From The Dust Returned Quotes

Please, please, help me grow to be like them, the ones'll soon be here, who never grow old, can't die, that's what they say, can't die, no matter what, or maybe they died a long time ago but Cecy calls, and Mother and Father call, and Grandmere who only whispers, and now they're coming and I'm nothing, not like them who pass through walls and live in trees or live underneath until seventeen-year rains flood them up and out, and the ones who run in packs, let me be the one! If they live forever, why not me? ~ Ray Bradbury

I take the dust from the lotus feet of the guru to cleanse the mirror of my mind." So begins a sacred ode to Hanuman. ~ Ram Dass

Engineers had not framework for understanding Mandelbrot's description, but mathematicians did. In effect, Mandelbrot was duplicating an abstract construction known as the Cantor set, after the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor. To make a Cantor set, you start with the interval of numbers from zero to one, represented by a line segment. Then you remove the middle third. That leaves two segments, and you remove the middle third of each (from one-ninth to two-ninths and from seven-ninths to eight-ninths). That leaves four segments, and you remove the middle third of each- and so on to infinity. What remains? A strange "dust" of points, arranged in clusters, infinitely many yet infinitely sparse. Mandelbrot was thinking of transmission errors as a Cantor set arranged in time. ~ James Gleick

They haven't killed us yet, I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it.
If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit.
This is the way the world is made now. ~ Lauren Oliver

My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music. ~ Sam Shepard

I am the dust and dirt from which this earth grows. ~ Sima Mittal

The earth provides us a brand new beginning every twenty-four hours. It is a repeated invitation to breathe in the cool morning air and start afresh; to mimic the sunrise and brighten up while reaching once more for the sky; to carry a glad song in our heart like the early birds; and, as faithfully as the morning dew, to wash off the dust from yesterday. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Dressed for Success"

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Tried to make it little by little
Tried to make it bit by bit on my own
Quit the job the gray believers
Another town where I get close to the bone

Whatcha gonna tell your brother?
Oh, oh, oh
Whatcha gonna tell your father?
I don't know
Whatcha gonna tell your mother?
Let me go

I'm gonna get dressed for success
Shaping me up for the big time, baby
Get dressed for success
Shaping it up for your love
For your love, yeah, yeah, yeah

I'm not afraid, a trembling flower
I'll feed your heart and blow the dust from your eyes, oh, oh, oh
And in the dark things happen faster
I love the way you sway your hips next to mine

Whatcha gonna tell your brother?
Oh, oh, oh
Whatcha gonna tell your father?
I don't know
Whatcha gonna tell your mother?
Let me go

I'm gonna get dressed for success
Shaping me up for the big time baby
Get dressed for success
Shaping it up for your love, yeah
(Look sharp)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, oh

Whatcha gonna tell your brother?
Oh, oh, oh
Whatcha gonna tell your father?
I don't know
Whatcha gonna tell your mother?
Let me go

(Dressed for success)
I'm gonna get
(Dressed for success)

I'm gonna get dressed for success
Hitting a s ~ Roxette

But somehow, without me noticing it happening, I became someone who after every failure, rejection and mistake can pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again. That life skill, the first one you need, came from my mother. So thanks to her, despite the rest of my upbringing and my awkward personality, I've survived. ~ Viv Albertine

So throw off all desires, remove all the dust from your eyes, be at ease within, not longing for something, not even for God. Every longing is the same, whether for a big car, or God, or a big house, makes no difference. Longing is the same. Don't long – just be. Don't even look – just be! Don't think! Let this moment be there, and you in it, and suddenly you have everything – because life is there. Suddenly everything starts showering on you, and then this moment becomes eternal and then there is no time. It is always the now. It never ends, never begins. But then you are in it, not an outsider. You have entered the whole, you have recognized who you are. ~ Osho

A Second Childhood."

