Churning Quotes

Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed
significance, but not purpose. ~ Lydia Millet

He could feel his stomach churning. I'm repressing things, he thought. Along with everything else I don't have time for. I'm searching for the slayers of the dead and can't even manage to pay attention to the living. For a dizzying instant his entire consciousness was filled with only one urge. To take off. Flee. Disappear. Start a new life. ~ Henning Mankell

I have this clutter of questions all churned together in my mind and they won't stop churning. I've found out too much and not enough. there are too many pieces that could go together too many ways and I can't stop shifting them around. There has to be some way it all makes sense and it doesn't yet."
"You're asking a lot of life if you want it to make sense."
Most of the time, Joliffe was of the same opinion, but he shook his head against it now like against a fly's buzz and said nothing, frowning at the pen he was still twirling.
Basset watched him a moment, then said,
"Well, if you can't let it go, go at it as if you were trying to make a story of all these pieces you have. Shift them around and fill the gaps until they make the sense you want. ~ Margaret Frazer

I hear his heartbeats as my own, I feel his urgency as my own, our covalent union making of us both a new, charged, unknown substance; so too my skin, my liquidy skin, is both our separation and our merger, it is our shared, evanescent frontier; yet when he kisses the valley of my belly so long and so shiver-warm I realize that I am also beyond his skin's extremity, I am past the barrier of his skin, I am also living within him, for the juncture is no longer clear: utterly, entirely, I feel his response to me, I feel his churning when I surge; and it is sublime circuitry, this overlap, this confusion, giving me new contours, new periphery, expand­ing me into added dimensions,... ~ Evan Dara

It was an imprudent idea to begin with."
"I shan't argue with you on that point."
Rose scoffed at him. "You don't get to play morally superior with me, Grey. I may have been stupid enough to conspire against you, but you didn't even recognize someone you've known for years! If one of us must be the bigger idiot, I think it must be you!" Oh dear God. She covered her mouth with her hand. What had she just said?
Dark arched brows pulled together tightly over stormy blue eyes. "You're right," he agreed. "I am an idiot, but only because I allowed this ridiculous ruse past the point when I realized your identity."
Rose froze-like a damp leaf on an icy pond. "You knew?" And yet he continued to pretend…oh, he was worse than she by far.
"Of course I knew." He glowered at her. "Blindfold me and I would know the scent of your skin, the exact color and texture of your skin. Do you not realize that I know the color of your eyes right down to the flecks of gold that light their depths?"
Heart pounding, stomach churning in shock, Rose could only stare at him. How could he say such things to her and sound so disgusted? "When?" Her voice was a ragged whisper. "When did you know?"
"I suspected before but tried to deny it. The morning after we last met I took one look at your sweet mouth and knew there couldn't be two women in the world, let alone London with the same delectable bottom lip."
It hurt. Oh, she hadn't thought hearing him say such wonderful t ~ Kathryn Smith

Sometimes you just know ... And then it doesn't even seem scary. Just certain and joyful. Like a deep stream, flowing steady and strong, jumping and splashing and churning as it passes around and over the land in which it is grounded. And for this knowing, and flowing, I am grateful. ~ Vashti Lsc

Literary censorship should not be necessary within the parameters of the law because it's simply a reflection of prevailing social prejudices!

Writing should challenge and change prevailing ideas - churning the guts and ruffling feathers of friends, family and society. Antagonizing is a product of open writing. Expecting less is resignation and stagnation that slides the art into the status-quo.

Writing needs the wider view that shows the causality of our prevailing social prejudice - and shakes at its foundation.

Writers spare us no less and please leave your praise and oppugn to Christopher Hitchens. ~ Jack Tar

Do you know the real secret of how Presidents become Presidents?" Before I can answer, he explains, "It's because they're good at getting people to do things for them. In fact, they're not just good at it. They're maestros. Virtuosos. To get that title of President, you need thousands of people doing thousands of different things, all for your benefit. It's a massive churning machine. And y'know what feeds that machine?" he asks. "People like you, Beecher. It's fed with your life, and your family, and your reputation. Because when things go wrong ... and they always go wrong ... the President isn't allowed to have that skunk smell around him. So when that happens, he doesn't just replace you. He crumples you up, tosses you out back, and ... chomp goes the woodchipper. ~ Brad Meltzer

All suffering is a consequence of a constant quest. A quest to follow a mirage, the mirage that is the creation of our mind, the illusion of happiness, the illusion of being loved. That is what it is. Love itself is an illusion. We misuse the word so much we forget what it means. It means nothing, because it simply does not exist. It is the destiny of the mind to seek. When it does not discover what it seeks, it gives birth to hopelessness. And given our undying spirit, from that hopelessness rises hope itself. This hope takes us to the quest all over again, churning us in an endless cycle of suffering. This cycle is called life. Suffer you will, one way or the other... ~ Nilesh Rathod

