Glittering Quotes

She didn't fear the night, though she found little comfort in its dark hours. It was the time when she slept, the time when she stalked and killed, the time when the stars emerged with glittering beauty and made her feel wonderfully small and insignificant. ~ Sarah J. Maas

The beginning of faith is the beginning of fruitfulness; but the beginning of unbelief, however glittering, is empty. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You erased my famine, unpicked my anger
Your energy charges my voice, it radiates my heart;
Now I am alive with the ore of words pouring
From my lips like molten lava glittering with joy. ~ Rumi

This glittering reality is so wonderful. It suits you. ~ Calista Lynne

Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back!
Stand beside me, Athena, fire me with daring, fierce
as the day we ripped Troy's glittering crown of towers down.
Stand by me - furious now as then, my bright-eyed one -
and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess,
with you to brace me, comrade-in-arms in battle! ~ Homer

But Mark was come of the glittering towns
Where hot white details show,
Where man can number and expound,
And his faith grew in a hard ground
Of doubt and reason and falsehood found,
Where no faith else could grow.
Belief that grew of all beliefs
One moment back was blown
And belief that stood on unbelief
Stood up iron and alone. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The glittering filament, finer than a hair, is far less than a denier in thickness. When a ray of sunlight struck it at the window at which I was examining it, I saw the thread blaze with all the colours of the spectrum. ~ Leena Krohn

For myself, it took only the early discovery of a golden ammonite, glittering on the beach between Lyme and Charmouth, for me to succumb to the seductive thrill of finding unexpected treasure. ~ Tracy Chevalier

The Romanians really do lead the world when it comes to cursing. "What have you got for me?" I asked a woman from Transylvania who was now living in Vienna.
"Shove your hand up my ass and jerk off my shit," she offered.

I was stunned. "Anyone else would say, 'Shove your hand up my ass,' and then run out of imagination," I told her. "You people, though, you just keep going. And that's what makes you the champions you are." Maybe it's not too late to learn how to drive, I thought, watching as she walked out the door and onto the unsuspecting streets of Vienna, this poet, this queen, this glittering jewel in a city of flint. ~ David Sedaris

When the tribal groups of december trade
Seated in the figure of crocodile
And songs are sung and deals discussed, are made
Real. All ... For more than one reason they smile.
These codes are writ in secret, feeling fine
To keep what's private to my self since we
All must face our maker in our own ryhme
And reasons for being ( from regrets) free
So let the memory of your glory
Be the tenderness heartfelt love starkly
In the sky of my mind vast and pretty
Evermore glittering simplicity
Where in the truth of country grows sober
And sunshines through fog to radiate wonder ~ John Armstrong

Even the girl he'd danced with had thought it was some marvelous trick. She had been enveloped in real, bright fire and she had tipped back her head and laughed, the tumble of her black hair becoming a crackling waterfall of light, the heels of her shoes striking sparks like glittering leaping dust all over the floor, her skirt trailing flame as if he were following a phoenix tail. Magnus had spun and swung with her, and she'd thought he was marvelous for a single moment of bright illusion.
But, like love, fire didn't last. ~ Cassandra Clare

Lesa's eyes flicked up behind me and widened. "Wow. Now that's even more unexpected."
Something smelled sweet and familiar. Confused, I twisted around. A single rose in full bloom, a vibrant red, brushed against the tip of my nose. Tan fingers held the green stem. My eyes lifted.
Daemon stood there, his eyes glittering like green tinsel. He patted me on the nose with the rose again. "Good morning."
Dumbfounded, I stared at him.
"This is for you," he added when I didn't say anything. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf.... ~ Andrei Makine

Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the ~ W.G. Sebald

In the sky the sun spit its golden, incandescent venom out at the glittering afternoon. A yellow, screaming banshee sparkling bitch of a diamond confidently suspended in a cloudless sky. ~ Gerard Harrison

It was still quite motionless and he felt it with his fingers; it was dead. Accustomed, no doubt, to an uneventful existence, to a humble life spent beneath its poor carapace, it had not been able to bear the dazzling splendor thrust upon it, the glittering cope in which it had been garbed, the gems with which its back had been encrusted, like a ciborium. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

We Let the Boat Drift

I set out for the pond, crossing the ravine
where seedling pines start up like sparks
between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.

