Midway Quotes

It's a half bridge, really, as only four of its original arches remain. It ends midway across the river. Like it reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short. ~ Khaled Hosseini

New Season
No coats today. Buds bulge on chestnut trees,
And on the doorstep of a big, old house
A young man stands and plays his flute.
I watch the silver notes fly up
And circle in the blue sky above the traffic,
Travelling where they will.
And suddenly this paving-stone
Midway between my front door and the bus stop
Is a starting point.
From here I can go anywhere I choose. ~ Wendy Cope

We live in a society that is based on 30-second sound bites. We have
technology that puts all of the information of humankind at our fingertips,
but we have the attention span of a three-year-old at a carnival
midway on the Fourth of July. We throw around a lot of words like
democracy, federal, republic, nationalist, socialist, liberal, and right-wing - but
do we really know what they mean? ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Human beings are midway between the size of a living cell and the size of Earth. ~ Matthew Fox

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. ~ Albert Camus

Midway between land and water, freshwater marshes are among the most highly productive ecosystems on earth, rivaling the tropical rainforest. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. ~ Dante Alighieri

Hours may have passed before I heard a throat clear behind us, saw Dad appear. His frame blocked out the sun, casting a cool shadow over where we lay.

I registered only once he was there that I had slowly shifted so I was lying with my head on Elliot's stomach, in our secluded stretch of sand. I pushed to sit up, awkwardly.

"What are you guys doing?"

"Nothing," we said in unison.

I could hear immediately how guilty our joined answer made us sound.

"Really?" Dad asked.

"Really," I answered, but he wasn't looking at me anymore. He and Elliot were having some kind of male Windtalker exchange that included prolonged eye contact, throat clearing, and probably some mysterious form of direct communication between their Y chromosomes.

"We were just reading," Elliot said finally, his voice shifting deeper midway through the sentence. I'm not sure if this sign of his impending manliness was reassuring or damning as far as my dad was concerned.

"Seriously, Dad," I said.

His eyes flickered to mine.

"Okay." Finally he seemed to relax and squatted down next to me. "What are you reading?"

"A Wrinkle in Time."

"Again?"

"It's so good. ~ Christina Lauren

CANTO I IN the midway of this our mortal life, ~ Dante Alighieri

Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us. ~ John Green

Midway from Nothing to the Deity! ~ Edward Young

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of the demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed. ~ Herman Melville

Sometimes, before even attempting to achieve something we feel afraid because we don't know what will be the result of our efforts. We don't know whether we will go all the way or whether dissatisfaction with the results would make us abandon our goals midway. ~ Prem Jagyasi

A true scientist doesn't perform prescribed experiments; she develops her own and thus generates wholly new knowledge. This transition between doing what you're told and telling yourself what to do generally occurs midway through a dissertation. In many ways, it is the most difficult and terrifying thing that a student can do, and being unable or unwilling to do it is much of what weeds people out of Ph.D. programs. ~ Hope Jahren

Midway through my treatments, I was at the White House to do an interview with President Bush's press secretary, Tony Snow. He had recently revealed he was facing cancer for a second time. While there I was told that the First Lady, Laura Bush, wanted to see me in the private residence for tea. Mrs. Bush has a family history of breast cancer. She personally invited me to accompany her on a portion of an international breast cancer initiative with the Susan G. Komen Foundation, and I couldn't pass up this opportunity. My doctors cleared me to travel - although getting my mom's blessing was far more difficult. Remember, I was in the middle of chemo treatments. I spent time with Mrs. Bush in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, in the UAE and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I met some incredible women on the trip. ~ Robin Roberts

A lot of our fellow liberals ... seem to me rather to doom themselves to futility in public affairs because the won't recognize that there's a zone of natural affection midway between the inner, or family one, and the outer, or all-humanity one. I suppose they are somehow short of a zone themselves and they seem to get vexed ... The common man knows better, just as he'd know better if some philosopher told him he ought not to make invidious distinctions by feeding his own children in preference to others. But of course he can't explain; he just ... goes on feeding the kids. ~ Charles Edward Montague

With Midway as the turning point, the fortunes of war appeared definitely to shift from our own to the Allied side. The defeat taught us many lessons and impelled our Navy, for the first time since the outbreak of war, to indulge in critical self-examination. ~ Mitsuo Fuchida

