Dome Quotes

I gazed back up the dome of the heavens painted on the ceiling above. It was only then that I noticed somethings else in the painted sky, directly above the bed. The sun, moon and stars were positioned in swirls around some object in the centre, like angels clustered round the throne of God. But this was no throne, nor was it God. [Vincent] ~ Karen Maitland

For to him, and nearly all the educated youth of that epoch, the stars were cruel things; though they glowed in the great dome every night, they were an enormous and ugly secret; they uncovered the nakedness of nature; they were a glimpse of the iron wheels and pulleys behind the scenes. For the young men of that sad time thought that the god always came from the machine. They did not know that in reality the machine only comes from the god. In short, they were all pessimists, and starlight was atrocious to them--atrocious because it was true. All their universe was black with white spots. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I am the love, the pain, the intensity
I am the remnants of a banished plea;
I am the trivialized doors of a jubilant home
I am the shadows of an abandoned dome;
I am the instinct, the bizarre sound
I am the fate of a trampled mound;
I am the words half-heard when half-said
I am the memories of a longing thread;
I am the anarchist in disdain,
I am the bewilderment of an orphan pain;
I am your hand, I am the bar
I am the bellicosity of our resilient scar;
I am the love, the pain, the intensity
I am the predicament of the silent sea. ~ Ashfaq Saraf

Close your eyes and click your heals three times ... because there's no place like Dome. ~ Stephen King

No end of blessings from heaven and earth. As we climb up out of the Moab valley and reach the high tableland stretching northward, traces of snow flying across the road, the sun emerges clear of the overcast, burning free on the very edge of the horizon. For a few minutes the whole region from the canyon of the Colorado to the Book Cliffs - crag, mesa, turret, dome, canyon wall, plain, swale and dune - glows with a vivid amber light against the darkness on the east. At the same time I see a mountain peak rising clear of the clouds, old Tukuhnikivats fierce as the Matterhorn, snowy as Everest, invincible. "Ferris, stop this car. Let's go back." But he only steps harder on the gas. "No," he says, "you've got a train to catch." He sees me craning my neck to stare backward. "Don't worry," he adds, "it'll all still be here next spring." The ~ Edward Abbey

The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum. ~ Herman Melville

I never saw a sky like the sky over Dorrego - so vast, so black, with stars in an infinite array of size and brilliance. Maybe it seemed vast because the Earth didn't get in the way: the countryside around Dorrego is flat, there are no big cities to blot out the stars with their own clouds of gas, their artificial starlight. (Cities have a terrible tendency to try and imitate starlight, you only have to see them from a plane.) …
Before Dorrego, I had always thought of the sky as a black screen on which a handful of scattered stars twinkled vaguely, but were no more enthralling than the ceiling of the Cine Opera. Dorrego revealed the other sky, the boundless dome that sends you rushing to a dictionary for synonyms for 'infinite'; stars that clustered, not into constellations, but into galaxies; stars like swarms of bees which suggested not stillness or permanence but movement, the trail of something, of someone that passed just now, a moment ago, when you weren't looking. A sky that seemed to suddenly reveal the meaning of all things: Man's need to create language to describe it, geography to explain his place within it, biology to remind him that he is a newcomer in this universe, and history, because everything is written in the sky above Dorrego. ~ Marcelo Figueras

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. ~ Robert Frost

I saw it from that hidden, silent place
Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin
At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,
Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
The evening star - but grown a thousandfold
More haunting in this hush and solitude.
It traced strange pictures on the quivering air -
Half-memories that had always filled my eyes -
Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
Of some dim life - I never could tell where.
But I knew that through the cosmic dome
Those rays were calling from my far, lost home. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Just a rock, a dome of snow, the deep blue sky, and a hunk of orange-painted metal from which a shredded American flag cracked in the wind. Nothing more. Except two tiny figures walking together those last few feet to the top of the Earth. ~ Tom Hornbein

The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I'm always at home - yea, I'm always at Om. ~ Eden Ahbez