The grass in the field would make a second crop
if early autumn rains hadn't washed
the goodness out. After the night's hard frost
it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.

The water is utterly still. Here and there
a black twig sticks up. It's five years today,
and even now I can't accept what cancer did
to him -- not death so much as the annihilation
of the whole man, sense by sense, thought
by thought, hope by hope.

Once we talked about the life to come.
I took the Bible from the nightstand
and offered John 14: "I go to prepare
a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said.
"But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore,
must be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect.'" And he wept.

My neighbor honks and waves driving by.
She counsels troubled students; keeps bees;
her goats follow her to the mailbox.

Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddles
rested across our laps; glittering drops
fell randomly from their tips. The light
around us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant-
let us get quite close before it dove, coming up
after a long time, and ~ Jane Kenyon

It should have been the Arabian Nights, but to Bond, seeing it first above the tops of trams and above the great scars of modern advertising along the river frontage, it seemed a once beautiful theatre-set that modern Turkey had thrown aside in favour of the steel and concrete flat-iron of the Istanbul-Hilton Hotel, blankly glittering behind him on the heights of Pera. ~ Ian Fleming

And yonder sits a maiden, The fairest of the fair, With gold in her garment glittering, And she combs her golden hair. ~ Heinrich Heine

Hands folded under my chin, I drifted. A bruise-colored cloud hung over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed shallow water had a strange boiled-vegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I tried to fix each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would. ~ William Finnegan

Winter was come indeed bringing with it those pleasures of which the summer dreamer knows nothing - the delight when the fine and glittering day shows in the window, though one knows how cold it is outside; the delight of getting as close as possible to the blazing range which in the shadowy kitchen throws reflections very different from the pale gleams of sunlight in the yard, the range we cannot take with us on our walk, busy with its own activity, growling and grumbling as it sets to work, for in three hours time luncheon must be ready; the delight of filling one's bowl with steaming café-au-lait - for it is only eight o'clock - and swallowing it in boiling gulps while servants at their tasks come in and out with a, 'Good morning: up early, aren't you?' and a kindly, 'It's snug enough in here, but cold outside,' accompanying the words with that smile which is to be seen only on the faces of those who for the moment are thinking of others and not of themselves, whose expressions, entirely freed from egotism, take on a quality of vacillating goodness, a smile which completes that earlier smile of the bright golden sky touching the window-panes, and crowns our every pleasure as we stand there with the lovely heat of the range at our backs, the hot and limpid flavour of the café-au-lait in our mouths; the delight of night-time when, having had to get up to go shiveringly to the icy lavatory in the tower, into which the air creeps through the ill-fitting window, we later return ~ Marcel Proust

Edie Sedgwick (1943-1971)

I don't know how she did it. Fire
She was shaking all over. It took
her hours to put her make-up on.
But she did it. Even the false eye-lashes.
She ordered gin with triple
limes. Then a limosine. Everyone
knew she was the real heroine of
Blonde on Blonde.
oh it isn't fair
oh it isn't fair
how her ermine hair
turned men around
she was white on white
so blonde on blonde
and her long long legs
how I used to beg
to dance with her
but I never had
a chance with her
oh it isn't fair
how her ermine hair
used to swing so nice
used to cut the air
how all the men
used to dance with her
I never got a chance with her
though I really asked her
down deep
where you do
really dream
in the mind
reading love
I'd get
inside
her move
and we'd
turn around
and she'd
turn around
and turn the head
of everyone in town
her shaking shaking
glittering bones
second blonde child
after brian jones
oh it isn't fair

how I dreamed of her
and she slept
and she slept
forever
and I'll never dance
with her no never
she broke down
like a baby
like a baby girl
like a lady
with ermine hair
oh it isn't fair
and I'd like to see
her rise again
her white white bones
with baby bri ~ Patti Smith

Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall. ~ Max Lerner

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
It was just where I went. ~ Robert Penn Warren

When my children wake up in the morning they know they will eat breakfast, get hugs from their parents, go to a good, safe school. Plates are full and store windows are glittering. But at the same time the great majority of the world's children and women stand - no - shiver on the precipice ~ Susan Sarandon

I realised something else tonight. Something about pancakes.'