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think that I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God's ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber's dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters w ~ G.K. Chesterton

Life is fleeting," Samuel said. "A short leap, in the eye of the Eternal, from dust to dust. May you pass it together. ~ Eric Corder

1. Modern thinking is a mysterious entity, it is covered in blood and is two meters tall, its smile opens your soul to you and its smile descends to the earth and opens a portal to the dimension of eternal laughter, into a world without values.
2. Death from the dust of all the dead and dust of memories. Fear is all out of the darkness of the subconscious of billions of threads of manipulation.
3. Under the ordinary eye, the eye of anger. Under the eye of anger, the eye of despondency. Under the eye of despondency, the eye of insight of enlightenment of good and light, selfless nobleness.
4. The face tears up from laughter, and there is not flesh and soul, but a continuous smile of awareness.
5. Love is a sports scoreboard, the score of the one who loves more is kept.
6. Truth is a card. An illusion. You tilt a little, you see one, and you straighten up you see another.
7. Lust is erotic poker cards, poker for stripping the truth. Here you will win only loneliness.
8. Reality is a terrible dystopia of smiling optimism, with wired senses, with laughing monsters in your head, that is, your vices.
9. Wandering around in the midst of twilight darkness, the creative person revealed to the world what was hidden in the egg that lay in this fog, essences and monsters of the subconscious crawled out of it through the force field of imagination and depravity, through the force field they arise in the mind. Some in the imagination become prettier, ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

Every time I hold your hand in the night and look at that star, I remember the fact that it is millions of light years away from us, we are looking at its past and it doesn't exist anymore and I always end up feeling, what if we both are made up of the dust of the same star we are staring at. ~ Akshay Vasu

One event that is both history and myth is the rain of blood around the year 1000 in Aquitaine and elsewhere in France. Reports exist from the early eleventh century of a blood rain that "fell upon the clothes of many men, and so stained them with gore that they shuddered at the sight of their own garments and tore them off." Fulbert of Chartres wrote that account in a letter to King Robert of France, after the worried king received a report from Duke William V about a rain of blood that fell in Aquitaine. Scientists today believe that historical reports of blood rain may have been due to dust containing iron oxide, ~ Joseph Finley

I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence. To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him! ~ Morris L. West

He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe. Of cours, she was only a child, still removing the dust from her first death. What else could she do? And he was already accumulating the dust of his second death. What else could he do? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I look at the sky and the dust that separates us from the stars that will be my home. I breathe in the night air, the rotten night air, and I miss,
I miss,
I miss. ~ Corinne Duyvis

A Lancashire Weaver

This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
The machines now stand idle
Looms clatter no more
There's a stack of old bobbins
piled up by the door.
I remember my Mam
she worked here, so she said
A Lancashire weaver
but now she is dead
Along with this mill
and along with the dreams
of working mill lasses
and their jobs, so it seems
We once wove the best
cotton cloth in the world
But now that's all gone
on the scrap heap been hurled
The clatter of clogs
on the old cobbled street
the humdrum staccato
from thousands of feet.
Tough work and much hardship
and many a care
Folks they got by
for brass, it was rare
but still we had pride
By Christ, did we ever!
Will it ever come back
The answer is NEVER
This place might be haunted
the ghost hunter said
'Midst the dust and the grime
walk the feet of the dead.
I'm glad that my Mam
never saw it this way
Out in all weathers
came here every day
When this closed down
she had already died
Perhaps just as well
She'd have bloody well cried. ~ David Hayes

As fire is engulfed by smoke; mirror obscured by dust; fetus covered by amnion, so is the knowledge buried by insatiable sexual desire. The sexual desire is the biggest enemy of the wise. This insatiable burning desire will obstruct and destroy knowledge. From Bhagavad Gita ~ Varma

It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. "Economizing," as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year's clothes again. The dread of rearing unfashionable children is understandable. But as a priority, "makes me look cool" has passed up "keeps arteries functional" and left the kids huffing and puffing (fashionably) in the dust. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers. ~ Cornelia Funke