My legs are still trembling as I climb the steps to Corly station. I've been shaking like this for hours, it must be the adrenaline, my heart just won't slow down. The train is packed - no chance of a seat here, it's not like getting on at Euston, so I have to stand, midway through a carriage. It's like a sweatbox. I'm trying to breathe slowly, my eyes cast down to my feet. I'm just trying to get a handle on what I'm feeling. Exultation, fear, confusion and guilt. Mostly guilt. ~ Paula Hawkins

In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe's gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.'
The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian's statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself.
'Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.'
This is poor stuff, Georgios thin ~ Ian McDonald

This boy turkied my Thanksgiving, but I won't let him Grinch my Christmas. -Dean Hughes (Midway to Heaven) ~ Dean Hughes

What troops Of generous boys in happiness thus bred Saturnians through life's Tempe led, Went from the North and came from the South, With golden mottoes in the mouth, To lie down midway on a bloody bed. ~ Herman Melville

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts. ~ Plotinus

Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce ... Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too. ~ Sarah Waters

Descending the endless stairs for the sixth time, Mr. Lecky thought of all the goods those closed doors hid. Fantastic was the discouragement it caused him. Aware of such variety and great quantity, Mr. Lecky saw the danger of forgetting or never even imagining things which, discovered, he would want. Everlastingly midway between two equal errors, to which could he cleave? To have time for everything, one must make haste. To gain access to everything, one must be patient.

Moreover, hasty, or patient as Job, with what great labor would Mr. Lecky carry up on his back all he got! Making, as he was every moment, the climb back longer, giving, as he did with each step down, consent to toil more and more severe, he could anticipate vaguely and abhor another possibility. Curious and insubstantial as his fearing not to find what he could not think of, was his resentment of a perhaps coming time when he might, in revolt against the inanity of exertion, live meanly and miserably, with no object but somehow to make what was already at hand suffice for him. Against this insidious ill chance there exists no defense, since so often what today is detested will appear tomorrow - though surely still detestable - good and wise. ~ James Gould Cozzens

The true artist stands midway between what he imagines and what he does. He is the one who is 'capable of.' he could be what he describes, experience what he writes. The mere act would limit him; he would be the one who has acted. ~ Albert Camus

What we have seen of recent American action in the Pacific, the bombing of Tokyo and the engagements in the Coral Sea, off Midway Island and at Dutch Harbour, has been sufficient indication that America is beginning to discharge her supremely important duty in the Pacific. ~ Chiang Kai-shek

Looking down at the stiff, cream-colored rice paper--the good kind that came in the books that we had never been able to afford--I was both excited and apprehensive. Remembering my rather precipitous departure from that wood gatherer's house, I decided that much as I valued my friends, I wanted to read Bran's letter alone.
No one followed me as I walked out. Behind, I heard Oria saying, in a voice very different from what I was used to hearing from her, "Come, Master Jerrol, there's some good ale here, and I'll make you some bread and cheese…"
As I walked up to my room, I reflected on the fact that I did want to read it alone, and not have whatever it said read from my face. Then there was the fact that they all let me go off alone without a word said, though I knew they wanted to know what was in it.
It's that invisible barrier again, I thought, feeling peculiar. We can work all day at the same tasks, bathe together at the village bathhouse, and sit down together at meals, but then something comes up and suddenly I'm the Astiar and they are the vassals…just as at the village dances all the best posies and the finest plates are brought to me, but the young men all talk and laugh with the other girls.
Was this, then, to be my life? To always feel suspended midway between the aristocrat and the vassal traditions, and to belong truly to neither? ~ Sherwood Smith

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray,
Gone from the path direct. ~ Dante Alighieri

It's only second period, and the whole school knows Emma broke up with him. So far, he's collected eight phone numbers, one kiss on the cheek, and one pinch to the back of his jeans. His attempts to talk to Emma between classes are thwarted by a hurricane of teenage females whose main goal seems to be keeping him and his ex-girlfriend separated.
When the third period bell rings, Emma has already chosen a seat where she'll be barricaded from him by other students. Throughout class, she pays attention as if the teacher were giving instructions on how to survive a life-threatening catastrophe in the next twenty-four hours. About midway through class, he receives a text from a number he doesn't recognize.
If you let me, I can do things to u to make u forget her.
As soon as he clears it, another one pops up from a different number.
Hit me back if u want to chat. I'll treat u better than E.
How did they get my number? Tucking his phone back into his pocket, he hovers over his notebook protectively, as if it's the only thing left that hasn't been invaded. Then he notices the foreign handwriting scribbled on it by a girl named Shena who encircled her name and phone number with a heart. Not throwing it across the room takes almost as much effort as not kissing Emma.
At lunch, Emma once again blocks his access to her by sitting between people at a full picnic table outside. He chooses the table directly across from her, but she seems oblivious, absently so ~ Anna Banks

