Something Wicked This Way Comes Quotes

The blows of his heart might jar him loose, crash him down, but he was glad to hear them, know himself alive. ~ Ray Bradbury

Too late, I found you can't wait to become perfect, you got to go out and fall down and get up with everybody else. ~ Ray Bradbury

..holding a book but reading the empty spaces. ~ Ray Bradbury

For these beings, fall is ever the normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth ... Such are the autumn people. ~ Ray Bradbury

Love may be on the horizon, but beware something wicked this way comes. ~ Wilkie Martin

Since you couldn't be bothered to give me your name, I'll just tell Moira that an extra from the porno version of Something Wicked This Way Comes was looking for her. ~ Allison Pang

Something Wicked This Way Comes ~ Ray Bradbury

Chapter One: The Dawn and the Dread

Heartbeat, heartbeat comes from Valhallan way,
To meet down in judgment, to ply its trade.
Two →swords← to join in worthy cross,
Actions to be rendered, one to be lost.

She did come now from 'yond northern slope,
A day of reckoning did she again once hope.
A devout meeting was her qwesterly bane,
To stay her hand was to go insane.

St. Kari of the Blade to meet her past,
A wicked enemy, peerless of match.
Rode Kari she her charger on down,
Past the Dead Land where Gaul sat crowned.

A killing job, yea, she desired to lastly kill,
To set things right so her heart might lie still.
Upon the mist and roaring plain,
She entered in, a soul uncontained.

A fierce wind in deed, and forever freed,
Enemies she annihilhates ('tis hur' creed).
Her own advanced guard of a sort,
Multitudes to follow in her report.

Know this Valkyrie from on cold,
An ancient maiden soft and bold.
A warrior spirit from Ages past,
A fragmented mind like broken glass.

Solid in stature this eternal framed being,
Yet crippled within from internaled bleedings.
A sword saint so refined in the poetic art,
A noble character yet with a banshee's heart.

Rhythmed horse now to the beats,
Kari emboldened amid the sleet.
Beyond the mountain she does come,
Unto southern fields wherein r ~ Douglas Laurent

Watch this, Larry. The seeds I saved from last year bring forth plants this year. It's a death, burial, and resurrection. It's this way with the sun also. It comes up in the morning and brings us light all the day long. But in the evening it goes down. Is that the end of the sun? No... It comes up the very next day. Death, burial, and resurrection."
"I never saw it like that, Charlie. Tell me more."
"See Larry, let's go deeper with that. Just for instance, something must die for something to live. You and I eat live substance--whether it is corn or beans, it's a life. That life dies to give us life. Now watch this, Larry. If that works with the physical; then it also works in the spiritual. Jesus Christ had to die to give us life... ~ Jerrel C. Thomas

Think of it this way: There are two kinds of failure. The first comes from never trying out your ideas because you are afraid, or because you are waiting for the perfect time. This kind of failure you can never learn from, and such timidity will destroy you. The second kind comes from a bold and venturesome spirit. If you fail in this way, the hit that you take to your reputation is greatly outweighed by what you learn. Repeated failure will toughen your spirit and show you with absolute clarity how things must be done. ~ Robert Greene

There are those sweet moments in your life where you realize that tings could be infinitely worse; that though you feel it's the end of the world, it is in fact simply a set back and you're being melodramatic. Usually, these moments are painfully pointed out by your best friends: those two funny women who make your day brighter simply because they exist in your world. Those women, who despite all of your many, many, flaws love you regardless and who know way too much about your stupidity when it comes to men and never once have said, "I told you so"...at least to your face. Those women are what make this world bearable when it is too cold to shoulder alone and it is because of them I was able to get up and carry on after something we will from henceforth refer to as "the event. ~ Sarah Damron

In the recurring dream everything has already fallen down, and I'm underneath. I'm crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. And as I crawl I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn't the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling and then suddenly I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming something else. ~ Miranda July

Beside him Mr. Harris folded his morning newspaper and held it out to Claude.

"Seen this yet?"

"No."

"Don't read it," Mr. Harris said, folding the paper once more and sliding it under his rear. "It will only upset you, son."