'What about them?'

'We both got so obsessed about that first pancake being thrown away that we forgot something really important,' Max explained. 'That first pancake tastes just as good as all the other ones. It's not its fault that it was first in line and the pan wasn't hot enough so it got a bit lumpy and misshapen.'

'And when you're really famished that first pancake tastes better than all the ones that come after it,' Neve said, and then she couldn't wait any longer. Her arms were around Max before she'd even finished forming the thought, but his arms were around her too in that exact same moment.

Just having him there to hold, warm and solid and real, was enough for five seconds, and then she was peppering his face with kisses – his forehead, his eyebrows, the tip of his crooked nose, along his cheekbones until she reached the glittering prize of his mouth.

Sometimes Neve thought that her appetite was the most robust thing about her, and she didn't kiss Max so much as she devoured him. Graceless, messy kisses without any thought or reason, but simply because she hungered for him. Kissed him with everything she had and everything she was, and she didn't know why she could kiss Max and have him kiss her back with the same fierceness but still be greedy for the next kiss and the one after that and the one after that and the one… ~ Sarra Manning

The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it'... that manifesto is doubted now, ladies and gentlemen... almost everywhere in our culture, in all walks of life, among the young and the old, but especially among the young, for whom the dream of a glittering future in which life will become ever sweeter and sweeter and sweeter, decade after decade, century after century, has been exploded and is meaningless. Your children know better. They know better in large part because you know better.

Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. They must, as a professional obligation, still affirm and proclaim the manifesto of our revolution. If they want to hold on to their jobs, they assure us with absolute conviction that a glorious future lies just ahead for us - provided that we march forward under the banner of conquest and rule. They assure us of this, and then they wonder, year after year, why fewer and fewer voters go to the poles. ~ Daniel Quinn

I knew his face when he came. Of course I knew it. Even a Star dreams. I have been dreaming a long time, and I watched the glittering cord of that man's life spool out until it intersected with mine, and how the sparks lit the grass at my feet! I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other. But Stars, you know, are fixed in their courses, and we can no more change the throttling paces of orbit than a rabbit can shorten its ears. I saw his cord lashing and snapping in the dark, and could do nothing. ~ Catherynne M Valente

His eyes ran over her hungrily. "I couldn't get it out of my mind," he said, almost to himself, "the way it felt, back at my mother's house. I was never so hungry for anyone, but it wasn't completely physical, even then." He frowned. "I want you, Cecily, and I hate myself for it."
"What else is new?" She gestured toward the door. "Go home. And I hope you don't sleep a wink."
"I probably won't," he said ruefully. He moved toward the door, hesitating.
"Good night," she said firmly, not moving.
He stood with his back to her, his spine very straight. "I can trace my ancestors back before the Mexican War in the early 1800s, pure Lakota blood, undiluted even by white settlement. There are so few of us left…"
She could have wept for what she knew, and he didn't know. "You don't have to explain it to me," she said solemnly. "I know how you feel."
"You don't," he bit off. He straightened again. "I'd die to have you, just once." He turned, and the fire was in his eyes as they met hers, glittering across the room. "It's like that for you, too."
"It's a corruption of the senses. You don't love me," she said quietly. "Without love, it's just sex."
He breathed deliberately, slowly. He didn't want to ask. He couldn't help it. "Something you know?"
"Yes. Something I know," she said, lying with a straight face and a smile that she hoped was worldly. She was not going to settle for crumbs from him, stolen hours in his bed. Men were devious when desi ~ Diana Palmer

Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was the second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. [ ... ] It's too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it's as of now real. [ ... ] He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. ~ David Foster Wallace

Miserable is the woman who arises from the inattentiveness and restlessness of youth and finds herself in the home of a man showering her with his glittering gold and precious gifts and according her all the honours and grace of lavish entertainment but unable to satisfy her soul with the heavenly wine which God pours from the eyes of a man into the heart of a woman. ~ Kahlil Gibran