His hair was mussed, and his teeth were very white in his swarthy, dust-streaked face. With his autocratic facade stripped away, and his eyes sparkling with enjoyment, his grin was so unexpectedly engaging that Lillian experienced a curious melting sensation inside. Hanging over him, she felt her own lips curving in a reluctant smile. A loose lock of her hair dangled free of its tether, sliding silkily over his jaw.
"What's a trebuchet?" she asked.
"A catapult. I have a friend who has a keen interest in medieval weaponry. He…" Westcliff hesitated, a new tension seeming to spread through his taut body as he lay beneath her. "He recently built a trebuchet using an ancient design…and enlisted me to help fire it…"
Lillian was entertained by the idea that the normally reserved Westcliff was capable of such boyish antics. Realizing that she was straddling him, she colored and began to wriggle off him. "Your aim was off?" she asked, striving to sound casual.
"The owner of the stone wall we demolished seemed to think so." The earl caught his breath sharply as her body slid away from his, and remained sitting on the ground even after she had gotten to her feet. ~ Lisa Kleypas

That afternoon the sky was scattered with black clouds galloping in from the sea and clustering over the city. Flashes of lightening echoed on the horizon and a charged warm wind smelling of dust announced a powerful summer storm. When I reached the station I noticed the first few drops, shiny and heavy, like coins falling from heaven ... Night seemed to fall suddenly, interrupted only by the lightning now bursting over the city, leaving a trail of noise and fury. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Life In Love

Escape me?
Never---
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again,---
So the chace takes up one's life ' that's all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me---
Ever
Removed! ~ Robert Browning

My name is Bis," he said, "and I was kicked off the basilica because I was spitting on the people coming in. Suck-up little Glissando thinks she knows angel dust from dirt and tattled on me. ~ Kim Harrison

That thou didst love her, strikes some scores away
From the great compt: but love that comes too late,
Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried,
To the great sender turns a sour offence,
Crying, 'That's good that's gone.' Our rash faults
Make trivial price of serious things we have,
Not knowing them until we know their grave:
Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,
Destroy our friends and after weep their dust
Our own love waking cries to see what's done,
While shame full late sleeps out the afternoon.
Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her. ~ William Shakespeare

Dear Neil Armstrong,

I write this to you as she sleeps down the hall. I need answers I think only you might have. When you were a boy, and space was simple science fiction, when flying was merely a daydream between periods of History and Physics, when gifts of moon dust to the one you loved could only be wrapped in your imagination.. Before the world knew your name; before it was a destination in the sky.. What was the moon like from your back yard?

Your arm, strong warm and wrapped under her hair both of you gazing up from your back porch summers before your distant journey. But upon landing on the moon, as the earth rose over the sea of tranquility, did you look for her? What was it like to see our planet, and know that everything, all you could be, all you could ever love and long for.. was just floating before you. Did you write her name in the dirt when the cameras weren't looking? Surrounding both your initials with a heart for alien life to study millions of years from now? What was it like to love something so distant? What words did you use to bring the moon back to her? And what did you promise in the moons ear, about that girl back home? Can you, teach me, how to fall from the sky?

I ask you this, not because I doubt your feat, I just want to know what it's like to go somewhere no man had ever been, just to find that she wasn't there. To realize your moon walk could never compare to the steps that led to her. I now know that the fli ~ Mike McGee

A righteous politician will make all his citizens leaders. He will know all the lives of his countrymen. He will know each family by name, when they were born, their problems and anxieties and he will wipe away all pain. He will know what his citizens have eaten, where they have slept and he will know all grazing and hunting animals. He will not have privileges and he will govern alongside his cittizens. He will not govern on the basis of death because he is a leader of life. He will not allow death to occur or appear in his country. He will not lead his country to battle and no sickness will prevail under his rule. In his country there will be neither poor nor rich. He will know the fish in the sea, the birds of the air in number and will know all wildlife. He will know all particles of dust in formation. He will know all seasons and foretell a million years to come. He will have no blood on his hands and will not suffer from guilt. His citizens will suffer from no want. ~ David Ssembajjo

Though man comes from the dust, sin is not a part of his nature. Man can overcome sin, and through repentance attain to at-one-ment with his Maker. ~ Joseph Hertz