With the tension churning within us, knowing all the ways the earth is not yet as God intended it to be, we are driven to pray daily: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." We are not looking for an escape from the world; we are looking for the restoration of the world. ~ Jonathan Martin

The first week I was here, a girl got canned for humming an Erasure song while she was churning butter. It's like, yeah, Erasure is historic, but not historic enough. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance
this is why people tell me secrets
my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound. ~ Dave Eggers

I liked sports real well myself. And when I was about thirteen, I thought I knew why. I looked at it this way. God put you in a body, and He made that body subject to a lot of natural laws, you know? Like gravity and stuff. You see, Doc, I was brought up very religious, and I believed in God. And I believed in a soul. And I got to thinking that maybe the soul was like a prisoner in the body. Maybe the soul was too big for the body and was always trying to get out. And sports was - well, according to natural laws, you should only be able to run so fast, right? I mean, you get your legs working, you get your muscles churning as fast as they can go, you take into account the wind against you, stuff like that, all natural and scientific, and then you know just how fast you can go. You see? But me, I figured that there was something inside you, inside your soul, that could make you go just a little bit faster. Just a little bit faster, and it didn't have anything to do with muscles or nature or anything. It was your soul doing it. And when your soul made you go just that little bit faster, well then, for that moment, you were free. Does that make any sense? ~ Paul Quarrington

Already churning. If I come, will you make Dad put ~ Sidney Sheldon

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick. ~ Mick Ralphs

And then, suddenly, we broke free from the trees. The rolling plain beyond was almost overwhelming in its openness, especially lit by a brilliant, almost awful sunset, the sky never redder, every cloud seemingly blazing from within, suffused with fire and vengeance, roiling, churning, nothing but fury in every direction. Some poets spoke of red sunsets as things of sublime beauty, prefacing good fortune or romance, but they always seemed to be foretelling some bloodletting, murder, or tragedy writ large for all the world to see, and never more so than now. ~ Jeff Salyards

He sat down among the evidence at a barren communal desk in the basement of the station. He looked through the stack of extra fliers that my father had made up. He had memorized my face, but still he looked at them. He had come to believe that the best hope in my case might be the recent rise in development in the area. With all the land churning and changing, perhaps other clues whould be found that would provide the answer he needed.
In the bottom of the box was the bag with my jingle-bell hat. When he'd handled it to my mother, she had collasped on the rug. He still couldn't pinpoint the moment he'd fallen in love with her. I knew it was the day he'd sat in our family room while my mother drew stick figures on butcher paper and Buckley and Nate slept toe to toe on the couch. I felt sorry for him. He had tried to solve my murder and he failed. He had tried to love my mother and he had failed.
Len looked at the drawing of the cornfield that Lindsey had stolen and forced himself to acknowledge this: in his cautiousness, he had allowed a murderer to get away. He could not shake his guilt. He knew, if no one else did, that by being with my mother in the mall that day he was the one to blame for George Harvey's freedom.
He took his wallet out of his back pocket and laid down the photos of all the unsolved cases he had ever worked on. Among them were his wife's. He turned them all face-down. 'Gone,' he wrote on each one of them. He would no longer wait for a date t ~ Alice Sebold

...for most of the ride through British Columbia we were treated to stunning scenery ranging from majestic peaks shrouded in mist to more barren vistas reminiscent of the Old West ... to churning rivers fed by waterfalls twisting down mountains like the woven tassels on the white summer Chanel bag I'd left back home. Do waterfalls ever feel unfashionable after Labor Day ~ Doreen Orion

1)The pain was a welcome distraction from the turbulence churning inside me. I was just happy to be thinking of something else, anything other than…her. ~ Kirsty Moseley

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood -- she was already almost a block away -- so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they'd written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it's the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don't? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don't calmly think, as you're scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before te ~ Heidi Julavits

There is funny ha-ha, and there is funny peculiar, and beneath a trapdoor in Kevin's mind is a place where the two blur together, the place of jokes, churning so furiously frequently, when it kicks up a line, he has no idea what it will turn out to be. ~ Kevin Brockmeier

In the beginning, in the time that was no time, nothing existed but the Womb. And the Womb was a limitless dark cauldron of all things in potential: a chaotic blood-soup of matter and energy, fluid as water yet mud-solid with salts of the earth; red-hot as fire yet restlessly churning and bubbling with all the winds. And the Womb was the Mother, before She took form and gave form to Existence. She was the Deep ... ~ Barbara G. Walker

PERFECTION The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. ~ David Bayles

I couldn't take my eyes from those plumes of spray, the churning shards of light. Was this what the old man was afraid of? I tried to think of poor dead Snowy Muir but death was hard to imagine when you had these blokes dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in their hair. I couldn't have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. ~ Tim Winton

