Grains Quotes

A gluten-free diet still allows you access to almost every fruit and vegetable, a variety of grains and legumes, your pick of dairy products, fresh meats and fish and a whole slew of special gluten-free delights to satisfy your pretzel-bagel-muffin-doughnut craving. ~ Daphne Oz

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

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars. Then the breeze died too and there was no noise save the drip and tickle of water that ran out of clefts and spilled down, leaf by leaf, to the brown earth of the island. The air was cool, moist, and clear; and presently even the sound of the water was still. The beast lay huddled on the pale beach and the stains spread, inch by inch.

The edge of the lagoon became a streak of phosphorescence which advanced minutely, as the great wave of the tide flowed. The clear water mirrored the clear sky and the angular bright constellations. The line of phosphorescence bulged about the sand grains and little pebbles; it held them each in a dimple of tension, then suddenly accepted them with an inaudible syllable and moved on.

Along the shoreward edge of the shallows the advancing clearness was full of strange, moonbeam-bodied creatures with fiery eyes. Here and there a larger pebble clung to its own air and was covered with a coat of pearls. The tide swelled in over the rain-pitted sand and smoothed everything with a layer of silver. Now it touched the first of the stains that seeped from the broken body and the creatures made a moving patch of light as they gathered at the edge. The water rose further and dressed Simon's coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured mar ~ William Golding

Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf. ~ Jonas Mekas

A sketchbook for a cloak? Hardly seems like a fair trade."
"It's a magic sketchbook," Edan said, reaching for it.
I rolled my eyes. "Really."
"See, when you turn it upside down, sand falls out." Edan smiled widely as he caught the desert's golden grains in his palm. "Sand, sand, and more sand."
"Oh, you! ~ Elizabeth Lim

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

People talk of natural sympathies ; I have heard of good genii ; there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing. ~ D.H. Lawrence

We need to take vegetables out of the role of side dish, even in low-fat, vegetarian diets, whose calories are generally derived mainly from grains and other starches. ~ Joel Fuhrman

Not a flower
But shows some touch, in freckle, streak or stain,
Of his unrivall'd pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odors, and imparts their hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the seaside sands,
The forms with which he sprinkles all the earth
Happy who walks with him! ~ William Cowper

You're not going to throw this away, are you?" she says, and she'll be talking about the grains of rice in the bottom of the salt shaker. "No, Mrs. Peacock, by all means, you take them. They'll come in handy when your son gets out of prison and marries your niece. ~ David Sedaris

One who loves Krishna will give Him whatever He wants, and he avoids offering anything which is undesirable or unasked for. Thus, meat, fish and eggs should not be offered to Krishna ... Vegetables, grains, fruits, milk and water are the proper foods for human beings and are prescribed by Lord Krishna Himself. Whatever else you eat, can not be offered to Him, since He will not accept it. ~ A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

Perfect Timing"

The night I fell in love with you I lost my watch:
stripping off at the sea's edge, it fell into the dark
as I swam out into a night thick with stars,
with fisherman calling from one lit boat to another
of their catches and harbours, leaving for the dawn.
Imagine it now, plunged deep in cool sand, still hidden
years later, grains ticking over it one by one -
as your hands slide into me and I move to their pulse. ~ Sarah Maguire

In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire. ~ Olaf Stapledon

The hearts of women are like little pieces of furniture wherein things are secreted, full of drawers fitted into each other; one hurts himself, breaks his nails in opening them, and then finds within only some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness! And then perhaps he felt afraid of learning too much about the matter. ~ Gustave Flaubert

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

Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study. ~ Henry Adams

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

Eating vegetables, fruits and grains rarely causes total destruction of the plant or tree on which the food grew; after harvesting, seeds remain to be replanted the next season. But this certainly does not happen when an animal is slaughtered - death is final; that animal will not reproduce again! ~ Sharon Gannon

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

Since 1963, LEGO bricks have been manufactured from acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene copolymer - ABS copolymer for short - a plastic with a matte finish. It is very hard and robust - import criteria for a children's toy. Laboratories in Switzerland and Denmark regularly test the quality of the ABS. The plastic is distributed to factories as granules rather than in liquid form. These grains of plastic are heated up to 232ºC and converted into a molten mass. Injection moulding machines weighing up to 150 tonnes squeeze the viscous plastic mass into the desired injection moulds - of which there are 2,400 varieties. After seven seconds, the brick produced in this way has cooled down enough to be removed from the mould. The injection moulding method is so precise that out of every million elements produced, only about 18 units have to be rejected. Unsold bricks are converted back into granulates and recycled. ~ Christian Humberg