"It's a wicked paper... " Claude agreed, but Mr. Harris was overspeaking him.

"It's the big black words that do it. The little grey ones don't matter very much, they're just fill-ins they take everyday from the wires. They concentrate their poison in the big black words, where it will radiate.

Of course if you read the little stories too you've got sure proof that every word they wrote above, themselves, was a fat black lie, but by then you've absorbed a thousand greyer ones, and where and how to check on those? This way the mind deteriorates. The best way you can save yourself is not to read it, son."

"No, I... "

"That's right, if you're not careful," Mr. Harris went on, blue-eyed, red-faced, "you find yourself pretty soon hating everyone but God, the Babe, and a few dead senators. That's no fun. Men aren't so bad as that."

"No."

"That's right, you begin to worry about anyone who opens his mouth except to say ho it looks like rain, let's bowl. Otherwise you wonder what the hell he's trying to prove, or undermine. If he asks what time it is, you wonder what terrible thing is scheduled to happen, where it will happen, when. You can't even stand to ~ Douglas Woolf

I remember this scene because it was embarrassing to live through it, and because remembering it is a way of knowing that I am half-true to my beliefs when the time comes. I sit silently defending them and I don't sell them out, but I put on a face that lets people think I'm on the winning team, that I'm laughing along with them instead of just standing among them. I save the best parts for myself and savor them in silence. Number three, power of flight. Number four, marauder. Enough vision to really see something. A stack of gold coins and a ledger. People want all kinds of things out of life, I knew early on. ~ John Darnielle

I don't get the point, really," I'd said as we contemplated the plastic-wrapped roses. "Why give a girl something that's supposed to represent love that's only going to wilt and die in a matter of hours?"
Steven laughed and said that was a pretty pessimistic way to view life, and I shrugged.
Then he said, "All the best things are like that, though, Lex, the most beautiful things. Part of the beauty comes from the fact that they're short-lived." He picked up a bouquet of deep-red roses, held it out to me. "These will never be as beautiful as they are at this moment, so we have to enjoy them now."
I stared at him. He scratched the back of his neck, a little red-faced, then gave me a sheepish grin. "Just call me a romantic," he said.
I wanted to say that there were some things in this world, some rare things, that were beautiful and stayed that way. ~ Cynthia Hand

Let no one take the limited, narrow position that any of the works of man can help in the least possible way to liquidate the debt of his transgression. This is a fatal deception. If you would understand it, you must cease haggling over your pet ideas, and with humble hears survey the atonement.
This matter is so dimly comprehended that thousands upon thousands claiming to be sons of God are children of the wicked one, because they will depend on their own works. God always demanded good works, the law demands it, but because man placed himself in sin where his good works were valueless, Jesus' righteousness alone can avail. Christ is able to save to the uttermost because He ever liveth to make intercession for us.
All man can possibly do toward his own salvation is to accept the invitation, Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely. ~ Ellen G. White

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. ~ John Banville

The Charcoal Sky

Sometimes you go to the wrong place, but the right way comes and finds you. It might make you trip over it or speak to it. Or it might come to you when a day is stripped apart by night and ask you to take its hand and forget this wrong place, this illusion where you stand.

I think of this mess in my mind and the girl who walked through it to stand before me and let her voice come close.

I remember brick walls.

There are moments when you can only stand and stare, watching the world forget you as you remove yourself from it - when you overcome it and cease to exist as the person you were.

It calls your name, but you're gone.
You hear nothing. See nothing.
You've gone somewhere else. You've gone somewhere to find a different definition of yourself, and it's a place where nothing else can touch you. Nothing else can swing on your thoughts. It's only yourself, flat against the charcoal sky, for one moment.

Then flat on the earth again, where the world doesn't recognize you anymore. Your name is what it always was. You look and sound like you always did, yet you're not the same, and when a city wind begins to call you, it's voice doesn't only hit the edges.

It connects.

It blows into you rather than in spite of you.

