Deep Frozen Winter Quotes

In the summer, we create memories of hot adventures so that those memories can warm-up the deep frozen winter. ~ Debasish Mridha

I always sleep well, dearest, except for when your hot body smothers me completely!"
Darcy grinned. "Forgive me. Even sub- consciously I must be near you. I have no control over the matter. Tea and a scone?"
"Yes, please." She sat, tucking her feet under her. "No need to apologize, William. I simply elbow you hard and you roll away, temporarily at least. Come winter you can re- pay the treatment when I slip my frozen feet between your thighs. ~ Sharon Lathan

Perhaps they had tried to migrate in the past but had found either their winter habitat destroyed or the path so fragmented and fraught with danger that it made more sense - to these few birds - to ignore the tuggings of the stars and seasons and instead to try to carve out new lives, new ways of being, even in such a stark and severe landscape: or rather, in a stark and severe period - knowing that lushness and bounty were still retained with that landscape, that it was only a phase, that better days would come. That in fact (the snipe knowing these things with their blood, ten million years in the world) the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil - if indeed that richness, that magic, that hope, did still exist beneath the ice and snow. Spring would come like its own green fire, if only the injured ones could hold on. And ~ Lex Williford

He felt as if he were blooming outward, his heart one of their own roses unfurling in deepest winter, which scared him because...well, roses that bloomed in the winter got frozen in the cold. ~ Laura Florand

Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made.
Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I'm not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men…but 'you mustn't be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall. ~ Paul Bogard

Unaware of them all, Temujin began to chant words he had not heard since old Chagatai had whispered them on a frozen night long before. The shaman's chant spoke of loss and revenge, of winter, ice, and blood. He did not have to struggle to recall the words; they were ready on his tongue as if he had always known them. ~ Conn Iggulden

What had come over her? He'd touched her, and it was like electric flame
like the lightning she could summon
shooting sparks through her veins. She'd all but melted, boneless, at his feet. He was the Winter King, her enemy, a man feared for his killing coldness, yet when he'd touched her, she had not frozen. She'd burned. ~ C.L. Wilson

I miss you like the sun misses the flowers, like the sun misses the flowers in the depths of winter, instead of beauty to direct it's light to, the heart hardens like the frozen world which your absence has banished me to. ~ William Thatcher

What he longs for instead, as he sits at the food-strewn table, is winter, winter itself. He wants the essentiality of winter, not this half-season grey selfsameness. He wants real winter where woods are sheathed in snow, trees emphatic with its white, their bareness shining and enhanced because of it, the ground underfoot snow-covered as if with frozen feathers or shredded cloud but streaked with gold through the trees from low winter sun, and at the end of the barely discernible track, along the dip in the snow that indicates a muffled path between the trees, the view and the woods opening to a light that's itself untrodden, never been blemished, wide like an expanse of snow-sea, above it more snow promised, waiting its time in the blank of the sky. ~ Ali Smith

A frozen river is not a dry one, it's just a still river on the surface but is still moving, and so am my winter writing. ~ Willie Nelson

If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need. ~ Ann Patchett

And, Legolas, when the torches are kindled and men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! Then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come, And plink! A silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in a grotto of the sea. Then evening comes:" they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is chamber after chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stair beyond stair; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains' heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm's Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of Job with this verse on it:

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone.
And the face of the deep is frozen.

The he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away.
It was a dramatic gesture, but that was the way Shackleton wanted it. From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed. ~ Alfred Lansing

The raft was seized, with a noise like needles knitting, and we were hemmed in for winter -- river and the old channel's oxbow lake having frozen solid. By now, we guessed we were not two ordinary river travelers...it must have been the river that was extraordinary: a marvel that protected us by the same mysterious action that had given a common horse wings and changed a woman into a laurel tree. ~ Norman Lock

After Christian's death he'd just existed. He felt nothing, just a sense of emptiness. In some ways he welcomed that hollowness inside of him. It was easier to be numb, not caring beyond the basic needs to survive. But with spring's return, some intangible force stirred inside him, as if his emotions had been frozen through dead of winter. Now it was time to live again. His spirit awakened. ~ Deborah Macgillivray

The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars. ~ David K. Shipler

Then sleep the seasons, full of might; While slowly swells the pod, And rounds the peach, and in the night The mushroom bursts the sod. The winter comes: the frozen rut Is bound with silver bars; the white drift heaps against the hut; and night is pierced with stars. ~ Coventry Patmore

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

To a hikikomori, winter is painful because everything feels cold, frozen over, and lonely. To a hikikomori, spring is also painful because everyone is in a good mood and therefore enviable. Summer, of course, is especially painful ... ~ Tatsuhiko Takimoto

Hockey wasn't invented but discovered. The game, and the large organizing idea behind Stephen Smith's deeply personal 'Puckstruck,' sleeps in ponds and in the crooked limbs of trees overhead; we merely pluck a stick from the sky and skate over the frozen world to find ourselves and each other. ~ Michael Winter

Blow on, ye death fraught whirlwinds! blow,
Around the rocks, and rifted caves;
Ye demons of the gulf below!
I hear you, in the troubled waves.
High on this cliff, which darkness shrouds
In night's impenetrable clouds,
My solitary watch I keep,
And listen, while the turbid deep
Groans to the raging tempests, as they roll
Their desolating force, to thunder at the pole.