I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. ~ Philip Pullman

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

The sand looked so beautiful then, so many little individual grains in the light of the night, giving the watcher the childhood feeling of infinite things finally understood, the humiliating feeling of the watcher's nothingness. ~ Ayi Kwei Armah

If the caged birds think whoever scattering grains for them that person is their deity,
what should we Kurds call the person who will grantee us an independence. ~ Davan Yahya Khalil

Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated. ~ Iain Banks

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

I eat a lot of whole grains for breakfast, a lot of dried fruit. And my big thing is pasta. I do a lot of simple pasta, with great ingredients. ~ Joe Bastianich

Evidence of identification was given by the husband, and the only other evidence was medical. Heather Badcock had died as a result of four grains of hy-ethyl-dexyl-barbo-quinde-lorytate, or, let us be frank, some such name. ~ Agatha Christie

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

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. ~ Susan Abulhawa

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

What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been carried all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the ~ James Joyce

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

Imagine sitting down to an eight ounce steak, and then, imagine the room filled wit 45 to 50 people with empty bowls ... For the feed cost of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a cup pf cooked cereal grains. ~ Frances Moore Lappe

I let every grain of sand slip through my fingers
As the wind carried them away;
Some drops of rain absorbed by the sand,
Some dissolved in the sea.

I'd go back carrying no traces
Of where I'd been,
But the sand settled between my fingers,
And the grains falling off from my toes.

I wouldn't soil the carpet on the floor
If only I'd known... ~ Sanhita Baruah

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

There are a few clear themes that emerge when we synthesize all the findings we've looked at so far, and those are jewels you should pluck out of this book, place in your pocket, and carry with you for as long as they serve you. Here are the biggies. Eliminate or drastically reduce your intake of refined grains, refined sugar, and high-omega-6 vegetable oils. No healthy human population has thrived on these items, and the bulk of the evidence points toward their harm. Secure a source of those precious fat-soluble vitamins - whether from shellfish, fish eggs, high-quality dairy, bone marrow, organ meats like liver, or cod liver oil. ~ Denise Minger

The storm front had finally broken, tatters of cloud pulling apart like cotton candy and sprinkling the sky with the bright sugar grains of stars. ~ Leah Raeder

a 2011 survey by Food Safety News showed that 75 percent of honey on store shelves had no pollen in it. All honey has at least a few grains of pollen that remain in it after normal straining, and that pollen is the only definitive way to determine country and even region of origin. A complete lack of pollen indicates one of two things: The jar has no honey in it at all, or the honey has been ultrafiltered by heating and forcing the honey through tiny filters to remove all of the pollen. ~ Mark L. Winston

Stardust is
the hardest thing
to hold out for.
You must make of yourself
a perfect plane-
something still
upon which
something settles-
something like
sugar grains on
something like
metal, but with
none of the chill.
It's hard to explain.
Stardust ~ Kay Ryan

… not my own opinion, but my wife's: Yesterday, when weary with writing, I was called to supper, and a salad I had asked for was set before me. 'It seems then,' I said, 'if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water, vinegar, oil and slices of eggs had been flying about in the air for all eternity, it might at last happen by chance that there would come a salad.' 'Yes,' responded my lovely, 'but not so nice as this one of mine. ~ Johannes Kepler

In my nutritional philosophy, tradition has weight. After all, we've survived anywhere from 7,000 to 77,000 generations on this planet (depending on whose science you believe). If we didn't know how to adequately nourish our children all that time, how did we even get here? And guess what? Traditional cultures didn't (and don't) feed their young babies infant cereal. Among the few cultures that fed their babies a gruel of grains, their practice radically differed from what we do today. They would either pre-chew the gruel for their babies until they were at least a year old, or the gruel was mildly fermented by soaking the grains for 24 hours or more. ~ Kristen Michaelis

Better to toil blindly, beating every stone in turn for grains of gold, whether they contain any or not, than lie down in apathetic decay. ~ John Muir

The air was cool and soft. The desert looked empty from our great height, enough to believe the geographers and travel writers who tell of the terrible desert life, the stillness, harshness, and death. I lay against the cold sand, tiny grains dancing fast and furious across my skin. I saw insects and scorpions, the line of a snake. Mohammed said the dunes moved millimeters a day. They inched across the desert floor toward the ocean. I smiled. The geographers were blind. ~ C. Lynn Murphy