So, I looked up, and we were in this giant dome like a glass snowball, and Mark said that the amazing white stars were really only holes in the black glass of the dome, and when you went to heaven, the glass broke away, and there was nothing but a whole sheet of star white, which is brighter than anything but doesn't hurt your eyes. It was vast and open and thinly quiet, and I felt so small. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through.
Have liberty not as the air within a grave
Or down a well. Breathe freedom, oh, my native,
In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate. ~ Wallace Stevens

And then, eyes widening in horror, he saw the word REDRUM reflecting dimly from the glass dome, now reflected twice. And he saw that it spelled MURDER. Danny ~ Stephen King

You are wrong," says the man. His voice is low and resonant. The metal walls of the dome, all the knives and swords and spears, all seem to vibrate with each of his words. "Your rulers and their propaganda have sold you this watered-down conceit of war, of a warrior yoked to the whims of civilization. Yet for all their self-professed civility, your rulers will gladly spend a soldier's life to better aid their posturing, to keep the cost of a crude good low. They will send the children of others off to die and only think upon it later to grandly and loudly memorialize them, lauding their great sacrifice. Civilization is but the adoption of this cowardly method of murder. ~ Robert Jackson Bennett

I Was Always Leaving"

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through. ~ Jean Nordhaus

The autumn months are my domain:
Mirrored in pools my castles dream
Of wars long past and out of mind
From towers with ivy garlands twined

Weak and with regret the sun
Drowns itself in the sluggish green
Water that marble fountains weep;
Trees open their nests to the wings of sleep.

The wind like a phantom seems to roar,
Returned to die of love once more
At the false meeting of the ways
Where a temple rounds its dome in the haze.

Sometimes a child is heard to laugh
In the house of the priest, far off;
His lamp on the ledge of the window gleams
Much as the Holy Spirit flames.

Then nothing. Only a plane tree sways
Its crown of leaves in the dark that graze
Slowly and with a sound so alight
They barely ripple the silent night.

I am the lord of this domain.
Through halls of hollow, echoing
Armor, I haul the heavy shame
Of not being able to be king. ~ Stuart Merrill

Do not put your head inside sand dome,someone will possibly kick you ~ El Hadi M. Suliman

the features that made the Church of the Holy Sepulcher different from any cathedral he had ever visited. For under the ornate dome of the rotunda, surrounded by massive marble columns, was a self-contained rectangular building, modest in proportions, with a fancy onion-domed cupola. "The Edicule," Neti said, drawing their attention. "That's where the tomb is. That's where we're going." They set the equipment and Grail box down on the marble floor. ~ Glenn Cooper

First the slender Spear Tower, a hundred-and-a-half feet tall and crowned with a spear of gilded steel that added another thirty feet to its height; then the mighty Tower of the Sun, with its dome of gold and leaded glass; last the dun-colored Sandship, looking like some monstrous dromond that had washed ashore and turned to stone. ~ George R R Martin

Arbre toujours au milieu
De tout ce qui l'entoure
Arbre qui savoure
La voute des cieux

(Tree always in the center
Of all that surrounds it
Tree feasting upon
Heaven's great dome) ~ Gaston Bachelard

Sometimes Scarlett felt all of Trisda was under a dome, a large piece of glass that trapped everyone inside while her father looked down, moving - or removing - people if they weren't in the right places. ~ Stephanie Garber

They say you never forget your first glimpse of Gehenna. Over the tall buildings the sky swirls with orange and red, true titian, a feature of the unique atmosphere. Of course that same air would kill human beings; hence they built the entire city inside a dome. Eternal sunset, that's why the place is so wild. You know the feeling you get, just before full dark? Sundown makes you feel like the world burgeons with possibility, and that's Gehenna for you.
Like any other romantic notion, it's based on bullshit, of course. Gehenna isn't the land of eternal sunset and infinite potential. The gas in the atmosphere just makes it impossible to see the sun. ~ Ann Aguirre

