Grains Of Sand Quotes

Time plays no role in the life of one man - the subtle consciousness of it floating past me is more than enough. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds - what does it matter? Floating by, it rubs against my skin, face, and hair - wearing me down, yet polishing me all the while. Time is like fine grains of sand in a desert storm. At first, you don't pay any attention to it, but the more it hits you in the face, the more aware of it you become, the more annoying it gets until, one day, you find yourself suffocating. The weight of it eventually bends your spine, until you are crawling on your hands and knees, unable to stand straight. Then comes the time to crawl back into the womb, crawl inside and wait for rebirth. ~ Henry Martin

For great are you, Lord, and you look kindly on what is humble, but the lofty-minded you regard from afar. Only to those whose hearts are crushed do you draw close. You will not let yourself be found by the proud, nor even by those who in their inquisitive skill count stars or grains of sand, or measure the expanses of heaven, or trace the paths of the planets. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom
so deep that not even light could touch it.
And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.
Like stars ... ~ Fuyumi Ono

The biggest single-celled organisms in the world. They live beneath the Antarctic ice. And as they grow, they take grains of sand from their environment and glue them together to form hard outer skins. ~ Neal Stephenson

They defended the grains of sand in the desert to the last drop of their blood. ~ Gamal Abdel Nasser

New York City is where specks of dust aspire randomly with all their cunning to become grains of sand. ~ David B. Lentz

Even if you have mountains of jewels and as many servants as there are grains of sand along the Ganges, you see them when your eyes are open. But what about when your eyes are shut?You should realize then that everything you see is like a dream or illusion. ~ Bodhidharma

We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'.

If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever. ~ Michael Frayn

Were there signs for each of the stars, and grains of sand on the beach? For tree or rock or river? For home? Would they look as beautiful as they sounded, hovering in the air? ~ Traci Chee

A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand ~ Leo Tolstoy

Infinity is present in each part. A loving smile contains all art. The motes of starlight spark and dart. A grain of sand holds power and might. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land.
So the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity. ~ Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney

Your existence is passing before you. Grains of sand in the hourglass. The Wicked Witch of the West has you in her castle and she's turned the hourglass over and the sand is running through. Will you be liberated or will you die? The only way you can beat death is liberation. ~ Frederick Lenz

Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose--no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars. The same promiscuity, and still more wonderful, between the things of the intellect and material things. Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, ~ Victor Hugo

How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things; in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despise the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers. All birds that fly have round their the thread of the infinite. Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where telescopes end, the microscopes begin. Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an ant hill of stars. ~ Victor Hugo

Does one grow wise in increments? By fractioning a life and then summing it? By stacking sand? An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender. Live long enough and you will solve them all. ~ Ethan Canin

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity. ~ Eric Knight

―The thing about memory is that you can feel it eroding slowly, being stolen away from you by time. It starts with the way you stop hearing his voice in your head. Then it's the color of the shirt he wore last Christmas. Before you know it, your memories have become fragmented, as if the small details were grains of sand blown away by the wind. I should be grateful that I'm starting to remember you less. Instead, I felt lonely. Pieces of you that I once held dear are being ripped apart into tiny shreds of information my brain thinks I can afford to forget. I can feel my heart fighting. It loves the feel of you though for the most part, you hurt. I looked for you in places where I knew I would never find you, in faces I knew I would never recognize. I looked for you hoping that through the sheer force of my will I would find your eyes staring back. But that's the thing about memory - you can feel it eroding slowly, being stolen away from you by time. I want to remember you. But I'm no longer entirely sure I really remember you. It kills me. Have you started remembering me less too? ~ Nessie Q.

I've put one foot before another and the years have passed, the time marked by late rent payments and the appearance of wrinkles - tiny ones, on the corners of my eyes. They are a reminder of my youth, and of the hourglass that we all live in, grains of sand slipping through the gap of time, each granule adding another wrinkle, another pocket of fat, another sag that I will fight to overcome, another grey hair to pluck or dye. ~ Alessandra Torre

Nothing happened for a whole day. Then, in a little hollow on the edge of the brooding hill, a few grains of sand shifted and left a tiny hole.

Something emerged. Something invisible. Something joyful and selfish and marvellous. Something as intangible as an idea, which is exactly what it was. A wild idea.

