Murky Quotes

the answers lay in flesh and blood, not in a book and not in a report. And so often not even in things corporeal, but in something that couldn't be held and contained and touched. The answers to his questions lay in the murky past and in the emotions hidden there. The ~ Louise Penny

When things feel murky and unsure, fine tuning our hearing so as to distinguish the voice of our Innermost Self brings clarity. ~ Kristi Bowman

I could be that tenebrous enigma that floods out your words with sighs and frustration. ~ Moonshine Noire

I have left behind what tethered me to the lake. The sadness. The self-pity. The dark tentacles of the murky sea monster only I could see. And I have come to appreciate the ocean. How the sun and salt together can leave things weightless, easy, and smooth around the edges. Like sea glass and driftwood. ~ Wendy Wunder

A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world. Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment. A key buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for spiritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change. ~ Matt Haig

...a dangerous heat came off of her, murky and wild, like a swamp.
pg. 11 ~ Rebecca Barry

I'd studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly ~ Sara Novic

But would it be that easy? To adjust my lens a little? To stop wallowing in all this murky sorrow? To change my attitude, let the sunlight in, fix myself? ~ Lauren Fox

What the fuck is this rubbish supposed to be? Special treatment? Ha, it isn't fucking Halloween, you oddball pack of Addams family rejects. I told you Mini-Morticia was a fucking freak and here's the proof. Looks like the whole family spend a little too much time swimming around in the murky end of the gene pool. ~ Jim Goforth

Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" - not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Tokyo is too close up to see, sometimes. There are no distances and everything is above your head - dentists, kindergartens, dance studios. Even the roads and walkways are up on murky stilts. An evil-twin Venice with all the water drained away. ~ David Mitchell

To Solitude
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,
Nature's observatory - whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river's crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
'Mongst boughs pavillion'd, where the deer's swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I'll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. ~ John Keats

That's a very murky position," objected Felix.
"So's the weather. But this is England, we must learn to live with uncertainty. ~ Gail Carriger

For several days, I slept. Whether this was a necessary part of physical recovery, or a stubborn retreat from waking reality, I do not know, but I woke only reluctantly to take a little food, falling at once back into a stupor of oblivion, as though the small, warm weight of broth in my stomach were an anchor that pulled me after it, down through the murky fathoms of sleep. ~ Diana Gabaldon

This was the thing with the murky world of the Internet. You swam along through cyberspace, merrily picking up this and that, and next thing you knew you'd stumbled upon something unsavory and ugly. ~ Liane Moriarty

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves. ~ Miguel Syjuco

Clouds hid the peaks and only their flanks were visible beneath a murky ceiling. ~ Joe Simpson

As far as my part in it is concerned, it began one night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, murky coal-hole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (IF YOU DUCK THE DRAKE YOUR A GOOSE!! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, sure enough, declare the presence inside of one 'Little Enis,' and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar, flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed! ~ Ed McClanahan

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes! ~ Salvador Dali

Toward nightfall, Khrenov's temperature had risen. The thermometer was warm, alive - the column of mercury climbed high on the little red ladder. For a long time he muttered unintelligibly, kept biting his lips and gently shaking his head. Then he fell asleep. Natasha undressed by a candle's wan flame, and saw her reflection in the murky glass of the window - her pale, thin neck, the dark braid that had fallen across her clavicle. She stood like that, in motionless languor, and suddenly it seemed to her that the room, together with the couch, the table littered with cigarette stubs, the bed on which, with open mouth, a sharp-nosed, sweaty old man slept restlessly - all this started to move, and was now floating, like the deck of a ship, into the black night. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Cities are murky places - hatching grounds for monsters ... ~ John Geddes

The old gods and their magics did not dwindle away into murky memories of brownies and little fairies more at home in a Disney cartoon; rather, they changed. The coming of Christ and Christians actually freed them. They were no longer bound to people's expectations but could now become anything that they could imagine themselves to be. They are still here, walking among us. We just don't recognize them anymore. ~ Charles De Lint

The night had darkened to the murky sort where the air hung like descending clouds and the overhead branches made the liquid darkness even more impenetrable. ~ Katherine McIntyre

Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowning actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die. . .