It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Better an imperfect dome in Florence than cathedrals in the clouds. ~ Twyla Tharp

At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell. ~ Ted Kooser

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. ~ Robinson Jeffers

So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And I came to a hill that I never saw before. I was in a dismal thicket full of black twisted boughs that tore me as I went through them, and I cried out because I was smarting all over, and then I found that I was climbing, and I went up and up a long way, till at last the thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the top of a big bare place, where there were ugly grey stones lying all about on the grass, and here and there a little, twisted stunted tree came out from under a stone, like a snake. And I went up, right to the top, a long way. I never saw such big ugly stones before; they came out of the earth some of them, and some looked as if they had been rolled to where they were, and they went on and on as far as I could see, a long, long way. I looked out from them and saw the country, but it was strange. It was winter time, and there were black terrible woods hanging from the hills all round; it was like seeing a large room hung with black curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed quite different from any I had ever seen before. I was afraid. Then beyond the woods there were other hills round in a great ring, but I had never seen any of them; it all looked black, and everything had a voor over it. It was all so still and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad, like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo. I went on into the dreadful rocks. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were like horrid-grinning men; I could see their faces as if they would ~ Arthur Machen

Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

The stupa is a white dome with a conical stone tower emerging from its center. There are two eyes painted on the tower, the all seeing eyes of Buddha. They're purple, and look a little sinister, like an Old Testament Buddha. ~ Joshua Isard

You find that all men are successes or failures. Success is the stamp of truth. I will say all men who fail to place their feet on the dome of facts do so by not sieving all truth and throwing the faulty to one side. ~ Andrew Taylor Still

So when his tractor came to a smash-halt, the potato-digger rising up behind and then crashing back down, Bob was flung forward over the engine block and directly into the Dome. His iPod exploded in the wide front pocket of his bib overalls, but he never felt it. He broke his neck and fractured his skull on the nothing he collided with and died in the dirt shortly thereafter, by one tall wheel of his tractor, which was still idling. Nothing, you know, runs like a Deere. ~ Stephen King

Oh! Great Lady of Fascination! We arise in somnambulant awe and dance entranced as you glide slowly and softly through the Heavenly Dome and suffuse our presence with unfathomable desires for faerie worlds, where all is order, where all is beauty, where nuances of quality proliferate miraculously in myraids of delicious subtleties. ~ Lady Svetlana

Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She'd looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She'd tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there. Looking ~ James S.A. Corey

Poor, chubby Annette Kelper, who desperately tries to pretend that nobody notices the fact that she's balding on top of her head. That's right. Look closely - balding just like a man. Perhaps Randy feels sorry for chrome-dome Annette. ~ David Sedaris

As a child, when his mother would pray that he would have a hedge of protection or a hedge of angels around him, he would think, "Anyone can jump a hedge. How hard is that? Forget the hedge of angels; I'm praying for a dome of angels. ~ Jonathan Acuff

[On how mothers are "doing the most important job" in the world by raising children]: If, in fact, it were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it? They'd rather make war, make foreign policy, invent nuclear weapons, decode DNA, paint The Last Supper, put the dome on St. Peter's Cathedral; they'd prefer to do all those things that are much less important than raising babies? ~ Linda R. Hirshman

I am convinced that poets are toddlers in a cathedral, slobbering on wooden blocks and piling them up in the light of the stained glass. We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn't beautiful in the first place. We aren't writers, but gleeful rearrangers of words whose meanings we can't begin to know. When we manage to make something pretty, it's only so because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas. That means there's no end to the discovery. We may crawl around the cathedral floor for ages before we grow up enough to reach the doorknob and walk outside into a garden of delights. Beyond that, the city, then the rolling hills, then the sea. And when the world of every cell has been limned and painted and sung, we lie back on the grass, satisfied that our work is done. Then, of course, the sun sets and we see above us the dark dome of glittering stars.