It was old in a way not measurable by any calendar known to Man and what it had, right now, was memories and needs. It remembered life, in other times and other universes. It needed people.

It rose against the stars, changing shape, coiling like smoke.

There were lights on the horizon.

It liked lights.

It regarded them for a few seconds and then, like an invisible arrow, extended itself towards the city and sped away.

It liked action, too . . . ~ Terry Pratchett

Someday I will pick up shells of every colour
And probably even rob the sea of its wonder
Yet I won't find a single piece
That'd resemble the broken pieces I gathered years ago
Thinking those grains of sand were whole ~ Sanhita Baruah

I observed certain animalcules, within whole bodies I saw so quick a motion as to exceed belief; they were about the size of a large grain of sand, and their bodies being transparent, that the internal motion could plainly be seen. Among other things, I saw in the body of one of these animalcules a bright and round corpuscle, placed near the head, and in which a very wonderful swift motion was to be seen, consisting of an alternate extension and contraction. This particle I concluded to be the heart ... ~ Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek

Filled with hope, Ico looked into Yorda's eyes. He felt like was looking into an hourglass, trying to pick through the grains of sand for some truth buried there long ago. He hadn't found anything yet, but the warmth of Yorda's hands in his told him that he was getting close. ~ Miyuki Miyabe

I lifted my chin, meeting the eyes of the woman who'd become the living embodiment of my totem, my bright phoenix, and forged ahead. "But I live with the wrong choices, the paths untraveled, the lives lost, and I never hold those regrets against anyone but myself. So, if you have some reason that you think I'll regret getting in that car or not getting in that car, then tell me. Because I won't have anything between us, either." My mind flashed to an hourglass, grains of sand trickling away, carrying my life with them. "At least, nothing that we can avoid...like the fear of unspoken words. ~ Marie Castle

In the shores of twilight,
Wide and deep as your eyes,
I swim.
In a way, I feel her

Night, a crowned goddess commanding the stars to swim,
So peaceful, even death escapes into serenity.
Stars so far, they seem as they tell the living world,
lights, live into shinning, die into nothingness.
Worlds I want to travel, away to shadows of your eyes in the hold of your lips.
So far, so far away....
As your kiss, as my lover.

Night,
With a soft touch,
Touches my face, winds to the trees, sunlight on grass, life, breath, so quite, death screams in the abyss, a black pearl with grains of sand.

The dance of the night..reminds me of her.
Her tender laughter, the gleam in her
enormous eyes, her soft whirlpool lips.
As a reflection from dark streams,
She reveals hot love,
Nothing hidden, no shame,
just love that hurts.
The solace in the night makes me cry...
The lights of stars as arrows to me.

Night,
Hits my eyes,
Beauty of the wilderness,
Calling me,
Homeless in a city, naked on cold steel
At home with the sea,
with night above,
foam of waters breaks below.
As my companion,
friend I speak to.
I say to the night sky.
Does she love me?
When travels of the heart goes outside of me, outside the seas into clouds of your warmth,
To another place in her heart tryin ~ Albert Alexander Bukoski

Faith as tiny as a grain of sand allows us to move mountains. ~ Paulo Coelho

Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes. ~ Thomas Huxley

Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. ~ Truman Capote

No matter what she was doing-baking cookies, walking around the lake on a beautiful day, making love to her husband-she felt rushed and jittery, as if the last few grains of sand were at that very moment sliding through the narrow waist of an hourglass. Any unforeseen occurrence-road construction, an inexperienced cashier, a missing set of keys-could plunge her into a mood of frantic despair that could poison an entire day. ~ Tom Perrotta

Sometimes it's the case that when you hear the thing you have most wanted to hear, you cannot take it in. Hope is everyone's mirage and everyone who comes upon that green and grassy spot, the swaying date palms and the bubbling blue pool, is temporarily taken in, even people who have been there before and even when, upon closer inspection, the oasis is nothing but a reef of sand; even with grains of sand blowing lightly across our faces, we find ourselves standing on soft grass of a tenacious, unreasonable green. ~ Amy Bloom

Life is like an Hourglass. The grains of sand drop one by one and then it's all over. Live before you die. - RVM. ~ R.v.m.