For them death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and ~ David Mitchell

As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there's something below it, I won't know it. But that's part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn't the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I'm perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. ~ N. T. Wright

Socialised humanity represses nature and degrades human nature; it takes life and waters it down - probably to control it - diluting existence with water that is lukewarm, sweet and murky. ~ Michael Leunig

There's more ways to stop a man then with an arrow in the heart!" the first shaft struck Drale in the shoulder and the moon blossomed red through the dust suddenly swirling in murky streams. Drale cleared his head and charged into his enemies sword raised high above his head, then a cloud covered the moon and the forest went black. ~ Elizabeth Novak

All I had left from down in the murky depths was the ability to look up, to find a way back out. ~ Max Henry

When being objective, we can transcend and look back at our constructs with powerful clarity; instead of looking through them, which can give a murky and distorted view. ~ Jay Woodman

He is spent. His mind is mercury again, its brief surge of humanity melting into an oily residue on its surface, and he no longer understands the feelings he felt in that strange moment on the overpass.
But he did feel them. They did happen. They rest on the murky seabed of his mind, buried under sand and silt and miles of grey waves. Patient seeds waiting for light. ~ Isaac Marion

It was a place for people with mental health problems and not alcoholics; as though the two could be neatly divided like that; as though the world was black and white and not a murky grey. ~ Victoria Spry

There is a danger in the repudiation of the feminine when the daughter who rejects the aspects of the negative feminine embodied by her mother also denies positive aspects of her own feminine nature, which are playful, sensuous, passionate, nurturing, intuitive, and creative. Many women who have had angry or emotional mothers seek to control their own anger and feelings lest they be seen as destructive and castrating. This repression of anger often prevents them from seeing the inequities in a male-defined system. Women who have seen their mothers as superstitious, religious, or old-fashioned discard the murky, mysterious, magical aspects of the feminine for cool logic and analysis. A chasm is created between the heroine and the maternal qualities within her; this chasm will have to be healed later in the journey for her to achieve wholeness. ~ Maureen Murdock

What Yoss and I had shared was more than first love.
It was deeper than adolescent lust and affection.
It had been soul changing.
Life altering.
It had been a reckless attachment during bleak, dangerous times.
It had been a light in a murky darkness that had almost consumed us both. ~ A Meredith Walters

In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations. ~ Lauren Groff

The whole world's a ghost factory. We all fade like the paint on these buildings, sometimes from too much sun, sometimes from too little. We blur and blend to the murky shades left behind when something vivid dies. ~ Will Ludwigsen

A blue sky, a jostling wind, a murky dream, a smiling moon, and a cup of coffee with a song unfinished in those eyes twinkling away a story untold. ~ Debatrayee Banerjee

We're all like the little sailor. From the harbors we hear the strains of accordions and the murky soapy noises of the docks, from the mountains we receive the dish of silence that the shepherds eat, but we don't hear more than our own distances. And what distances without end and without doors and without mountains! ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

There was no place more solitary than a dark room, with its murky light and fetid closeness. ~ Amitav Ghosh

Thankfully the rain had softened to a light drizzle, but the murky gray of the sky painted a dreary mausoleum atmosphere. ~ Rita Herron

was one of those large, under-lit places that seemed to recede into shadow at the periphery, and in the murky middle ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Anxiety felt like a grapnel anchor had been pickaxed into your back, one prong in each lung, one through the heart, one through the spine, the weight curving your posture forward, dragging you down to the murky depths of the sea floor. The good news was that you kind of got used to it after a while. Got used to the gasping, brink-of-heart-attack feeling that followed you everywhere. All you had to do was grab one of the prongs that stuck out from the bottom of your sternum, give it a little shake, and say, "Listen, asshole. We're not dying. We have shit to do. ~ Krystal Sutherland

