Severn Quotes

Loving her forever couldn't be wrong. Not when seeing her made his breath catch or his heart stop. Not when hope demanded they make it one more day together. No one compared to her, and he couldn't bear to lose her again. ~ Nichole Severn

AT FIRST THE PEOPLE in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded. This was difficult to explain to young people in the following decades, but in all fairness, the entire history of being stranded in airports up to that point was also a history of eventually becoming unstranded, of boarding a plane and flying away. At first it seemed inevitable that the National Guard would roll in at any moment with blankets and boxes of food, that ground crews would return shortly thereafter and planes would start landing and taking off again. Day One, Day Two, Day Forty-eight, Day Ninety, any expectation of a return to normalcy long gone by now, then Year One, Year Two, Year Three. Time had been reset by catastrophe. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he'd been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin. And not just to have seen the remembered splendors of the former world, the space shuttles and the electrical grid and the amplified guitars, the computers that could be held in the palm of a hand and the high-speed trains between cities, but to have lived among those wonders for so long. To have dwelt in that spectacular world for fifty-one years of his life. Sometimes he lay awake in Concourse B of the Severn City Airport and thought, "I was there," and the thought pierced him through with an admixture of sadness and exhilaration. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

VIII

'Farewell to barn and stack and tree,
Farewell to Severn shore.
Terence, look your last at me,
For I come home no more.

'The sun burns on the half-mown hill,
By now the blood is dried;
And Maurice amongst the hay lies still
And my knife is in his side.

'My mother thinks us long away;
'Tis time the field were mown.
She had two sons at rising day,
To-night she'll be alone.

'And here's a bloody hand to shake,
And oh, man, here's good-bye;
We'll sweat no more on scythe and rake,
My blood hands and I.

'I wish you strength to bring you pride,
And a love to keep you clean,
And I wish you luck, come Lammastide,
At racing on the green.

'Long for me the rick will wait,
And long will wait the fold,
And long will stand the empty plate,
And dinner will be cold.'

IX

On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.

A careless shepherd once would keep
The flocks by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.

They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn.
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.

There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, ~ A.E. Housman

And friends abroad must bear in mind
Friends at home they leave behind.
Oh, I shall be stiff and cold
When I forget you, hearts of gold;
The land where I shall mind you not
Is the land where all's forgot.
And if my foot returns no more
To Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,
Luck, my lads, be with you still
By falling stream and standing hill,
By chiming tower and whispering tree,
Men that made a man of me.
About your work in town and farm
Still you'll keep my head from harm,
Still you'll help me, hands that gave
A grasp to friend me to the grave. ~ A.E. Housman

Teela turned to Severn. "I'm having trouble remembering why I haven't
strangled her yet."
Severn shrugged. "I have that problem myself some days. At the moment,
though, the only betting pool in the office seems to be on the Sergeant."
"Ha-ha." Kaylin said with a distinct lack of cheer. And then, because she
was a fiefling, "What odds?" He cuffed the top of her head. ~ Michelle Sagara West

You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream. You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert. If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it! ~ Severn Cullis-Suzuki

I known I'm only a child, yet I know we're all in the this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal ~ Severn Cullis-Suzuki

For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America. ~ Edward Rutherfurd

Severn - I - lift me up - I am dying - I shall die easy; don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come. ~ John Keats

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to severn strode, / The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The shows she'd watch on the Discovery Channel hadn't prepared her for a kidnapping. Terrorist attack? Yes. Defending her home? Yes. Kidnapped by a police officer? No. She'd have to write to the network about that. ~ Nichole Severn

If 50 million people say a stupid thing, it's still a stupid thing. ~ David Severn

She outpaced Severn. Whole years of her life had been narrowly defined by the fact that she couldn't even keep up. ~ Michelle Sagara

Stop judging your life only by the failures," he whispered.
"What should I do?" she whispered. "I'm always going to fail."
"We all do," he said softly, his voice closer now. "We all fail. But none of us fail all the time. ~ Michelle Sagara West

The Lancastrian army had been on the march for fully fifteen hours, had managed to cover twenty-four miles in that dash for the Severn. But Edward had done the impossible; in just twelve hours, he'd ridden an astonishing thirty-five miles. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;The wind it plies the saplings double, And thick on Severn snow the leaves. ~ A.E. Housman

As thou these ashes, little brook, wilt bear Into the Avon, Avon to the tide Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas, Into main ocean they, this deed accursed An emblem yields to friends and enemies How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed. ~ William Wordsworth

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors' dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and he ~ Emily St. John Mandel