Who can calculate the trajectory of a molecule? How do we know the creation of worlds is not determined by the falling of grains of sand? Who, after all, knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely big and the infinitely small, the reverberation of causes in the chasms of a being, the avalanches of creation? A ~ Victor Hugo

To ache from the knowledge that I may never hold you again - to count the moments, like grains of sand, while we were parted only to escape the sky and find that you still only know me as a boy from school ... ~ Amy A. Bartol

I remember how we clung to our Russia even as she slipped through our fingers like so many grains of sand at the shore where we used to spend the summer. Through it all, I danced, I danced - I was young and impossibly strong. I am called Anastasiya - the springtime, new life. I have created myself again and again, as the phoenix rises from the ashes. But I grow tired. I could go back now, but for what? Everything I loved is gone. I have no country anymore. Our Russia is dead, her people are dead. Perhaps even the melting snows no longer smell the same. She lives within me, perhaps only within me. Those laughing faces, those poignant songs, they have floated up with the incense, disappearing from human recollection.
We were all so young!" -- from "Madame Anastasiya" by Emily Lapisardi (2020) ~ Emily Lapisardi

I think I have been much of my life an irritant. But some people say that something good came out of my research, something valuable that could be regarded as a pearl, and I can assure those who worked with me it was you who made the pearls and I was merely the grain of sand, the irritant to produce the pearls. ~ Nicholas Kurti

But germs are the most common snowflake starters and lie at the heart of 85 percent of all flakes.2
So next time you gaze at a lovely snowstorm, inform your favorite germophobe or hypochondriac that living bacteria sit shivering in most of those untold billions of flakes. Then hand him or her a snow cone or organize a catch-a-snowflake-on-your-tongue party.
Once the ice-forming process is started, more molecules join the party, and the crystal grows. It can ultimately become either a snowflake or a rough granule of ice called by the odd name graupel. A snowflake contains ten quintillion water molecules. That's ten million trillion. Ten snowflakes - which can fit on your thumb tip - have the same number of molecules as there are grains of sand on the earth. Or stars in the visible universe. How many flakes, how many molecules fashioned the snowy landscape I was observing as I drove east? It numbed the brain. ~ Bob Berman

Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god. ~ Ian McEwan

Inside the bone was a tiny man he didn't recognize. The man was made of thin flesh, wrapped around translucent bones, wrapped around organs no bigger than grains of sand pumping wildly. A small mortal man he'd carried hidden inside his own good, strong body. ~ Eleanor Davis

Imagine the ability to let go of everything. To step back from the expectations of life, let it all slip through your fingers as though none of it mattered. Your doubts, your fears, your weaknesses, all of them falling like grains of sand into the wind. It feels like freedom, but it's an illusion. ~ Pippa DaCosta

I felt the currents move. The grains of sand whispered against each other. His wings were lifting. The darkness around us shimmered with clouds of his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer.

Then, child, make another. ~ Madeline Miller

I know that's really horrible, but that's how I do it in my head. I'm going to die. It doesn't matter. I don't matter. I'm a grain of sand. As a grain of sand, I may as well go out and relate to people and enjoy my short time on this planet that I have. Who knows what's coming next? ~ Kathleen Hanna

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power ... It must follow knowledge, and serve need. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I wonder if we might pledge ourselves to remember what life is really all about - not to be afraid that we're less flashy than the next, not to worry that our influence is not that of a tornado, but rather that of a grain of sand in an oyster! Do we have that kind of patience? ~ Fred Rogers

From a grain of sand in the Pearl comes. ~ Confucius

One thought includes all thought, in the sense that a grain of sand includes the universe. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We dangle by a flimsy thread,
Our little lives are grains of sand:
The Cosmos is a tiny sphere
Held in the hollow of God's hand.
Give up your anger and your spite,
And imitate the Deer, the Tree;
In sweet Forgiveness find your joy,
For it alone can set you free. ~ Margaret Atwood

Take three grains of sand and put them in the middle of a vast cathedral. Now the cathedral is as full with sand as the universe is with stars...Most of the universe is empty space! ~ Vedang Sati

Most people miss their whole lives, you know. Listen, life isn't when you are standing on top of a mountain looking at a sunset. Life isn't waiting at the alter or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in a deep water and a dolphin came up alongside you. These are fragments. 10 or 12 grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus. Or walking. Every day, thousands of tiny events happen and if you're not watching, if you're not careful, if you don't capture them and make them COUNT, your could miss it. You could miss your whole life. ~ Toni Jordan