Was it a convent you escaped from, Miss Turner?" He turned the boat with a deft pull on one oar.
"Escaped?" Her heart knocked against her hidden purse. "I'm a governess, I told you. I'm not running away, from a convent or anywhere else. Why would you ask that?"
He chuckled. "Because you're staring at me as though you've never seen a man before."
Sophia's cheeks burned. She was staring. Worse, now she found herself powerless to turn away. What with the murky shadows of the tavern and the confusion of the quay, not to mention her own discomposure, she hadn't taken a good, clear look at his eyes until this moment.
They defied her mental palette utterly.
The pupils were ringed with a thin line of blue. Darker than Prussian, yet lighter than indigo. Perhaps matching that dearest of pigments-the one even her father's generous allowance did not permit-ultramarine. Yet within that blue circumference shifted a changing sea of color-green one moment, gray the next…in the shadow of a half-blink, hinting at blue.
He laughed again, and flinty sparks of amusement lit them.
Yes, she was still staring.
Forcing her gaze to the side, she saw their rowboat nearing the scraped hull of a ship. She cleared her throat and tasted brine. "Forgive me, Mr. Grayson. I'm only trying to make you out. I understood you to be the ship's captain."
"Well," he said, grasping a rope thrown down to him and securing it to the boat, "now you know I'm not."
"Might I ~ Tessa Dare

Out, damned spot! out, I say! - One, two; why, then 'tis time to do't. - Hell is murky! - Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? - Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him? The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now? - What, will these hands ne'er be clean? - No more o'that, my lord, no more o'that: you mar all with this starting. Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh! ~ William Shakespeare

Some movies are what I would call murky. Just because it's murky doesn't make it artistic. It makes it hard to see. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

They dived into the ocean of shadow and smog, adding to it with the fumes of their own aircraft. The goggles were useless now, but Jacob kept them on, in case there might be some break in the murky pool. It was fitting that the Worldwaker had passed through there, with the shark emblem painted on brightly. In those deep waters it could not be seen. It almost felt like it had lured them in. The dolphins do not hunt the sharks. ~ Dean F. Wilson

I think about the structure, sure. I think about what's going to happen, and how it's going to happen, and the pace. But I think if I stop to think about it in an abstract sense, I feel very daunted. I just try to enter into the story and feel my way through it. It's a very murky, intuitive way of going about it. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about - the Saffron Shift.

If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor.

Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown - but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names.

As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world.

And the present moment is perfectly transparent.

It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . . ~ Vera Nazarian

November
with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes
days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees. What cared they? Old Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew. ~ L.M. Montgomery

We tend to be rather murky little ponds, containing many layers of suspended dirt and grime and our greatest depths are stirred by the strangest of currents. ~ Irvine Welsh

The Danube is not blue, as Karl Isidore Beck calls it in the lines which suggested to Strauss the fetching, mendacious title of his waltz. The Danube is blond, 'a szöke Duna', as the Hungarians say, but even that 'blond' is a Magyar gallantry, or a French one, since in 1904 Gaston Lavergnolle called it Le Beau Danube blond. More down to earth, Jules Verne thought of entitling a novel Le Beau Danube jaune. Muddy yellow is the water that grows murky at the bottom of these [the Strudlhof] steps. ~ Claudio Magris

There are truths and lies and there are things in between, murky waters where light gets bent and broken. ~ Nadia Hashimi

If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as a Third World, dirty-underbelly, developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It's just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner, gets creative Golden Globe recognition. The other would perhaps not. ~ Amitabh Bachchan

Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night and the dark woods of affliction and sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot and the brush of His hand as He passed; and to remember that the path He trod He has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrance and hidden strength in the remembrance of Him as " in all points tempted like as we are," bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us. ~ Alexander MacLaren

Don't bring confusion to my table.
Bring flowers. Bring books. Bring cakes.
But leave your indecisiveness behind.
My heart is not up for breaking (again)
and my time is precious.
Don't waste either on murky thoughts
and cloudy thinking. ~ Melody Lee

Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist.
But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going, but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are.
There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind. ~ Brigid Gorry-Hines

The best revenge to get on your distractors is taking the high road. Avoid playing their game, following their murky rules. ~ Assegid Habtewold

