Lighthouse Quotes

Shine the light of awareness on your disempowering beliefs and choose to substitute them with empowering beliefs. This way you will choose love over fear and your path to purpose becomes clear. ~ Sharon Kirstin

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors' equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Perhaps so many journals had piled up in the lighthouse because on some level most came, in time, to recognize the futility of language. Not just in Area X but against the rightness of the lived-in moment, the instant of touch, of connection for which words were such a sorrowful disappointment, so inadequate an expression of both the finite and the infinite. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Some people are destined to be a lighthouse for a lost comrade. ~ Erin Forbes

It's because a lighthouse is two-faced, and this is how she feels each time she visits. A lighthouse is both an invitation and a warning. A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger. ~ Nathan Hill

A song of despair


The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
Pablo Neruda

Beacon, beacon, lonesome on a hill -
Waves run aground, pound 'round, what a thrill!
Water water everywhere crashes,
Shore's not lazy for it mashes, bashes…..
Summer's when tourists traipse o'er to see you,
Offering to wipe-wash your dust and mildew;
Summer painters place you with dinghy and gull,
Historians have you as subject o'er which to mull.
When feline Fog drifts gently or is heavy,
Your bright light's followed by boat bevy;
And during those calm, clear days and nights
You're that upright nautical dream exciting tiny tykes. ~ Mariecor Ruediger

A True Friend who leaves heart felt messages, can be a lighthouse to others, sharing light and truth, which comes from their heart. ~ Tom Baker

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. ~ Virginia Woolf

Two men in a small boat, never sure what they might encounter out on the sea or what they might pull up from the abyss, beneath melted stars and electric full moons, where breakers and swells assault the islets like hysterical herds of cattle and the lunatic eye of the lighthouse never lets us out of its sight. ~ Morten A. Strøksnes

Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way, still shone across the miles as a warning, an invitation, or even just a static signal. People opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes, so you couldn't see it, because they had no other choice. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

To me, a king is a lighthouse. A guide who can cast his glow across his kingdom and bring every last one of us out of the shadows. A beacon who we can look up to when the world seems lost. A bridge who can unite us when our differences seem to stark to reconcile. Tonight, we need a king who is all of those things. A king who can look each of you in the eye and make you feel that you won't just fight for him or his kingdom, but you'll fight for our way of life. ~ Soman Chainani

...the lighthouse, as a symbol, made no sense. Someone had declared it a Christian beacon of some sort, but a lighthouse wasn't something that led you to a safe harbor, a lighthouse was something that you avoided at all costs, a lighthouse was something you stayed away from lest you and your ship be dashed on the rocks. The most perverse message a lighthouse could ever deliver is come here and be saved. ~ Antoine Wilson

There was no lifeboat here in these
deep, killing waters, not even a lighthouse, marking the way back to shore with its soft amber promise.
There was only the storm of Barrons and the one I seemed to be, and if there were dark shapes moving in the waters beneath my feet that I should probably take a good hard look at and possibly reconsider trying to swim here, I didn't care. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods. ~ Michael Koryta

At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was only remembering a dream? She was alone among the rocks on a dark coast beside the sea. The water surged upward and fell back languidly, and in the distance she heard surf breaking slowly on a sandy shore. It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the intimate nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing. And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up onto the beach, she became aware of another sound entwined with the intermittent crash of waves: a vast horizontal whisper across the bossom of the sea, carrying an ever-repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing: Dawn will be breaking soon. She listened a long time: again and again the scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving water. A great weight was being lifted slowly from her; little by little her happiness became more complete, and she awoke. Then she lay for a few minutes marveling the dream, and once again fell asleep. ~ Paul Bowles

He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him -- without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he could feel it on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did--(and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in a business, a bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track down and stamp out -- tyranny, despotism, he called it -- making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak. ~ Virginia Woolf

She needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself. ~ Toni Morrison

Movement, Space, and Embodied Cognition in To the Lighthouse ~ Allison Pease

The moon is the lighthouse of love, and as changing as a woman's mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

The love within them shone as brightly as the lighthouse beam on the darkest, stormiest night. It broke through her confusion and heartache and filled her with a warm glow. ~ Jody Hedlund

