Charred Quotes

In 5-billion years the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I was once making a burger for myself at my boyfriend's house and a lyric started pouring out and I had to catch it, so I ran to another room to write it down, but then the kitchen caught fire. His cabinets were charred, and he was furious. But it was worth it for a song. ~ Jill Scott

He believed that a burger joint ought to look like a join, not like a surgery, not like a nursery with pictures of clowns and funny animals on walls, not like a bamboo pavilion on a tropical island, not like a glossy plastic replica of a 1950s diner that never actually existed. If you were going to eat charred cow smothered in cheese, with a side order of potato strips made as crisp as ancient papyrus by immersion in boiling oil, and if you were going to wash it all down with either satisfying quantities of icy beer or a milkshake containing the caloric equivalent of an entire roasted pig, then this fabulous consumption ought to occur in an ambience that virtually screamed guilty pleasure, if not sin. ~ Dean Koontz

It was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. "Here, do you see this marvelous book, the skins of 182 sheep," he once pronounced as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. "The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot; pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects. Pigments formed at the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine. ~ Regina O'Melveny

I dore not always touch her, lest the kiss
Leave my lips charred. Yea, Lord, a little bliss,
Brief, bitter bliss, one hath for a great sin;
Nathless thou knowest how sweet a thing it is. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. ~ Jonathan Tropper

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of a chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centere, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken for each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; through communtiy of vitality was destroyed -- the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree -- a ruin, but and entire ruin.

'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said: as if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear me. 'I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more -- never more see birds making nests and singing idylls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.' As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disc was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. T ~ Charlotte Bronte

The walls inside were charred from some ancient fire, blackened and lichened and weathered hard, smelling faintly of a smoke so old there may be no one still alive who could possibly remember the flame. ~ Jean Hegland

Evans turned away, did something with his left eyelid for the benefit of the other two. "It's got him," he smirked. "He's tuned-in from now on."

Time started to slow up and act crazy. Minutes took much longer to pass than they had before. It was hard for him to adjust himself to the new ratio, he got all balled-up. When it seemed like half an hour had gone by, the radio would still be playing only the first chorus of the same selection that had begun a good thirty minutes before. Otherwise, nothing much happened. Vinnie was doing a good deal of muffled giggling over there on the divan. The stranger who had been sitting reading the paper got up, yawned, stretched ponderously, and strolled out into the hall, with a muttered "Happy landing!" by way of leave-taking. He didn't come back again any more.

Turner looked down one time and a quarter of an inch of charred paper was all that was left between his fingers. Then the next time he looked there was a full length cigarette again. ~ Cornell Woolrich

My eyes shifted to the charred, smoking remains of the Caste vampire who'd taken the right bullet. And fate whispered in my ear, Who's the bitch now? ~ Jaye Wells

We are acting as if we were the last generation on the planet. Without a radical change in heart, in mind, in vision, the earth will end up like Venus, charred and dead. ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

I worry I'm surrounded by madmen who desire to burn the world down without thought for the consequences of their actions, without regard for all the innocent lives that will be charred by the flames. ~ Chanel Cleeton

The charred smell came, he assumed, from the pages themselves, burning away invisibly as they had for years in the Impetus vault in New York. Eventually they would crumble and be lost to the world, if they weren't thrown away first. For today, though, they were his to inhale and get lost in. ~ Jonathan Galassi

I had no monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself; and when I try to organize, my little force explodes and leaves me bare and charred. ~ Emily Dickinson

Charred bits of black silk swirl into the air, and pearls clatter to the stage ... I'm in a dress of the exact design of my wedding dress, only it's the color of coal and made of tiny feathers. Wonderingly, I lift my long, flowing sleeves into the air, and that's when I see myself on the television screen. Clothed in black except for the white patches on my sleeves. Or should I say my wings. Because Cinna had turned me into a mockingjay. ~ Suzanne Collins

What were you doing spying on me?" she asked bluntly as she flounced down on a bench to inspect her charred skirts.
The lean, hard muscles of his thighs flexed beneath the tight-fitting breeches as he half sat, half leaned on a high stool nearby.
"I grew bored with viewing the ladies who meander about the markets, and I came to see if the sights were better here at the mayor's cottage."
The corners of his lips twitched with amusement, and his eyes gleamed into hers as he added, "I am happy to report, they are!"
Erienne got to her feet in a huff. "Have you nothing better to do than go about ogling the women?"
"I suppose I could find something else to occupy me," he replied easily, "but I can't think of anything that's nearly as enjoyable, except, of course, being in a lady's company."

