Lehnert Sand Quotes

The truth is . . . Well, the truth is the truth, and thus worth telling, but sometimes truths are so complicated that it's exhausting to get them out in the right order." He glanced up at her. That sounded like an evasion if ever she'd heard one. She raised an eyebrow. ~ Merrie Haskell

His great carved wooden head was marked with a black eye that was more yellow than black and from this spectacular bed of bruised flesh the eye itself, sand irritated, bloodshot, as wild as a currawong's, stared out at a landscape in which the tops of fences protruded from windswept sand. ~ Peter Carey

Another reason for our resistance [to the idea of idolatrous friendships] is that these friendships, at least in the beginning, feel like winning the friendship jackpot. Like you've finally found the person who gets you, who is there for you, and who makes you feel at home. When our idol has not yet failed us, when the water has not yet drained out of the broken cistern, when the storm has not yet come to destroy our house built on sand, we perceive our friendship to be the best thing ever. But just because a friendship that replaces Jesus "feels right" does not make it right. ~ Kelly Needham

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

I'd rather die than be famous,
I want to go live in the desert
With long wild hair, eating
At my campfire, full of sand ~ Jack Kerouac

Others may not notice it, because an angry Toraf is truly a rare thing to behold, but Galen can practically feel the animosity emanating from his friend. Which is why he casually bumps into him, taking care to be overly apologetic.
"Oh, sorry about that, minnow. I didn't even see you there." Galen mimics Toraf's demeanor, crossing his arms and staring ahead of them. What they're supposed to be staring at, he's not sure.
His effort is rewarded with a slight upward curve of his friend's mouth. "Oh, don't think twice about it, tadpole. I know it must be difficult to swim straight with a whale's tail."
Galen scowls, taking care not to glance down at his fin. Ever since they went to retrieve Grom, he's been sore all below the waist, but he'd just attributed it to tension from finding Nalia, and then the whole tribunal mess-not to mention, hovering in place for hours at a time. Still, he did examine his fin the evening before, hoping to massage out any knots he found, but was a bit shocked to see that his fin span seemed to have widened. He decided that he was letting his imagination get the better of him. Now he's not so sure. "What do you mean?" he says lightly.
Toraf nods down toward the sand. "You know what I mean. Looks like you have the red fever."
"The red fever bloats you all over, idiot. Right before it kills you. It doesn't make your fin grow wider. Besides, the red tide hasn't been bad for years now." But Toraf already knows what the red fever lo ~ Anna Banks

We slid down on our behinds, little avalanches of sand pouring around our feet and down our pants. ~ Ransom Riggs

Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil. ~ E. Stanley Jones

Some Things, Say the Wise Ones Some things, say the wise ones who know everything, are not living. I say, you live your life your way and leave me alone. I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they are afraid of being left behind; I have said, Hurry, hurry! and they have said: thank you, we are hurrying. About cows, and starfish, and roses, there is no argument. They die, after all. But water is a question, so many living things in it, but what is it, itself, living or not? Oh, gleaming generosity, how can they write you out? As I think this I am sitting on the sand beside the harbor. I am holding in my hand small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist. Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep. ~ Mary Oliver

Snakes can have dozens of young at a time, and so they are often symbols of fertility. They resemble vegetation, especially roots, in their form and often in the green and brown of their skins. The undulating form of a snake also suggests a river. A point of muscular tension passes through the body of a snake and drives the animal forward, like a moment moving along a continuum of days and years. Like time itself, a snake seems to progress while remaining still. In addition, the body of a snake also resembles those marks with a stylus, brush, or pen that make up our letters. Ornamental alphabets of the ancient Celts and others were often made up of intertwined serpents. It could even be that the tracks of a snake in sand helped to inspire the invention of the alphabet. The manner in which snakes curl up in a ball has made people associate them with the sun. ~ Boria Sax

He noticed that Ursula's ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one's fingers like sand or water. Or time. Perhaps nothing should be kept. ~ Kate Atkinson

Elaboration is not beauty, and sand-paper never finished a piece of bad work. ~ William Morris Hunt