Grasping the staff, Donia pressed her mouth to Beira's still body and inhaled. The rest of the Winter Queen's cold flowed into her, rolling through her like an icy wave, churning until it suddenly stopped and lay quiet - a fathomless frozen pool surrounded by ice-laden trees and unmarred white fields.
The words came to her from the white world, sliding through her lips like a winter wind, "I am the Winter Queen. As those before me, I will carry the wind and ice."
And she was healed, stronger than she'd ever been. ~ Melissa Marr

When I hit my 20s, I took a chill pill and relaxed because throughout my teens I was churning out an album a year. It was a treadmill of work then recording, promoting and touring. ~ Vanessa Mae

absence
looks like a lake bed flooded with sky
sounds like cotton howling
tastes like tear-stained pillows
smells like churning bile and burnt hair
feels like screaming agony, my heart dying and dying ~ Beth Morey

I see the wheels churning in that big brain. What's going through your pretty head? ~ Lorelei James

The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury against the rocky bulwarks of the coast; giant tides eat away the sand beaches and alter the entire contour of an island overnight; williwaw winds pour down the side of a volcano like snow sliding off a roof, building to a hundred-mile velocity in a matter of minutes and churning the ocean into a maelstrom where the stoutest vessels founder. ~ Corey Ford

Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, narrowing, dangerous form of behavior.

The romantic poetry and fiction of the last 200 years has quite blinded us to the fact that emotions are an active and harmful form of stupor.

Any peasant can tell you that. Beware of emotions. Any child can tell you that. Watch out for the emotional person. He is a lurching lunatic.

Emotions are caused by biochemical secretions in the body to serve during the state of acute emergency. An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac. Emotions are addictive and narcotic and stupefacient.

Do not trust anyone who comes on emotional.

What are the emotions? In a book entitled Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, written when I was a psychologist, I presented classifications of emotions and detailed descriptions of their moderate and extreme manifestations. Emotions are all based on fear. [...]

The emotional person cannot think; he cannot perform any effective game action (except in acts of physical aggression and strength). The emotional person is turned off sensually. His body is a churning robot. [...]

The only state in which we can learn, harmonize, grow, merge, join, understand is the absence of emotion. This is called bliss or ecstasy, attained through centering the emotions. [...]

Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other ~ Timothy Leary

America has tolerated inequality because people think they can get ahead. If you have immobility on top of inequality, then people are not going to be happy campers. If you're stuck on the bottom and there just isn't much churning in society and you're stuck there through your adulthood, that's not a nice life to look forward to. ~ Thomas B. Edsall

Years may go by, and the wheel in the river Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day, Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for ever Long after all of the boys are away. Home for the Indies and home from the ocean, Heroes and soldiers we all will come home; Still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion, Turning and churning that river to foam. You with the bean that I gave when we quarrelled, I with your marble of Saturday last, Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled, Here we shall meet and remember the past. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

My wolf-sharpened sense of smell caught the scent of ice-cream cones, of asphalt, of churning ocean, of swirling beer, of first kisses and last kisses. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Don't worry about genius - just keep churning out the words. Genius comes naturally. ~ Joel Dicker

I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano's point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, constantly scheming, or reacting to incoming fire, the mind gets exhausted. You get sloppy and make bad decisions. I could see how the counterintuitive act of stopping, even for a few seconds, could be a source of strength, not weakness. ~ Dan Harris

There were things in nature that took their beauty from delicate structure and intricate symmetry. Flowers. Seashells. Butterfly wings. And then there were things that were beautiful for their wild power and their refusal to be tamed. Snowcapped mountains. Churning thunderclouds. Shaggy, sharp-toothed lions.

This man silhouetted before her? He belonged, quite solidly, in the latter category. ~ Tessa Dare

Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans. ~ Neil Gaiman

Like a duck on the pond. On the surface everything looks calm, but beneath the water those little feet are churning a mile a minute. ~ Gene Hackman

When I heard 'Back to Black' from Amy Winehouse, I was, like, 'Wow.' To hear such a soulful voice that feels like it's from a different era, I mean, it felt so fresh and unique, and that was something that opened my eyes and made me believe that it's not always about churning out the same thing in this industry. ~ Ella Henderson

Inside, inside I had become like that distant sea, relentlessly churning, tossed about by squalls that tore away any sense of where the surface might be. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Doubt is unsettling to the ego, and those who are drawn to ideologies that promise the dispelling of doubt by proffering certainties will never grow. In seeking certainty they are courting the death of the soul, whose nature is forever churning possibility, forever seeking the larger, forever riding the melting edge of certainty's glacier. ~ James Hollis

