Bergemann Soot Quotes

A Roman came to Rabbi Gimzo the Water Carrier, and asked, "What is this study of the law that you Jews engage in?" and Gimzo replied, "I shall explain. There were two men on a roof, and they climbed down the chimney. One's face became sooty. The other's not. Which one washed his face?" The Roman said, "That's easy, the sooty one, of course." Gimzo said, "No. The man without the soot looked at his friend, saw that the man's face was dirty, assumed that his was too, and washed it." Cried the Roman, "Ah ha! So that's the study of law. Sound reasoning." But Gimzo said, "You foolish man, you don't understand. Let me explain again. Two men on a roof. They climb down a chimney. One's face is sooty, the other's not. Which one washes?" The Roman said, "As you just explained, the man without the soot." Gimzo cried,"No, you foolish one! There was a mirror on the wall and the man with the dirty face saw how sooty it was and washed it." The Roman said, "Ah ha! So that's the study of law! Conforming to the logical." But Rabbi Gimzo said, "No, you foolish one. Two men climbed down the chimney. One's face became sooty? The other's not? That's impossible. You're wasting my time with such a proposition." And the Roman said, "So that's the law! Common sense." And Gimzo said, "You foolish man! Of course it was possible. When the first man climbed down the chimney he brushed the soot away. So the man who followed found none to mar him." And the Roman cried, "That's brilliant, Rabbi Gimzo. Law is ~ James A. Michener

My sadness isn't a way I feel but a thing trapped inside the walls of my flesh, like a smog. It takes the sheen off everything. It rolls the world in soot. It saps the power from my limbs and presses my back into a stoop. ~ Sara Baume

When we speak of the perfection of art, we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shade, umber or soot. ~ John Constable

The great city seemed to weigh upon me, as though it were crushing me under its heap of brick and stone. Gray, drizzly skies, congested streets, the soot-belching boats and barges chugging up and down the Thames, the teeming mass of four millions hastening about the countless activities of daily life in a metropolis, things adventurous, meaningful, spiritual, quotidian, futile, criminal, meaningless and absurd. Amidst this seething stew of humanity, I painted. ~ Gary Inbinder

I'm killing Zil. Clear enough? I'm putting him down."
"Whoa, man," Edilio said. "That's not what we do. We're the good guys, right?"
"There has to be an end to it, Edilio." He wiped soot from his face with the back of his hand, but smoke had filled his eyes with tears. "I can't keep doing it and never reaching the end."
"It's not your call anymore," Edilio said.
Sam turned a steely glare on him. "You too? Now you're siding with Astrid?"
"Man, there have to be limits," Edilio said.
Sam stood staring down the street. The fire was out of control. All of Sherman was burning, from one end to the other. If they were lucky it wouldn't jump to another street. But one way or the other, Sherman was lost.
"We should be looking to save any kids that are trapped," Edilio said.
Sam didn't answer.
"Sam," Edilio pleaded.
"I begged Him to let me die, Edilio. I prayed to the God who Astrid likes so much and I said, God, if You're there, kill me. Don't let me feel this pain anymore."
Edilio said nothing.
"You don't understand, Edilio," Sam said so softly, he doubted Edilio could hear him over the roar and crackle of the fire raging all around them. "You can't do anything else with people like this. You have to kill them all. Zil. Caine. Drake. You just have to kill them. So right now, I'm starting with Zil and his crew," Sam said. "You can come with me or not. ~ Michael Grant

When we breathe it in, soot can interfere with our lungs and increase the risk of asthma attacks, lung cancer and even premature death. The smallest particles can pass into the blood stream and cause heart disease, stroke and reproductive complications. ~ Sheldon Whitehouse

We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers' headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.
We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.(Pg. 53) ~ Sarah Vowell