On and on it goes, all the way to the lightless borderlands of time and space, which we come to discover in some future age are but the beginnings or endings of a single word spoken from the mouth of God. Some nights, while I traipse down the hill, I imagine that word isn't a word at all, but a burst of laughter. ~ Andrew Peterson

The sun appeared between the twin spires of the cathedral as its light reflected off the crescent and star that rose out of the dome on top of the mosque. It was beautiful, and surreal. In one instant, the bells rang out from the cathedral and if I closed my eyes then I could easily imagine that I was back home in Europe, but in the next, the call to morning prayer sounded from the mosque, and it was a stark reminder of how far away I actually was from my true home. ~ Tucker Elliot

Swiveling in his old wooden chair, the legs squeaking as if startled by the sudden movement, he glanced at the clock on the wall behind him and surveyed the time imprisoned behind its yellowed and crazed plastic dome. ~ Hugh Howey

But Justice, though her dome doom she doe prolong,Yet at the last she will her owne cause right. ~ Edmund Spenser

We could go back," he said. In the dome light of the car, his face looked hard as stone. "We could go back to your house. I can stay with you always. We can know each other's bodies in every way, night after night. I could love you." His nostrils flared, and he looked suddenly proud. "I could work. You would not be poor. I would help you."
"Sounds like a marriage," I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. But my voice was too shaky.
"Yes," he said. ~ Charlaine Harris

Oscar's breath warmed the back of her head, his lips brushing against her hair, loosened from a braid. He drew a lock away from her neck and kissed the skin just beneath her earlobe, against the throb of her quickening pulse. Like the blackness outside the dome of lamplight, there seemed to be nothing more in the world than his lips, his touch, and the flood of heat consuming her.
With a gentle nudge, Oscar turned her toward him. He looked at her the way he had in the Grampains meadow-as if she was the most fascinating woman he'd ever seen. Under his gaze she felt fascinating, too. Capivating…wanted. He traced her jaw with his lips, kissing the angle of her neck ever so tenderly, as though he weren't certain she wanted him, too. Camille closed the inch of space left between them, her body pressing against his. The muscles in his chest and arms tightened. He was wanted, and she needed to show him how much. No one was there to watch, no one to judge, or tell her the lips caressing her were unworthy of tasting her skin.
With those very thoughts, Oscar's grip loosened. His lips retreated.
"This isn't right," he whispered, catching his breath.
Camille stared at him, her hurt and disappointment plain on her face.
"You're engaged, Camille." He looked around the room. His eyes rested on the bed. "I shouldn't be here."
All of a sudden, Camille completely and fully detested Randall. Good, sweet, well-meaning Randall infuriated her with his mere existence, ~ Angie Frazier

The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished
glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine,
this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the
computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface.
Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in
several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's father, who was stationed in
Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back
from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when
he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as
they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And
once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so
powerful and vulnerable at once, Hiro could only think it was like nuzzling
through skirts and lingerie and outer labia and inner labia. . . . It made
him feel naked and weak and brave.
The lens can see half of the universe -- the half that is above the computer,
which includes most of Hiro. In this way, it can generally keep track of where
Hiro is and what direction he's looking in.
Down inside the computer are three lasers -- a red one, a green one, and a blue
one. They are powerful enough to make a bright light but not powerful enough to
burn ~ Neal Stephenson

Get it off," she said, jerking their bound wrists up and holding them up under his nose.
"I thought perhaps we might at least introduce ourselves," he said lightly.
"Get it off!"
"What shall I call you?" he asked as he pulled her to the table and removed the silver dome on the platter. Mutton stew, by the smell of it. Not a single knife to be had. "Lover?"
"Rest assured you'll never need to call me anything at all!" she said with admirable conviction.
"You may reduce your rancor and save it for when you might need it," he said calmly. "I am as enchanted by this arrangement as you are. May I remove your brooch?"
"Pardon?"
"Your brooch," he said, looking at the small gold ring-shaped brooch that held her shawl on her shoulder.
Her eyes narrowed.
Jack knew that look and gestured to their wrists. "Rein in your thoughts, lass. I need something to get it off. ~ Julia London