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of all enigmas and the freshest draught of the true water of life to be near at hand; his heart rejoices, and it seems to the weary traveller that his lips already touch the goal of all the perseverance and sorrows of the scientific life... Other natures again, may well grow exceedingly ill-humoured and curse the salty taste which these apparitions leave behind in the mouth and from which arises a raging thirst – without one having been brought so much as a step nearer to any kind of spring. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Over his shoulder, Evangeline prowls like a predatory cat, a glittering storm of knives at her fist. ~ Victoria Aveyard

I look at [books] as a child looks at cakes - with glittering eyes and a watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

New year is the glittering light to brighten the dream-lined pathway of future ~ Munia Khan

The truth is that I've spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm ... maybe if I hadn't gone with Spike ... maybe if I could have lived more peaceably ... maybe if I'd met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn't done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But perfect-coloured without white or red.
And her lips opened amorously, and said
I wist not what, saving one word
Delight.
And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to my eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs
And glittering eyelids of my soul's desire. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Worry! What a waste of time. All the holy books were right. Clearly 'worry' was the mark of a primitive and spiritually unevolved person. What was that line from Yeats, about the bemused Chinese sages? All things fall and are built again. Ancient glittering eyes. This was wisdom. People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries and wailing about their puny individual lives, when - what was the point? All this useless sorrow? Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the earth to be happy, in the brief time allotted to us? ~ Donna Tartt

A single slim trunk
Branches that bow in a storm
Green, leathery leaves with a soft centre
Glittering against blue sky
White bark scarred, bleeding
Heart wide-open
Bandaged, but upright she stands... (225) ~ Fadia Faqir

Farran studied his new ally, his gaze glittering. "You have no idea." After another moment, he asked, "Why did you do it?"
Arobynn's attention drifted back to the wagon, already a small dot in the rolling foothills above Rifthold. "Because I don't like sharing my belongings. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Because that's the way it is when a possibility opens up; the body doesn't know any better. It reaches for the glittering incongruity. ~ Vanessa Veselka

She bore down upon him like a glittering siege engine. ~ Terry Pratchett

The glittering baits of titles and honours are only for children and fools. ~ Jane Welsh Carlyle

There's smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It's a Western,
Henry. It's a downright shoot-em-up. We've made a graveyard
out of the bone white afternoon.
It's another wrong-man-dies scenario, and we keep doing it Henry,
keep saying until we get it right … but we always win and we never quit.
See, we've won again,
here we are at the place where I get to beg for it, where I get to say Please,
for just one night, will you lie down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,
we can stay all buttoned up …
But we both know how it goes - I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head underwater. I say I want you inside me and you split me open
with a knife. ~ Richard Siken

Aiden was taught about the old world, the ways in which his ancestors and their nations lived. In those 'grandest times' it seemed Outside was valued highly, that great attention was lavished upon the sun, and the air, and movement. There were tales of people running in circles, fighting in the open air, crowds choosing to watch. He'd thought such sport nonsense, the idea of participating in vast collectives in the Outside ridiculous enough, but even the idea that one might take such a thing as 'a walk', that there was a better use of time than spending it with the height human accomplishment, surrounded by fine and beautiful possessions, rich jewellery and glorious illustration, with the writings of generations for comfort, had seemed purest idiocy. Imagine, he had thought, Outside having as much to offer as Inside. Imagine it having any point at all. Oh, he thought, how those people of the past placed false treasure in the powers of sun, and of sky. Oh, how they underestimated true wealth: the jewels of the earth, hewn and sculpted and sanded into glittering lumps of perfection. ~ A.E. Shaw

His arm slid around my shoulders and drew me to him. It was odd, sitting there under the veil of darkness, watching the neighborhood settle down. Lamps burned in windows. TVs flickered. A few houses down, the rhythmic thud of a basketball on concrete and muffled laughter alerted us to the only other people outside on this glorious fall night.

"This is a perfect date," I said.

He tensed. "You'd call it a date?"

"Sure. You wouldn't?"

He looked down at me, his eyes glittering in the faint light. "I thought American girls liked more formality in a date."

"More money is what you mean." I smiled. "It's a date. Don't argue with me."