From Oleg Cassini's memoirs... I learned that Cassini had also suffered from insomnia. One night, he woke from uneasy dreams with the opening of Dante's Inferno setting off 'a clamorous tumult in [his] subconscious: "Midway the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest."' When I read these terrible words, chills ran up my arms. I knew 'midway the journey' was supposed to mean midlife crisis. But it seemed to me one had always been midway the journey of our life, and would be maybe right up until the moment of death. ~ Elif Batuman

But one thing was quite clear ... " [Sol Bloom, chief of the Midway] wrote. "[B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time. ~ Erik Larson

Death is not the end. It is a midway state. ~ Darren Shan

Kiernan gives him a suspicious look. "You performed at the Expo?"
"Yes," Bess answers. "Along with his brother, Dash. They headlined as The Brothers Houdini on the Midway Plaisance."
"Really?" Kiernan shakes his head. "I was there as well. For the entire run. I knew every headliner on the Midway."
Houdini eyes shift slightly. "Well, we weren't exactly headliners, but yes, we did perform at the Fair. ~ Rysa Walker

In a lovely book called On Hope, Josef Pieper explores Thomas Aquinas' theology of hope along these lines: the hopeful person is by definition a wayfarer (viator), because the virtue of hope lies midway between the two vices of despair (desperatio) and presumption (praesumptio). What despairing persons and presumptuous persons have in common is that they aren't going anywhere, they are fixed in place: the despairing because they don't think there's anywhere to go, the presumptuous because they think they have reached the pinnacle of achievement. ~ Alan Jacobs

It was the Kojagar full moon, and I was slowly pacing the riverside conversing with myself. It could hardly be called a conversation, as I was doing all the talking and my imaginary companion all the listening. The poor fellow had no chance of speaking up for himself, for was not mine the power to compel him helplessly to answer like a fool?

But what a night it was! How often have I tried to write of such, but never got it done! There was not a line of ripple on the river; and from away over there, where the farthest shore of the distant main stream is seen beyond the other edge of the midway belt of sand, right up to this shore, glimmers a broad band of moonlight. Not a human being, not a boat in sight; not a tree, nor blade of grass on the fresh-formed island sand-bank.

It seemed as though a desolate moon was rising upon a devastated earth; a random river wandering through a lifeless solitude; a long-drawn fairy-tale coming to a close over a deserted world, - all the kings and the princesses, their ministers and friends and their golden castles vanished, leaving the Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers and the Unending Moor, over which the adventurous princes fared forth, wanly gleaming in the pale moonlight. I was pacing up and down like the last pulse-beats of this dying world. Every one else seemed to be on the opposite shore - the shore of life - where the British Government and the Nineteenth Century hold sway, and tea and cigarettes. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

We believe in marbles that disintegrate when we search for them but that are as real as any genuine marble when we're not looking for them. Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. [...] What one gives up on is a childlike sense that things are exactly as they appear, and that our solid-seeming, marble-like "I" is the realest thing in the world; what one acquires is an appreciation of how tenuous we are at our cores, and how wildly different we are from what we seem to be. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter

Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose," began the man. "You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed. ~ Haruki Murakami

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

It doesn't seem like you're living a life, it's almost like you're travelling on a train with the destination unknown.

You're sitting on a seat near the window looking outside, imagining how things are there outside, how is it like to live in the houses that you pass by. And when you're busy noticing the outside, you at times do not pay heed to your surroundings inside the coach.

And thus some passengers who got down at a station midway fail to capture your interest, or maybe it is because of your deviation of interest towards the outside. While at other stops new people get up, and you like their company, you share and you laugh.

But sooner or later they get down.

Because it's your journey, you're the traveler and they just accompany you for some distances.