Great nations which fail to meet their responsibilities to God are consigned to the dust bin of history. We grew from that small, weak republic which had as its assets spirit, optimism, faith in God and an unshakeable belief that free men and women could govern themselves wisely. We became the leader of the free world, an example for all those who cherish freedom. If we are to continue to be that example-if we are to preserve our own freedom-we must understand those who would dominate us and deal with them with determination. ~ Ronald Reagan

She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! ~ Zora Neale Hurston

She moved suddenly, planting her hands against the kitchen floor. Throwing back her head, she screamed, and that sound was full of sorrow and heartbreak. It started as a low tremble under my feet and then increased, shaking the kitchen table and rattling the plates and cups in the cabinets. Then it was a rumble, causing the house to groan and small clouds of dust to drop from the ceiling. The table scuttled over the floor. A chair toppled over and then another. Somewhere in the living room, a window shattered. Kat was going to bring the house down. Shit. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Then he took my arm, in a much softer grip than the one he'd used on our first date when he'd kept me from biting the dust. "No, c'mon," he said, pulling me closer to him and securing his arms around my waist. I died a thousand deaths as he whispered softly, "What's wrong?"
What could I possibly say? Oh, nothing, it's just that I've been slowly breaking up with my boyfriend from California and I uninvited him to my brother's wedding last week and I thought everything was fine and then he called last night after I got home from cooking you that Linguine and Clam Sauce you loved so much and he said he was flying here today and I told him not to because there really wasn't anything else we could possibly talk about and I thought he understood and while I was driving out here just now he called me and it just so happens he's at the airport right now but I decided not to go because I didn't want to have a big emotional drama (you mean like the one you're playing out in Marlboro Man's kitchen right now?) and I'm finding myself vacillating between sadness over the end of our four-year relationship, regret over not going to see him in person, and confusion over how to feel about my upcoming move to Chicago. And where that will leave you and me, you big hunk of burning love.
"I ran over my dog today!" I blubbered and collapsed into another heap of impossible-to-corral tears. Marlboro Man was embracing me tightly now, knowing full well that his arms were the only offering he ~ Ree Drummond

She sat down at a table, with books piled high around her and began looking through them rapidly, looking for some information concerning marriage with mortals. Dust rose from the books and swirled about her, dancing and glittering wherever the light struck it.

Mika leaned over her shoulder curiously, repeating softly to himself some of the incantations he read there. At once there were faint rustlings and sighs in the air.

"Stop, stop!" Flumpdoria cried. "You silly thing, do you want all the jinns and genii in the world bumping about in this room? Don't say those spells aloud. And stop looking over my shoulder. It gives me the creeps. ~ Marian Cockrell

It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. ~ Bram Stoker

So you wish to conquer in the Olympic Games, my friend? And I, too ... But first mark the conditions and the consequences. You will have to put yourself under discipline; to eat by rule, to avoid cakes and sweetmeats; to take exercise at the appointed hour whether you like it or not, in cold and heat; to abstain from cold drinks and wine at your will. Then, in the conflict itself you are likely enough to dislocate your wrist or twist your ankle, to swallow a great deal of dust, to be severely thrashed, and after all of these things, to be defeated. ~ Epictetus

I do not know what dust is, I do not know where it comes from, I only know that it settles on things. I cannot see it in the air, or watch it fall. Sometimes Im home all day but I never see it sliding about looking for a place to rest when my back is turned. Does it wait til I go out? Or, does it happen in the night when I sleep? Dust is not fussy about the places it chooses, though it seems to prefer still objects. Sometimes, out of kindness, I let it lie for weeks. On some places it will lie forever. However, dust holds no grudges and once removed it will always return, in a friendly way. ~ Ivor Cutler

England in the late 1940s was famously grim. As I remember it, London back then was a very dirty place, from coal dust and smoke, from the grit stirred up every day by the jackhammers still clearing out rubble from the Blitz. ~ Alexander Cockburn

When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly ... he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science ... Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries. ~ Max Planck

The shade melted away as the sun climbed into its zenith. All colors were now covered in stone dust. The only vigorous activity came from the bushes, where cicada songs pulsed like alien hearts. ~ Aleksandr Voinov