You need demarcation."
"Demarcation?" I asked.
"It means a clear separation between two things," he told me. "A solid end before a clean beginning. No murky borders. Clarity. ~ Sarah Dessen

Life is agid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Dig down into the blood depths of hormonal bedrock, where violence and sex and power grow fibrously entwined. It's a murky, complicated place down there. No telling what you'll drag up once you start excavating. ~ Richard K. Morgan

Whenever I can, in my study, on the subway, in bed before going to sleep, I immerse myself in Italian. I enter another land, unexplored, murky. A ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

In her most recent project, she tested 356 children, ages five to ten, who were brought to Monell to determine their "bliss point" for sugar31. The bliss point is the precise amount of sweetness - no more, no less - that makes food and drink most enjoyable. She was finishing up this project in the fall of 2010 when she agreed to show me some of the methods she had developed. Before we got started, I did a little research on the term bliss point itself. Its origins are murky, having some roots in economic theory. In relation to sugar, however, the term appears to have been coined in the 1970s by a Boston mathematician named Joseph Balintfy, who used computer modeling to predict eating behavior. The concept has obsessed the food industry ever since. ~ Michael Moss

Great actions have shaped our society.' Sindermann said. The greatest of these, physically, has been the Emperor's formal and complete unification of Terra, the outward sequel to which, this Great Crusade, we are now engaged upon. But the greatest, intellectually, has been our casting off of that heavy mantle called religion. Religion damned our species for thousands of years, from the lowest superstition to the highest conclaves of spiritual faith. It drove us to madness, to war,
to murder, it hung upon us like a disease, like a shackle ball. I'll tell you what religion was... No, you tell me. You, there?'
'Ignorance, sir.'
Thank you, Khanna. Ignorance. Since the earliest times, our species has striven to understand the workings of the cosmos, and where that understanding has failed, or fallen short, we have filled in the gaps, plastered over the discrepancies, with blind faith. Why does the sun go round the sky? I don't know, so I will attribute it to the efforts of a sun god with a golden chariot. Why do people die? I can't say, but I will choose to believe it is the murky business of a reaper who carries souls to some afterworld. ~ Dan Abnett

At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room. ~ H.L. Mencken

Why don't they complain?"
"They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion. ~ Amitav Ghosh

The education business is a little murky because by 1900, it has been pretty well decided that a certain amount of education was required to make the system of repression work. You had to have people who showed up punctually. You had to have people who took their orders obediently and understand them fully. ~ David Levering Lewis

Seek to make life henceforth a consecrated thing; that so, when the sunset is nearing, with its murky vapors and lowering skies, the very clouds of sorrow may be fringed with golden light. Thus will the song in the house of your pilgrimage be always the truest harmony. It will be composed of no jarring, discordant notes; but with all its varied tones will form one sustained, life-long melody; dropped for a moment in death, only to be resumed with the angels, and blended with the everlasting cadences of your Father's house. ~ John Ross Macduff

People often say "Just look for the silver lining." But what do you say to the person surrounded by fog? They don't see a fluffy object in the sky, blocking the sun for a moment or two. But instead, they see everything as it was before, but through the murky, un-clarity of hopelessness. As if they were standing at the bottom of a grimy lake except able to breathe. But not wanting to because with each breath they grow numb from the cold loneliness. What if they're surrounded by a dreary blanket of darkness, made up of their own thoughts, too impenetrable for any light to break through? So what do you tell that person who, as far as the eye could see, only sees fog? A place where there is no silver lining peeking around the corner. Imagine a place where your only companion is the confusion you walk around with. ~ Sadie Turner

A dingy emblem on the door depicted a little boy peeing into a pot. The rest of the bar was equally drab and tasteless. Dim bulbs behind red-tasseled lamp shades barely illuminated each of a dozen maroon vinyl booths, which marched along one wall toward the murky front windows. Chipped Formica tables anchored the booths in place. Opposite the row of booths was a long, scarred wooden bar with uncomfortable-looking stools. Behind the bar, sitting on glass shelves in front of a cloudy mirror, were endless rows of bottles, each looking as forlorn as the folks for whom they waited.
He caught the strong odors of liquor and tobacco smoke, and the weaker scents of cleaning chemicals and vomit. In one of the booths , two heads bobbed with the movement of mug-clenching fists. A scrawny bartender with droopy eyelids picked his teeth with a swizzle stick and chatted quietly with a woman seated at the bar. Otherwise the bar was empty. ~ Robert Liparulo