And then, maybe when you reach your destination there will still be passengers in the train, passengers you've mingled with or passengers you hate, people who were there since the train had started or people who got in just before the last stoppage, and like it or not, they will get off the train with you, at your destination which also proved to be there destination. ~ Sanhita Baruah

I was midway down to the first floor when it finally hit me: I had just told the alpha of all shapeshifters that hell would freeze over before I got into his bed. Not only had I just kissed any cooperation from the Pack good-bye, but I had also challenged him. Again. I stopped and hit my head a few times on the wall. Keep your mouth shut, stupid.
Derek appeared at the bottom of the stairway. It went that well, huh? ~ Ilona Andrews

After the Battle of Midway it was clear that the Pacific war would be won by planes launched from ships. Both Japan and the United States began crash programs to build aircraft carriers as fast as possible. During 1943 and 1944, Japan produced seven of these huge, costly vessels. In the same period, the United States produced ninety. ~ Ken Follett

He's from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That's the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness. Midway is nowhere. ~ Marlon James

Distinguisht Link in Being's endless Chain!
Midway from Nothing to the Deity! ~ Edward Young

Stephen King consummately honors several traditions with his rare paperback original, 'Joyland.' He addresses the novel of carny life and sideshows, where the midway serves as microcosm, such as in those famous books by Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney and William Lindsay Gresham. ~ Paul Di Filippo

What had happened, for instance, at one of the war's biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn't there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map? (Midway, released in 1976 and starring Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, and -- inevitably -- Henry Fonda.) A couple of people were even surprised to hear that Midway Airport was named after the battle, though they'd walked past the ugly commemorative sculpture in the concourse so many times. All in all, this was a dispiriting exercise. The astonishing events of that morning, the "fatal five minutes" on which the war and the fate of the world hung, had been reduced to a plaque nobody reads, at an airport with a vaguely puzzling name, midway between Chicago and nowhere at all. ~ Lee Sandlin

I'm very surprised - midway through my second glass of red wine last night, I really didn't think I'd be standing here with a trophy in my hands. ~ Graeme McDowell

It had been a long while since I'd watched any television, and things had only gotten weirder. Beauty pageants for infants; ruddy men in trucker caps fighting over abandoned storage lockers; public shamings of compulsive hoarders and pre-diabetics; affluent suburban women made up like transvestite hookers, competing with each other in feats of coarseness and cruelty; barely literate pregnant teens with tattoos, unfocused eyes, and futures like wrecked cars; apoplectic crypto-fascists spitting bile and paranoia; a carnival midway of weight loss devices, hair growth creams, erectile dysfunction potions, and pottery from which herbs grew like green hair. It was like the day room of a surrealist mental hospital, or any big city ER on a summer Saturday night. ~ Peter Spiegelman

I've always had a thing for theme parks and their less-glorious cousins, amusement parks, the carnival midway, and others of such ilk. ~ Greg Rucka

Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology, phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway. ~ James J. Kilpatrick

The wise man knoweth where to stop, as he runneth in the race of fortune, For experience of old hath taught him, that happiness lingered midway; And many in hot pursuit have hasted to the goal of wealth, But have lost, as they ran, those apples of gold
the mind and the power to enjoy it. ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper

There should be a law that makes it illegal to have to get out of bed before Helios is at least midway across the sky. ~ Jenifer Mohammed

But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders -- the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded. ~ Lee Sandlin

We coin concepts and we use them to analyse and explain nature and society. But we seem to forget, midway, that these concepts are our own constructs and start equating them with reality. ~ Abdolkarim Soroush

And with light lips yet full of their swift smile,
And hands that wist not though they dug a grave,
Undid the hasps of gold, and drank, and gave,
And he drank after, a deep glad kingly draught:
And all their life changed in them, for they quaffed
Death; if it be death so to drink, and fare
As men who change and are what these twain were.
And shuddering with eyes full of fear and fire
And heart-stung with a serpentine desire
He turned and saw the terror in her eyes
That yearned upon him shining in such wise
As a star midway in the midnight fixed.
Their Galahault was the cup, and she that mixed;
Nor other hand there needed, nor sweet speech
To lure their lips together; each on each
Hung with strange eyes and hovered as a bird
Wounded, and each mouth trembled for a world;
Their heads neared, and their hands were drawn in one,
And they saw dark, though still the unsunken sun
Far through fine rain shot fire into the south;
And their four lips became one burning mouth. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective. ~ Freya North

By nature you instinctively seek out the middle road, midway between dangerous passion and soul-destroying indifference. ~ Richard Russo

They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now.

