Grey Skies Quotes

My father was often impatient during March, waiting for winter to end, the cold to ease, the sun to reappear. March was an unpredictable month, when it was never clear what might happen. Warm days raised hopes until ice and grey skies shut over the town again. ~ Tracy Chevalier

No Absolutes

The sound of the human voice like the bell ring of metal and crisp air under grey skies -

romantic yet ominous -

Don't worry about contradictions. No one is innocent.

No one is guilty.

We are all misunderstood even by ourselves.

Yet when we know love

we know everything. ~ Belinda Subraman

Scrape the grey sky clean. Realize every grey cloud is a smoke screen to blind us from the truth, and the truth is whether we see them or not the sun and moon are still there, and always there is light. ~ Shane Koyczan

I believe in roses. And I believe in putting roses into a vase and sitting the vase on the table. I believe in getting lost and being found, I believe in going barefoot, and in laughter! My religion is to laugh at myself, whenever I can! I believe in the sunlight and in grey skies with big, beautiful clouds! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and i could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold ~ Robert M. Pirsig

I miss a lot about England when I'm working away, even the slate grey skies. ~ Sean Bean

God abides in men"

"God abides in men,
These are men who are simple,
they are fields of corn...
Such men have minds
like wide grey skies,
they have the grandeur
that the fools call emptiness.

God abides in men.

Some men are not simple,
they live in cities
among the teeming buildings,
wrestling with forces
as strong as the sun and the rain.
Often they must forgo dream upon dream...
Christ walks in the wilderness
in such lives.
God abides in men,
because Christ has put on
the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.
He has put on everyone's life...
to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,
to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...
Christ has put on Man's nature,
and given him back his humanness...

God abides in man. ~ Caryll Houselander

But first I want your life: - before I die I want to see
The world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes
There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering, it may be,
Yet on brown fields there lies
A haunting purple bloom: is there not something in grey skies
And in grey sea?
I want what world there is behind your eyes, ~ Charlotte Mew

The snow drifted down and down, all in ghostly silence, and lay thick and unbroken on the ground. It was a place of whites and blacks and greys. White towers and white snow and white statues, black shadows and black trees, the dark grey sky above. A pure world, Sansa thought. I do not belong here. Yet she stepped out all the same. ~ George R R Martin

You might imagine that the magic stopped at the airport, and to a great extent it did. When we arrived back in London, the skies were overcast and heavy. The bus driver from the airport was morose and unkempt; the streets seemed run-down and dirty, the people sour-faced. But that, I suspect, is how coming home is for everyone; Parisians probably felt the same when they returned from somewhere else. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." … The word that offends against realism here is "enjoy." I'm sorry - enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you're being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what's happening to you where you'll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you'll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error.
But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks?
… Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on you ~ Francis Spufford

Jacquelyn, Luna, Mate. You have many names. Each of them holds a special meaning, but the only thing I want to call you is mine.
Loftis, Quinn (2011-11-18). Blood Rites: Book 2 Grey Wolves Series (The Grey Wolves Series) (p. 233). Kindle Edition. ~ Quinn Loftis

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won't cut it anymore. ~ David Nicholls

In a word, God paints in many colors; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realized this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colorless thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funereal dress of this pessimistic period. Which is not the case.
Meanwhile I could not find my chalk. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Georgie, have you gone insane?"
I smiled. "No, brother. All is well."
"Then why on Earth are you in Italy?"
"To find love, of course. ~ R.S. Grey

Spring came late. For the children, shut in the dark, cold parsonage, adjusting to Aunt and getting over the death that brought her, the winter had seemed endless. But now the rough moor was flecked with racing cloud shadows; the maltreated holly tree had stopped weeping; the green mould on the graves had dried to an unsuggestive grey.
The church could never look cheerful. It was too black, and its voice, the bell, always said 'Fu - ner -al ... fu - ner- al ... ' even when it was only calling them to hear one of their Papa's dramatic sermons. ~ Lynne Reid Banks

Only Earl Grey will ever do. ~ Tillie Cole

Besides, he overcame the world when no one else had overcome it. It was as it were a young lion which had never been defeated in a fight: it roared upon him out of the thicket and leaped upon him in the fulness of its strength. Now if our greater Samson tore this young lion as though it were a kid and flung it down as a vanquished thing, you may depend upon it that now it is an old lion, and grey and covered with the wounds which he gave it of old, we, having the Lord's life and power in us, will overcome it too. Blessed be his name! What good cheer there is in his victory. He as good as says to us, I have overcome the world, and you in whom I dwell, who are clothed with my Spirit, must overcome it too. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin' less somebody else can understand. ~ Walter Mosley