Up near the top, the view pierces me so totally I have one of those flash thoughts about tossing myself into the ocean. Surrender to the enormous wildness, the water's churning gray force, the solid rocks. It doesn't seem so scary. The idea. It seems like it could bring a lot of quiet. Endless quiet. ~ Amy McNamara

This clockwork twin of mine halted before me, her bowels churning out a settecento minuet, and offered me the bold carnation of her smile. Click, click
she raises her arm and busily dusts my cheeks with pink, powdered chalk that makes me cough; then thrusts towards me her little mirror. ~ Angela Carter

Have you ever had so many thoughts churning inside that you didn't dare let them escape, in case they blew you wide open? ~ Ellen Hopkins

She wanted to explain everything to him - how certain notes of the Moonlight Sonata shredded her heart like wind inside a paper bag; how her soul felt as endless and deep as the sea churning on their left; how the sight of the young Muslim couple filled her with an emotion that was equal parts joy and sadness; and above all, how she wanted a marriage that was different from the dead sea of marriages she saw all around her, how she wanted something finer, deeper, a marriage made out of silk and velvet instead of coarse cloth, a marriage made of clouds and stardust and red earth and ocean foam and moonlight and sonatas and books and art galleries and passion and kindness and sorrow and ecstasy and of fingers touching from under a burqua. ~ Thrity Umrigar

The results you are churning out are a direct or indirect reflection of what you allowed into your life. Unlearning what you already know and practice is no easy task, but sometimes it's necessary for the programming or re-programming that must take place for success to be made deliberate. ~ Archibald Marwizi

I was perplexed by the failure of teachers at school to address what seemed the most urgent matter of all: the bewildering, stomach-churning insecurity of being alive. The standard subjects of history, geography, mathematics, and English seemed perversely designed to ignore the questions that really mattered. As soon as I had some inkling of what 'philosophy' meant, I was puzzled as to why we were not taught it. And my skepticism about religion only grew as I failed to see what the vicars and priests I encountered gained from their faith. They struck me either as insincere, pious, and aloof or just bumblingly good-natured. (p. 10) ~ Stephen Batchelor

The sea is never quiet. There is always noise. Close to the city, the deep hum of the generators and the clanking of people and machines churning out whatever it was they made. ~ G.R. Matthews

When had she so internalized the feeling that if something wasn't great she needed to bridge the gap between reality and idealism with her own manufactured enthusiasm? Her enthusiasm was like one of those faux snow machines at a ski resort. For most of her life it had been churning out synthetic delight. It had basically forgotten the original recipe. ~ Alissa Nutting

I stared at his back as he left, my stomach churning at his commands and confidence, and I shot out my foot, kicking the leg of my chair. He had spanked me. He'd spanked me! I looked over at the windows, the angry sky dark with the promise of rain and the trees' leaves dancing wildly. Smooth sailing, my ass. ~ Penelope Douglas

My stomach was kind of churning, but I couldn't tell why. I never understood my body - was it scared or excited? ~ John Green

Relly fired off the opening riff. Butt laid down the beat, old doom and new joy mixed together. "I wait till I, like fire, shall rise," Jerod sang. And then again, louder, wailing sure and true.
I was the last one to join in. I had a bass line all wroked out, of course. I'd been waiting weeks for this momment. My fingers colosed on the strings, pressed them hard to the frets. Butt and Relly were locked in, repeating the four-bar intro. Louder and louder, fierce as a war cry.
"Ok," I whispered into the pounding noise.
I joined in, doubling Relly at first, then splitting off to coil our riffs together. It was great, it was huge, it was endless. The song rose, churning and sucking everything in like a cyclone.
"The will my voice in great goodbyes," Jerod screamed from the speakers. "Join to the chorus of the skies."
Silence was inside me, riding the Ghost Metal tornado. Right at the center, at the heart of the song.
I didn't need a voice. I had a bass. I didn't need to hear myself talk or sing. Jerod could make the words for me.
Or maybe it was Silence herself, pouring out through the PA system. Either way, any way, They were my words. And all the world would hear them. ~ Leander Watts

And if Annie's work is fueled by love, then it's a form of love that doesn't blunt or distort her gaze. Her love sharpens her sight. Her work has helped me trust that an enduring emotional investment - even in all its mess and mistakes, because of its mess and mistakes - can help you see more acutely. It can sensitize your gaze to the competing vectors of emotional churning beneath ordinary moments. ~ Leslie Jamison

I feel it in me like a woman having a baby, all that life churning inside me. I feel it every day; it moves, stretches, yawns. It's getting ready to be born. It knows exactly what it is. ~ Maurice Sendak

In years since he has rarely gone back to those old memories. As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he's startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. It's not plain to Daniel why these impressions have stayed, while others, which seemed as or more important to him at the time they happened, have gone away. But if the gold-panning similitude is faithful, it means that these memories matter more than the ones that have flown. For gold stays in the pan's center because of its density; it has more matter (whatever that means) in a given extent than anything else. ~ Neal Stephenson