-Erienne & Christopher ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

She'd lost so much in the process of becoming Zyne, but somewhere in the middle of it all, she'd found herself. Her heritage had shattered her illusions of a tranquil life. Destiny swept behind in a blaze, decimating everything she tried to hold on to. She was left alone, like the solitary tree standing after a forest fire. She'd thought she would crumble to ash, just another memory on the wind. But as blackened pieces of her cracked and fell away, she saw the truth. Under all that charred wreckage was the heartwood. Bruised. Scarred. But still good. Still capable of growth. When she looked in the mirror, she no longer saw a victim, but a survivor. ~ Gwen Mitchell

They burnt down the whole palace and they laughed menacingly. The shadows of the dreams and memories they burnt alive walked all over the ruins, trying to hold on to the charred pieces of their body. ~ Akshay Vasu

But the fucked-up part is once you start self-harming, you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed, inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking repeat. ~ Kathleen Glasgow

Gently Aethelbald lowered his face to hers and kissed her on her charred and blackened mouth. She closed her eyes and felt she could not bear such exquisite pain or beauty. ~ Anne Elisabeth Stengl

The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anynymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. ~ Cormac McCarthy

There's no material safety data sheet for astatine. If there were, it would just be the word "NO" scrawled over and over in charred blood. ~ Randall Munroe

Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished - perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds - on the distant planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan

You're not a killer, Seirin." Sweat coated his face, speckled his clothes. "You couldn't kill Vissyus, and you can't kill me."
Seirin grinned maliciously. "A woman's prerogative. I've had a very long time to think things over."
Botua's charred body floated out of some locked section of her mind. Her will hardened. She'd learned the cost of hesitation. Things were different now. Lon-Shan would face justice. ~ Keith Yatsuhashi

Every year, Kansas watches the world die. Civilizations of wheat grow tall and green; they grow old and golden, and then men shaped from the same earth as the crop cut those lives down. And when the grain is threshed, and the dances and festivals have come and gone, then the fields are given over to fire, and the wheat stubble ascends into the Kansas sky, and the moon swells to bursting above a blackened earth.

The fields around Henry, Kansas, had given up their gold and were charred. Some had already been tilled under, waiting for the promised life of new seed. Waiting for winter, and for spring, and another black death.

The harvest had been good. Men, women, boys and girls had found work, and Henry Days had been all hot dogs and laughter, even without Frank Willis's old brown truck in the parade.

The truck was over on the edge of town, by a lonely barn decorated with new No Trespassing signs and a hole in the ground where the Willis house had been in the spring and the early summer. Late summer had now faded into fall, and the pale blue farm house was gone. Kansas would never forget it. ~ N.D. Wilson

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralized upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. ~ H.G.Wells

Gather Me


Scatter me into the digression of this noise
For, I hear not when my eyes are at peace.
I smother the audacity in my voice
Hiding behind a half-charred fleece;
Let me dwell with the fleeting score,
For, I breathe not when my heart is agog!
I strangle the remains of what you tore
Building the ruins of a deserted synagogue;
Then, gather me
From the compositions of a faded song,
From the reverberations of an unaided gong;
From the mirth of our spring sky,
From the waters where thirsts lie;
From the sleekness of white-rose petals,
From the shrieks of remorse bells;
From the digression of laughter beats,
From the silence of bloodied streets;
From the eyes of their precarious silence,
From there; thence, from there; thence,
Then, gather me. ~ Ashfaq Saraf

Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the and of things inside it.
Blue hills most gentle in calm light, then stretches of assail
And ransack. Such tangles of charred wreckage, shrapnel-bits
Singling and singeing where they fall. I feel the stumbling gait of what I am,
The quiet uproar of undone, how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing
Each thought breaking always in another.
All the unlawful elsewheres rushing in. ~ Laure Sheck

The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...
We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that. ~ Lorrie Moore