"I never do. ~ Elizabeth Langston

It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn't have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho's colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice. ~ Thomas Pynchon

believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it.
I don't want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day. I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grab on to and extend to one another. That's the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don't even see it, because I'm too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I am about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting.
The Heisman Trophy winner knows this. He knows that his big moment was not when they gave him the trophy. It was the thousand times he went to practice instead of going back to bed. It was the miles run on rainy days, the healthy meals when a burg ~ Shauna Niequist

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

On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn't. Without even noticing what you're doing, you open up your heart and just start talking to the person next to you - you talk as if you have no audience but the glittering stars, far overhead. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter and snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds' star, eventide Venus; and Mars- quivering, red. But in days of blood and of peace the years fly like an arrow and the thick frost of a hoary white December, season of Christmas trees, Santa Claus, joy and glittering snow, overtook the young Turbins unawares. For the reigning head of the family, their adored mother, was no longer with them. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it's not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That's the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered. ~ Ann Druyan

I pour upward through the long dark tunnel of the spout. I am a funnel of smoke, a whirlwind of fire. I open myself and multiply, swelling into a great cloud over the boy's head. I press a thousand smoky hands against the stone ceiling of the cave. I roll a thousand fiery eyes and stretch a thousand glittering legs. I unfold and unfold and unfold. How good it feels to be out! I crackle with energy and excitement, my blood lightning and my breath thunder. ~ Jessica Khoury

The whole glittering nebula of shapes was framed by midnight colors - black, bruised blue, indigo, all textured into intricacy by clouds and the reachless vaults between them. Here, darkness was not simple; it hinted at structures and meanings, hidden activity and watchful eyes. Beacons flickered, miles away, then disappeared behind fog banks. Half-glimpsed ropes twisted and contorted their way up, down, and to every side, synapses reaching to contact the outlier towns and factories of Sere's hinterland. One or two of those ropes, if you followed them far enough, would emerge into sunlight at other nations' borders. ~ Karl Schroeder

We sat on the verandah drinking beer before we left, the hotel dark behind us. The moonlight was so strong we could see the grains of white sand glittering individually where it had been flung across the tarmac by the ox-wagon wheels. The heavy-hanging, pointed leaves of the gum-trees shone like tiny spears. I ~ Doris Lessing

We have given you a world as contradictory as a female, as cabbalistic as a male, a conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven, revolving in the ballroom of the skies glittering with conflict as diamonds: we have wasted paradox and mystery on you when all you ask us for is cause and effect! ~ Christopher Fry

I thought she had another animal pelt lying next to her, and then I realized it was a live animal - a deer with glittering fur and silver horns, its head resting contentedly in Artemis's lap. ~ Rick Riordan

All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops; - on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run. ~ William Wordsworth

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade. ~ K. Hari Kumar

His face was terrifying in its stillness, with only his eyes alive, glittering with rage. She could feel the force of his anger in the coiled strength of his body, hear it in the almost inaudible softness of his tone. He wasn't a man who lost control in his anger; he gained it to an even greater degree. ~ Linda Howard

The feel of the place was deep, the prehistoric heartbeat of the rocks complicating the music, the people bright, all different kinds of dancers, smilers, swayers, swirlers, smokers, beer-drinking boppers, tripsters, spinners. I looked back at the crowd ... and saw the show for a moment as a jewel ... like a gem in a bracelet: an ornament on the body of the country, glittering in the coming darkness. ~ Jason Burke

In good truth he had started in London with some vague idea that as his life in it would not be of long continuance, the pace at which he elected to travel would be of little consequence; but the years since his first entry into the Metropolis were now piled one on top of another, his youth was behind him, his chances of longevity, spite of the way he had striven to injure his constitution, quite as good as ever. He had come to that period of existence, to that narrow strip of tableland, whence the ascent of youth and the descent of age are equally discernible - when, simply because he has lived for so many years, it strikes a man as possible he may have to live for just as many more, with the ability for hard work gone, with the boon companions scattered, with the capacity for enjoying convivial meetings a mere memory, with small means perhaps, with no bright hopes, with the pomp and the circumstance and the fairy carriages, and the glamour which youth flings over earthly objects, faded away like the pageant of yesterday, while the dreary ceremony of living has to be gone through today and tomorrow and the morrow after, as though the gay cavalcade and the martial music, and the glittering helmets and the prancing steeds were still accompanying the wayfarer to his journey's end.
Ah! my friends, there comes a moment when we must all leave the coach with its four bright bays, its pleasant outside freight, its cheery company, its guard who blows the horn so merrily through ~ Charlotte Riddell