Eternal world of waters, hail!
Within thy caves my Lover lies;
And day and night alike shall fail
Ere slumber lock my streaming eyes.
Along this wild untrodden coast,
Heap'd by the gelid' hand of frost;
Thro' this unbounded waste of seas,
Where never sigh'd the vernal breeze;
Mine was the choice, in this terrific form,
To brave the icy surge, to shiver in the storm.

Yes! I am chang'd - My heart, my soul,
Retain no more their former glow.
Hence, ere the black'ning tempests roll,
I watch the bark, in murmurs low,
(While darker low'rs the thick'ning' gloom)
To lure the sailor to his doom;
Soft from some pile of frozen snow
I pour the syren-song of woe;
Like the sad mariner's expiring cry,
As, faint and worn with toil, he lays him down to die.

Then, while the dark and angry deep
Hangs his huge billows high in air ;
And the wild wind with awful sweep,
Howls in each fitful swell - beware!
Firm on the rent and crashing mast,
I ~ Anne Bannerman

Your holiness!" She raised her voice, forcing herself to sound tearful and
supplicatory. "If we are to die, would you let me kiss him one last time?"
She half expected Taka to react to her uncharacteristic behavior, but he didn't
move, didn't look at her. He was kneeling in the frozen dirt beside her, every inch of him alert, and she was probably the least of his concerns.
"You want to kiss the man who tried to kill you? You are a very foolish young
woman," the Shirosama said. "Go ahead."
Taka turned to her, his eyes dark and unreadable, waiting. She reached up, put her mouth against his and whispered, "I have a knife that's fallen down the front of my shirt, you son of a bitch. See if you can get it." The feel of his lips against hers was agony. The sickness deep inside her was that she wanted to kiss him anyway, no matter what he'd done. ~ Anne Stuart

The winter street is a salt cave. The snow has stopped falling and it's very cold. The cold is spectacular, penetrating. The street has been silenced, a theatre of whiteness, drifts like frozen waves. Crystals glisten under the streetlights. ~ Anne Michaels

I'm a migrant worker picking frozen peas,
and a clodhopper hiding behind a white sheet.
I'm a shootout at Ruby Ridge,
and a freefall of flames.
I am closed for the winter,
and crawling in my playpen.
I am cold,
and quick chatter and beautiful smiles.
I am a man missing a limb,
and lettuce and tomatoes.
I am a palace,
and fresh milk and goat cheese.
I'm the great emptiness among Cubans,
and a job that requires the auditing of truth and lies.
I'm a confounding calm that will shatter fear and complacency,
and a town full of self-defined renegades and recluses.
I'm a public execution,
and a lanky husband waiting by the checkout. ~ Brian D'Ambrosio

I've been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow. ~ Hannah Kent

I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat; you see I'm just another snowman standing in the rain and sleet who loved you with his frozen love, his second hand physique, with all he is and all he was a thousand kisses deep. ~ Leonard Cohen

There was a zombie at my back door. Its eyes swung up, and they were blue, the whites already clouding with the egg rot of death. Its jaw a mess of meat and frozen blood; something had eaten half its face. Its fingertips already worn down to bony nubs, scraped against the window. Flesh hung in strips from it's hand, and my stomach turned over hard. Black mist rose at the corners of my vision, and the funny rushing sound in my head sounded like a jet plane taking off. I'd know that zombie anywhere. Even if he was dead and mangled, his eyes were the same. Blue as winter ice, fringed with pale lashes. ~ Lilith Saintcrow

My throat raw with emotion, I said, "I thought love was supposed to be weak knees and butterflies in your stomach and a terrible longing that could never be quenched."

Eeny shook her head, chuckled, came over and embraced me. "No, child," she said gently, patting my back. "That's romance. Romance is built on doubt. Love is solid. Constant. If you're not careful, you might mistake it for bein' boring because it's so reliable. Love is warm and deep and comfortable, just right, so you float in it peacefully without ever being scalded or frozen, like a perfect, relaxing bubble bath.

"But it's also fierce and strong and demands all the best parts of you, the parts that are giving and honest and true. Love makes you a better person. It makes you want to be a better person. You know it's love when you feel comfortable just as you are, when you feel seen and understood, when you know you could tell all your darkest truths and they'd be accepted without judgement."

Eeny pulled away and gently smoothed a hand over my hair. "Love isn't butterflies, boo. It isn't weak knees. It's a pride of lions. It's a pack of wolves. It's 'I've got your back even if it costs me my own life,' because unlike romance that fizzles at the first sign of trouble, love will fight to the death. When it's love, you'll go to war to avenge even the slightest offense. And you'll be justified.