(for the setting of her beauty was always that - hasty, but apt) ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Tragedies of this world behave like the storms of the vast oceans! While you are inside this storm, let your mind stand upright like a lighthouse! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Country music is always changing but the Opry is always there to serve as a lighthouse for what country music really is. The past, present and future is all encompassed by not only the physical structure of the building but also the radio show. ~ Dierks Bentley

I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land. ~ Pablo Neruda

Her hand stopped only as the sun rose high above the lighthouse tower. ~ Ashley McLeo

Ruth looked for the water mark several times during the day. She knew it was there, would always be there, but she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was life and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside herself. ~ Toni Morrison

The sky was a road and the stars made pathways; the moon was a watchtower, a lighthouse that led you home. ~ Cassandra Clare

To make music I rely on other people, which is good - that's the main difference in painting and music at this stage. They are separate parts of my life really, like having two jobs, one in a bar, one in a lighthouse. ~ Danny Fox

From my novel "Broken Things" (Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas):
Those eyes had haunted his dreams―and nightmares too―for over a quarter of a century.
"I wanted to tell you Allie's in town. Allie Drake. You remember her, don't you?"
Jack's gaze shifted back to his brother's grinning face and suddenly he wanted to pop Steve right in the nose. Did he remember Allie Drake? What a stupid question! ~ Andrea Boeshaar

Man must behave like a lighthouse; he must shine day and night for the goodness of everyman. ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Be for once a white boat adrift, in debt to no lighthouse.
- Arachne ~ Robin Hyde

For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty - the world of the elderly - thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable - "I am what I am, and intend to be it," for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. ~ Virginia Woolf

A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it. ~ M.L. Stedman

Why's there a pharos here?" he said. "You don't put a lighthouse where no one's going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go. ~ China Mieville

a lighthouse warns of danger--tells people to keep their distance. She had mistaken it for a place of safety. ~ M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

Why can't people just be happy and live? ~ Jonathan Dunne

Every man should use his intellect, not as he uses his lamp in the study, only for his own seeing, but as the lighthouse uses its lamps, that those afar off on the seas may see the shining, and learn their way. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Remember, you are the true guru of yourself. You are therefore always with Guru - your soul. However, at various stages you meet mentors. Mentors are like lighthouse who supports navigation in a journey called life. But, it is the innocence, vision, and purity of yourself (Guru within) determines the degree of success you can achieve. ~ Vishwas Chavan

If you are a lighthouse, you cannot hide yourself; if you hide yourself, you cannot be a lighthouse! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The library is every child's lighthouse. It is every person's
sanctuary. It is every town and county's fortress in the face of
ignorance, intrusion and bad behavior. ~ Amy Bloom

Consider a lighthouse. It stands on the shore with its beckoning light, guiding ships safely into the harbor. The lighthouse can't uproot itself, wade out into the water, grab the ship by the stern and say, "Listen, you fool! If you stay on this path you may break up on the rocks!" No. The ship has some responsibility for its own destiny. It can choose to be guided by the lighthouse. Or, it can go its own way. The lighthouse is not responsible for the ship's decisions. All it can do is be the best lighthouse it knows how to be. ~ Randi Kreger

Who is Hunter Becker?"
"Becker the Gory? Lighthouse Keepers? Boston?"
"I would've preferred Becker the Easiley Surrendering or Becker the Quite Reasonable, but beyond that his name tells me nothing. ~ Ilona Andrews

A fallen lighthouse is more dangerous than a reef. ~ Navjot Singh Sidhu

It's about how you're like a lighthouse, always searching far into the distance. But the thing you're looking for is usually close to you and always has been. That's why you have to look within yourself to find answers instead of searching beyond. ~ Susane Colasanti

Gonzo, the enlightened hippy-biker island god, was a hermit in every sense of the word; a hermit crab and this island was his shell. ~ Jonathan Dunne

On that island was a lighthouse I had seen every single summer of my entire life and my mother, too, had seen it her entire life, and I wondered how it might affect your way of thinking, if you always had a lighthouse in the corner of your eye. ~ Per Petterson