I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess that we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it. ~ John D. MacDonald

A long, white banner spread out, lifting on the air. Rand could only stare. The whole thing seemed of a piece, neither woven, nor dyed, nor painted. A figure like a serpent, scaled in scarlet and gold, ran the entire length, but it had scaled legs, and feet with five long, golden claws on each, and a great head with a golden mane and eyes like the sun. The stirring of the banner made it seem to move, scales glittering like precious metals and gems, alive, and he almost thought he could hear it roar defiance. ~ Robert Jordan

The sun is rising with a bright golden glittering glint. Let us wake up to enjoy the joyful battles of light and darkness. ~ Debasish Mridha

People created chaos, not places, and they were damned good at it no matter where they lived. And when this glittering gem of a city teamed up with the world's oldest profession, fantasy piled atop fantasy; it could convince anyone that impulse was a virtue, not a vice. ~ Vicki Pettersson

Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection. ~ Andy Warhol

You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything? ~ Elif Shafak

How I long to
feel
your presence
next to mine,
to dream of your
fingertips caressing
my worries and
turning them into
glittering stars
in the night
enhanced only by the
pale glow
that your eyes,
like the moon,
radiate in the
cool, dark night. ~ Will Darbyshire

The door opens, and I turn my head, my heart thudding at the sight of Griffin. Tall, broad, muscular but sleek, he stalks into the room like a predator, his gait balanced and sure, his glittering, gray eyes focused entirely on me. Inky hair, a hawkish nose, that stubborn jaw, and thick, black stubble make him look hard and intimidating. With his sword strapped on and his dark brows lowered, he's a warlord on the prowl.
I shiver. I couldn't want him more. ~ Amanda Bouchet

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt. ~ Ben H. Winters

Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.

When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another's heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.

In the coastline's haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel's withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees' jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by thei ~ Italo Calvino

The night garden felt like a home, with the glittering sky for the ceiling, the bushes our rug, and the dilapidated pavilion our bed. He lit up the place like a heart-warming hearth fire. He was the walls of my sanctuary, the food for my eyes, the scent of a home. He was everything. ~ Weina Dai Randel

The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy.
She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall.
Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the armed knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity.
Bogies will not scare her in the dark: bullets will not frighten her in the day.
Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.
The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.
A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong turning: but she passes safely through.
He details immortal gods to attend her: upon every road where she must travel.
They take her hand at hard places: she will not stub her toes in the dark.
She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionettes.
He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world's desire. ~ C.S. Lewis

In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again. ~ Glen Cook

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!" Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul on board ~ Herman Melville

Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity. ~ Jean Baudrillard

A whole Gothic world had come to grief ... there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled ... ~ Evelyn Waugh

I told Papa of whole cities under water, streets filled with drifting seaweed and glittering fish ~ Mette Jakobsen

We filled the night air with light and shone brighter than all those millions of glittering stars watching us from the sky. ~ Kenya Wright

Against firelight, he sees the face of the woman / Lean over, and the lips purse sweet as to bestow a kiss, but / This is not true, and the great glob of spit / Hangs there, glittering, before she lets it fall.
The spit is what softens like silk the passage of steel / On the fine-grained stone. It whispers. ~ Robert Penn Warren

Have you seen lamplight shine through dusty air, setting the dust motes on fire?" He waved a hand. "Imagine that, spread across the night sky - but ten thousand motes and ten thousand times brighter, glittering like the eyes of all the gods. ~ Rosamund Hodge

The faded glittering in his eyes is like a falling star on a dull autumn's day. ~ Anna Paszkiewicz

When I close my eyes to see, to hear, to smell, to touch a country I have known, I feel my body shake and fill with joy as if a beloved person had come near me.

