Bivouac Quotes

The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised
by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations
ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from
India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous
handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of
coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position.
You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far
would I go for a cup? ~ Jeet Thayil

They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta ?rsula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest periods of love had unexplored possibilities, ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks "the heaven and the earth, and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? ~ Annie Dillard

In the world's broad field of battle, In the bivouac of Life, Be not like dumb, driven cattle! Be a hero in the strife! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The new French theme park based on Napoleon is named Napoleon's Bivouac, and will honor Napoleon with rides, battle reenactments, and the brutal March on Moscow ride. That's a walk-in freezer you stand in for 18 months while you try to eat a dead horse. ~ Peter Sagal

Wake, soldier wake, thy war-horse waits
To bear thee to the battle back;
Thou slumberest at a foeman's gates,
Thy dog would break thy bivouac;
Thy plume is trailing in the dust,
And thy red falchion gathering rust. ~ Thomas Kibble Hervey

Oh, it's mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It's one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can't see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something. Galileo thought that comets were an optical illusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they're not, we can look at what scientists are saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger. ~ Annie Dillard

The punctilious magistrate, presiding in his bivouac of matting, vanished without punctilio. ~ Richard Hughes

Some mountaineers are proud of having done all their climbs without bivouac. How much they have missed ! And the same applies to those who enjoy only rock climbing, or only the ice climbs, onyl the ridges or faces. We should refuse none of the thousands and one joys that the mountains offer us at every turn. We should brush nothing aside, set no restrictions. We should experience hunger and thirst, be able to go fast, but also to go slowly and to contemplate. ~ Gaston Rebuffat

The muffled drum's sad roll has beat; The soldier's last tattoo; No more on Life's parade shall meet; The brave and fallen few. On Fame's eternal camping-ground; Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round; The bivouac of the dead. ~ Theodore O'Hara

I hear that you were on a date with Trouble Kelp. Are you two planning on building a bivouac any time soon? ~ Eoin Colfer