We took a right at the fork, heading farther north. The charred houses continued. To the right, a large sign nailed to an old telephone post shouted DANGER in huge red letters. Underneath in crisp black letters was written:
IM-1: Infectious Magic Area
Do Not Enter
Authorized Personnel Only
A second smaller sign under the first one, written on a piece of plastic with permanent marker, read:
Keep out, stupid.
"We aren't going to keep out, are we?" Ascanio asked.
"No."
"Awesome. ~ Ilona Andrews

It is remarkable indeed how we human beings are capable of delighting in the mating call of a flower while we are surrounded by the charred carcasses of our fellow animals. ~ Mohsin Hamid

My first outdoor cooking memories are full of erratic British summers, Dad swearing at a barbecue that he couldn't put together, and eventually eating charred sausages, feeling brilliant. ~ Jamie Oliver

the rank and melancholy smell of charred wet wood and sodden leaves coming towards me on a wisp of air. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

I'll always choose a teacher with enthusiasm and weak technique over one with brilliant strategies but who is just punching the clock. Why? An enthusiastic teacher can learn technique, but it is almost impossible to light a fire inside the charred heart of a burned-out teacher. ~ Dave Burgess

The flame went out and fizzled in the puddle beneath it, and nothing remained of the note but a couple of charred, disintegrated tatters. ~ Evan Angler

Gigantic second and third growth trees are found in the redwoods, forming magnificent temple-like circles around charred ruins more than a thousand years old. ~ John Muir

We found a jewel in the desert,'" I quoted. "'And from it fashioned a charred cinder.
'Queen of Fire Pg 313 ~ Anthony Ryan

3A.02 WAR
Expenses for war equipment,
Training and peoples recruitment,
Be at the cost of hunger and pride,
Humanity be charred in this ride.
[196] - 3A ~ Munindra Misra

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and sub ~ Derek Walcott

A streak of green fire blasted out of the back of the shed, passed a foot over the heads of the mob, and burned a charred rosette in the woodwork over the door.
Then came a voice that was a honeyed purr of sheer deadly menance.
"This is Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, the hottest dragon in the city. It could burn your head clean off."
Captain Vimes limped forward from the shadows. A small and extremely frightened golden dragon was clamped firmly under one arm. His other hand held it by the tail. The rioters watched it, hypnotized.
"Now I know what you're thinking," Vimes went on, softly. "You're wondering, after all this excitement, has it got enough flame left? And, y'know, I ain't so sure myself ... "
He leaned forward, sighting between the dragon's ears, and his voice buzzed like a knife blade: "What you've got to ask yourself is: Am I feeling lucky? ~ Terry Pratchett

The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by debriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. they brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I've never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin. ~ Andrew Davidson

On the platter sat the roast, half of it black, the other half bloody. A wilted sprig of parsley sat beside it, as if Mary couldn't quite allow the roast to leave her kitchen without trying to disguise it.
Silence hung over the table.
Dougal set the cover to one side and removed the covers from the other dishes: a bowl of something green that sat in an oily liquid; a thick slab of pork in the middle of a large, chipped platter; some turnips floating unappetizingly in water; and a basket of undercooked bread.
Sophia thought the turnips were a nice touch. No one liked turnips.
Dougal picked up the carving knife. "Well, my dear?" he asked pleasantly, an amused glint in his eyes. "How do you like your meat? Raw? Or burned to a charred mess? ~ Karen Hawkins

Is this the seedman Jasher?" The commander indicated the charred remains.
"It's his identical twin."
"We know he traveled with you until recently. Where is his amar?"
"I ate it."
"This is a foolish time for flippancy."
"I panicked. It tasted horrible. Do you have any mouthwash? ~ Brandon Mull

He passed the open library door, then stopped, returned. He pushed the door wider to see Kestrel more fully.
A fire burned in the grate. The room was warm, and Kestrel was browsing the shelves as if this were her home, which Arin wanted it to be. Her back to him, she slid a book from its row, a finger on top of its spine.
She seemed to sense his presence. She slid the book back and turned. The graze on her cheek had scabbed over. Her blackened eye had sealed shut. The other eye studied him, almond-shaped, amber, perfect. The sight of her rattled Arin even more than he had expected.
"Don't tell people why you killed Cheat," she said. "It won't win you any favors."
"I don't care what they think of me. They need to know what happened."
"It's not your story to tell."
A charred log shifted on the fire. Its crackle and sift was loud. "You're right," Arin said slowly, "but I can't lie about this."
"Then say nothing."
"I'll be questioned. I'll be held accountable by our new leader, though I'm not sure who will take Cheat's place--"
"You. Obviously."
He shook his head.
Kestrel lifted one shoulder in a shrug. She turned back to the books.
"Kestrel, I didn't come in here to talk politics."
Her hand trembled slightly, then swept along the titles to hide it.
Arin didn't know how much last night had changed things between them, or in what way. "I'm sorry," he said. "Cheat should never have been a threat to you. You shoul ~ Marie Rutkoski

The oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world. Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the faith. ~ Richard Dawkins

What good is a book no-one can read, save for the paper? He was lucky I'd had to let him live. If my glare could have started a fire, he'd have been charred. ~ Kaje Harper

Sensing us, the trees tremble in their sleep, The living leaves recoil before our fires, Baring to us war-charred and broken branches, And seeing theirs, we for our own destruction weep. ~ Kathleen Raine

Over everything - up through the wreckage of the city, in gutters, along the riverbanks, tangled among tiles and tin roofing, climbing on charred tree trunks - was a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green; the verdancy rose even from the foundations of ruined houses. Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of the plants intact; it had stimulated them. ~ John Hersey

Love falls to earth, rises from the ground, pools around the afflicted. Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil. The sun rises. ~ Anne Lamott

Suddenly the clouds seem high above us. They're moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth's sloping atmosphere? ~ Lauren DeStefano

Simon, would you still care for me if you discovered I was not who I say I am?"
What do you mean?"
I mean would you still care for me, no matter what you came to know?"
What a thing to ponder. I don't know what to say."
The answer is no. He does not need to say it.
With a sigh, Simon digs at the fire with the iron poker. Bits of the charred log fall away, revealing the angry insides. they flare orange for a moment, then quiet down again. After three tries, he gives up.
I'm afraid this fire's had it."
I can see a few embers remaining. "No, I think not. If ... "
He sighs, and it says everything. ~ Libba Bray

When Rochambeau put to death 500 at Le Cap and buried them in a large hole dug while they waited for execution, Dessalines raised gibbets of branches and hanged 500 for Rochambeau and the whites in Le Cap to see. But neither Dessalines' army nor his ferocity won the victory. It was the people. They burned San Domingo flat so that at the end of the war it was a charred desert. Why do you burn everything? asked a French officer of a prisoner. We have a right to burn what we cultivate because a man has a right to dispose of his own labour, was the reply of this unknown anarchist. ~ C.L.R. James

There are stories you don't want to tell, and there are stories that scald your brainpan right down to the tongue at the mere thought of uttering. But you can't NOT. Even if you wait until your skull is nothing but a charred and smoking husk, the truth will still be in there, squirming. ~ Jerry Stahl

…It was this white garment of mourning which he still wore, the white mourning of surgical gowns so much more significant than black, since white is the colour of obliteration whereas black, far from being the colour of emptiness and nothingness, is much more the active shade which makes the deep and therefore dark substance of all things stand out, from the flight of despair whose magical blackness animates the blank parchment of the soul, to the supposedly sinister flight of the raven, whose croakings and cadaverous meals are but the joyful signs of physical metamorphoses, black as congelead blood or charred wood, but much less lugubrious than the deathly restfulness of white. Yet this desert whiteness did not rule out all subsequent possibilities, when it too would coagulate to form directions in blood and when it too would know the three congruences of putrefaction. ~ Michel Leiris

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls ... ~ Penelope Lively

How had she lived until now without knowing what a touch and a kiss could do, how it could consume a person like a wildfire consumed a forest, leaving nothing behind but a charred surface? ~ Tina Folsom

Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter what befalls us in life, we can take the charred remnants and we can reconstruct a life unimaginably richer than that from which the shards and pieces fell. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

He also ate every scrap of the cold meat she had cooked for him, and good gods, it was pretty awful. Somehow she had managed to wreck the simple task of browning chicken in a skillet. The outside was charred black, and the inside oozed juice that was still pink. ~ Thea Harrison