I remember a time when my mind wouldn't have been able to shut down, my cases churning so relentlessly that I could barely see the person standing right in front of me. I remember when it had to be me who solved the case, who figured out the riddle. Now I didn't care who did it, how it came about, just as long as it was over. I'm tired of seeing all the rotten things one person does to another person. Don't get me wrong, I'm not about to open a flower shop. But this is my dream: One day, I leave my job at my office and it doesn't follow me home and haunt me in my sleep. Another dream: I don't live in my brother's basement apartment. After everything I've seen and done and mused about endlessly, I'm convinced of one thing: There's more to life than this, and sometimes when I picture more, it looks like something so simple, like so much less. ~ Lisa Lutz

I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day - the interview, the concert, the after-party's private session - when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk about unexpected segues. Letting him know that I had not and wasn't about to, I successfully changed the subject by asking him to give me a condensed account about traveling to Mississippi in search of Bukka White. ~ Kenny Weissberg

Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It's fun and it's frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression's paranoid self-loathing. ~ David Lovelace

The jungle at night is the greatest freak show on earth. When the sun goes down the landscape welcomes a churning nightshift of murdering, slithering, creeping, fornicating, stalking, swimming, glowing life. To walk the Amazon by night is to enter a world where you are gravely disadvantaged compared to millions of sensory savants. ~ Paul Rosolie

I saw her, once.

"She passed through our village, through fields littered with dead soldiers after her forces overwhelmed the nation of Dumor. Her other Elites followed and then rows of white-robed Inquisitors, wielding the white-and-silver banners of the White Wolf. Where they went, the sky dimmed and the ground cracked - the clouds gathered behind the army as if a creature alive, black and churning in fury. As if the goddess of Death herself had come.

"She paused to look down at one of our dying soldiers. He trembled on the ground, but his eyes stayed on her. He spat something at her. She only stared back at him. I don't know what he saw in her expression, but his muscles tightened, his legs pushing against the dirt as he tried in vain to get away from her. Then the man started to scream. It is a sound I shall never forget as long as I live. She nodded to her Rainmaker, and he descended from his horse to plunge a sword through the dying soldier. Her face did not change at all. She simply rode on.

"I never saw her again. But even now, as an old man, I remember her as clearly as if she were standing before me. She was ice personified. There was once a time when darkness shrouded the world, and the darkness had a queen."

- A witness's account of Queen Adelina's siege on the nation of Dumor

The Village of Pon-de-Terre

28 Marzien, 1402 ~ Marie Lu

Racism is apparently a card to be played; much like the joker, it's a
very versatile card that can be used in any situation that might require
it. Only non-white people ever play this card to excuse their own
personal failings - even those of us that are materially successful.
Humans racialised as white cannot play the race card - just like they
cannot be terrorists - so European national empires colonising almost
the entire globe and enacting centuries of unapologetically and openly
racist legislation and practices, churning out an impressively large body
of proudly racist justificatory literature and cinema and much else has
had no impact on shaping human history, it has really just been black
and brown people playing cards. ~ Akala

There was a nebula there, an explosion of dust and light, the fiery corpse of an ancient giant. Within the gaseous folds slept clusters of unborn stars, shining softly. She took inventory of her body. She felt her breath, her blood, the ties binding it together. Every piece, down to the last atom, had been made out here, flung through the open in a moment of violence, until they had swirled round and round, churning, and coalescing, becoming heavy, weighing each other down, but not any more. The pieces were floating free now. They had returned home. ~ Becky Chambers

If you want to understand who you are and where you stand in this maelstrom of churning values, you have first to understand how commodity values get created and produced and with what consequences - social, environmental, political and the like. If you think you can solve a serious environmental question like global warming without actually confronting the question of by whom and how the foundational value structure of our society is being determined, then you are kidding yourself. So Marx insists that we must understand what commodity values and the social necessities that determine them are all about. ~ David Harvey

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. Your imagination is your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. Your imagination is what you use to shape your future. And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source,tirelessly churning out mental pictures of what you'll be doing in the future. ~ Rob Brezsny

I'm not a pop act, churning stuff out really quickly. I find the music that arises from that style of working is distracted, not particularly profound. ~ Paloma Faith

The sound of the ice cream churning outside sounds like bones crunching. ~ Kathryn Stockett

Henry McAllan was as landsick as any man I ever seen and I seen plenty of em, white and colored both. It's in their eyes, the way they look at the land like a woman they's itching for. White men already got her, they thinking, You mine now, just wait and see what I'm gone do to you. Colored men ain't got her and ain't never gone get her but they dreaming bout her just the same, with every push of that plow and every chop of that hoe. White or colored, none of em got sense enough to see that she the one owns them. She takes their sweat and blood and the sweat and blood of their women and children and when she done took it all she takes their bodies too, churning and churning em up till they one and the same, them and her. ~ Hillary Jordan