The sign of its passing was written there upon the sky as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapor trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

This must be the taste of Language -
the tongue mapped by many colors,
parsed by the vowels of memory, the roof
of the mouth the dome of a world
circumscribed by consonants, whose edges
suggest the sour-sweetness of oranges,
the bittermelon's green rind, the river-
scent of mangoes all the way to the grove. ~ Marjorie M. Evasco

You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on ... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet. ~ Elon Musk

High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. ~ William Gibson

Millions of shining lights, silver nails driven into a dome of dark blue velvet . . . ~ Dmitry Glukhovsky

Statues and street names honoring Confederates are common sights in the South. Fears by some South Carolina whites that such tributes would be erased forced a compromise in a 2000 law that removed the Confederate flag from the statehouse dome in Columbia. The law also said no historical memorial may be "relocated, removed, distributed or altered" without legislative approval. ~ Anonymous

This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I looked into the vast dome of blue emptiness that stretched out above me in all directions and the illusion was still there, the size and speed, and what information they were sending to mother earth. ~ Nelson Mandela

In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They're out there showering down, committing hari-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps into the ocean. But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I'd never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of that strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever. ~ Annie Dillard

In this world with starry dome,Floored with gemlike plains and seas,Shall I never feel at home,Never wholly be at ease? ~ William Watson

The sun,
the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man
burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray. ~ Charles Dickens

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice. ~ William Gibson

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better. ~ Thomas Carlyle

Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome;
The good, the true, the tender - these form the wealth of home. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale

At Gabriel College there was a very holy object on the high altar of the Oratory, covered with a black velvet cloth... At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was something too distant to see, until he pulled a string attached to a shutter above, letting a ray of sunlight through to strike the dome exactly. Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on one side and white on the other, began to whirl around as the light struck it. It illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, for the black of ignorance fled from the light, whereas the wisdom of white rushed to embrace it.

{Alluding to William Crookes's radiometer.} ~ Philip Pullman

How do you open the eyes to see how to take the daily, domestic, workday vortex and invert it into the dome of an everyday cathedral? ~ Ann Voskamp

To laugh is to live profoundly ... The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter ... it is an expression of being rejoicing at being ... ~ Milan Kundera

A keen wind from the west struck our faces, and as swiftly as it had come the fog rolled away from us, in one mighty mass, stripping clean and pure the starry dome of heaven... ~ Erskine Childers

It is now one hour before dawn on a day in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock is open: Muslims are praying. The Wall is always open: the Jews are praying. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is open: the Christians are praying in several languages. The sun is rising over Jerusalem, its rays making the light Herodian stones of the Wall almost snowy - just as Josephus described it two thousand years ago - and then catching the glorious gold of the Dome of the Rock that glints back at the sun. The divine esplanade where Heaven and Earth meet, where God meets man, is still in a realm beyond human cartography. Only the rays of the sun can do it and finally the light falls on the most exquisite and mysterious edifice in Jerusalem. Bathing and glowing in the sunlight, it earns its auric name. But the Golden Gate remains locked, until the coming of the Last Days. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

Food of Love
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II

I'm going to murder you with love;
I'm going to suffocate you with embraces;
I'm going to hug you, bone by bone,
Till you're dead all over.
Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.

You will become my personal Sahara;
I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow
Drain you remaining brackish well.
With my female blade I'll carve my name
In your most aspiring palm
Before I chop it down.
Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole.

But in the total desert you become
You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,
Opulent mirage!
Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen.
Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.

So you will summon each dry grain of sand
And move towards me in undulating dunes
Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine:
A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;
Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes
Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,
Surprising life! And I will be that green.