It takes the better part of those months for Herr Thiessen to complete the clock. He works on little else, though the sum of money involved makes the arrangement more than manageable. Weeks are spent on the design and the mechanics. He hires an assistant to complete some of the basic woodwork, but he takes care of all the details himself. Herr Thiessen loves details and he loves a challenge. He balances the entire design on that one specific word Mr. Barris used. Dreamlike.
The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock.
But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else.
The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite side.
Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As thought clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully.
All of this takes hours.
The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle sha ~ Erin Morgenstern

Don't cry, Ana, please," he murmurs against my mouth. "It was long ago. I am aching for you to touch me, but I just can't bear it. It's too much. Please, please don't cry. ~ E.L. James

The first thing I ever said to her was to recite a poem, so after a moment I finished this one for her, softly.

"Hope sails and plunges
firmly caught
at the end of her string -
fallen slack, pulling taught
ragged and featherless.
Hope never flies
but doggedly watches
for windy skies."

She was quiet then. The last verse isn't really very hopeful. Poor ragged kite, always waiting for a wind that never comes.

Finally, Róza took a deep breath.

"It's windy now," she said. ~ Elizabeth Wein

I was silver-white by the time I was 35, but having grey hair makes me look washed out. My wife and son have both said that grey hair doesn't suit me because I have a boyish face. ~ David Cassidy

O brief, bright smile of summer! O days divine and dear The voices of winter's sorrow Already we can hear. And we know that the frosts will find us, And the smiling skies grow rude, While we look in the face of Beauty, And worship her every mood. ~ Celia Thaxter

How prone poor Humanity is to dam up the minutest remnants of its freedom, and build an artificial roof to prevent it looking up to the clear blue sky. ~ E.T.A. Hoffmann

To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless. ~ Albert Camus

I like to work. I don't like to have lulls. I feel like it makes me lazy and uncreative, and that's when your ideas become stagnant. ~ Sasha Grey

We are joint heirs,' I said in a sharp undertone. 'The land will always be partly mine.'
Richard smiled, a smile like midsummer skies. 'I shan't regard it.' He said sweetly. 'And you don't know the law, my clever little cousin. If they commit you to an asylum, you are disinherited at once. Did you not know that, my dear? If you go on with your seeings and your dreamings, you will lose everything. ~ Philippa Gregory

I know you think this world is too dark to even dream in color,
but I've seen flowers bloom at midnight.
I've seen kites fly in gray skies
and they were real close to looking like the sunrise,
and sometime it takes the most wounded wings
the most broken things
to notice how strong the breeze is,
how precious the flight. ~ Andrea Gibson

Is this your idea of a joke?" she whispered as Mr. Jenkins stood to begin that day's lesson. I pulled out my notebook and shook my head. "No joke. My plan is to win you back one physics problem at a time." Connor laughed. "Does this make me Jacob? ~ R.S. Grey

(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?
(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?
(c) Is there a chance (and please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a key or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow a government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go mad, go gibbering through the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you---or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. ~ Zadie Smith

Through the open door A drowsy smell of flowers -grey heliotrope And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette Comes fairly in, and silent chorus leads To the pervading symphony of Peace. ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

Father of rosy day, No more thy clouds of incense rise; But waking flow'rs, At morning hours, Give out their sweets to meet thee in the skies. ~ Thomas Hood

Now he understood. He had dreamed about her countless times, on that same staircase, with that same blue dress and that same movement of her ash-grey eyes, without knowing who she was or why she smiled at him. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

At night all cats are grey. ~ George Orwell

For a kiss to be really good, you want it to mean something. You want it to be with someone you can't get out of your head. So that when your lips finally touch, you feel it everywhere. ~ Alex Kerev

Have I told you today how incredibly beautiful you are? If I haven't, I deeply apologize. That's something that should be recognized on a daily basis. ~ Jamie McGuire

You already have it, you have that thing everybody else wants. You can take it for granted but let me tell you if you didn't, if you couldn't be with the person that you love I guarantee that hearing him promise to love you and honor you and cherish you no matter what, it would be pretty much all you could think about. ~ Isobel Stevens

Swing your razor wide! Sweeney, hold it to the skies! ~ Stephen Sondheim