You could just hold them, couldn't you? You could sit close to them, nestle into them so you could hear the machine of them churning away. You could press your ear against that person's back, listening to the rhythm of them, knowing that you were both made of the same exact stuff. You could do things like that. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt

Just emotional? There's no such thing. Emotions are nothing without a corresponding physical response. Adrenaline-fueled joy, heart-thumping fear, gut-churning loss. ~ Leisa Rayven

It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upward, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.) ~ Marisha Pessl

When I could hold my eyes open long enough, I did stare up at the rain pelting down on me. I've never looked at it like that, straight up into the sky, and while I flinched more than I could actually see, when I could see it was absolutely beautiful. Like each drop rocketing towards me was separate from the thousands of others and for a suspended moment in time, I could glimpse it and see its delicate facets. I saw the gray clouds churning above me and felt the car shake when the wind from the traffic pushed against it. I shivered even though it's warm enough to swim. But nothing I saw or felt or heard was as warm and fascinating as Andrew's closeness. ~ J.A. Redmerski

When you think about it, the universe is nothing but this vast knackery of churning black holes and exploding stars, constantly free atoms that collect together and become something else, and something else again. ~ Andrew Smith

Look for a wave shaped like an A.

An A.

Hmm.

I saw Zs and H's and Vs. I saw the Hindi alphabet and the Thai alphabet. I saw Arabic script. I saw no As.

Finally I gave up, and chose the next wave that would have me, which turned out to be a poor move.

There is a moment, shortly after one accepts the imminence of one's demise, when it occurs that you could be elsewhere: that if you simply left the house a little later, or lingered over a Mai Tai, you would not be here now confronting your mortality. This moment occurred just as I encountered a very large (from my perspective), rare and surprising wave. A wave that was pitching and howling, and it really had no business being where it was - underneath me.

The demon wave picked me up, and after that I have only a a vague recollection of spinning limbs, a weaponized surf board, and chaotic white water, churning together over a reef.

I decided surfing was not for me. I generally no longer engage in adrenaline rush activities that carry with them a strong likely hood of life-altering injury. (p. 138)
~ J. Maarten Troost

From the pay phone at the library I dialed the number on the Missing poster. An elderly female voice identified it as the Natalie Keene Hotline, but in the background I could hear a dishwasher churning. The woman informed me that so far as she knew, the search was still going in the North Woods. Those who wanted to help should report to the main access road and bring their own water. Record temperatures were expected. ~ Gillian Flynn

ShiShi landed on his paws with a thump. "Still there, little soldier?"
Mulan caught her breath and waited a beat for her stomach to stop churning. "Still here."
The stone lion grunted, a sound that somehow indicated he was half impressed that she was still in one piece and half disappointed that the fall hadn't terrified her. "Most men get sick on the way down here."
I'm not most men, Mulan thought, but she kept quiet and climbed off ShiShi's back. ~ Elizabeth Lim

I can't imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it's better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It's better than starving to death. But you don't want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three days it's going to calm down. It's going to be the longest three days you've spent in your life, and you wonder why you're doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don't know. I still don't know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can't stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you're throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit's coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens for real, that's when a reasonable man says, "I'm hooked." But even that doesn't stop a reasonable man from going back on it. ~ Keith Richards

One reason I avoid the American TV talk show circuit, when I'm over there, is that the tabloids and the gossip mill are always churning with new, true, or untrue stories about new loves, old loves, pending marriages, divorces, trial separations, flings and affairs with people of every description. I'm not into any of that. ~ George Harrison

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite. ~ Seth Shostak

I missed the moonlight, the stars. There were times I forgot that there was an entire universe above the clouds. It was as if a shroud had been pulled around the Earth. Over time, we would forget everything that we had once struggled so hard to observe and learn and prove. We would forget about Jupiter and its churning storms. We would forget about the Big Dipper, about Halley's comet. We would stumble across telescopes in old department stores and never give them a second look, never wonder about the things they once made large. ~ Jason Gurley

This is one of my absolute favourite quotes its from the evernight series (stargazer)
charity to Balthazar
You remind me of too much. you remind me of what it felt like to be alive, to think of sunlight as something you could enjoy instead of something you could bare, to breath and have it change you, refresh you, awaken you, instead of just churning on and on some old useless habit that taunts you with what you use to be, to sigh and feel relief, to cry and let your sadness pass, instead of having it all bottled up inside of you forever and ever until you don't know who you are any more. ~ Claudia Gray

What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back. ~ Ann Brashares

If mind belongs to humans alone, then stones, trees, and streams become mere objects of human tinkering. We can plunder the earth's resources with impunity, treating creeks and mountaintops in Kentucky or rivers in India or forests in northwest America as if they existed only for economic development. Systems of land and river become inert chunks of lifeless mud or mechanical runs of H2O rather than the living, breathing bodies upon which we and all other creatures depend for our very lives.