She was not afraid of cyclones in the darkest bile-green-and-black skies during storms that cracked off the limbs of oaks and the tops of pines and made the tin roof of the house and gallery pop and groan and bend upward at the edges. Nor of the hail that pocked the tin like buckshot raining down. Nor of lightning that split trees their length and left smoldering charred skeletons rooted to the wet, scorched earth. She was not afraid of God, with his sly and untrustworthy balance of love and wrath, who was yet curious enough to make himself vulnerable and walk among humans just like herself in the beautiful, harrowing embodiment of Jesus. ~ Brad Watson

The thing about tragedy is that it isn't about just getting through it, it's about getting on with your life when the dust has settled but the landscape is bombed out, smoke in the air, charred remains at your feet. ~ Andrea Dunlop

The tilapia has been drowned in a garlic and chilli and coriander sauce, so many exposed white bones in its charred and thorny dorsal fin that they look like the ivory keys in the warped piano organ the devil plays in hell. ~ Trent Dalton

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms, them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready. ~ Wendell Berry

My Deep-Fried Pork Cutlet with Fondue Lunch Set is ready to eat!"
A Lunch Set?! With fondue even?!
Wow, that's, um... a really Soma thing to make!
"So I'm assuming the cheese is a dipping sauce? And it's in this little pot?"
"Yep, you got it. Go on and give it a good dunking."
"Here we go...
huh?
It's black?! Wait a minute, isn't this supposed to be cheese?!"
Mmm! Sooo gooood! It's so light and tender! The crunchy outer shell practically melts in your mouth the second you bite into it!
And the sauce is mellow and rich, melding together with the cutlet in indescribable deliciousness!
"Wait... what is this sauce?!"
"At a glance, it looks like tonkatsu sauce- the plain old black paste that always goes with pork cutlets. But it's really a black cheese sauce!
I made an eggplant puree from chunks of eggplant I grilled over a brazier until their skins were charred good and black. Then I took that puree, rich with the unique aroma of charcoal grilling, and blend it with cheese!"
"Ah! Now I see! The soft flavors of cheese and chargrilling work together, lingering in the mouth as a light but rich aftertaste!
That's how you managed to give such a refined and elegant deliciousness! ~ Yuto Tsukuda

When she treads on my grave and feels as if she's trampling on that doting old man's bones, my spirit will still be alive, feeling the whole weight of her body, feeling pain, feeling the fine-grained velvety smoothness of the soles of her feet. Even after I'm dead I'll be aware of that. I can't believe I won't. In the same way, Satsuko will be aware of the presence of my spirit, joyfully enduring her weight. Perhaps she may even hear my charred bones rattling together, chuckling, moaning, creaking. And that would by no means occur only when she was actually stepping on my grave. At the very thought of those Buddha's Footprints modeled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone. Between sobs I would scream: It hurts! It hurts! ... Even though it hurts, I'm happy - I've never been more happy, I'm much, much happier than when I was alive! ... Trample harder! Harder! ~ Junichiro Tanizaki

Zoey didn't want to be paranoid, but there was something about the man in the loincloth made of charred doll heads that made her nervous. ~ David Wong

Sometimes, most times, when I think back to the people that I loved, the person that I was ... I feel like I'm reading the pages of a book written about
someone else's life.
I can't believe that was me. I can't believe that was you. I can't believe there was an us.
It's not that I regret it. It just doesn't feel like it happened to me and yet, I can't forget it.
I feel like it's still refracting and reflecting back on me, haunting me.
Jesus intercepted my mind, my thoughts, my mistakes, my shame. He's changed me from the inside out. But I'm afraid you still see the stain.
Lord, let them see my heart, look at You and Your still-in-progress work of art. Help us all to look beyond our burned bridges, charred reputations, scattered shards of memories, and gaze at the One who took on the weight of all the hate to find the freedom in redemption that we all crave. ~ Katie Kiesler

I possessed only a book, which I carried in my small backpack. Suddenly, while I was walking, the book began to burn. Dawn was breaking and almost no cars passed. While throwing the charred backpack in an irrigation ditch I felt my back sting as though I had wings. ~ Roberto Bolano

A Favorite start to a book [sorry it's long!]:

"In yesterday's Sunday Times, a report from Francistown in Botswana. Sometime last week, in the middle of the night, a car, a white American model, drove up to a house in a residential area. Men wearing balaclavas jumped out, kicked down the front door, and began shooting. When they had done with shooting they set fire to the house and drove off. From the embers the neighbors dragged seven charred bodies: two men, three women, two children.
Th killers appeared to be black, but one of the neighbors heard them speaking Afrikaans among themselves. And was convinced they were whites in blackface. The dead were South Africans, refugees who had moved into the house mere weeks ago.
Approached for comment, the SA Minister of Foreign Affairs, through a spokesman, calls the report 'unverified'. Inquiries will be undertaken, he says, to determine whether the deceased were indeed SA citizens. As for the military, an unnamed source denies that the SA Defence Force had anything to do with the matter. The killings are probably an internal ANC matter, he suggests, reflecting 'ongoing tensions between factions.
So they come out, week after week, these tales from the borderlands, murders followed by bland denials. He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to! Yet where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled? Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a dist ~ J.M. Coetzee

Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. ~ Cormac McCarthy

They had met one another, at first not very often, throughout the heady autumn of the first London air raids. Never had a season been more felt; one bought the poetic sense of it with the sense of death. Out of mists of morning charred by the smoke from ruins each day rose to a height of unmisty glitter; between the last of sunset and first note of the siren the darkening glassy tenseness of evening was drawn fine. From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of an acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear. All through London the ropings-off of dangerous tracts of streets made islands of exalted if stricken silence, and people crowded against the ropes to admire the sunny emptiness on the other side. The diversion of traffic out of blocked main thoroughfares into byways, the unstopping phatasmagoric streaming of lorries, buses, vans, drays, taxis past modest windows and quiet doorways set up an overpowering sense of London's organic power – somewhere there was a source from which heavy motion boiled, surged and, not to be damned up, force itself into new channels. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Me was the glittering desolation of the sea, the awful solitude upon which I had already suffered so much; behind me the island, hushed under the dawn, its Beast People silent and unseen. The enclosure, with all its provisions and ammunition, burnt noisily, with sudden gusts of flame, a fitful crackling, and now and then a crash. The heavy smoke drove up the beach away from me, rolling low over the distant tree-tops towards the huts in the ravine. Beside me were the charred vestiges of the boats and these four dead bodies. ~ H.G.Wells

It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings
his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again ... When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse. ~ Elie Wiesel

My brothers were still catching sparrows when my cousin told me to give him the baby bird. I didn't want to, but I took the squirming bird out of my pocket anyway. I wanted another look at it. It was so small. I don't think it could fly yet. My cousin plucked the bird from my palm and went off with it. I should never have taken it out of my pocket. When he returned, the birds were all burnt to a crisp. Their bones were popping out of their skin. I couldn't even tell which of the birds was mine. I looked at their burnt feathers and blackened skin and burst into tears. I cried for him to give me back my bird, but it was too late. My yelling must have irritate him, because he grabbed the smallest one and shoved it in my face, and said, 'Here it is.' When I took that charred baby bird from him, I felt the world crash down on me. It was the first time I had ever held something that had died. I love you as much as the sorrow I felt. ~ Kyung-Sook Shin

Beyond the field my eyes studied a long wall of pine trees, a windbreak of sorts that stretched from the road back toward an old farmhouse and an older barn surrounded by low brush. Through the binoculars, I could just make out the top of Carney's Impala parked in the side yard by the house. From a long way off you could see that the white house paint was blistered or gone to bare clapboard. The roof of the barn looked like it had been hit by lightning at some point. There was a charred, gaping hole on one corner. The whole structure sagged left. ~ James Patterson

If the forest has a day of fire and the heat of the flames does not consume a special tree, it will still be changed; charred, but still standing. ~ Dan Groat

Like the phoenix, socialism is reborn from every pile of ashes left day in, day out, by burnt-out human dreams and charred hopes. ~ Zygmunt Bauman

Fire surrounded them. Fire. Mustafar. Obi-Wan. He used his ever-present anger to burn away the memories, but the charred husks of the past clung to the forefront of his consciousness. Padmé. ~ Paul S. Kemp

Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of becomings - becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic - just as he was also an antichrist, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated by lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference. ~ Nick Land

All I could hear was the violin, and it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. ~ Elie Wiesel

There is a bus station in Henry, but it isn't on Main Street. It's one block north - the town fathers hadn't wanted all the additional traffic. The station lost one-third of its roof to a tornado fifteen years ago. In the same summer, a bottle rocket brought the gift of fire to its restrooms. The damage has never been repaired, but the town council makes sure that the building is painted fresh every other year, and always the color of a swimming pool. There is never graffiti. Vandals would have to drive more than twenty miles to buy the spray paint.