When you are fed and watered, flourishing
With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire,
Till you are resurrected field in bloom,
I will devour you, my natural food,
My host, my final supper on the earth,
And you'll begin to die again. ~ Carolyn Kizer

Come on, Paisley. What's the worst that could happen?"
Aria meant it as a joke,but her voice sounded too high so she tacked on a laugh. That came out sounding mildly hysterical.
"What could happen in a damaged dome?"
Paisley counted on her slender fingers. "Our skin could rot off. We could get locked out. An Aether storm could turn us into human bacon. Then the cannibals could eat us for breakfast. ~ Veronica Rossi

just got back from a beautiful eve of winter solstice snowshoeing. my heart was lost and enlivened by both the hush of the mountainous snow world and a very fun irreverence with friends. i shared a solstice quote but did not share this one.

so in the spirit of the year--happy solistice! may there be ever present and growing light in your life as nature unfolds the same in the upcoming months.

"sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive leap off the rim of earth across the dome. it is a night to make the heavens our home. more than the nest whereto apace we strive. lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, in swarms outrushing from the golden comb. they waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: you throb in me, the dead revive. yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, life glistens on the river of death. it folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs of radiance, the radiance enrings: and this is the soul's haven to have felt." --from _winter heavens_ ~ George Meredith

And this one kid Mark at the party who gave me this come out of nowhere and looked at the sky and told me to see the stars. So, I looked up, and we were in this giant dome like a glass snowball and Mark said that the amazing white stars were really only holes in the black glass of the dome, and when you went to heaven, the glass broke away, and there was nothing but a whole sheet of star white, which is brighter than anything but doesn't hurt your eyes. ~ Stephen Chbosky

Reading Myself
Like thousands I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire
somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus ...
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work live long
enough for the sweet tooth bear to desecrate
this open book..my open coffin ~ Robert Lowell

If I traveled all my life And I never get to stop and settle down Long as I have you by my side There's a roof above and good walls all around You're my castle, you're my cabin and my instant pleasure dome I need you in my house 'cause you're my home. ~ Billy Joel

The marsh toads interviewed the eagle
'How come you venture so high?
Aren't you scared you'll hit the ceiling
That blue metal dome they call the sky?'

The eagle knew these earth-bound creatures
Were ignorant of
boundless space
And couldn't conceive
of infinities
Not being born to the wind's embrace."
From Bachchoo's Fables ~ Farrukh Dhondy

One my favorite things is to go to the provinces of Russia and see the 18th century wood churches with the onion dome architecture. These humble wonders of incredible imagination of architects that were obviously not living in places like Paris or London, but they've created these amazing churches. ~ Andre Leon Talley

The Dome is a metaphor that could mean anything - it could be nuclear fallout, terrorists - I've always been fascinated with stories where people's roles are flipped on their heads, be it the Wall Street guy, the techno guy, etc. All of those things are only successful when there are people and money around. ~ Mike Vogel

By the way, if I have my own cult of personality with my own geodetic dome in western Massachusetts, I will have a hurt yurt for anyone who crosses me. ~ John Hodgman

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own. ~ Herman Melville

There, eastward, within a stone's throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring. Behind them, black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her belfry louvres; and Queen's with her dome of green copper; and, as the eye turned southward, Magdalen, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers; the Schools and the battlemented front of University; Merton, square-pinnacled, half-hidden behind the shadowed North side and mounting spire of St. Mary's. Westward again, Christ Church, vast between Cathedral spire and Tom Tower; Brasenose close at hand; St. Aldate's and Carfax beyond; spire and tower and quadrangle, all Oxford springing underfoot in living leaf and enduring stone, ringed far off by her bulwark of blue hills. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things. ~ Oscar Wilde

..she can feel that burden sometimes like a wall pressing in over the dome of the false sky that bounds the city.
*Someone has to*, she says again, as if the ghost is somewhere in the machines that create this Seaheaven, as if he might have cared and turns away, walks back down the vivid street, the dust soft and almost real against her feet. ~ Melissa Scott

My trigger finger itching, positioned at your dome, one twitch and it's on. No remorse or second thoughts. ~ Snoop Dogg