A rabbi was once asked the following question: 'When you say that the Jews should return to Palestine, you mean, surely, the heavenly, the immaterial, the spiritual Palestine, our true homeland?' The rabbi jabbed his staff into the ground in wrath and shouted, 'No! I want the Palestine down here, the one you can touch with your hands, with its stones, its thorns and its mud!'

Neither am I nourished by fleshless, abstract memories. If I expected my mind to distill from a turbid host of bodily joys and bitternesses an immaterial, crystal-clear thought, I would die of hunger. When I close my eyes in order to enjoy a country again, my five senses, the five mouth-filled tentacles of my body, pounce upon it and bring it to me. Colors, fruits, women. The smells of orchards, of filthy narrow alleys, of armpits. Endless snows with blue, glittering reflections. Scorching, wavy deserts of sand shimmering under the hot sun. Tears, cries, songs, distant bells of mules, camels or troikas. The acrid, nauseating stench of some Mongolian cities will never leave my nostrils. And I will eternally hold in my hands – eternally, that is, until my hands rot – the melons of Bukhara, the watermelons of the Volga, the cool, dainty hand of a Japanese girl…

For a time, in my early youth, I struggled to nourish my ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

In the storm-lit darkness, the beaded sweat and raindrops on her arm were like so many glittering stars, and her skin was like a span of night sky. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Of course he would think the whole glittering universe existed to spin anything he wanted out of stardust. He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires. ~ Anna-Marie McLemore

There was such glittering darkness in her, an endless rift straight through her core ~ Sarah J. Maas

He concluded the speech with an irritated motion of his hands.
Unfortunately, Evie had been conditioned by too many encounters with Uncle Peregrine to discern between angry gestures and the beginnings of a physical attack. She flinched instinctively, her own arms flying up to shield her head. When the expected pain of a blow did not come, she let out a breath and tentatively lowered her arms to find Sebastian staring at her with blank astonishment.
Then his face went dark.
"Evie," he said, his voice containing a bladelike ferocity that frightened her. "Did you think I was about to…Christ. Someone hit you. Someone hit you in the past - who the hell was it?" He reached for her suddenly - too suddenly - and she stumbled backward, coming up hard against the wall. Sebastian went very still. "Goddamn," he whispered. Appearing to struggle with some powerful emotion, he stared at her intently. After a long moment, he spoke softly. "I would never strike a woman. I would never harm you. You know that, don't you?"
Transfixed by the light, glittering eyes that held hers with such intensity, Evie couldn't move or make a sound. She started as he approached her slowly. "It's all right," he murmured. "Let me come to you. It's all right. Easy." One of his arms slid around her, while he used his free hand to smooth her hair, and then she was breathing, sighing, as relief flowed through her. Sebastian brought her closer against him, his mouth brushing her temple. "Who was it ~ Lisa Kleypas

Evil Hall had been transformed into a magnificent ballroom, glittering with green tinsel, black balloons, thousands of green-flamed candles, and a spinning chandelier streaking wall murals with emerald bursts of light. Around a towering ice sculpture of two entwined snakes, Hort and Dot stumbled through a waltz, Anadil wrapped her arms around Vex, Brone tried not to step on Mona's green feet, and Hester and Ravan swayed and whispered as more villainous couples waltzed around them. Ravan's bunk mates picked up the music on reed violins as more pairs flooded onto the floor, clumsy, bashful, but aglow with happiness, dancing beneath a spangled banner:
THE 1ST ANNUAL VILLAINS NO BALL ~ Soman Chainani

I tried to avoid looking at the dress full on, lest it burn out my retinas with its glittering hideousness. ~ Katie MacAlister

Loving or not loving should be like coffee or tea; people should be allowed to decide. How else are we to get over all our dead and the women we've lost?" Cunco whispered dejectedly.
"Maybe we shouldn't."
"You think so? Not get over it. but...then? What then? What task do the departed want us to do?"
That was the question that Jean Perdu had been unable to answer for all these years.
Until now. Now he knew.
"To carry them within us - that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we've lost, then...then we are no longer present either. "
Jean looked at the Allier River, glittering in the moonlight.
"All the love, all the dead, all the people we've known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too."
He felt an overwhelming inner thirst to seize life with both hands before time sped past even faster. He didn't want to die of thirst, he wanted to be as wide and free as the sea - full and deep. He longed for friends. He wanted to love. He wanted to feel the marks that Manon had left inside him. He still wanted to feel her coursing through him, mingling with him. Manon had changed him forever - why deny it? That was how he had become the man whom Catherine had allowed to approach her.
Jean Perdu suddenly realized that Catherine could never taken Mann's place. She took her own ~ Nina George

