Shifting Sand Quotes

It is impossible to stand upright when one plants his roots in the shifting sands of popular opinion and approval. Needed is the courage of a Daniel, an Abinadi, a Moroni, or a Joseph Smith in order for us to hold strong and fast to that which we know is right. They had the courage to do not that which was easy but that which was right.
We will all face fear, experience ridicule, and meet opposition. Let us
all of us
have the courage to defy the consensus, the courage to stand for principle. Courage, not compromise, brings the smile of God's approval. Courage becomes a living and an attractive virtue when it is regarded not only as a willingness to die manfully but also as the determination to live decently. As we move forward, striving to live as we should, we will surely receive help from the Lord and can find comfort in His words ~ Thomas S. Monson

People don't change. The world carries on spinning inexorably around but people don't spin with it. They dig their heels into the shifting sand and cling on for dear life. ~ Tamar Cohen

Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes cliched. And vice versa. ~ Ella Leya

The writer's craft, explained!

I have stood on the shores of imagination, gazing at a sea of dreams.
It is a lonely place, for not many can stand on that shifting sand and call it home.
I can see others who also weave a web of dreams and will share them.
We are called storytellers and we alone have that gift that feed the needs of the many.
We are a strange family, united in our separate talents and bonded by our willingness to share.
The price we pay, is a dependence on others, reaching out to listen to our stories.
WE must never forget our need for the herd or they will forget us!
There is no savage punishment for such as we, than to be easily forgotten!
This is our greatest fear and all of us share that terror.
So write brothers and sisters, write and bare your souls without fear.
If you are good enough, they will listen and they will remember you.
Its all we can ask! ~ Barry Woodham

Without core convictions to help us navigate, we stand uneasily on shifting sand, and we lack the solid footing with which to stage a life of principle and character. Today is a call to biblical conviction ... What is needed today is a battalion of believers who follow Christ and stand for Him and His truth. ~ Dennis Rainey

Jesus is calling the bluff of the religious. He says, why play this game? Why call me Lord as if you care who I am or what I want when you don't bother really knowing me or doing what I say? And then Jesus tells the story about the builders and their two houses. The homes they build represent their lives
their beliefs, convictions, aspirations, and choices.
Jesus is telling us that there are stable and unstable foundations on which to construct our lives. Regardless of our intentions, it's possible to base our confidence and trust
the very footing of our lives
on what is insecure and faulty. On shifting sand. ~ Joshua Harris

Studios and networks who ignore either shift - whether the increasing sophistication of storytelling, or the constantly shifting sands of technological advancement - will be left behind, ~ Kevin Spacey

The heart must be renewed by divine grace, or it will be in vain to seek for purity of life. He who attempts to build up a noble, virtuous character independent of the grace of Christ is building his house upon the shifting sand. ~ Ellen G. White

You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand. ~ Francis Schaeffer

Integrity is the very core of our being. It is who we really are. When all the scaffolding is removed, it is our integrity that both defines us and identifies us. Men of integrity are like the Rock of Gibraltar - steadfast and immovable. Men without it are like the shifting sands on the Sahara Desert - tossed to and fro by every variant wind of life. ~ Tad R. Callister

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that can ~ G.K. Chesterton

Where only a fool would build a house on shifting sand, the same goes for those who would build their lives on a lie - eventually, it is going to crumble. ~ Maggi Myers

Since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I am a builder
Sometimes I have built well, but often
I have built without researching the ground
upon which I put my building
I raised a beautiful house
and I lived in it for a year
Then it slowly drifted away with the tides
for I had laid the foundation
upon shifting sand ~ Maya Angelou

The easy way is efficacious and speedy, the hard way arduous and long. But, as the clock ticks, the easy way becomes harder and the hard way becomes easier. And as the calendar records the years, it becomes increasingly evident that the easy way rests hazardously upon shifting sands, whereas the hard way builds solidly a foundation of confidence that cannot be swept away. ~ Colonel Sanders