Sometimes you feel like it's calling out for you. ~ Markus Zusak

Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing
by dint of ignorance and innocence
that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. ~ Gregory Maguire

being attached in this way to any number of things, we're weighed down by them and dragged down. [16] That is why, if the weather prevents us from sailing, we sit there in a state of anxiety, constantly peering around. 'What wind is this?' The North Wind. And what does it matter to us and to him? 'When will the West Wind blow?' When it so chooses, my good friend, or rather, when Aeolus chooses; for God hasn't appointed you to be controller of the winds, he has appointed Aeolus. [17] What are we to do, then? To make the best of what lies within our power, and deal with everything else as it comes. ~ Epictetus

Then there are the fully intentional pleasures, which, although in some way tied up with sensory or perceptual experience, are modes of exploration of the world. Aesthetic pleasures are like this. Aesthetic pleasures are contemplative - they involve studying an object OUTSIDE of the self, to which one is GIVING something (namely, attention and all that flows from it), and not TAKING, as in the pleasure that comes from drugs and drinks. Hence such pleasures are not addictive - there is no pathway to reward that can be short-circuited here, and a serotonin injection is not a cheap way of obtaining the experience of PARISFAL or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. ~ Roger Scruton

The problem comes when religion enters the science classroom. There's no tradition of scientists knocking down the Sunday school door, telling preachers what to teach. Scientists don't picket churches. By and large - though it may not look this way today - science and religion have achieved peaceful coexistence for quite some time. In fact, the greatest conflicts in the world are not between religion and science; they're between religion and religion. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Good crews are good blends of personalities: someone to lead the charge, someone to hold something in reserve; someone to pick a fight, someone to make peace; someone to think things through, someone to charge ahead without thinking. Somehow all this must mesh. That's the steepest challenge. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. It is an exquisite thing when it all comes together in just the right way. The intense bonding and the sense of exhilaration that results from it are what many oarsmen row for, far more than for trophies or accolades. But it takes young men or women of extraordinary character as well as extraordinary physical ability to pull it off. ~ Daniel James Brown

I don't know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them? ~ Edwidge Danticat

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it. ~ Jessica Stern

["F]or it's not possible," [Socrates] said, "for anybody to experience a greater evil than hating arguments. Hatred of arguments and hatred of human beings come about in the same way. For hatred of human beings arises from artlessly trusting somebody to excess, and believing that human being to be in every way true and sound and trustworthy, and then a little later discovering that this person is wicked and untrustworthy - and then having this experience again with another. And whenever somebody experiences this many times, and especially at the hands of just those he might regard as his most intimate friends and comrades, he then ends up taking offense all the time and hates all human beings and believes there's nothing at all sound in anybody. ~ Plato

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning? ~ Virginia Woolf

It is only one Life that you have; just this one lifetime! So, please don't postpone Happiness, don't postpone living. Of course, you can't avoid the lows, the crises, the tragedies. But you can learn to be happy despite the circumstances. You do that by accepting whatever comes your way and by letting go of debilitating emotions. Remember: only when you let go of something can you receive another…clinging on never helps…so, to receive grace and abundance…let go, let go, let go…of all that makes you unhappy and…simply flow with Life! ~ AVIS Viswanathan

When we walk in, everybody turns to look at us. Pres looks down at our joined hands and then looks to Knox. I open my mouth to say something, but he beats me to it.

Of course he does.

"Yo. Little announcement here. Violent Violet and I are together. She's my old lady and I'm her old man. Yada yada yada, we're getting married. So there's that."

I look at him, and I feel my jaw pop open. "Did you just yada yada your proposal to me?"

Knox shrugs like it's no big deal. "Wasn't going to let you tell me no."

The big scarred-up guy comes over and gives him a high five. "Best way to do it," he says and pats Knox on the back.

"About time you made an honest man out of him," Pres says, walking over and giving me a hug. I feel Knox's hand tighten, and he doesn't let it go while I awkwardly try to hug the guy back.

"We're all a family here now, and it's going to stay that way. We agreed that you're patched in, regardless if you marry this nerd or not."

I lean into Knox and laugh. "Thank you."

"Welcome to the Ghost Riders," Pres says, and suddenly I hear a champagne cork pop and we're all being sprayed with suds.

I try to turn into Knox's chest, but he holds me in front of him so I get covered.

As more champagne is popped and more bottles get poured, Knox spins me in his arms and raises me up so we are at eye level.