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

For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit... ~ George Eliot

Cruciferous vegetables Examples: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower Servings: 1 Size: ½ cup Greens Examples: kale, spinach Swiss chard Servings: 2 Size: 1 cup raw, ½ cup cooked Other vegetables Examples: beets, peppers, carrots Servings: 2 Size: 1 cup leafy, ½ cup non-leafy, ½ cup juice Beans Examples: black beans, kidney beans, lentils Servings: 3 Size: ¼ cup dip, ½ cup cooked, 1 cup fresh Berries Examples: grapes, raisins, cherries Servings: 1 Size: ¼ dried, ½ cup fresh or frozen Other fruit Examples: apples, avocados, bananas Servings: 3 Size: 1 cup fruit, 1 medium, ¼ cup dried Flaxseeds Servings: 1 Size: 1 tbsp Nuts and seeds Examples: peanut butter, whole almonds, sunflower seeds Servings: 1 Size: ¼ cup or 2 tbsp butter Spices Examples: turmeric Servings: 1 Size: ¼ tsp Whole grains Examples: rice, quinoa, bread Servings: 3 Size: ½ cup cooked, 1 slice of bread Water Servings: 5 Size: 12 oz. Daily ~ Project Inspiration

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

How strange it is that the house of these hedonic stalwarts is filled with all the luxuries of life, right from plasma televisions to Swiss bank cheque books. So how will they notice the tonnes of food grains rotting in the northern belt? ~ Faraaz Kazi

As people move further away from a meat-based diet, I think the focus will shift to using grains as the central focus of our food supply. ~ Daniel Humm

These can be scary and confusing times in which to eat, made still scarier by the fact that there are so many 'experts' out there selling us fear of food and fad cures. Times of transition have always been a gift to confidence tricksters. When everything seems to be changing and we can no longer rely on the truths of the past, we become vulnerable to hucksters. Some diet gurus tell us to beware all grains; others tell us that we should fear supposedly 'acid-producing' foods from ranging from dairy to meat and coffee. These new diets are perhaps best seen as a dysfunctional response to a still more dysfunctional food supply: a false promise of purity in a toxic world. ~ Bee Wilson

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

Prior to 1968, the gullible gentiles could take a one dollar Federal Reserve note into any bank in America and redeem it for a dollar which was by law a coin containing 412 1/2 grains of 90 per cent silver. Up until 1933, one could have redeemed the same note for a coin of 25 4/5ths grains of 90 per cent gold. All we do is give the goy more non-redeemable notes, or else copper slugs. But we never give them their gold and silver. Only more paper, ~ Harold Wallace Rosenthal

1. More salad and other vegetables on the acceptable foods list
2. Fresh cheeses (as well as more aged cheese)
3. Seeds and nuts
4. Berries
5. Wine and other spirits low in carbs
6. Legumes
7. Fruits other than berries and melons
8. Starchy vegetables
9. Whole grains ~ Robert C. Atkins

―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 eat everything, that's a problem. I don't have discipline. My favorite dish is the Caribbean. Meat, rice, lots of grains. But I do like to do exercises. Lately, I've been having capoeira classes and lots of cardiovascular exercises, such as jogging and cycling. ~ Ricky Martin

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

I didn't know why dessert was invented or what function it was meant to perform. Raising livestock and the harvesting of grains are ancient activities, but when did humankind decide it also needed creme brulee? ~ Bill Buford

The ideal human diet looks like this: Consume plant-based foods in forms as close to their natural state as possible ("whole" foods). Eat a variety of vegetables, fruits, raw nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and whole grains. Avoid heavily processed foods and animal products. Stay away from added salt, oil, and sugar. Aim to get 80 percent of your calories from carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat, and 10 percent from protein. ~ T. Colin Campbell

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

One day when I went to see him (Picasso), we were looking at the dust dancing in a ray of sunlight that slanted in through one of the high windows. He said to me, 'Nobody has any real importance to me. As far as I'm concerned, other people are like those little grains of dust floating in the sunlight. It takes only a push of the broom and out they go.'I told him I had often noticed in his dealings with others that he considered the rest of the world only little grains of dust. But I said, as it happened, I was a little grain of dust gifted with autonomous movement and who didn't therefore need a broom. I could go out by myself. ~ Francoise Gilot