Just for a moment, she could hear the muffled tick tick from inside its mouth before it disappeared underneath the murky surface, and curled away. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

So the hours are pretty good then?' he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
Yeah,' he said, 'but now you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy. ~ Douglas Adams

Jill, a comprehensive school teacher in her early thirties, has put her dark past behind her to become a lady in control of her own life. Successful in her career, soon to be divorced and with no emotional ties, she is content. Except that one morning, while trying to find work for a recalcitrant Year 9 class, she finds herself in a dark and murky street in Victorian England. The image soon disappears and she is back in the classroom, but the children she was teaching have gone and so has an hour of her life. Soon Jill finds herself living two parallel lives, one as a teacher and the other as a Victorian governess. And this is just the beginning ~ Jan Hunter

O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings ~ John Keats

I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible. ~ Patrick Modiano

During the same hours of 1993 when the chopper crews in Somalia were slowly being overpowered and gunned down, there were twenty-four young boys back in the United States who would grow up to be future players in that African struggle. They had no way to know anything yet about the unique fighting group every one of them would eventually strive with all his determination to join. They also couldn't know, though they would one day find out in person, that this particular battle corps is so elite, the candidate must first be a Navy SEAL just to attempt to get through the training - and even then, three out of four of those superb warrior-athletes fail to qualify.
The group has had numerous military names during its long rise from the murky history of the early "frogmen" swimmers, to the black operations of the Underwater Demolition Teams whose only calling card was to render their targets dead, to the latest appellation as the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group - or DEVGRU, for those who prefer names ugly and short. But the group is better known to the general public as the near-mythical warriors of "SEAL Team Six." Their complex training supports a brilliantly simple task: to be the very last thing their opponents see, if they are ever seen at all. ~ Anthony Flacco

I will tell you the whole story of my life, and it is a life that truly began only on the day I met you. Before that, there was nothing but murky confusion into which my memory never dipped again, some kind of cellar full of dusty, cobwebbed, sombre objects and people. ~ Stefan Zweig

When his mind turned to look back at the memories of a life gone off the track, everything appeared murky, like looking through a stagnant pond, covered completely with green algae, black beneath with the overabundance of bacteria and rot that made it incapable of supporting any other life besides. Through the murk he saw love, love that wasn't cultivated, love that was left to wither and die on the vine in his vain attempt to find happiness. Happiness that he didn't even know he might have had in his hands, had he done his part.
He saw missed opportunities, roads not taken, chances that asked too much of him. And his life, like a beautiful room that slowly emptied of all furnishings until it came down to only himself and the worn soiled carpet beneath him, the walls darkening to make the hell he thought would be his happiness - the hell that was his life. ~ Jason Huffman-Black

Busy in a bus or lacking luck you poke to pluck a pick-up truck.
Utterly shocked you choke in the lock and check if you chuck a buck or if you are stuck in the muck.
So you should lurk in a day like this in such a murky lucky way.
In a day when you don't know if you laugh or cry...
Errands wait for those who are late in the busiest day.
Such day that defies all your senses and makes you want to fly...
To fly away! ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation ~ Charles Petzold

I see top business schools working to bridge this gap [between academic research and business application] by respecting executive education, by having more mature students who proactively draw from faculty what they know they need, and by having faculty who are willing to leave their ivory towers for the murky world of business reality. Unfortunately, at other times, business professors have little or not interest or savvy about business issues. ~ Dave Ulrich