Hey," he said, his hand gently rubbing my back. I heard the diesel rattle of vehicles driving away from the scene.
"Hey," I replied, sitting up and looking at my watch. It was 5:00 A.M. "Are you okay?"
"Yep," he said. "We finally got it out." Marlboro Man's clothes were black. Heavy soot covered his drawn, exhausted face.
"Can I go home now?" I said. I was only halfway kidding. And actually, I wasn't kidding at all.
"Sorry about that," Marlboro Man said, still rubbing my back. "That was crazy." He gave a half-chuckle and kissed my forehead. I didn't know what to say.
Driving back to his house, the pickup was quiet. My mind began to race, which is never good at five in the morning. And then, inexplicably, just as we reached the road to his house, I lost it.
"So, why did you even take me there, anyway?" I said. "I mean, if I'm just going to ride in someone's pickup, why even bring me along? It's not like I was any help to anyone…"
Marlboro Man glanced over at me. His eyes were tired. "So…did you want to operate one of the sprayers?" he asked, an unfamiliar edge to his voice.
"No, I just…I mean…" I searched for the words. "I mean, that was just ridiculous! That was dangerous!"
"Well, prairie fires are dangerous," Marlboro Man answered. "But that's life. Stuff like this happens."
I was cranky. The nap had done little to calm me down. "What happens? You just drive right into fires and throw caution to the wind? I mean, people could ~ Ree Drummond

Temple of the Rat King. Ark of the Soot God. Sphincter of Hades. Yes, King's Cross Station, where, according to Knuckle Sandwich, a blow job costs only five quid - any of the furthest-left three cubicles in the men's lavvy downstairs, twenty-four hours a day. ~ David Mitchell

It had been two weeks since they had last danced, and Azalea lay in bed, awake again. A dream hadn't roused her this time, but rather an odd tinny noise that had been clinking across the wooden floor of their room, under their beds and butting against the wainscot with a clinkety tap-tap. It sounded like ... well, quite honestly, it sounded like a spider dragging a spoon.

Azalea knew it couldn't possibly be that (or, rather, she hoped it wasn't), but even so, she heaved herself from the bed and grasped one of Hollyhock's boots, strewn across the floor. The tapping now clinked from the fireplace, and Azalea caught a glint of silver among the soot. Raising the boot, she tiptoed to the unlit hearth.

The fireplace in their room was massive - so large that Azalea could stand up in it and her skirts wouldn't brush the sides. The silver hopped. Azalea dove.

In a puff of soot, Azalea found herself sitting in the hearth, and the silver bit skittering away like mad. Azalea grabbed at it and was rewarded with a very sharp, very familiar bite.

"You!" Azalea seethed, leaping up. Now she recognized the half-hopping half-skitter motion. The sugar teeth! ~ Heather Dixon Wallwork

If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste. ~ Jonathan Swift

Walking in the mountain with bare foot,
Teasing the flowers with heavy soot,
Touching the grasses, climbing the horses, swinging the girls
It is joyful, jolly like the flying.
Swimming in the rivers, tearing the clothes and burning the shoes
Angel of the nature; counting the grasses, touching the flower, teasing the birds ~ M.F. Moonzajer

I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling. There was a gusty wind blowing in at the windows and the soot from the oil burners of the hotel next door was drown-draughted into the room and rolling across the top of the desk like tumbleweed drifting across a vacant lot. I was thinking about going out to lunch and that life was pretty flat and that it would probably be just as flat if I took a drink and that taking a drink all alone at that time of day wouldn't be any fun anyway. ~ Raymond Chandler

Blue bead on the wick,
there's that in me that
burns and chills, blackening
my heart with its soot,
I think sometimes not Apollo heard me
but a different god. ~ Denise Levertov

The smoke from the fire passes through the building and the soot affixes itself to the walls. The smoke passes through the air and keeps going - liberation. ~ Frederick Lenz

Had I been in Toronto, I would certainly have been killed in this attack. In the room where I normally sleep, the flames and the smoke and the soot is such that the gases would have killed me. ~ Ernst Zundel

Southern women are unique; there is no disputing that. We are women born of conflict, our pasts littered with battles and chaos, self-preservation, and protection. We've run plantations during wars, served Union soldiers tea before watching them burn our homes, hidden slaves from prosecution, and endured centuries of watching and learning from our men's mistakes. It is not easy to survive life in the South. It is even more difficult to do it with a smile on your face. We have held these states together, held our dignity and graciousness, held our head high when it was smeared with blood and soot. We are strong. We are Southern. We have secrets and lives you will never imagine. ~ Alessandra Torre

Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground. Everything inanimate - stones, iron - was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful. And when he came back home, the smell of smoke from the kitchen, the barking of dogs, and the cackling of hens somehow seemed all the sweeter. ~ Vasily Grossman