But she failed to add: if you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn't you be unable to know what the whole thing's about? Just blindly clutch and hold and fear that it will get away. But unable to stop, to think, to give it any name.

Just two more people sharing a common human experience. Infinite in its complexity, tricky at times, but almost always successfully surmounted in one of two ways: either blandly content with the results as they are, or else vaguely discontent but chained by habit. Most women don't marry a man, they marry a habit. Even when a habit is good, it can become monotonous; most do. When it is bad in just the average degree it usually becomes no more than a nuisance and an irritant; and most do.

But when it is darkly, starkly evil in the deepest sense of the word, then it can truly become a hell on earth.

Theirs seemed to fall midway between the first two, for just a little while. Then it started veering over slowly toward the last. Very slowly, at the start, but very steadily...

("For The Rest Of Her Life") ~ Cornell Woolrich

Midway along the journey of our life
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.
How hard it is to tell what it was like,
this wood of wilderness, savage and stubborn
(the thought of it brings back all my old fears),
a bitter place! Death could scarce be bitterer.
But if I would show the good that came of it
I must talk about things other than the good. ~ Dante Alighieri

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

While one would expect a liberated society to regard bisexuality as the norm, this view would not mean that all persons would behave bisexually … The nonrepressed person recognizes his bisexual potential, he is not some ideal person midway along the Kinsey behavioral scale. People would still fall in love and form relationships, and these relationships would be homosexual as well as heterosexual. What would be different is that the social difference between the two would vanish, and once this happened we would lose the feeling of being limited, of having to choose between an exclusively straight or exclusively gay world. ~ Dennis Altman

HOMOEOPATHY, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior, for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not. ~ Ambrose Bierce

I grew up a geek. I added comedy to it midway through high school. ~ Jordan Klepper

Capitalism and socialism are two distinct patterns of social organization. Private control of the means of production and public control are contradictory notions and not merely contrary notions. There is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative. ~ George Will

Battles that involve oatmeal are just never going to end up being historic, you know?" Jake went on. "Gettysburg? No major oatmeal involvement. The Battle of Midway? Neither side used oatmeal. Desert Storm? No oatmeal. ~ K.A. Applegate

After the Battle of Midway there was a week in a rest camp at Pearl Harbor. ~ Jack Adams

The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn't use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we'd broken the Japanese code. He thought he' broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office. ~ Lawrence Wilkerson

He slipped his arms into the scarlet woollen cassock and fastened the thirty-three buttons that ran from his neck to his ankles - one button for each year of Christ's life. Around his waist he tied the red watered-silk sash of the cincture, or fascia, designed to remind him of his vow of chastity, and checked to make sure its tasselled end hung to a point midway up his left calf. Then he pulled over his head the thin white linen rochet - the symbol, along with the mozzetta, of his judicial authority. The bottom two-thirds and the cuffs were of white lace with a floral pattern. He tied the tapes in a bow at his neck and tugged the rochet down so that it extended to just below his knees. Finally he put on his mozzetta, an elbow-length nine-buttoned scarlet cape. ~ Robert Harris

I'm staying right here," grumbled the rat. "I haven't the slightest interest in fairs."
"That's because you've never been to one," remarked the old sheep . "A fair is a rat's paradise. Everybody spills food at a fair. A rat can creep out late at night and have a feast. In the horse barn you will find oats that the trotters and pacers have spilled. In the trampled grass of the infield you will find old discarded lunch boxes containing the foul remains of peanut butter sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, cracker crumbs, bits of doughnuts, and particles of cheese. In the hard-packed dirt of the midway, after the glaring lights are out and the people have gone home to bed, you will find a veritable treasure of popcorn fragments, frozen custard dribblings, candied apples abandoned by tired children, sugar fluff crystals, salted almonds, popsicles,partially gnawed ice cream cones,and the wooden sticks of lollypops. Everywhere is loot for a rat--in tents, in booths, in hay lofts--why, a fair has enough disgusting leftover food to satisfy a whole army of rats."
Templeton's eyes were blazing.
" Is this true?" he asked. "Is this appetizing yarn of yours true? I like high living, and what you say tempts me."
"It is true," said the old sheep. "Go to the Fair Templeton. You will find that the conditions at a fair will surpass your wildest dreams. Buckets with sour mash sticking to them, tin cans containing particles of tuna fish, greasy bags stuffed with rotten..."
"T ~ E.B. White