There's your problem," Leo announced.
Jason scratched his head. "Uh.... what are we looking at?"
Leo thought it was pretty obvious, but Piper looked confused too.
"Okay," Leo sighed, " you want the full explanation or the short explanation?"
"Short," Piper and Jason said in unison.
Leo gestured to the empty core. "The syncopator goes here. It's a multi-access gyro-valve to regulate flow. The doxen glass tubes on the outside? Those are filled with powerful,dangerous stuff. That glowing red one is Lemnos fire from my dad's forges. This murky stuff here? That's water from the River Styx. The stuff in the tubes is going to power the ship, right? Like radioactive rods in a nuclear reactor. But the mix ratio has to be controlled, and the timer is already operational.... That means without the syncopator, this stuff is all going to vent into the chamber at the same time, in sixty-five minutes. At that point, we'll get a very nasty reaction."
Jason and Piper stared at him. Leo wondered if he'd been speaking English. Sometimes when he was agitated he slipped into Spanish, like his mom used to do in her workshop. But he was pretty sure he'd used English.
"Um..." Piper cleared her throat." Could you make the short explanation shorter?"
Leo palm-smacked his forehead. "Fine. One hour. Fluids mix. Bunker goes ka-boom. One square mile of forest tuns into a smoking crater."
"Oh," Piper said in a small voice. "Can't you just..... turn it off?"< ~ Rick Riordan

Desperate times require desperate measures. What Lincoln and the Lobbyist for the Amendment and the Manager of the Amendment and himself, what they did to get this passed was not illegal. It was murky, but what they did was noble and grand. How they went about it was somewhat murky, but nothing they did was really illegal. ~ Steven Spielberg

People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. ~ Markus Zusak

It was a murky confusion - here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel - of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. ~ Charles Dickens

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Love has made him surprise himself. He would never have believed it possible, but it's turned out that he is a man who can walk up to a closed door on a murky November day, wearing his one good suit, and knock without hesitation, waiting while the rain comes down around him, even though he's not wanted. He can do this and not think twice, just the way he can spend hours watching a wounded cedar beetle and weep over its rare beauty, as well as its agony.

Richard is certain that other species fall in love - primates, of course, and canines - but he has wondered about his beetles. There are people who would surely get a chuckle out of the mere suggestion, but in Richard's opinion it's pure vanity to presume that love exists only on our terms. A red leaf may be the universe for the tortoise beetle or the ladybird. A single touch the ecstasy of a lifetime. And so, here he is, in love despite everything. It is he, stupider than any beetle, and far more obstinate, who has traveled three thousand miles, even though he fully expects to be turned away. ~ Alice Hoffman

She had slowly encroached on every inch of my being, and occupied a lot of space on my mind. Her jet black hair that fell in wisps across her cheeks, the murky eyes that find my soul every time, her long fingers that threaded with mine and the way she held my hand till our fingertips every time I had to leave… Preethi was on my mind, here to stay. ~ Kavipriya Moorthy

That car, as with the rest of Mr. Mao's lifestyle, was brand new. He had gotten rich, and gotten rich quick. But like the rest of his generation of Chinese Jay Gatsbys, the source of his wealth was murky. ~ Michael Levy

I see murky visions of other gods and rival magic."
That REALLY didn't sound good.
"What do you mean?" I asked. "what OTHER GODS?"
"I don't know, Sadie. But Egypt has always faced challenges from outside –– magicians from elsewhere, even gods from elsewhere. Just be vigilant."

~Ruby & Sadie Kane about...? Possibly Greeks? ~ Rick Riordan

And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire. ~ Patti Smith

I've defined myself, privately and abstractly, by my brief, intense years as an athlete, a swimmer. I practiced five or six hours a day, six days a week, eating and sleeping as much as possible in between. Weekends were spent either training or competing. I wasn't the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, traveled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn't the best; I was pretty good.


I liked how hard swimming at that level was- that I could do something difficult and unusual. Liked knowing my discipline would be recognized, respected, that I might not be able to say the right things or fit in, but I could do something well. I wanted to believe that I was talented; being fast was proof. Though I loved racing, the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn't motivate me.