Not to mention what 'nature as machine' has done to our emotional and spiritual well-being. When we regard nature as churning its way forward mindlessly through time, we turn our backs on mystery, shunning the complexity as well as the delights of relationship. We isolate ourselves from the rest of the creatures with whom we share this world. We imagine ourselves the apex of creation -- a lonely spot indeed. Human minds become the measure of creation and human thoughts become the only ones that count. The result is a concept of mind shorn of its wild connections, in which feelings become irrelevant, daydreams are mere distractions, and nighttime dreams -- if we attend to them at all -- are but the cast-offs of yesterday's overactive brain. Mind is cut off from matter, untouched by exingencies of mud or leaf, shaped by whispers or gales of wind, as if we were not, like rocks, made of soil.

And then we wonder at our sadness and depression, not realizing that our own vi ~ Priscilla Stuckey

There are two ways to look at my publishing career. One is that I'm a novelist churning out books, who is eight into a series; the other way is that I'm a cartoonist, just starting out. Most cartoonists have long careers: Charles Schulz drew Peanuts for 50 years. ~ Jeff Kinney

It's hard to describe, but I imagine the way I am at this moment is a lot like getting sucked into a vortex. Everything dark and churning, but slow churning instead of fast, and this great weight pulling you down, like it's attached to your feet even if you can't see it. I think, This is what it must be feel like to be trapped in quicksand. ~ Jennifer Niven

He smiled too, but did not hold her gaze. She watched as he put a few more pieces of wood on the fire, and wondered again who he was, who he really was. What happened to you? What could have been so bad? As she watched, she was struck by the undeniable sense that behind his introverted, self-effacing demeanor was a tireless mind churning with thought and memory, self-sustained like the constant machinations of a kinetic engine; and much like his two differently colored eyes, she also sensed that there were two just as different sides to him. ~ Sean J. Quirk

And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats
then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water
seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. ~ Elizabeth Strout

Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas. ~ Sam Harris

Still seasick?" Milo asked. "What does it look like?" Milo laughed. "I'll take that as a yes. I can't believe you've never been to sea before." "Believe it. Now go away and leave me to die." "Don't worry, it won't be much longer now. I can see land from here." Felix managed to raise his bloodshot eyes to see that, far in the distance, across miles upon miles of churning, open sea - His stomach flopped and gurgled. - was the edge of land. "Praise the goddess," Felix groaned. "I think I might stay in Kraeshia forever." "I ~ Morgan Rhodes

Spider?" I'd said, with a question mark in my voice.
"Yeah."
"You know at school . . . what did you do that for? Wade in like that?"
Spider frowned. "He was disrespectful, Jem. What you said - I could tell it was real. It was what you were really feeling. He had no right to make a joke of it."
"Yeah, I know, he's a tosser, but it's nothing to do with you. You made a right show of yourself. You made a show of me."
"I didn't want him to get away with it."
"Yeah, but I don't need a knight in shining armor. I can look after myself." He was smiling a bit now. I paused. "It's not funny, man. It's made everything worse," I said quietly. "I've got comments all the time now, 'bout you and me. Sly comments."
He looked away, studied his hands. The knuckles on the right one were nearly healed up now.
My mouth had gone dry, but I had to get this clear with him. "You do know there's no 'you and me,' don't you, Spider?"
He looked up. "What?"
"We're not like . . . together. Just mates."
There was something about his sullenness when he said, "Yeah, 'course. Just mates. Mates is good," that made me think he felt the exact opposite. I was churning inside, cursing that day under the bridge. People were so bloody difficult. Why had I ever got involved?
He stood up, came toward me, putting an arm out. I thought, Shit, he's going to hug me. Hasn't he listened to anything? But his hand formed a fist, and he lightly punched my arm. "Listen, ~ Rachel Ward

Sometimes Valène dreamt of cataclysms and tempests, of whirlwinds that would carry the whole house off like a wisp of straw and display the infinite marvels of the solar system to its shipwrecked inhabitants; or that an unseen crack would run through the building from top to bottom, like a shiver, and with a long, deep, snapping sound it would open in two and be slowly swallowed up in an indescribable yawning chasm; then hordes would overrun it, bleary-eyed monsters, giant insects with steel mandibles, blind termites, great white worms with insatiable mouths: the wood would crumble, the stone would turn to sand, the cupboards would collapse under their own weight, all would return to dust. But no. Only these shabby squabbles over buckets and tubs, over matches and sinks. And behind that ever-closed door the morbid gloom of that slow revenge, that ponderous business of two senile monomaniacs churning over their feigned histories and their wretched traps and snares. ~ Georges Perec