His body was sweet and clean smelling. As she finished [massaging his dislocated shoulder], Fay bent and gently kissed him on the neck, that part where the skin is so soft abd sensitive, midway between the angle of the jaw and the hair line at the back of the neck. He opened his eyes, startled, then smiled as he murmured, "Oh! It's you. That's all right." He folded his arms about her, bringing her head close to his, then like a contented child sank into a deep sleep. His clean body odor gave her keenest delight. She hesitated to attempt to alter their relationship, and possibly lose him entirely. He had accepted her as a pal, that she would be. ~ Robert Scully

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the master-stroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six. ~ James Joyce

French Polynesia embraces a vast ocean area strewn with faraway outer islands, each with a mystique of its own. The 118 islands and atolls are scattered over an expanse of water 18 times the size of California, though in dry land terms the territory is only slightly bigger than Rhode Island. The distance from one end of the island groups to another is four times further than from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Every oceanic island type is represented in these sprawling archipelagoes positioned midway between California and New Zealand. The coral atolls of the Tuamotus are so low they're threatened by rising sea levels, while volcanic Tahiti soars to 2,241 meters. Bora Bora and Maupiti, also high volcanic islands, rise from the lagoons of what would otherwise be atolls.
~ David Stanley

Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. ~ Dante Alighieri

My Childhood Home I See Again
by Abraham Lincoln


My childhood home I see again,
And sadden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There's pleasure in it too.

O Memory! thou midway world
'Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise,

And, freed from all that's earthly vile,
Seem hallowed, pure, and bright,
Like scenes in some enchanted isle
All bathed in liquid light.

As dusky mountains please the eye
When twilight chases day;
As bugle-notes that, passing by,
In distance die away;

As leaving some grand waterfall,
We, lingering, list its roar--
So memory will hallow all
We've known, but know no more.

Near twenty years have passed away
Since here I bid farewell
To woods and fields, and scenes of play,
And playmates loved so well.

Where many were, but few remain
Of old familiar things;
But seeing them, to mind again
The lost and absent brings.

The friends I left that parting day,
How changed, as time has sped!
Young childhood grown, strong manhood gray,
And half of all are dead.

I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.

I range the fields with ~ Abraham Lincoln

Man is at the bottom an animal, midway a citizen, and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The fog turned a strange yellow, then orange, then black. The gilded winged statue Victory at Buckingham Palace retreated into mist. St. Paul's was a hazy outline, ghostlike in the gloom. La Traviata at the Sadler's Wells theatre was terminated midway because the audience could no longer see the singers on stage. Pedestrians noticed how everything below the waist disappeared. Knees, shoes, dogs became indistinguishable. The Great Smog was days and nights of people and things passing out of sight and existence. It seemed a fitting time for a mother to evaporate. ~ Kyo Maclear

Back in 1990, there were fewer than 20 wineries in and around Paso Robles, a farming community midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Most of the wines produced there were rustic, highly tannic and alcoholic, with little charm or finesse. ~ Robert M. Parker, Jr.

I'm just a girl on a midway, he's just a boy on a midway, and not everything has to end like a daydream. ~ Katie McGarry

THE UNICORN: The saintly hermit, midway through his prayers
stopped suddenly, and raised his eyes to witness
the unbelievable: for there before him stood
the legendary creature, startling white, that
had approached, soundlessly, pleading with his eyes.
The legs, so delicately shaped, balanced a
body wrought of finest ivory. And as
he moved, his coat shone like reflected moonlight.
High on his forehead rose the magic horn, the sign
of his uniqueness: a tower held upright
by his alert, yet gentle, timid gait.
The mouth of softest tints of rose and grey, when
opened slightly, revealed his gleaming teeth,
whiter than snow. The nostrils quivered faintly:
he sought to quench his thirst, to rest and find repose.
His eyes looked far beyond the saint's enclosure,
reflecting vistas and events long vanished,
and closed the circle of this ancient mystic legend. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Orthodoxy, however, entails a revolution in our metaphysical conception of the relationship between God and humanity, and therefore between the uncreated Unum and the maior dissimilitudo of the creature before the Unum. Properly understood, the apostolic confession of the unity of Christ does not stand midway between a "too unitive Christology" on the one hand, and a "too differentiating Christology" on the other; rather, it wholly recapitulates the nature of the difference of man before God. ~ Aaron Riches