"Because of all the marvelous and terrible things we can experience in this lif ~ J.T. Geissinger

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The
relativist or the universalist?"
"He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are
both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had
essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning."
"But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists
think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the
pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits."
"Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a
language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret."
"The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro
says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only
once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the
information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into
hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out,
but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the
newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and
that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself
accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent
part of the brain's deep ~ Neal Stephenson

Well. Um. The thing is…" I inhale, then continue with rapid-fire speed. "Imnotahockeyfan."

A wrinkle appears in his forehead. "What?"

I repeat myself, slowly this time, with actual pauses between each word. "I'm not a hockey fan."

Then I hold my breath and await his reaction.

He blinks. Blinks again. And again. His expression is a mixture of shock and horror. "You don't like hockey?"

I regretfully shake my head.

"Not even a little bit?"

Now I shrug. "I don't mind it as background noise - "

"Background noise?"

" - but I won't pay attention to it if it's on." I bite my lip. I'm already in this deep - might as well deliver the final blow. "I come from a football family."

"Football," he says dully.

"Yeah, my dad and I are huge Pats fans. And my grandfather was an offensive lineman for the Bears back in the day."

"Football." He grabs his water and takes a deep swig, as if he needs to rehydrate after that bombshell.

I smother a laugh. "I think it's awesome that you're so good at it, though. And congrats on the Frozen Four win."

Logan stares at me. "You couldn't have told me this before I asked you out? What are we even doing here, Grace? I can never marry you now - it would be blasphemous."

His twitching lips make it clear that he's joking, and the laughter I've been fighting spills over. "Hey, don't go canceling the we ~ Elle Kennedy

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape.
("The Triumph Of The Night") ~ Edith Wharton

It was like climbing a mountain of waist-deep molasses while giving someone a fireman's carry, who, for good measure, was also trying to force a pair of frozen socks into your mouth. Nice. ~ Bear Grylls

Silence can always be broken by the sound

Of footsteps walking over frozen ground
In winter when the melancholy trees
Stand abject and let their branches freeze ~ Merrill Moore

Tsukuru's mind grew still and tranquil. A quiet feeling, like a frozen tree on a windless winter night. But there was little pain mixed in. Over the years Tsukuru had grown used to this mental image, so much so that it no longer brought him any particular pain. ~ Haruki Murakami

I headed downtown right away. It was still early in the evening, glittering with electric, with ice; and trembling in the factories, those nearly all windows, over the prairies that had returned over demolitions with winter grass pricking the snow and thrashed and frozen together into beards by the wind. The cold simmer of the lake also, blue; the steady skating of rails too, down to the dark. ~ Saul Bellow

I begin to describe a three-tier cake. The bottom tier would be a deep, dark devil's food cake filled with thick chocolate custard. The middle tier would be a vanilla cake filled with a fluffy vanilla mousse and a layer of roasted strawberries. The top tier, designed to be removed whole and frozen for the first anniversary, would be one layer of chocolate cake and one of vanilla with a strawberry buttercream filling. The whole cake would be covered in a layer of vanilla buttercream, perfectly smoothed, and the tiers separated by a simple line of piped dots, looking like a string of pearls. ~ Stacey Ballis

Where I lived - winter and hard earth.
I sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,
to break the ice. My broken heart -
I tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.
She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,
In bare feet, bringing all spring's flowers
to her mother's house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,
the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon. ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Perly stood as if frozen in place, watching the turmoil beneath him spread. "Just remember this," he said in a deep voice that cut neatly through the confusion. "Whatever I've done, you've let me do. ~ Joan Samson

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Luthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Luthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where he feet had passed. Then the spell of silence fell from Beren, and he called to her, crying Tinuviel; and the woods echoed the name. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Winter in Wisconsin is the ideal time to avoid someone because our garments grow ever larger, ever thicker, and we go about the frozen world insulated beneath knit caps and mittens, our feet clad in mukluks or boots. ~ Nickolas Butler

MAULANA'S LAST LETTER TO SHAMS

Sometimes I wonder, sweetest love, if you
Were a mere dream in along winter night,
A dream of spring-days, and of golden light
Which sheds its rays upon a frozen heart;
A dream of wine that fills the drunken eye.

And so I wonder, sweetest love, if I
Should drink this ruby wine, or rather weep;
Each tear a bezel with your face engraved,
A rosary to memorize your name...

There are so many ways to call you back-
Yes, even if you only were a dream. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

He woke up frozen stiff. A cold dawn was lighting up the peaks on the other side of the valley, making them shine like giant lanterns. Above, through the broken bones of the roof, he could see the sky, clear now, a deep violet blue, waiting for the sun to breach the mountaintops. The snow clouds had gone, off to bother someone else. Where he lay was still dark, wrapped in leftover shadows. The wall, so deliciously warm when he'd fallen asleep, was like ice, sucking the heat out of him, but what had woken him were screams. Long piercing screams, over and over. ~ Stephen Deas

Winter tightened its grip on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck -- car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake -- car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn't go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed in holes and went into hiding. Not so ~ Kristin Hannah