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

Up from behind a sand dune close beside her rose the form of her enemy Bitterness. He did not come any nearer, having learned a little more prudence, and was not going to make her call for the Shepherd if he could avoid it, but simply stood and looked at her and laughed and laughed again, the bitterest sound that Much-Afraid had heard in all her life. ~ Hannah Hurnard

Nina knew that double whammy: the emotion itself and the frustration of not being able to put it into words. She'd read somewhere that if you can't put language around an experience or feeling it's because its from your earliest childhood, before speech, when everything was inexplicable and overwhelming. She'd look at their faces, and ideas would hover on the edge of her mind just out of sight. If she tried to capture them, they'd dig themselves deeper like sand crabs, glimpsed for a second as the feelings washed over her and then were gone. ~ Abbi Waxman

Back in the buffalo days, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had seen a vision of men with hair on their faces who would come bringing a white sand that was poison to Indians. The prophecy had come true, the white sand was sugar, and Adeline blamed the white man for poisoning her right up to two hundred pounds. ~ Christopher Moore

Beneath the light, the river and hills are beautiful, The spring breeze bears the fragrance of flowers and grass. The mud has thawed, and swallows fly around. On the warm sand, mandarin ducks are sleeping. ~ Du Fu

JANE: What to do when it is that time in your girl child's life:

1. Sit down calmly and explain sex to her?

2. Buy her a book, video, or CD that gives her the details?

3. Buy her condoms and put her on the pill?

Or do as many mothers before you did - just stick your head in the sand and hope she joins a convent.

Of course these days your child may know more about sex than you did at her age, what with in-school health lessons, and out-of-school R-rated movies easily accessed on the TV, not to mention the Starr Report!

In the days of fairy tales, sex was dangerous because so many women died in childbirth. Today sex is again dangerous because of diseases like AIDS. So what do we say? ~ Jane Yolen

In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams! ~ Carl Sagan

It was all a part of being trustworthy - of being a piece of sea glass. High tides, low tides, storms, sand and mistakes all contributed to the polishing process. Though difficult to endure at the time, the demanding elements helped smooth the surface, transforming one into a better person, not worse. A person who learned from the harsh environment, who knew the storm would end, and who felt confident she would still be in one piece. ~ Maria V. Snyder

A Quote from Monty's journal in GOD MUST BE WEEPING. I felt as anonymous as a grain of sand. ~ J.D. Winston

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Don't just ask questions. Know how the answers to the questions will change your behavior. In other words, draw a line in the sand before you run the survey. ~ Alistair Croll

It was June in Maharashtra, and the monsoon would not come. The whole district lay panting in the heat, the burning sky clapped tight overhead like the lid of a tandoor oven. Lean goats stumbled down the narrow alleyways, udders hanging slack and dry beneath them; beggars cried for water in every village. Dust-devils swept over baked clay and through the dry weeds, whistling and shrieking. Hot sand blew into the eyes of torpid bullocks as they leaned into the yoke, whips snapping over their bony backs. A single stream crept along the valley floor, shrunken and muddy, and women stood ankle deep in its shallows, beating their laundry against rocks that rippled and danced in the sun. ~ Arinn Dembo

I never see a ship sailing out of the channel, or a gull soaring over the sand-bar, without wishing I were on board the ship or had wings, not like a dove 'to fly away and be at rest,' but like a gull, to sweep out into the very heart of the storm. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Madness is the WHO staring into the abyss and denying it is there. Madness is an ostrich who sticks her head in the sand while a pack of hyenas closes around her. - Lanky Man with green eyes ~ Dan Brown

from "Semele Recycled"

But then your great voice rang out under the skies
my name!-- and all those private names
for the parts and places that had loved you best.
And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.
The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,
and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,
and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,
and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,
set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"
that our two bodies met like a thunderclap
in midday-- right at the corner of that wretched field
with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.
We fell in a heap on the compost heap
and all our loving parts made love at once,
while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes
and then went decently about their business.