People link the heart to stupidity. They say the heart wants what it wants; it is foolish and driven. They play the victim and blame their emotions for every pain they suffer. The truth is that we own our body.. Therefore we own our heart and it will feel whatever we attract to it. Be certain that the heart you call stupid has greater sense of intuition than brilliant minds combined. It aches, dreams, hates, loves independently; while the rest of your body awaits signals from the brain to function. The heart is the lighthouse that guides all our senses and it is the essence of our humanity. That is why when they say "follow your heart" it is never easy; because by doing so you've made a choice to follow a natural unexplainable genius that is beyond your comprehension. ~ Asrarabdulghani

Even a lighthouse needs TLC, and a caretaker. ~ Cheri Bauer

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity. ~ E. M. Forster

What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by? ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

And Futh, looking at the lighthouse, wondered how this could happen--how there could be this constant warning of danger, the taking of all these precautions, and yet still there was all this wreckage. ~ Alison Moore

Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn't know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, 'Tell your daughter three things.'

"Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the world beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They've been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell's observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse.

"Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write ~ Barry Lopez

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth

There was considerable critical interest in Woolf 's life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer's Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone's The Bloomsbury
Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf 's writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis.
James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The
English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian 'moment' in terms of 'short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf 's use
of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough'. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner's 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar's Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962).
The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and H ~ Jane Goldman

A wise person is like a lighthouse. We are looking for their lights and follow them when we are in danger. ~ Debasish Mridha

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago. ~ Virginia Woolf

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. ~ Anthony Rapp

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind. ~ M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone on a beach. God made us this way so we would know where every lighthouse can be found and tell others how to find them. We were never meant to stand on the beach with you because every rescue we do rescues ourselves. We always go back to the sea because that is where driftwood belongs
forever searching for answers to our endless questions and sharing what we learned ... (2012, Writer's Conference) ~ Shannon L. Alder

She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable
this interminable life. ~ Virginia Woolf

If lighthouse becomes a burning candle,
flickered upon ocean's insanity.
Your sailing heart there anchors to handle
the obsessed breeze towards sand dune's vanity. ~ Munia Khan

There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at - that light, for example. ~ Virginia Woolf

He turned his head to look at her, trying to think of ways to plead his case. Some way to dazzle and beguile her and make her glad that it was him she was here with. Something witty and persuasive, but she turned at precisely the same moment he did, with invitation in her eyes, and all he could come up with was, "Damn, I really want to kiss you."

Her hesitation was a mere fraction of a second. "Me too," she whispered.

It was all he needed to hear, and in an instant she was in his arms. He kissed her, hard, with no prelude, no artful negotiations or seductive machinations. Just hungry kisses that sent his mind spinning and his body following. She kissed him back with equal enthusiasm, with one hand on his chest and the other wrapped tightly around the back of his neck, pulling him closer. Her mouth was sweet, as sweet as he'd imagined, with lips so soft he could have fallen over the edge of that lighthouse and thought the sensation was just from her touch. ~ Tracy Brogan

Our light shall burn the pathway to the stars ~ Mladen Đorđević

Many a year I told her tales. And then the time came for me to watch. And watch I have. ~ Gina Marinello-Sweeney

God, remember when we defeated Goliath, when we pastured sheep or we threw, in vain, the nets, and You chose us."
FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE OF ASAPH BOOK ~ Roberto Ornan Roche

As I left the landing, I had the peculiar thought that I was not the first to pocket the photo, that someone would always come behind to replace it, to circle the lighthouse keeper again. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me. ~ Ford Madox Ford

The ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell
buoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which
dropped things are bound to sink
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor
consciousness. ~ Marianne Moore

We sat within the farm-house old,
Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port,
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night,
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.

The very tones in why we spake,
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rattling in the dark.

Oft died the words upon our lips,
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.

And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.

The w ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It was high tide, and the sound of the waves
coming in sounded like the breath of an enormous dinosaur.
Round the lighthouse, on the opposite side to Snugs' room, Mr andMrs Merryweather put down the blinds, and blew out the candle. They
were very tired, and tomorrow was Christmas Eve on The Isle of Wight. ~ Suzy Davies

Black met black on the distant horizon, the stars alone distinguishing sky from lake. On the sand below, Silver Beach glittered at the water's edge while on the north side of the river the lighthouse's beacon signaled safe harbor. ~ Erin Farwell