In the back seat the three now silent, soot-smeared children absorbed it all - the choking creosote stench, the roar of wind and flame, the wild rocking of a car being driven that hard, the heat, the emotion so raw and exposed it was like butchered flesh; the tormented, hopeless feeling of two people who lived together in a love not yet love, nor yet not; an unshared life shared; a conspiracy of affections, illnesses, tragedies, jokes and labour; a marriage - the strange, terrible neverendingness of human beings. A family. ~ Richard Flanagan

Thank you," he was whispering, "thank you, thank you. ... " And then he was kissing my face, every inch of it he could find, wiping away the tears and soot, chanting my name. ~ Alexandra Bracken

He bent over Farid and wiped some soot from his cold forehead. "Roxanne knows it," he said. "She'll tell it to you. Just go to her and ... and tell her I've had to go away. Tell her I'm going to find out if the story is true."
He spoke with a strange kind of hesitation, as if it were infinitely difficult to find the right words. "And remind her of my promise - that I'll always find a way back to her, wherever I am. Will you tell her that? ~ Cornelia Funke

As he crossed Grattan Bridge he looked down the river towards the lower quays and pitied the poor stunted houses. They seemed to him a band of tramps, huddled together along the riverbanks, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of sunset and waiting for the first chill of night bid them arise, shake themselves and begone. ~ James Joyce

That's my little piece of heaven. Go ahead."
Ciro followed Remo through the open door to a small enclosed garden. Terra-cotta pots positioned along the top of the stone wall spilled over with red geraniums and orange impatiens. An elm tree with a wide trunk and deep roots filled the center of the garden. Its green leaves and thick branches reached past the roof of Remo's building, creating a canopy over the garden. There was a small white marble birdbath, gray with soot, flanked by two deep wicker armchairs.
Remo fished a cigarette out of his pocket, offering another to Ciro as both men took a seat. "This is where I come to think."
"Va bene," Ciro said as he looked up into the tree. He remembered the thousands of trees that blanketed the Alps; here on Mulberry Street, one tree with peeling gray bark and holes in its leaves was cause for celebration. ~ Adriana Trigiani

When you make a mistake with metal, you can melt things down and start afresh. It is irritating, and it costs in time and soot and sweat, but it can be done. There is a comfort in iron, knowing that a fresh start is always possible.

But a city is not a sword. It is a living thing, and living things defy simple fixing. Roots cannot be reforged. They scar, and broken branches must be cut and sealed with tar, and this makes me angry, as it always has, and my anger has no place to go.

It was easier when I was young. I could use my anger like a hammer against the world. I was so sure of myself and my friends and my rightness. I would hammer at the world, and breaking felt like making to me, and I was good at it. And while I was not wrong, neither was I entirely right.

Nothing is simple. I do not work in wood. I am not brave enough for that. There is a comfort in iron, a promise of safety, a second chance if mistakes are made. But a city is more a forest than a sword. No, it needs more tending than that. Perhaps a city is like a garden, then.

So these days, it seems I have become a gardener. I dig foundations in the earth. I sow rows of houses. I plan and plant. I watch the skies for rain and ruin. I cannot help but think that you would be better at this, but circumstance has put both of us in our own odd place. You are forced to be a hammer in the world, and my ungentle hands are learning how to tend a plot of land.

We must d ~ Patrick Rothfuss

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. ~ Andre Aciman

In a matter of minutes, nothing was left of Spider but a large black soot mark on the ceiling. ~ Jennifer Valoppi

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost") ~ Fritz Leiber

There was soot and orphans everywhere, and gaslit cobbled streets full of fog and sinister gentlemen out for a night of illicit murder. It was a strict and unforgiving society; looking at a piano, eating too much butter, dancing with elan
the sour-faced Queen Victoria forbade all these things. And, it was also raining in the London of themdays
dirty grey slabs of rain that left everywhere shining and slippery. ~ Gideon Defoe

Why did you step out of my life, you minx? Your new hair-do is fascinating and cosmopolitan." He snatched at her pigtail and pressed it to his wet moustache, kissing it vigorously. "The scent of soot and carbon in your hair excites me with suggestions of glamorous Gotham. We must leave immediately. I must go flower in Manhattan. ~ John Kennedy Toole