Regardless of subject matter, this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God. Close your eyes and breathe your way beneath your troubles, the way a diver slips to that depth of stillness that is always waiting beneath the churning of the waves. Now, consider two things you love doing, such as running, drawing, singing, bird-watching, gardening, or reading. Meditate on what it is in each of these that makes you feel alive. Hold what they have in common before you, and breathing slowly, feel the spot of grace these dear things mirror within you. ~ Mark Nepo

Also, she does this thing women sometimes do with their eyebrows where they just completely shave them off and draw news ones in a different weird place with a Sharpie or something, and the more you think about it, the more your stomach starts churning around and you want to claw your own head. ~ Jesse Andrews

The biggest journalistic game-changer of our time has been the rise of social media and the overgrowth of faux news sources - league- and team-sponsored blogs, player tweets, fanboy sites, rumor mills - churning bits of information and speculation into a clattering fog storm. Who will cut through the drivel and whim-wham to tell us what's really going on? ~ Robert Lipsyte

You are not a god, though you are hostile
as a god, inhospitable and anonymous
as a metropolis, your grey and single-
minded industry transforming the shore
into yourself. Narcissism is not
self-love, but a mechanism of survival,
your cogs churning amorphous as maggots,
pallid as almonds, paper-whites, the high
notes of foam. ~ Warren Heiti

RISE UP AND SALUTE THE SUN

Rise up!
RISE UP everyone!
Rise up and salute the sun!
Rise up and synergize as ONE.
And division there shall be none.
Yes!
And division there shall be none!

Wise up!
Wise up and salute the sun!
So what is right will always be won -
And so what is wrong will be never be
done.
Yes!
So what is wrong will never be done,
And justice will always be won!

Rise up!
Wise up and salute the sun!
Because what is turning
Can never be undone,
And what is churning
Has already been spun.
Yes,
The lies are distorting the sum.
And they're quickly earning
The minds of our young.

Rise Up!
Wise up and vibrate knowledge and peace
Throughout the streets and
UNIVERSAL KINGDOM!
Spread light to replace all the hatred
And ignorance in the world -
With Truth and amplified WISDOM!

Rise up!
Rise up and salute the sun.
Get wise and join lights as ONE.
Because the journey has just begun.
Yes,
The REVOLUTION has just begun.

So wise up!
Wise up and free all your minds.
Rise up and stand up for all mankind!
Put on your gold crowns and SHINE!
Because the sun symbolizes what's lit inside.
Illumination frees us and gives us eyes.
It's what heals us and gives us life.
It's also the symbol of the Most High --
-- THE LIGHT ~ Suzy Kassem

The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart. ~ Rudy Rucker

It was not as if the rest of the nation was suffering from want. .. Americans were experiencing a war-related economic boom. these same citizens might be enjoying an unusual level of prosperity, but they were not aboutto share it with their struggling national government and their even more beleaguered army. Without an ability to raise its own taxes, the Continental Congress had been printing its own money to pay for the war. But after five years of churning out bills that had become almost worthless, Congress was left with few options. By the spring of 1780 every thing was beginning to grind to a terrible and tragic halt. ~ Nathaniel Philbrick

Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn't be much aware of the storm. ~ Diane Ackerman

Oh, Gray, she said. Oh, gray, indeed. As in, oh Gray what the holy hell has come over you and what the devil do you intend to do about it?
He took the coward's way out. He looked away.
"I thought you were painting a portrait. Of me."
She turned her head, following his gaze to her easel. A vast seascape overflowed the small canvas. Towering thunderclouds and a violent, frothy sea. And slightly off center, a tiny ship cresting a massive wave.
"I am painting you."
"What, am I on the little boat, then?" It was a relief to joke.
The relief was short-lived.
"No," she said softly, turning back to look at him. "I'm on the little boat. You're the storm. And the ocean. You're…Gray, you're everything."
And that was when things went from "very bad" to "worse."
"I can't take credit for the composition. It's inspired by a painting I once saw, in a gallery on Queen Anne Street. By a Mr. Turner."
"Turner. Yes, I know his work. No relation, I suppose?"
"No." She looked back at the canvas. "When I saw it that day, so brash and wild…I could feel the tempest churning in my blood. I just knew then and there, that I had something inside me-a passion too bold, too grand to keep squeezed inside a drawing room. First I tried to deny it, and then I tried to run from it…and then I met you, and I saw you have it, too. Don't deny it, Gray. Don't run from it and leave me alone."
She sat up, still rubbing his cheek with her thumb. Grasping his oth ~ Tessa Dare

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do ~ Seth Godin