I have to admit that most of the time I read in the same way that I smoke and chew gum and jiggle my leg a lot. I read a lot, but at the same time I'm not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I'll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text. There are even certain works that are very important to me (Like Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, for example) that I probably haven't ever read all the way through from beginning to end, just certain passages over and over. I tend to read at stuff, rather that through it, if that makes any sense, and maybe there's something a little bit rodent-like about it, like a gerbil gnawing on woodchips in those, tiny, rapid obsessive bites. ~ Dan Chaon

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer. ~ Virginia Woolf

Same day, 11 o'clock p. m.. - Oh, but I am tired! If it were not that I had made my diary a duty I should not open it tonight. We had a lovely walk. Lucy, after a while, was in gay spirits, owing, I think, to some dear cows who came nosing towards us in a field close to the lighthouse, and frightened the wits out of us. I believe we forgot everything, except of course, personal fear, and it seemed to wipe the slate clean and give us a fresh start. We had a capital `severe tea' at Robin Hood's Bay in a sweet little oldfashioned inn, with a bow window right over the seaweedcovered rocks of the strand. I believe we should have shocked the `New Woman' with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them! Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest, and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls. ~ Bram Stoker

Your attention is the same as the ray from a lighthouse. I am struck dumb beneath it. ~ Daisy Johnson

But some jokes are hilarious until they become true and they're not so funny anymore. ~ Jonathan Dunne

for they were gifted, her children, but all in quite different ways. And the result of it was, she sighed, taking in the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking against James's leg, that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer after summer....The wallpaper was flapping. You couldn't tell any more that those were roses on it. ~ Virginia Woolf

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled. ~ Barbara Tuchman

Across the street at the New Orleans headquarters of the Lighthouse for the Blind - a two-story building attached to a four-story stucco lighthouse - another Christmas party was under way, and Wright watched as the sightless guests arrived. Then, before his eyes, a curious scene unfolded. As they were greeted by their hosts, the blind whites were escorted to a large room at the front of the house, whereas the blind Negroes were taken to the rear, where they stayed. Separated. Transfixed, Wright had to look twice before it dawned on him: 'They couldn't see to segregate themselves ~ Gilbert King

My job as artistic director at the Brighton digital agency Lighthouse is all about trying to show that digital culture is about more than just tools and gadgets - it's about perceiving the societal transformations being brought about by technology. ~ Honor Harger

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf 's birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature. ~ Jane Goldman

Prophesies are dark and don't need a flashlight to illuminate. I'm a bring my own lighthouse kind of lover. ~ Jarod Kintz

If there was a moment that determined the course of my future, I'm pretty sure this was it. I had two somewhat simple choices. I could make a run for it and go back to Uncle Al's. Back to the bonfire where my cousins and dear sister would be drinking and revel in the normalcy of a Saturday night and forget I ever went to this horrid place and ran into this weirdo. Or I could go with said weirdo up the stairs in this decrepit old lighthouse, which was most likely condemned and unsafe, towards some unknown person (or thing) that was walking around, potentially waiting to murder us in horrific ways.

It didn't seem like a very hard decision to make. In fact, I think 99.7% of people in the right frame of mind would have picked from column A and gone on with their merry lives. But for some freaking crazy reason, I thought that maybe, just maybe I should go with this stranger up those kelp-ridden stairs and toward the lair of unimaginable horror. You know, because it was the more interesting alternative. ~ Karina Halle

The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard, as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves. ~ Charles Dickens

Gennie,you should have told me you hadn't been with a man before." And how was it possible, he wondered, that she'd let no man touch her before? That he was the first...the only.
"Why?" she said flatly,wishing he would go, wishing she had the strength to leave. "It was my business."
Swearing,he shifted,leaning over her. His eyes were dark and angry, but when she tried to pull away,he pinned her. "I don't have much gentleness," he told her, and the words were unsteady with feeling. "But I would have used all I had,I would have tried to find more,for you." When she only stared at him, Grant lowered his forehead to hers. "Gennie..."
Her doubts,her fears,melted at that one softly murmured word. "I wasn't looking for gentleness then," she whispered. Framing his face with her hands, she lifted it. "But now..." She smiled, and watched the frown fade from his eyes.
He dropped a kiss on her lips, soft, more like whisper,then rising, lifted her into his arms. Gennie laughed at the feeling of weightlessness and ease. "What're you doing now?"
"Taking you inside so you can warm up, dry off and make love with me again-maybe not in that order."
Gennie curled her arms around his neck. "I'm beginning to like your ideas. What about our clothes?"
"We can salvage what's left of them later." He pushed open the door of the lighthouse. "We won't be needing them for quite a while."
"Definitely like your ideas." She pressed her mouth against his throat. ~ Nora Roberts