One night, Ye was working the night shift. This was the loneliest time. In the deep silence of midnight, the universe revealed itself to its listeners as a vast desolation. What Ye disliked most was seeing the waves that slowly crawled across the display, a visual record of the meaningless noise Red Coast picked up from space. Ye felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance - without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert made of all the grains of sand lined up in a row, lonely, desolate, so long that it was intolerable. You could follow it and go forward or backward as long as you liked, but you'd never find the end. ~ Liu Cixin

Gratitude and Contentment is the greatest worker of miracles. It transforms water into wine, grains of sand into pearls, raindrops into balsam, poverty into wealth, the smallest into the greatest, the most common to the most noble, earth into paradise. ~ Kaspar Hauser

The greatest mountain is still made of grains of sand. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Grains of sand will only flow with the winds, Kenton, never against them. ~ Brandon Sanderson

JAMIE'S SONG 'WHERE YOU ARE':

I left my heart at your door,
Don't tread on it on your way out.
It's convulsing on the floor,
Can't you hear it scream and shout?

I dropped my life by your feet,
Don't kick it as you walk down the street.
I put my dreams in your hand,
Don't let them slip through your fingers like grains of sand.

And my eyes will watch you from afar,
Guide you like a shooting star.

And you'll see that I'll always be where you are.
Where you are.
Yes, you know that I'll always be where you are.

Yes my eyes will watch you from afar,
Guide you like a shooting star.
And you'll see that I'll always be where you are.
Where you are. ~ Neha Yazmin

All things have the capacity for speech -- all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings. Indeed, what is perception if not the experience of this gregarious, communicative power of things, wherein even obstensibly 'inert' objects radiate out of themselves, conveying their shapes, hues, and rhythms to other beings and to us, influencing and informing our breathing bodies though we stand far apart from those things?

Not just animals and plants, then, but tumbling waterfalls and dry riverbeds, gusts of wind, compost piles and cumulus clouds, freshly painted houses (as well as houses abandoned and sometimes haunted), rusting automobiles, feathers, granite cliffs and grains of sand, tax forms, dormant volcanoes, bays and bayous made wretched by pollutants, snowdrifts, shed antlers, diamonds, and daikon radishes, all are expressive, sometimes eloquent and hence participant in the mystery of language. Our own chatter erupts in response to the abundant articulations of the world: human speech is simply our part of a much broader conversation.

It follows that the myriad things are also listening, or attending, to various signs and gestures around them. Indeed, when we are at ease in our animal flesh, we will sometimes feel we are being listened to, or sensed, by the earthly surroundings. And so we take deeper care with our speaking, mindful that our sounds may carry more than a merely human meaning and resonance. This care -- ~ David Abram

A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall. ~ Ernest Renan

I think a responsibility comes with notoriety, but I never think of it as power. It's more like something you hold, like grains of sand. If you keep your hand closed, you can have it and possess it, but if you open your fingers in any way, you can lose it just as quickly. ~ Diana Ross

God is everywhere, in the smallest grain of sand. ~ Caspar David Friedrich

If I stay, it's going to be in your bed."
Her pounding heart relaxed, the fear that he'd reject her floating away like tiny grains of sand in the wind. "I know."
"And we're not going to sleep."
"I'm good with that, too. ~ Robin Bielman

You have more brain cells than there are grains of sand on your favorite beach, and you have cleverness, dexterity, and creativity - all of which powerfully combine when you are at risk - if you listen to your intuition ~ Gavin De Becker

People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. "Stephen," they say, accusingly, "you know a lot." This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless. We are all sandless. We are all ignorant. There are beaches and deserts and dunes of knowledge whose existance we have never even guessed at, let alone visited. ~ Stephen Fry

Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass ... if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass ... slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own ... structure. ~ Dale Carnegie

It has been a week since Ami died and this morning I woke suddenly hours before dawn, indeed the same hour as when my mother died. It was not a dream that woke me, but a thought. And with that thought I could swear I heard Ami's voice.
But I am not frightened. I am joyous. Joyous with realization. For I cannot help but think what a lucky person I am. Imagine that in all the eons of time, in all the possible universes of which Dara speaks, of all the stars in the heavens, Ami and I came together for one brief and shining sliver of time.
I stop. I think.
Supposing in the grand infinity of this universe two particles of life, Ami and me, swirl endlessly like grains of sand in the oceans of the world
how much of a chance is there for these two particles, these two grains of sand, to collide, to rest briefly together ... at the same moment in time?
That is what happened with Ami and me ... this miracle of chance. ~ Kathryn Lasky