Pavel interrupted him. "I'll explain what the Talmund is to you, with an example. Now listen carefully: Two chimneysweeps fall down the flue of a chimney; one comes out all covered with soot, the other comes out clean: which of the two goes to wash himself?"
Suspecting a trap, Piotr looked around, as if seeking help. Then he plucked up his courage and answered: "The one who's dirty goes to wash."
"Wrong," Pavel said. "The one who's dirty sees the other man's face, and it's clean, so he thinks he's clean, too. Instead, the clean one see shte soot on the other one's face, believes he's dirty himself, and goes to wash. You understand?"
"I understand. That makes sense."
"But wait; I haven't finished the example. Now I'll ask you a second question. Those two chimneysweeps fall a second time down the same flue, and again one is dirty and one isn't. Which one goes to wash?"
"I told you I understand. The clean one goes to wash."
"Wrong," Pavel said mercilessly. "When he washed after the first fall, the clean man saw that the water in his basin didn't get dirty, and the dirty man realized why the clean man had gone to wash. So, this time, the dirty chimneysweep went and washed."
Piotr listened to this, with his mouth open, half in fright and half in curiosity.
"And now the third question. The pair falls down the flue a third time. Which of the two goes to wash?"
"From now on, the dirty one will go and wash,"
"Wrong again. Did ~ Primo Levi

The rest of the world points an angry finger at the South. The rest of the world sees the cinders only in the eyes of southerners. The rest of the world refuses to see the soot in its own eyes.

The South, in attitude and in effect, is probably not much worse than the North--only in degree and display. It's simply that the South has always been honest about its hatred and its prejudice. Northern intolerance has been subtle, therefore more pernicious and snaring. ~ Eddy L. Harris

Excuse me, ladies," said Nathaniel. He bowed, which dislodged a trickle of soot from his hair. Then his eyes rolled up, and he collapsed face-first onto the floor. ~ Margaret Rogerson

Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven's gate. ~ Ned Hayes

It's amazing what a bit of soot and shaving can do for muscle definition, honestly. ~ Joe Dempsie

Of all the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works. When darkness sifts from the air like fine soft soot and light spreads slowly out of the east then all but the most wretched of humankind rally. It is a spectacle we immortals enjoy, this minor daily resurrection, often we will gather at the ramparts of the clouds and gaze down upon them, our little ones, as they bestir themselves to welcome the new day. What silence falls upon us then, the sad silence of our envy. ~ John Banville

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.
When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann's.
Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman's frightful vision of soot and stone, worker's flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn't let the grass grow under his feet.
As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

Old Prague was a story-book city caked in grime: ancient, soot-blackened. History lived in every detail: in the deerstalker rooftops and the blue-sparking trams. He wandered the streets in disbelief, photographing everything, images from Kafka crowding into his head. With the turn of every corner it came back to him: the special frisson you get behind enemy lines. ~ Philip Sington

We are far from liking London well enough till we like its defects: the dense darkness of much of its winter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons.
There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of children - the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday walk - in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the other. ~ Henry James

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. ~ Charles Dickens

We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners, and that's the whole of eternity. I sometimes fancy something of that sort. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It wasn't a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who'd never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed ...
... and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made. And also clothes, and fashions, and ideas, and interesting vices, songs, and knowledge, and something which, if looked at in the right light, was called civilization. That was what civilization meant. It meant the city. ~ Terry Pratchett

I suppose you could call me ... Soot," said the thing. "Yes ... Soot. I have breathed it, lived in it, and eaten it for so long that it is a fitting name."
"Eaten it?" asked Suzy. "Why eat soot?"
"Boredom," said Soot. ~ Garth Nix

Leaden trumpets spit the soot of power they sayI'm on your side when nobody is, cause nobody is.Come sit right here and sleep while I slip poison in your ear ~ St. Vincent

At the end of the world there lies a mountain so high it makes you dizzy even to think about it. It is as black as soot, as smooth as silk, terribly steep, and where there should be a bottom, there are only clouds. But high up on the peak stands the Hobgoblin's House, and it looks like this." And Snufkin drew a house in the sand.
"Hasn't it got any windows?" asked Sniff.
"No," said Snufkin, "and it hasn't got a door either, because the Hobgoblin always goes home by air riding on a black panther. He goes out every night and collects rubies in his hat."
"What did you say?" asked Sniff, with his eyes popping out of his head. "Rubies! Where does he get them from?"
"The Hobgoblin can change himself into anything he likes," Snufkin answered, "and then he can crawl under the ground and even down onto the sea bed where buried treasure lies. ~ Tove Jansson

Soot is a mixture of chemicals that would eventually be found to contain several carcinogens. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Soot and sorrow: the Night Market's invocation of desperate seriousness, of doom and disaster. ~ Nick Harkaway