A mirror does not exist by itself. A mirror is a half. Half is done by the piece. The other half has to be done by the beholder. You need to be the half to see what you're looking for, so the mirror can exist. As you should do with other persons. ~ Cristiane Serruya

Midway between the too soiled ground and the too-sublime vaults, at the level of the air, entering the skin of the role, poetry plays its game. ~ Michel Leiris

In ticking off the things that weren't done, it was easy to forget the big thing that was done. Against overwhelming odds, with the most meager resources, and often at fearful self-sacrifice, a few determined men reversed the course of the war in the Pacific. Japan would never again take the offensive. Yet the margin was thin - so narrow that almost any man there could say with pride that he personally helped turn the tide at Midway. It was indeed, as General Marshall said in Washington, "the closest squeak and the greatest victory. ~ Walter Lord

And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. ~ Albert Camus

Look at the four-spaced year
That imitates four seasons of our lives;
First Spring, that delicate season, bright with flowers,
Quickening, yet shy, and like a milk-fed child,
Its way unsteady while the countryman
Delights in promise of another year.
Green meadows wake to bloom, frail shoots and grasses,
And then Spring turns to Summer's hardiness,
The boy to manhood. There's no time of year
Of greater richness, warmth, and love of living,
New strength untried. And after Summer, Autumn,
First flushes gone, the temperate season here
Midway between quick youth and growing age,
And grey hair glinting when the head turns toward us,
Then senile Winter, bald or with white hair,
Terror in palsy as he walks alone. ~ Ovid

But if you could just pay her some small attention-or better yet, escort her yourself-it would be ever so helpful, and I would be grateful forever."
"Alex, if you were married to anyone but Jordan Townsende, I might consider asking you how you'd be willing to express your gratitude. However, since I haven't any real wish to see my life brought to a premature end, I shall refrain from doing so and say instead that your smile is gratitude enough."
"Don't joke, Roddy, I'm quite desperately in need of your help, and I would be eternally grateful for it."
"You are making me quake with trepidation, my sweet. Whoever she is, she must be in a deal of trouble if you need me."
"She's lovely and spirited, and you will admire her tremendously."
"In that case, I shall deem it an embarrassing honor to lend my support to her. Who-" His gaze flicked to a sudden movement in the doorway and riveted there, his eternally bland expression giving way to reverent admiration. "My God," he whispered.
Standing in the doorway like a vision from heaven was an unknown young woman clad in a shimmering silver-blue gown with a low, square neckline that offered a tantalizing view of smooth, voluptuous flesh, and a diagonally wrapped bodice that emphasized a tiny waist. Her glossy golden hair was swept back off her forehead and held in place with a sapphire clip, then left to fall artlessly about her shoulders and midway down her back, where it ended in luxurious waves and curls ~ Judith McNaught

After September 11, I wondered rhetorically midway through a column what we in the West are prepared to die for, and got a convoluted e-mail back from a French professor explaining that the fact that Europeans weren't prepared to die for anything was the best evidence of their superiority: they were building a post-historical utopia - a Europe it would not be necessary to die for. But sometimes you die anyway. ~ Mark Steyn

Then said Fate to Chance: "Let us play our old game again." And they played it again together, using the gods as pieces, as they had played it oft before. So that those things which have been shall all be again, and under the same bank in the same land a sudden glare of singlight on the same spring day shall bring the same daffodil to bloom once more and the same child shall pick it, and not regretted shall be the billion years that fell between. And the same old faces shall be seen again, yet not bereaved of their familiar haunts. And you and I shall in a garden meet again upon an afternoon in summer when the sun stands midway between his zenith and the sea, where we met oft before. For Fate and Chance play but one game together with every move the same, and they play it oft to while eternity away. ~ Lord Dunsany

There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, that gamers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, have many times replayed the 1942 Battle of Midway - but have never been able to produce an American victory. ~ Robert Cowley

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Why can't DFW compete like San Francisco does with Oakland, like Miami does with Fort Lauderdale, and like Chicago O'Hare does with Midway? ~ John Ensign

As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form, Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,- Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head. ~ Oliver Goldsmith