Every once in a long while, a bus creeps into town and eases to a stop beside the mostly roofed, bright aqua station with the charred bathrooms. Henry is always glad to see a bus. Such treats are rare. ~ N.D. Wilson

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around ... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind ... And of course, the usual mess - apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody's handkerchief, somebody's penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow. ~ Arkady Strugatsky

The music and applause fast fading from his ears, Bruce would lay down his guitar, grit his teeth, and walk dutifuly back into his father's charred vision of the world. ~ Peter Ames Carlin

Frank, hunched against a bastard wind knifing in off the Irish Sea, isn't sure at first where the sound is coming from. It's barely light and a soft insistent hiss sits below the whining gale, like white-noise feedback at song's end. He leans a little closer and realises the source is sand rattling against the charred skin stretched tom-tom tight across the dead man's face. ~ Ed Chatterton

[Piper] rushed to get dressed. By the time she got up on deck, the others had already gathered - all hastily dressed except for Coach Hedge, who had pulled the night watch.
Frank's Vancouver Winter Olympics shirt was inside out. Percy wore pajama pants and a bronze breastplate, which was an interesting fashion statement. Hazel's hair was all blown to one side as though she'd walked through a cyclone; and Leo had accidentally set himself on fire. His T-shirt was in charred tatters. His arms were smoking. ~ Rick Riordan

Luce closed her eyes,trying to remember exactly what he'd looked like. There were no words for it.It was just an incredible, joyous connection.
"I saw him."
"Who,Daniel? Yeah,I saw him,too. He was the guy who dropped the ax when it was his turn to do the chopping. Big mistake. Huge."
"No,I really saw him. As he truly is." Her voice shook. "He was so beautiful."
"Oh,that." Bill tossed his head, annoyed.
"I recognized him.I think I've seen him before."
"Doubt it." Bill coughed. "That was the first and last time you'll be able to see him like that.You saw him, and then you died.That's what happens when mortal flesh looks upon an angel's unbridled glory. Instant death. Burned away by the angel's beauty."
"No,it wasn't like that."
"You saw what happened to everyone else. Poof. Gone." Bill plopped down beside her and patted her knee. "Why do you think the Mayans started doing sacrifices by fire after that? A neighboring tribe discovered the charred remains and had to explain it somehow."
"Yes,they burst into flames right away. But I lasted longer-"
"A couple of extra seconds? When you were turned away? Congratulations."
"You're wrong.And I know I've seen that before."
"You've seen his wings before, maybe.But Daniel shedding his human guise and showing you his true form as an angel? Kills you every time."
"No." Luce shook her head. "You're saying he can never show me who he really is?"
Bill shrugged. "Not without ~ Lauren Kate

Amongst these brave soldiers was Dfr Vir Singh (Retd) of 4 Horse, whose flesh was charred off his bones by a Cobra missile that hit his tank. He spoke with great regard for his Squadron Commander Maj Bhupinder Singh, MVC, who too was severely burned in the same attack after they had destroyed many tanks in the Battle of Phillora. When the then Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri visited a dying Maj Singh in the Army Base Hospital, Delhi, the officer had tears in his eyes. A touched Shastri told Maj Singh that tears didn't become a brave soldier like him. Maj Singh replied, 'Sir, I'm not pained because of any injury. I'm anguished that a soldier is not being able to salute his Prime Minister. ~ Rachna Bisht Rawat

By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor... ~ Cormac McCarthy

Never counted in the "costs" of war are the dead birds, the charred animals the murdered fish, incinerated insects, poisoned water sources, destroyed vegetation. Rarely mentioned is the arrogance of the human race toward other living things with which it shares this planet. All these are forgotten in the fight for markets and ideologies. This arrogance will probably be the ultimate undoing of the human species. ~ Arundhati Roy

The air there was heavy with the somnolence of a party prolonged into the early hours; and a dull light came from the lamps, whose charred wicks glowed red inside their globes. The ladies had reached that vaguely melancholy hour when they felt it necessary to tell each other the story of their lives. ~ Emile Zola