Oh, that the wise from their bright minds would kindle
Such lamps within the dome of this dim world
That the pale name of priest might shrink and dwindle
Into the Hell from which it first was furled. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Iron Dome system is a proven way for Israel to defend its citizens from hostile threats and will advance missile defense technology for us and other allies. ~ Rob Portman

Wait," said Butler. "Just wait, Holly. Artemis has a plan." He squinted through the green dome. "What is your plan, Artemis?"
All Artemis could do was smile and shrug. ~ Eoin Colfer

The major concern ... was to create a monument which would have lasting significance and would be a landmark of our time ... Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose. But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right. ~ Eero Saarinen

I have a room, which is in my brain, and it's very, very, very ... untidy! There is stuff fallen everywhere. There are some very important ideas next to dome very silly ones. There is a bottle of wine that was opened five years ago, and there is a lunch I haven't eaten from last summer. There are faces of children who are going to die but don't have to. There's my fathers face telling me to tidy up my room. So that's what I'm doing - tidying my room. ~ Bono

Cutting the cake in the shape of Half Dome with Laurene and his daughter from a previous relationship, Lisa Brennan. ~ Walter Isaacson

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral. ~ Iain Sinclair

And here come the Left Brothers - Al "747" Sharpton and Jesse "DC 10" Jackson - barreling in for a landing on top of Goodell's dome. And this time every black person with an ounce of common sense and self-respect is riding shotgun with Jesse and Al, who have justifiably voiced their displeasure with Limbaugh's ownership bid. ~ Jason Whitlock

... opened the door, and stepped into a memaid's grotto, into a drowned girl's sanctuary. The walls were tiled in glittering blue and silver, like scales, arching together to form the high, pointed dome of the roof. It was a flower frozen in the moment before it could open; it was a teardrop turned to crystal before it could fall. Little nooks were set into the walls, filled with candles, which cast a dancing light over everything they touched. ~ Seanan McGuire

The sun, the hero of every day, the impersonal old man that beams as brightly on death as on birth, came up every morning and raced across the blue dome and dipped into the sea of fire every evening. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

There was no sign of life round the domed emplacement of the Moonraker, and the concrete, already beginning to shimmer in the early morning sun, stretched emptily away towards Deal. It looked like a newly laid aerodome or rather, he thought, with its three disparate concrete 'things', the beehive dome,the flat-iron blast-wall, and the distant cube of the firing point, each casting black pools of shadow towards him in the early sun, like a Dali desert landscape in which three objets trouves reposed at carefully calculated random. ~ Ian Fleming

The place is of no concern to them. They've left it to fester. An informational dead zone. The abstraction doesn't penetrate here, by design. The dome rebuffs it. The family craved their privacy, their insularity. My alert was a simple radio frequency trigger, with just enough power to reach beyond the estate. A risk even in that, but one worth taking."
"You keep saying them," Dreyfus said.
"For a reason," Stasov answered. ~ Alastair Reynolds

The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one's selfhood or erase it? ~ Salman Rushdie

Slowly, he starts to hum. I recognize the tune as the sad song, the one we kissed to in a room full of moonlight.
Thunder rumbles in the clouds, threatening to burst. Raindrops pitter on the dome above us. It shocks and sizzles the rain, but the water keeps coming in a steady downpour. Even the sky weeps for our loss. ~ Victoria Aveyard

I'm freestylin just on the microphone
On the BBC, on the BBC
I'm just freestylin on the BBC
Um British Broadcasting Company
i'm just basically making this shit up as I go along
Basically just free
Just basically from the top of my dome
Sometimes it's not so good
My rhymes are so potent that in this small segment
I made all the lady listeners pregnant ~ Flight Of The Conchords

I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall. ~ Annie Dillard

Dr. Sarvis with his bald mottled dome and savage visage, grim and noble as Sibelius, was out night-riding on a routine neighborhood beautification project, burning billboards along the highway - U.S. 66, ~ Edward Abbey

Lines for Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself -
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are. ~ Mark Strand