What we know is to what we do not know, as a grain of sand is to the beach. ~ Ivan Panin

If wishes were grains of sand, the world would be a desert. ~ Palle Oswald

I'll tell you truly: I value my thought and work terribly, but in essence - think about it - this whole world of ours is just a bit of mildew that grew over a tiny planet. And we think we can have something great - thoughts, deeds! They're all grains of sand ~ Leo Tolstoy

We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, you step beyond who you are and where you are. ~ Robert R. McCammon

All that mankind has ever learned is nothing more than a single grain of sand on a beach that reaches to infinity. ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

God will forgive you if you ask him to. Though your sins be numerous as the grains of sand on the shore, God's merciful forgiveness is far greater than your sins. Do not be afraid. Trust in his love. Repent of your sins without delay and return to the house of the Father. He is waiting for you. ~ Patrick Madrid

It's like grains of sand crumbling in warning at the beginning of a landslide to realise I have not missed him. ~ Raffaella Barker

In the silence of the woods it felt like I could hear the passage of time, of life passing by. One person leaves, another appears. A thought flits away and another takes its place. One image bids farewell and another one appears on the scene. As the days piled up, I wore out, too, and was remade. Nothing stayed still. And time was lost. Behind me, time became dead grains of sand, which one after another gave way and vanished. I just sat there in front of the hole, listening to the sound of time dying. ~ Haruki Murakami

Happiness is a series of grains of sand spread out in a desert of violence and anguish. ~ Sebastien De Castell

Eena focused on the younger version of herself. Her hair was tied back with a pink ribbon. The ruffled dress she wore was soiled up to the waist in wet grains of sand. A short, square shovel was gripped tightly as the child concentrated on her digging efforts.

Curious, Eena stepped closer to the girls. Ian followed along silently. Eena could feel his eyes on her, searching her profile before turning to the sand scene. She approached her younger self and stopped to watch. At first, she smiled at the darling ponytailed child. Then the spoiled girl's mouth opened.

"Angee," the five-year-old called the younger version of Angelle. "Go get water."

The older child jumped up at the command. "Yes, Eena."

"A whole bucket full."

"Yes, Eena."

"Angee, don't step on my holes!"

The older girl quickly picked up her foot, checking to be sure there were no child-made burrows nearby. She nodded at the little five-year-old. "Okay, Eena, I'll be careful."

Instead of being grateful, the ponytailed child tilted her head and bugged out her eyes. "Hurry up, Angee!"

"Okay, okay." The young Angelle lifted her skirt to watch for surrounding holes while carting a bucket in her other hand towards the lake.

Eena frowned at the sight. She heard Ian snicker beside her.

"I was a brat," she admitted ruefully.

"You still are. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The landscape of the desert changes very gradually as little breezes lift grains of sand and move them, sometimes a few feet, sometimes miles and miles, so that at the end of the day, when the sun sets, the face of the desert is completely different from the landscape it had in the morning when the sun rose on it. ~ Marian Keyes

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie. ~ Joanne Harris

She finds tales everywhere, in grains of sand she picks up from the garden, in puffs of smoke that drift out from the chimneys of the village, in fragments of smooth timber or glass in the jetsam. She will ask them, "Where did you come from? How did you get here?" And they will answer her in voices very like her own, but with new lilts and squeaks and splashes in them that show they are their own. ~ David Almond

I don't want to sit on the sidelines and not value the gift of being here. Instead of the idea of time ticking away, the grains of sand running out, I try to think of time as giving me another grain of sand, another gift. So time passing is an accumulation, rather than a diminishing. ~ Tori Amos

Time slips through our hands like grains of sand, never to return again. ~ Robin Sharma

It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials
I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered
it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. ~ Susan Vreeland

We were right to come here, if only because the ocean reminded you that impossible things were possible. Miles and miles of the deepest waters that moved like clockwork were possible. Creatures like jellyfish and sea urchins were, too. Millions and jillions of the tiniest grains of sand to form one long, soft beach - yep, even that was possible. ~ Deb Caletti