And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the river
and are sweet and wholesome once more.
We kneel side by side in the sand;
we worship each other in whispers.
But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,
the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,
and passion, its bloody labor,
its birth and rebirth and decay. ~ Carolyn Kizer

Her kiss is hungry, as if long deprived. As if they didn't already spend the morning doing just exactly this, making up for the lost time they were apart. Triton's trident, I could do this all day. Then he catches himself. No, I couldn't. Not without wanting more. Which is why we need to stop.
Instead, he entwines his hands in her hair, and she teases his lips with her tongue, trying to get him to fully open his mouth to her. He gladly complies. Her fingers sneak their way under his shirt, up his stomach, sending a trail of fire to his chest.
He is about to lose his shirt altogether. Until Antonis's voice booms from the doorway. "Extract yourself from Prince Galen, Emma," he says. "You two are not mated. This behavior is inappropriate for any Syrena, let alone a Royal."
Emma's eyes go round as sand dollars. He can tell she's not sure what to think about her grandfather telling her what to do. Or maybe she's caught off guard that he called her a Royal. Either way, like most people, Emma decides to obey. Galen does, too. They stand up side by side, not daring to be close enough to touch. They behold King Antonis in a polka-dot bathrobe, and though he's the one who looks silly, they are the ones who look shamed.
Galen feels like a fingerling again. "I apologize, Highness," he says. It seems like all he does lately is apologize to the Poseidon king. "It was my fault."
Antonis gives him a reproving look. "I like you, young prince. But you well know the law ~ Anna Banks

Nothing truly beautiful without its element of strangeness, nothing whole without its own incongruity, these (Jacksonville-area pioneer house) ruins sand up from the earth in sacred conjunction. These ruins conjoin the earth and the manmade, moving from one to the other and back again. The Browards built their house out of shell and limestone, and limestone forms naturally from the shells and skeletons of miniscule sea creatures over great periods of time. The Browards shaped the earth upright toward the sky. THey shaped it with doorframes and windows and chimneys. THey shaped the earth up around them as a shelter. But shaped earth was always the earth. Now the walls fall back down and join once again the ground, taken over by roots of ferns and weeds and small trees. The house was always the ground, only contained in an upward suspension. The house was always the earth, but brought up into architecture, and now the house that was always the earth crumbles back into the earth and nourishes new green things -- dog fennel and morning glories and palmettoes and cabbage palms and cedars. A true symbol of sacredness of the earth is earth's reclaiming of human ingenuity. ~ Tim Gilmore

Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of ... less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.
'Think of that. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Silicon Valley, "the largest legal creation of wealth in history," was built largely by unprofessional amateurs using math, sand, and the institutions of freedom. The Soviet Union had the greatest mathematicians on earth, and plenty of sand, but without the institutions of freedom their brilliant mathematicians were not empowered to create those devices that are changing the world. ~ Michael Strong

She'd been so nervous as the boy took her on the sand, making her his, something switching inside of him as the came together, like the final piece of their souls had fixed in place and all that was left was them as one. ~ Tillie Cole

From the beginning, man could look up at a vast universe dotted by innumerable stars to find every evidence that he was nothing. This evidence only grows stronger as science and technology record an expanse of galaxies filled with planetary solar systems beyond any visible end. Man is but a grain of sand lost on an endless seashore, and yet he believes with conviction in his own greatness. He is either a divine soul intuitively aware of his inherent, limitless potential - or he is a blind fool. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Prince Doran had closed the draperies of his litter as soon as the Spear Tower came in sight, yet still the small folk shouted out to him as the litter passed. The Sand Snakes have stirred them to a boil, the captain thought uneasily. ~ George R R Martin

Pearls, because your skin is as smooth and luminescent as one, and because the first time my lips caressed your throat I thought your flesh as opulent and lush
as one. Gold," he whispered, moving closer, "because it reminded me of how your hair looked in the dying
candlelight, how it burned and glistened, and how badly I want to lie in bed, in our chamber, and watch you at your dressing table, unpinning it for me. I will have that, Lucy, the
rights of a husband to enter his wife's room, to see her at her toilette, to watch what no other man will ever be
granted. You do understand that? That I won't settle for less?"
"You have made your line in the sand very clear."
He grinned. "You can cross it anytime you wish, you know. You might even like it on my side. ~ Charlotte Featherstone