All you need do is refrain from smoking, drinking and the use of drugs. Eat only wholesome,low-fat foods, with the emphasis on vegetables, grains and fish. Seek work. Work hard. Show up on time. Do more than is expected. Think of ways to make the job efficient. Don't complain. Shave, bathe and wear clean clothes. Be cheerful. Don't gamble. Live within your means. Save. And then, when you have all this in balance, study things of substance. Read to satisfy your curiosity. Don't father children out of wedlock or bear them as a single mother. Exercise. You will find that you will be promoted - perhaps not knighted, but promoted. Is that doesn't happen, look quietly for a better position. Find a husband or a wife whom you love and who has the same good habits. Invest. Assume a mortgage if you must. Teach your children the virtues. And then, having become the means of production, you will own your share of the means of production, and if you do those things, all of which are within your power, you will live your own lives."

They looked at him as if he were an armadillo that has just spoken to them in Chinese. Not having assimilated a single phrase, they all got up and went to the bus. ~ Mark Helprin

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

Everything is so precariously held together here that you might want a helping hand. Nobody is going to teach you that right after a harvest, poorly paid labourers were hungry enough to smoke out rodent holes and steal back the grains of paddy pilfered by rats. But you will manage. You will learn to relate without family trees. You will learn to make do without a village map. You will learn that criminal landlords can break civil laws to enforce caste codes. You will learn that handfuls of rice of rice can consume half a village. You will loafer learn that in the eyes of the law, the rich are incapable of soiling their hands with either mud or blood. You will learn to wait for revenge with the patience of a village awaiting rain. ~ Meena Kandasamy

She stood on the willow bank. It was bright as mid-afternoon in the openness of the water, quiet and peaceful. She took off her clothes and let herself into the river. She saw her waist disappear into reflection less water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All seemed one weight, one matter -- until she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instan ~ Eudora Welty

But what about a person's anger? What about her voice? Her laughter? Her arrogance? Her irreverence? Her humor, her ego, her honor, her character? Do these fingerprints of an individual life simply evaporate and disappear with the last exhale? And if that is so, what use all this struggle, misery and strife? What difference whether a woman ever lived or not? Whether she was loved or unloved, educated or illiterate, wanted or unwanted by her parents, whether or not she suffered hurt and betrayal, or whether she still managed to retain her humanity and nobility? In the end, Bhima thinks, it doesn't matter. It is all ash and dust. This is what it means to be human, she thinks: Grains of dust arranged in human form - some dark, some light, some tall, some short, some male, some female. And in the end, the same gust of wind breaks them all down. ~ Thrity Umrigar

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

For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light. ~ Virginia Woolf

Creativity is alive
And thriving in my body.
The energy you bring out in me
Is within me infinitely.
My power is overflowing.
My lips are soft and welcoming
To the exhale,
The new Braille,
The silence that persists
After our moans die away,
I look at myself and say,
"Root down so you can burn.
Beautiful girl, it's your turn
To create magic within yourself.
This time, without his help.
Find your roots and find your fire,
Be mindful of what you desire,
Persist in what you know is true,
Stay focused on the endless route
Toward your own potential.
Allow the existential
Void to swallow you whole.
Take on your old role:
The lone seeker.
Become quieter.
Become meeker.
Become the beauty that you seek.
Embody strength if you feel weak.
Find love within the walls
Of this sacred temple.
Let yourself shake and tremble,
But keep your eyes ever fixed
On the horizon
Where it's rising,
No revising,
Fears capsizing
As you sail, sail, sail
Toward the wail
Of your siren spirit
Beckoning you to bloom
The flower in your womb,
The seed of creativity,
Your triumphant legacy."
These words, I will carry
Within me as I bury
Grains of wisdom
In the whispers of the wind.
And when I arrive
To the altar of our origin,
I'll be dressed in white and black,
A ~ Vironika Tugaleva

nestle up with me now and let us
fall in love with the feeling
of our worries spilling into the sheets.
nestle up with me now,
let us give birth to seeds of whispering moans
and let those coil with our bones
as we tumble in love with the blooming echo.
nestle up with me now,
let us grow old and die delicate in each other's arms
for my god what an exquisite honor it would be
to erode from this crumbling earth
all the while being washed in your
lover's grains,

nestle up with me. ~ Christopher Poindexter

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God's sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football m ~ Roberto Bolano