I eat a bunch of spinach, but only to clean out my pipes to make room for more ribs, fool! I will submit to fruit and zucchini, yes, with gusto, so that my steak-eating machine will continue to masticate delicious charred flesh at an optimal running speed. By consuming kale, I am buying myself bonus years of life, during which I can eat a shit-ton more delicious meat. You don't put oil in your truck because it tastes good. You do it so your truck can continue burning sweet gasoline and hauling a manly payload. ~ Nick Offerman

But this you must know: the violent murder of a mother- when a boy is at the tender age, when he is just discovering girls- it is a terrible thing. confusingly mixed up with all the things feminine, it leaves a charred residue on the soul, like the black marks found at the bottom of a burned pot. no matter how much you scrub and scrub the pot bottom with steel wool and cleansers, the scars, they are permanent ~ Richard C. Morais

After the fire died down, what remained were two charred hearts, that once beat as one. ~ Anthony Liccione

The mountain consisted of a giant cone of blue-gray rock and was surrounded by an endless, barren highland studded with a few trees charred by fire and overgrown with gray moss and gray brush, out of which here and there brown boulders jutted up like rotten teeth. Even by light of day, the region was so dismal and dreary that the poorest shepherd in this poverty-stricken province would not have driven his animals here. And by night, by the bleaching light of the moon, it was such a godforsaken wilderness that it seemed not of this world. ~ Patrick Suskind

Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigned in New York this week, where he stepped up his controversial goal of helping children ... It's all summed up in his campaign slogan, 'Arnold Schwarzenegger: Cutting violence in half with a laser-guided chain gun across a charred landscape - for the children.' ~ Jon Stewart

Once when I was a tree, African sun woke me up green at dawn. African wind combed the branches of my hair. African rain washed my limbs. Once when I was a tree, flesh came and worshipped my roots. Flesh came to preserve my voice. Flesh came honoring my limbs. Now flesh comes with metal teeth, with chomping sticks and fire launchers. And flesh cuts me down and enslaves my limbs to make forts, ships, pews for other gods. Now flesh laughs at my charred and beaten frame, discarding me in the mud, burning me up in the flames. Flesh has grown pale and lazy. Flesh has sinned against the fathers. Now flesh listens no more to the voice of spirits talking through my limbs. If flesh would listen, I would warn him that the spirits are displeased and are planning what to do with him. But flesh thinks I am dead, charred and gone. Flesh thinks that by fire he can kill, thinks that with metal teeth, I will die. Thinks that all the voices linked from root to limb are silenced. Flesh does not know that he does not give me life, nor can he take it away. That Is What the spirits are singing now. It is time that flesh bow down on his knee again. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Seeing that glorious body and to-die-for face only made her crave him more.
Then he had kissed her.
And what a kiss!
It was a kiss like none other. There was fire and a hunger that was both savage as well as tender.
At first.
Then the fire had come. The kiss had charred her, searing her from the inside out. Each touch of his tongue, each time those lips of his moved over here, had been the most incredible feeling in the world. ~ Donna Grant

My murdered poets drew from deep wells, even if they were presently hidden from me. They spoke the same words as the monks, as the Conquistadores, as our Dictator General, but coaxed a language anew from the charred bones they'd been tossed. I had taken comfort that we had been lying for millennia, erasing whole races of writers, executing texts with aplomb. It wasn't new. And someone had always been pressing hidden words from quill to parchment backed by stone. Whispering them into someone's ear. Even if the parchment was burned and the hand chopped off and thrown into the same fire, the stone remained. Only there were the words legible. ~ Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

Our human flesh is better than most things at keeping pace with its own decay, and yet it takes so little - a tiny knife dragged across the windpipe, a dropped roof tile, a puddle three inches deep - to unmake a man or woman. It's amazing, given everything's fragility, that we don't live in a smashed world, all order and structure utterly undone, the whole land heaped with bone, charred wood, carelessly shattered glass. It amazes me sometimes that anything is still standing. ~ Brian Staveley

Then there are some minor points that strike me as suggestive - for instance, the position of Mrs. Hubbard's sponge bag, the name of Mrs. Armstrong's mother, the detective methods of Mr. Hardman, the suggestion of Mr. MacQueen that Ratchett himself destroyed the charred note we found, Princess Dragomiroff's Christian name, and a grease spot on a Hungarian passport. ~ Agatha Christie