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the representation of time itself changed; it moved away from allegorical human figures - an old man, a blind youth holding an hourglass, a woman with bared breasts representing Fate - to the impersonal language of numbers: railroad schedules, the bottom line of industrial progress. Time was no longer shifting sand; time was money. Yet the modern era also allowed for multiple conceptions of time and made the experience of time more individual and creative. ~ Svetlana Boym

Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion's shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying A plague on both your houses! ~ Dan Simmons

Seeds send down a runner beneath the surface. Before making an appearance above ground, the seed first grows beneath the surface. In the same way, we must first go deep in order to find the source of living water to sustain our lives. We must go deep into the Word of G-D lest we build ourselves on a foundation of shifting sand and get blown over in the first storm that comes into our lives. We must first grow beneath the surface. ~ Eric Walker

When you're making a psychological thriller, what you need to do is have an audience on shifting sand so they're never quite sure where they are. ~ Mark Strong

In the Valley. The power is shifting to the engineers who create the companies. ~ Michael Lewis

I draw myself up next to her and look at her profile, making no effort to disguise my attention, here, where there is only Puck to see me. The evening sun loves her throat and her cheekbones. Her hair the color of cliff grass rises and falls over her face in the breeze. Her expression is less ferocious than usual, less guarded.

I say, "Are you afraid?"

Her eyes are far away on the horizon line, out to the west where the sun has gone but the glow remains. Somewhere out there are my capaill uisce, George Holly's America, every gallon of water that every ship rides on.

Puck doesn't look away from the orange glow at the end of the world. "Tell me what it's like. The race."

What it's like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It's the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It's speed, if you're lucky. It's life and it's death or it's both and there's nothing like it. Once upon a time, this moment - this last light of evening the day before the race - was the best moment of the year for me. The anticipation of the game to come. But that was when all I had to lose was my life.

"There's no one braver than you on that beach."

Her voice is dismissive. "That doesn't matter."

"It does. I meant what I said at the festival. This island cares no ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument. ~ George Sand

Do you know what it's like," he asked at length, "to feel that nothing is quite real -- including yourself?"
Susila nodded. "It sometimes happens when one's just on the point of discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one ever imagined. It's like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before you change into high. ~ Aldous Huxley

Those joys were so small that they passed unnoticed, like gold in sand, and at bad moments she could see nothing but the pain, nothing but sand; but there were good moments too when she saw nothing but the joy, nothing but gold. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Is this the highest point of reason, to realize that the soil beneath our feet is shifting, to pompously name 'interrogation' what is only a persistent state of stupor, to call 'research' or 'quest' what is only trudging in a circle, to call 'Being' that which never fully is? ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Tortoise steps, slow steps, four steps like a tank with a tail dragging in the sand.
Tortoise steps, land based, land locked, dusty like the desert tortoise herself, fenced in, a prisoner on her own reservation
teaching us the slow art of revolutionary patience. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Your existence is passing before you. Grains of sand in the hourglass. The Wicked Witch of the West has you in her castle and she's turned the hourglass over and the sand is running through. Will you be liberated or will you die? The only way you can beat death is liberation. ~ Frederick Lenz

What binds the fabric together when the raging, shifting, winds of change keep ripping away? ~ Jonathan Larson

We must not adopt the world's view and then tweak it to make it Christian. We must draw a line in the sand and stand firm in the radical teachings of Christ and His gospel. We must preach the truth and be the examples of the truth we preach. ~ Paul Washer

However, at the end of the night I saw Nick stomping out to the car park, obviously in a terrible mood. They take their lives so seriously, these young people. "Just appreciate the fact that you can stomp so energetically," I wanted to say to him. I'd pay a million dollars to be Alice and Elisabeth's age again for just one day. I'd dance like Olivia's butterfly and bite into crisp green apples and run across hot sand into the surf, and I'd walk, as far as I wanted, wherever I wanted, in big loping, leaping strides, with my head held high and my lungs filling with air. ~ Liane Moriarty

Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn't anything else - I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a lonely cockpit high above the desert. ~ Donna Tartt

