is to figure out what that is as soon as possible, so you go about the business of being on track, of not being owned by what your mother said, what society said, whatever people think a woman is supposed to be when you can exceed other people's expectations and be defined by your own! ~ Oprah Winfrey

This presents a serious question." They both looked at me. "What's that?" asked Lena. "Whether to start you off with a Doctor Who marathon or dive straight into Firefly. ~ Jim C. Hines

My rib cage clenched all of the organs and muscles within it. It pulsed, full of life and warmth and gummy bears and glitter. This was... I don't know how to explain it - it was like Christmas morning when you were a kid. It was everything I'd wanted.

Each of his thumbs curved over the shells of my ears. "That's my girl."

His girl.
After all the crap that I'd gone through today, there couldn't have been three better words to hear.

Well, there were three other words I'd like to hear but I'd take these from him. That didn't mean that he was the only one who knew how to give. He'd given enough. My bones and heart knew that there was nothing for me to fear. I loved him and sometimes there were consequences of it that were scary, but it - the emotion itself - wasn't. I knew that now.

What kind of life was I living if I let my fears steer me? This was a gift I'd forgotten to appreciate lately. For so long I'd been happy to just be alive but now...now I had Dex. I had my entire life ahead of me, and I needed to quit being a wuss and grab life by the balls. In this case, I'd take his nipple piercings.

"What'cha thinkin', Ritz?"

I held my hands out for him to see how badly they were shaking. "I'm thinking that I love you so much it scares me. See?"

Dex's thumbs tipped my chin back so that I could look at his face - at his beautiful, scruffy face. "Baby." He said my name like a purr that reached the vert ~ Mariana Zapata

I've got my own moral compass to steer by
A guiding star beats a spirit in the sky
And all the preaching voices -
Empty vessels ring so loud
As they move among the crowd
Fools and thieves are well disguised
In the temple and market place

Like a stone in the river
Against the floods of spring
I will quietly resist

Like the willows in the wind
Or the cliffs along the ocean
I will quietly resist

I don't have faith in faith
I don't believe in belief
You can call me faithless
I still cling to hope
And I believe in love
And that's faith enough for me

I've got my own spirit level for balance
To tell if my choice is leaning up or down
And all the shouting voices
Try to throw me off my course
Some by sermon, some by force
Fools and thieves are dangerous
In the temple and market place

Like a forest bows to winter
Beneath the deep white silence
I will quietly resist

Like a flower in the desert
That only blooms at night
I will quietly resist ~ Rush

It's supposed to be a joke, but John is the one with the insults while Timo exultantly chases after him, like a firefly in a storm cloud. ~ Becca Ritchie

Mother Firefly is the kind of character I've always wanted to play. She's larger than life, terribly tragic, and capable of a lot of love. ~ Leslie Easterbrook

Phases of the Love Cloud
Week 1: A cloud of feelings form around you.

Week 2: It has the texture of cotton candy with an implied sweetness and suggestion of sensuality.

Week 3: It lightens to a blinding brightness, as if barely covering the sun.

Week 4: The texture become less permeable and hardens like sugar caramelized when making leche flan on too high a fire.

Week 5: The cloud darkens gradually and lightning blinks
intermittently like a firefly convention in Georgia.

Week 6: There's an eerie silence gathering around the cloud
which is growing way out of proportion.

Week 8: 200 MPH winds hit, torrential rains
and the roof comes off the house.

Week 10: There's not a cloud in the sky. The sun appears.

Weeks11-25: Inside you there's a storm of tears
that makes Noah's flood look a kiddie-pool.

Week 26: A new cloud of feelings form around you... ~ Beryl Dov

This was just one night, one chance to vary and see where it took me. The fireflies were probably already out: maybe it wasn't just a season or a time but a whole world I'd forgotten. I'd never know until I stepped out into it. So I did. ~ Sarah Dessen

Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.' ~ Gerhard Richter

I need you to make a choice, Breanna. If you want things to stay as they are between us, then I need you to walk out that door. Otherwise, it's going to change."
She tilts her head as if she's as lost in emotion as I am. "It's already changed."
A part of me mourns for her. She's the firefly I'm not sure I'll be able to keep alive, but I shove those thoughts away. Breanna is here, and she isn't leaving, which means she's mine. ~ Katie McGarry

dont get me wrong oblivion
I never loved you kiddo
you that was always sticking around
spoiling me for everyone else
telling me how it would make
you nutty if I didnt let you
go the distance
and I gave you my breasts to feel
didnt I
and my mouth to kiss

O I was too good to you oblivion old kid thats all
and when I might have told you
to go ahead and croak yourselflike
you was always threatning you are
are going to do
I didnt
I said go on you inter-
est me
I let you hang around
and whimper
and Ive been getting mine
Listen

theres a fellow I love like I never love anyone else thats six
foot two tall with a face like any girl would die to kiss and a skin
like a little kittens
thats asked me to go to Murrays tonight with him and see the cab-
aret and dance you know
well
if he asks me to take another Im going to and if he asks me to take
another after that Im going to do that and if he puts me into a taxi
and tells the driver to take her easy and steer for the morning Im
going to let him and if he starts in right away putting it to me in
the cab
Im not going to whisper
Oblivion
do you get me
not that Im tired of automats and Childss and handling out ribbon to
old ladies that aint got three teeth and being followed home by pimps
and ~ E.E. Cummings

There is a place where time stands still ... illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies. ~ Alan Lightman

To the bankrupt poet, to the jilted lover, to anyone who yearns to elude the doubt within and the din without, the tidal strait between Manhattan Island and her favorite suburb offers the specious illusion of easy death. Melville prepared for the plunge from the breakwater on the South Street promenade, Whitman at the railing of the outbound ferry, both men redeemed by some Darwinian impulse, maybe some epic vision, which enabled them to change leaden water into lyric wine. Hart Crane rejected the limpid estuary for the brackish swirl of the Caribbean Sea. In each generation, from Washington Irving's to Truman Capote's, countless young men of promise and talent have examined the rippling foam between the nation's literary furnace and her literary playground, questioning whether the reams of manuscript in their Brooklyn lofts will earn them garlands in Manhattan's salons and ballrooms, wavering between the workroom and the water. And the city had done everything in its power to assist these men, to ease their affliction and to steer them toward the most judicious of decisions. It has built them a bridge. ~ Jacob M. Appel