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What's become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall I build a tower, boys, knowing it will rend
Crack upon the hour, boys, waiting for the end?
Shall I pluck a flower, boys, shall I save or spend?
All turns sour, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall I send a wire, boys? Where is there to send?
All are under fire, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall I turn a sire, boys? Shall I choose a friend?
The fat is in the pyre, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend,
Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end,
Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend,
Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?

Shall we send a cable, boys, accurately penned,
Knowing we are able, boys, waiting for the end,
Via the Tower of Babel, boys? Christ will not ascend.
He's hiding in his stable, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall we blow a bubble, boys, glittering to distend,
Hiding from our trouble, boys, waiting for the end?
When you build on rubble, boys, Nature will append
Double and re-double, boys, waiting for the end.

Shall we make a tale, boys, that things are sure to mend,
Playing bluff and hale, boys, waiting for the end?
It will be b ~ William Empson

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

You think ninety percent of the things I want to do are silly."
"i think my allowing you to do all these things is silly."
She winced visibly. "We need less of this allow stuff.Besides, you owe me a night out without any trouble."
"You had trouble tonight?" Gary asked.
"There was no trouble." Gregori was clearly puzzled.
"You're always getting in fights. Everywhere we go,you just can't help yourself," Savannah accused ndignantly. "You picked the one tonight."
"You picked a fight?" Gary was astounded.
"I did not pick a fight," Gregori denied. "A few men were determined to mug us,so I provided them with an interesting experience. There was no fight. Had I actually struck them physical blows, they would be in the hospital." His white teeth gleamed, the silver eyes glittering with more than danger, with a hint of amusement. "As it is,they just think they should be hospitalized.There is nothing wrong with any of them.I was quite gentle for Savannah's sake.Which,I see, she does not appreciate."
"I would appreciate going out and behaving normally."
"I was behaving in my normal fashion, cherie," he reminded her gently.
"I take it we're going on a vampire hunt tomorrow night," Gary said, laughter in his voice. ~ Christine Feehan

This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. ~ William Wordsworth

It was an amazing garden like nothing Will had ever seen. Everything was covered in snow and glittering ice, the winding paths, the clusters of trees and what looked like mazes. And here and there blue fountains splashed and a river meandered between them, though the water didn't look like water at all but like a stream of sapphires. And strangest of all was how see-through everything looked, trees showing through trees, the river showing through heaps of snow. It was all like a daydream, half imagination, half reality. But Will knew that it was real. ~ Dew Pellucid

The sparkling smile became enormous. 'Do you think she has a dagger there? Do you? Ask her, M. Francis? For,' said the most noble and most powerful Princess Mary Stewart, Queen of Scotland, delving furiously under all the stiff red velvet, showing shift, hose and garters, shoes, knees and a long ribboned end of something recently torn loose, and emerging therefrom with a fist closed tight on an object short and hard and glittering, 'for I have!' And breathlessly, flinging back her head, with the little knife offered like a quill, 'Try to stab me!' she encouraged her visitor. There was a queer silence, during which the eyes of Oonagh O'Dwyer and her love of one night met and locked like magnet and iron. The child, waiting a moment, offered again, the ringing, joyful defiance still in her voice. 'Try to stab me! … Go on, and I'll kill you all dead!'

Her throat dry, Oonagh spoke. 'Save your steel for those you trust. They are the ones who will carry your bier; the men who cannot hate, nor can they know love. Send away the cold servants.' The red mouth had opened a little; the knife hung forgotten in her hand.

'I would,' said Mary, surprised. 'But I do not know any.' And, anxiously demonstrating her point, she caught Lymond by the hand. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

From her perch more than a kilometer aboveground, she surveys the city that never sleeps, glittering and coruscating in the rain like a metaphor for her glamorous life. ~ Bao Shu