We must understand that the local church isn't a country club or a casual self-help group. It is God's holy temple, a congregation of redeemed saints and priests who are consecrated to God. It is God's lighthouse in a dark world. It is the pillar and support of the truth. ~ Alexander Strauch

After All This"

After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors
through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty
bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of
disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns
to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing
inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point
still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of an arm.
The tides inside your heart still pull me towards you.
After all this, what are these words but mollusk shells
a child plays with? What could say more than the eloquence
of last night's constellations? or the storm anchored by
its own flashes behind the far mountains? I remember
the way your body wavers under my touch like the northern
lights. After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots
spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear
again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can
hear the footsteps of the stars. How can these words
ever reveal the secret that waits in their sleeping light?
The words that walk through my mind say only what has
already passed. Beyond, the swallows are still knitting
the wind. After a while, the smokebush will turn to fire.
After a while, the thin moon will grow like a tear in a curtain.
Under it, a small boy kicks a ball against the wall of
a burned out house. He is too young to remember the wa ~ Richard Jackson

It has been often said that writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. In my experience, this is true. But, in my opinion, it is useless without that 1 percent. It's like an engine without fuel
can't get anywhere without it. Or like a lighthouse without a light on top
doesn't guide anyone in to home or safe harbor. ~ Robert Fanney

If you close your eyes, no lighthouse can help you! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

In the year 2000, the lighthouse was on the move again. ~ Gary Dickinson

And Lynnie understood. There were two kinds of hope: the kind you couldn't do anything about and the kind you could. And even if the kind you could do something about wasn't what you'd originally wanted, it was still worth doing. A rainy day is better than no day. A small happiness can make a big sadness less sad.
p 313
"The sky was crying outside, and as she watched the drops come down, she thought: A rainy day can actually be a very important day. And a small hope isn't really small if it makes a lost hope less sad."
p 318
Lynnie about the lost hope of finding Homan, the hope of seeing the lighthouse/connecting with her daughter and how selling her art work was doing something about it. ~ Rachel Simon

Be like the sun
who fell in love with the moon
and shared all his light.
Be like the moon
who became a lighthouse
to guide others in the night.
Be like the mountains
who were once hills
that wanted to kiss the sky.
Be like the trees
who are firmly grounded
but dream up high.
Be like the waves
who play and tickle
each other endlessly.
Be like the children
who enjoy and live
in the present entirely.
Be like the God
who equally loves
everything and everyone.
And be like the love
who brought compassion
when she visited the sun. ~ Kamand Kojouri

Earth is such a sweet 'n sour place, thought Gonzo, puffing on his seaweed roll-up, and he knew that if aliens did exist, then they'd probably only stop to avail of this planet's toilet facilities on the intergalactic highway. ~ Jonathan Dunne

Everything is a hero: A lighthouse which gives light to us; weeds that provide shelter to little insects; a water drop which quenches a thirsty ant! Everything that helps us to live is a hero! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. ~ Immanuel Kant

The Great Point lighthouse rose at the far end of the barrier beach, a tall white steeple to the sky, with a working light flashing at the top. Here was the end of the island, the great point where the Atlantic Ocean met Nantucket Sound in a froth of waves. All along the point, enormous fat seals lolled on the sand, occasionally lumbering in and out of the water, grunting and lounging like a tribe of overfed Roman emperors. ~ Nancy Thayer

Lighthouse people are beacons that call all the sailors in ships back to land, beckoning them in toward the light. Lighthouse people are magnetic and luminescent, so much so that even when one sailor manages to row all the way to land and climbs up into the lighthouse, the rest of the sailors will stay out there on the water, waiting for their chance to come to shore. They will feel that it's always best to keep an eye on the lighthouse, even if they have to come and go due to other sailorly obligations. The lighthouse might act like it doesn't know it's so popular with the sailors, but it does. How could it not? Even if the lighthouse has a special sailor for the moment, its light is always on. It can't help it. ~ Katie Heaney