If you took all the sand from all the beaches, all the desserts, and all the oceans and called that the Universe, our whole solar system would be less than one grain of sand. ~ Seth Shostak

One day or one night - between my days and nights, what difference can there be? - I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there were three. Thus the grains of sand multiplied, little by little, until they filled the cell and I was dying beneath that hemisphere of sand. I realized that I was dreaming; with a vast effort I woke myself. But waking up was useless - I was suffocated by the countless sand. Someone said to me:

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of the grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

I felt lost. The sand crushed my mouth, but I cried out: I cannot be killed by sand that I dream - nor is there any such thing as a dream within a dream.

- Jorge Luis Borges, The Writing of the God ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand? ~ Victor Hugo

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not ge ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Do you know how big snakes get? Or how many grains of sand are in the deserts? Or what lurks at the bottoms of the oceans' floors?" ...
"No."
"Well, if you can't answer those simple scientific queries, then what makes you think that mankind is smart enough to discover vampirekind's existence? ~ Heather Brewer

Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan

The more we wait, the more everything and everyone looks like a grain of sand escaping between our fingers before vanishing into the wind. ~ Fabio Moon

A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife's, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth.
As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared south, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky. ~ Mitch Albom

Sonnet: To the River Otter

Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have passed,
What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! Yet so deep impressed
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows grey,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs:
Ah! that once more I were a careless child! ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Bastian had climbed a dune of purplish-red sand and all around him he saw nothing but hill after hill of every imaginable color. Each hill revealed a shade or tint that occured in no other. The nearest was cobalt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve, turquoise blue, lilac, moss green, ruby red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, vermillion, lapis lazuli, and so on from horizon to horizon. And between the hill, separating color from color, flowed streams of gold and silver sand. ~ Michael Ende

Beneath a toilet water of punctilio and restraint ... a deep smell came off Kelly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher's block, and something else, some whiff of the icy rot and iodine in a piece of marine nerve left to bleach on the sand. With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch's curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb. It was all of Deborah for me. ~ Norman Mailer

I always thought that in modern history Chinese people are like a dish of sand, never really close together. But I think a dish of sand is a good metaphor because we have the Internet. We don't have to be physically united. You can be an individual and have your own set of values but join others in certain struggles. There is nothing more powerful than that. ~ Ai Weiwei

As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mind of God. ~ Isaac Of Nineveh

I've always been very Type-A, so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in L.A. I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica, where there's this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think, 25 miles. I'd go onto the bike path, and I would [go] head down and push it - just red-faced huffing, all the way, pushing it as hard as I could. I would go all the way down to one end of the bike path and back, and then head home, and I'd set my little timer when doing this. . . .

"I noticed it was always 43 minutes. That's what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path. But I noticed that, over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path. Because mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work. . . . So, then I thought, 'You know, it's not cool for me to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don't I just chill? For once, I'm gonna go on the same bike ride, and I'm not going to be a complete snail, but I'll go at half of my normal pace.' I got on my bike, and it was just pleasant.

"I went on the same bike ride, and I noticed that I was standing up, and I was looking around more. I looked into the ocean, and I saw there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean, and I went down to Marina del Rey, to my turnaround point, and I noticed in Marina del Rey, that there was a pelican that was flying above me. I looked up. I was like, 'Hey, a pelican!' and he shit in ~ Derek Sivers

The question is: how bad do things have to get before you will do something about it? Where is your line in the sand? If you don't enforce the constitutional limitations on your government very soon, you are likely to find out what World War III will be like. ~ Michael Badnarik

A ministry based on pragmatism is built on sand regardless of whether it is more traditional or contemporary. ~ Michael S. Horton

Whoever deemed the ocean an invigorating place needed to reconsider the reality of crashing waves, sunburn, and sand wedged up into places no one should have it. ~ Natalia Jaster

Knowing the difference between right and wrong sometimes did not serve to clarify much of anything. Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn't mean he'll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it. ~ Graham Moore

Basic SEAL training is six months of long, torturous runs in the soft sand, midnight swims in the cold water off San Diego, obstacles courses, unending calisthenics, days without sleep and always being cold, wet and miserable. ~ William H. McRaven