No shifting in my car Blake,I don't want slobber all over my seats. Neesa ~ C.T. Todd

Outrage steamed her brain. "I've waited three days... Do you know what day it is?"
He gave a one-sided shrug, his massive shoulder muscles shifting. "Who has time to check the calendar when people are shooting at you and snakes are biting you in the ass? ~ Dana Marton

A dark shadow rose from the depth of the watercourse. Forced to crawl out of the oceans rolling waves, it struggled against the pull of the undertow. Rising, it moved further up the white sandy beach away from the cold water. The creature collapsed onto the cool sand as the crescent moon above shone on his sleek gray skin revealing two immense leather-like wings protruding from his back. Exhaustion clouded his mind.
The darkness of night was soothing, refreshing. Somehow he knew it would bring him strength and sustenance. The creature watched as a great rolling storm cloud sunk into the salty water before him and he tried to remember why he had come. ~ Alaina Stanford

We are all different. God made us that way. Drawing a line in the sand due to that is indeed unfortunate. ~ Jill Telford

When my toes are sunk into warm sand and the ocean is lapping my feet, when I breathe in the scent of salt and hear the cry of a seagull, I know that I am returned to a place of restoration. I am home.I can heal here. ~ Toni Sorenson

I have many names, and none of them matter. Names are not important. To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upon reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so the question him saying, 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them. Perhaps he has seen the very first fire in the world. He tells them, 'It is red, like a poppy, but through it dance other colors. It has no form, like water, flowing everywhere. It is warm, like the sun of summer, only warmer. It exists for a time upon a piece of wood, and then the wood is gone, as though it were eaten, leaving behind that which is black and can be sifted like sand. When the wood is gone, it too is gone.' Therefore, the hearers must think reality is like a poppy, like water, like the sun, like that which eats and excretes. They think it is like to anything that they are told it is like by the man who has known it. But they have not looked upon fire. They cannot really know it. They can only know of it. But fire comes again into the world, many times. More men look upon fire. After a time, fire is as common as grass and clouds and the air they breathe. They see that, while it is like a poppy, it is not a poppy, while it is like water, it is not water, while it is like the sun, it is not the sun, and while it is like that which eats and passes wastes, it is not that which eats and p ~ Roger Zelazny

Inland Florida was not the Florida of blue ocean, white sand, and crushed-white-shell parking lots. It was a land sun bleached and sickened after too many droughts and wildfires. ~ Dennis Lehane

Next to fat babies, midgets are my favorite things to hold. I love them so much, and I want to help them to do adult things like drive cars, Jet-Ski, and lip-synch. I'm in awe of their little limbs, their large craniums, and their medicine-ball asses. I love the little baby steps they take while shifting their weight from side to side, and the fact that when you knock one over accidentally, he flails like a turtle on its back that can't get up right away. ~ Chelsea Handler

Have you ever thought that if one thing hadn't happened, a whole set of things never would have either? Like dominoes in time, a single event kicked off an unstoppable series of changes that gained momentum and spun out of control, and nothing was ever the same again. Don't ever doubt that a mere second can change your life forever. ~ Kimberly K. Jones

The barrenness of sand, as it is usually pictured, was not caused by simple dryness, but apparently was due to the ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared with the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out. ~ Kobo Abe

The hot west wind that blew like sand whispering across stone. ~ Steven Erikson

And you're too nice," he added, above the lap-lap of the water and the patter of sand on the water-lily leaves. "I was relying on you being too jealous to let that demon near the place. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

There was such a rush about me: wing, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.
I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

She didn't drink a lot, but she drank me into wonderland where we spent the time giggling and laughing. However, know this if you are able or leave while you still can. Love is unstable when built on what must come and go with the wind and sand.
After awhile, I heard the increasing activity from the hall as the campus was starting to come alive and I said to Penny, "I think we need to get to the bistro" and she responded by slipping one brown shoe delicately over her white nylon socking. ~ Joseph Persia

Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over, and it was sunset, and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was.
He said, 'spiral jetty.'
She said, 'In sand?'
He smiled and said, 'That's its beauty.'
A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hand't seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth, a sweetness, a sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers.
Instead, she bent and helped, they all did. And deep into the morning, when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed somehow ~ Lauren Groff

Terplash, & what difference make! One little white spark of light! Hair woven hands Penelope seaboat smeller
Is Virgin you trying to fathom me Tiresome old sea, aint you sick & tired of all of this merde? this incessant boom boom & sand walk ~ Jack Kerouac

Yeah, I was just curious. I concentrated on my footsteps.
Yeah, well, next time you think about stepping into rock concerts you might want to bring a bodyguard.
I stopped and turned around. I brought my hands to my hips, a bit offended. What is that supposed to mean?
He dropped the end of the bat into the sand.
It means your small. ~ Holly Hood

There's so much more power, so you're short-shifting all the way down into fifth, sixth, seventh before you can get the full throttle. But great fun otherwise, ~ Lewis Hamilton

I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity. ~ George Sand

Every challenge we take on has the power to knock us to our knees. But what's even more disconcerting than the jolt itself is our fear that we won't withstand it. When we feel the ground beneath us shifting, we panic. We forget everything we know and allow fear to freeze us. Just the thought of what could happen is enough to throw us off balance. What I know for sure is that the only way to endure the quake is to adjust your stance. You can't avoid the daily tremors. They come with being alive. But I believe these experiences are gifts that force us to step to the right or left in search of a new center of gravity. Don't fight them. Let them help you adjust your footing. ~ Oprah Winfrey

We are people, individuals comprising a variety of sexes, races, shifting sexualities and all the rest of it. Every convention that tries to reinforce this difference is a step back. Notions of gender pointlessly separate men from women, but also mothers from daughters and fathers from sons. ~ Robert Webb

There's one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there's a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic. ~ Paolo Sorrentino

The photograph is in my hand. It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at an amusement park, in 1959. [ ... ] I'm tired of looking at the photograph now. I open my fingers. It falls to the sand at my feet. I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us ... All we ever see of stars are their old photographs. [ ... ] It's October, 1985. I'm basking in the two-million-year-old light of Andromeda. I can see the supernova that Ernst Hartwig discovered in 1885, a century ago. It scintillates, a wink intended for the Trilobites, all long dead. Supernovas are where gold forms; the only place. All gold comes from supernovas. ~ Alan Moore

Technically speaking, you can build anything out of sand; it doesn't mean you do it. ~ Eric Bana

All things have the capacity for speech -- all beings have the ability to communicate something of themselves to other beings. Indeed, what is perception if not the experience of this gregarious, communicative power of things, wherein even obstensibly 'inert' objects radiate out of themselves, conveying their shapes, hues, and rhythms to other beings and to us, influencing and informing our breathing bodies though we stand far apart from those things?

Not just animals and plants, then, but tumbling waterfalls and dry riverbeds, gusts of wind, compost piles and cumulus clouds, freshly painted houses (as well as houses abandoned and sometimes haunted), rusting automobiles, feathers, granite cliffs and grains of sand, tax forms, dormant volcanoes, bays and bayous made wretched by pollutants, snowdrifts, shed antlers, diamonds, and daikon radishes, all are expressive, sometimes eloquent and hence participant in the mystery of language. Our own chatter erupts in response to the abundant articulations of the world: human speech is simply our part of a much broader conversation.

It follows that the myriad things are also listening, or attending, to various signs and gestures around them. Indeed, when we are at ease in our animal flesh, we will sometimes feel we are being listened to, or sensed, by the earthly surroundings. And so we take deeper care with our speaking, mindful that our sounds may carry more than a merely human meaning and resonance. This care -- ~ David Abram

The insidious reasons for a brown girl's self-loathing won't be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations - and what they mean about your worth - might not dawn on you while you're playing cricket in the sand. What's at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards. ~ Padma Lakshmi

Solid stone is just sand and water ... Sand and water and a million years gone by. ~ Beth Nielsen Chapman