I still dream of practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors. I'm drawn to swimming pools, all swimming pools, no matter how small or murky. When I swim now, I step into the water as though absentmindedly touching a scar. My recreational laps are phantoms of my competitive races ~ Leanne Shapton

The elegant and beautiful Lotus flower must toil through the mud and mire of murky swamps and shadowy waters of darkness before it can finally bloom. Above the fray of struggle yet firmly rooted in rugged beginnings, it ultimately lies pristinely above the water, basking in the sun of triumph. So no matter what you've endured or where you come from...you are no different and no less beautiful. There is simply no greater beauty than when a flower blossoms despite its tough and humble beginnings. ~Jason Versey ~ Jason Versey

Daydream, which is to thought as the nebula is to the star, borders on sleep, and is concerned with it as its frontier. An atmosphere inhabited by living transparencies: there's a beginning of the unknown. But beyond it the Possible opens out, immense.
Other beings, other facts, are there. No supernaturalism, only the occult continuation of infinite nature. . . . Sleep is in contact with the Possible, which we also call the improbable. The world of the night is a world. Night, as night, is a universe. . . . The dark things of the unknown world become neighbors of man, whether by true communication or by a visionary enlargement of the distances of the abyss . . . and the sleeper, not quite seeing, not quite unconscious, glimpses the strange animalities, weird vegetations, terrible or radiant pallors, ghosts, masks, figures, hydras, confusions, moonless moonlights, obscure unmakings of miracle, growths and vanishings within a murky depth, shapes floating in shadow, the whole mystery which we call Dreaming, and which is nothing other than the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of Night. ~ Victor Hugo

Lotus flowers lead harrowing journeys. Their seeds sprout in murky swamp water, thick with dirt and debris and snarls of roots. For a lotus to bloom, she must forge her way through this terrible darkness, avoid being eaten by fish and insects, and keep pressing onward, innately knowing, or at least hoping, that there is sunlight somewhere above the water's surface, if she can only summon the strength to get there. And when she does, she emerges unscathed by her journey and blooms triumphantly. ~ Sarah Jio

Now, what's stirring in this murky sea of complexity and foolishness is an almost suffocating need to breathe fresh history. ~ Laurie Perez

But the moon came slowly up in all her gentle glory, and the stars looked out, and through the small compass of the grated window, as through the narrow crevice of one good deed in a murky life of guilt, the face of Heaven shone bright and merciful. He raised his head; gazed upward at the quiet sky, which seemed to smile upon the earth in sadness, as if the night, more thoughtful than the day, looked down in sorrow on the sufferings and evil deeds of men; and felt its peace sink deep into his heart. ~ Charles Dickens

Ave Maria

Ave Maria! Maiden mild!
Listen to a maiden's pleading
from these rocks, stark and wild,
my prayer shall be wafted to thee.
we shall sleep safely till morning,
though men be ever so cruel.
o Maiden, see a maiden's distress,
O Mother, hear a suppliant child.

Ave Maria, undefiled!
When we upon this rock lie down
to slumber, and they protection covers us,
The hard stone will seem soft to us.
If Though smilest, the scent of roses will float
Through this murky cavern,
O Mother, hear a child's petition,
O maiden, 'tis a maid that calls!

Ave Maria, Maiden pure,
the demons of the earth and air,
drien forth by thy gracious glance
cannot stay here with us.
we will camly bow to fate
Since they holy comfort hovers over us;
Mayest though be favourably inclined to the maiden,
To the child that pleads for her father! ~ Barbara Bonney

At 11, I went to Misha's school for two summers. So when I wasn't in that school, I was taking classes at David Howard or Robert Denver's studios - kind of legendary places - and there was one summer where Alexander Godunov sort of took me under his wing; the memory's a little murky, but I felt as if I was his project for those weeks. ~ Sascha Radetsky

If you are trying to please, how do you take responsibility for your own needs? How do you even know what your own needs are? What do you have to cut off in yourself in order to please others? I think the act of pleasing makes everything murky. We lose track of ourselves. We stop uttering declaratory sentences. We stop directing our lives. We wait to be rescued. We forget what we know. We make everything okay rather than real. ~ Eve Ensler