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

From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why. ~ Willa Cather

if you already have genes predisposed to an autoimmune disease, and you eat grains and legumes, you're putting your hand on a trigger, and it's only a matter of time before you pull it and allow the damaged genes to rule. ~ Nicole Swenson

For her, from the Tiber down, there, there beyond the crumbling castles, and after the blond vineyards, there was, on the hills and mountains, and in the brief plains of Italy, a kind of great fertile womb, two swollen Eustachian tubes, streaked with an abundance of granules, the granular and greasy, the happy caviar of the race. From time to time, from the great Ovary ripened follicles opened, like pomegranate seeds: and red grains, mad with amorous certitude, descended upon the city, to encounter the male afflatus, the vitalizing impulse, that spermatic aura of which the ovarists of the eighteenth century wrote their fantastic treatise. ~ Carlo Emilio Gadda

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future. ~ Lord Acton

I spent the next two hours down there, first sitting in the sand, sifting and swirling, watching the grains fall from the webs of my dusty hands and then walking down by the water, collecting those little pieces of beach glass. There were more of them than I thought. They were surprisingly strong. I tried to snap one in half to see if the inside was still shiny and clear like regular glass, but it wouldn't break. Its scuffy exterior was like scar tissue. (67) ~ Wendy Blackburn

We're plotting to steal time itself from you ... We're going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it's so still, we'll pull it out from under you
and send you spinning off around the galaxy's edge. We're planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets ... so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we'll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate. ~ Samuel R. Delany

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

On Stripping Bark from Myself

(for Jane, who said trees die from it)

Because women are expected to keep silent about
their close escapes I will not keep silent
and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will
please
mark the spot
where I fall and know I could not live
silent in my own lies
hearing their 'how nice she is!'
whose adoration of the retouched image
I so despise.

No. I am finished with living
for what my mother believes
for what my brother and father defend
for what my lover elevates
for what my sister, blushing, denies or rushes
to embrace.

I find my own
small person
a standing self
against the world
an equality of wills
I finally understand.

Besides:

My struggle was always against
an inner darkness: I carry within myself
the only known keys
to my death – to unlock life, or close it shut
forever. A woman who loves wood grains, the color
yellow
and the sun, I am happy to fight
all outside murderers
as I see I must. ~ Alice Walker

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

For you must know, gentlemen, that when the mariner is dosed, he likes to know that he has been dosed: with fifteen grains or even less of this valuable substance scenting him and the very air about him there can be no doubt of the matter; and such is the nature of the human mind that he experiences a far greater real benefit than the drug itself would provide, were it deprived of its stench. ~ Patrick O'Brian

Someone once said that the challenge of living is to develop a long obedience in the same direction. When it's demanded, we can rise on occasion and be patient . . . as long as there are limits. But we balk when patience is required over a long haul. We don't much like endurance. It's painful to persevere through a marriage that's forever struggling. A church that never crest 100 members. Housekeeping routines that never vary from week-to-week. Even caring for an elderly parent or a handicapped child can feel like a long obedience in the same direction.

If only we could open our spiritual eyes to see the fields of grain we're planting, growing, and reaping along the way. That's what happens when we endure...

Right now you may be in the middle of a long stretch of the same old routine.... You don't hear any cheers or applause. The days run together―and so do the weeks. Your commitment to keep putting one foot in front of the other is starting to falter.

Take a moment and look at the fruit. Perseverance. Determination. Fortitude. Patience.

Your life is not a boring stretch of highway. It's a straight line to heaven. And just look at the fields ripening along the way. Look at the tenacity and endurance. Look at the grains of righteousness. You'll have quite a crop at harvest . . . so don't give up! ~ Joni Eareckson Tada

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

It may seem draconian, but the best recommendation I can make is to completely avoid grains. ~ David Perlmutter

Before World War II, there was no such thing as organic food. All food was organic. Food was just food - plants, grains, meats, and dairy that we could all recognize or grow. There were no long lists of ingredients on packages that you couldn't pronounce, much less have any idea what they did to your body or the environment. In 1938, the USDA's Yearbook of Agriculture was called Soils and Men, and it remains a handbook of organic farming today, but back then that was the norm. ~ Nora Pouillon

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

Like-dislike, good-bad, profit-loss; who gave rise to all these dualities? The society did. As far as God is concerned, there is no duality. If there are grains of food on one side and excrement on the other, in God's eyes, they are both "material (matter)". What does God say about this? "All are materials! ~ Dada Bhagwan

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.