"I love you, baby," he says, kissing me on ~ Alexa Riley

We're going to rectify the situation right now."
"What do you mean? What situation?"
"Your situation. Ana, I'm going to make love to you, now."
"Oh." The floor has fallen away. I'm a situation. I'm holding my breath.
"That's if you want to, I mean, I don't want to push my luck."
"I thought you didn't make love. I thought you fucked hard." I swallow, my mouth suddenly dry.
He gives me a wicked grin, the effects of which travel all the way down there.
"I can make an exception, or maybe combine the two, we'll see. I really want to make love to you. Please, come to bed with me. I want our arrangement to work, but you re­ally need to have some idea what you're getting yourself into. We can start your training tonight – with the basics. This doesn't mean I've come over all hearts and flowers, it's a means to an end, but one that I want, and hopefully you do too." His gray gaze is intense ~ E.L. James

Yeah, impress her with your carpentry skills. Judging by some of the books she reads, she likes big, strong, guys - men who do honest work to build their muscles. She's horny as hell when she comes to bed some nights. I'm thinking you could offer to mend some fencing, finish my deck, or something. Watching you work would get her juices flowing."

"Is this your way of tricking me into doing your yard work?" Connor snickered and raised his beer. "Strange way to go about it, bud. ~ Anne Lange

I do not know what, in the end, makes a person who they are. If we`re all born one way, or if we only arrive there after as series of chioces. The bible claims that the wicked act on their own desires and impulses, because God is good, only good, and He would never compel a soul to wickedness. That I`m supposed to count on justice in the next life, even if I can`t have it in this one. ~ Alexandra Bracken

One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight. ~ Martin Buber

The lesson we learn from Nightingale's experience is that, as painful as it may sound, we humans are barely able to reason on our own or when surrounded by like-minded people. When we try to reason this way, we end up rationalizing because we use arguments as self-reinforcing virtue signals. And the worst news is that the more intelligent we are and the more information we have access to, the more successful our rationalizations are. This is in part because we're more aware of what the members of the groups -- political parties, churches, and others -- that we belong to think, and we try to align with them. On the other hand, if you are exposed to an opinion and don't know where the opinion comes from, you're more likely to think about it on its merits. ~ Alberto Cairo

I close my eyes and let the music flow through my body like I was made for dancing to this specific song. When I open them, he is staring at me with an unmistakable yearning burning in his pupils. If there were a bedroom here, I have no doubt he would sling me over his shoulder and have his wicked way with me. ~ Nacole Stayton

This is, if not a lifetime process, it's awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, 'Huzzah! Eureka! I've got it!' and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn't work that way. It's a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it's hard. ~ Rod Serling

The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won't fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn't stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I was the box, I was the thing that didn't fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands. ~ Helen Macdonald

Well,'said Ernest, 'by some strange coincidence I know this story.'
Boddichek was not good at irony. 'I knew that there was that possibility,' he said, 'but we have a great new way to treat it, and I thought you might want to reread it before taking a meeting.'
'Reread it?' said Mayday. 'We are talking about Cinderella, and the wicked stepmother and the Ugly Sisters and Buttons the page and the Fairy Godmother, "Cinders, you shall go to the ball but be sure you're home by midnight or you'll turn into pumpkin"?'
'Hey, you know it pretty well,' said young Casey with admiration in his voice. 'But I've found a new directionality for this story.'
'Do you mean direction?' asked Mayday.
'I guess I do.'
'Then', snapped Mayday, 'why don't you fucking say so? ~ Jonathan Lynn

What comes from sorrow, watered by tears, grows something of beauty. A salt garden. And so this I leave behind. A harvest for those who find their way into my life and I into theirs. ~ Cindy McCormick Martinusen

The correspondence testifies to the frailty of human longings, to the process of how something precious can turn fatal, a reality become illusion. We are reminded that love should be cherished when it comes your way, because no matter in what form it arrives, carrying no matter what baggage in its fragile beautiful hands, you should welcome it and protect it from the harshness of this world. ~ Karina Szczurek

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly-line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. ~ Neal Stephenson

Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don't the adult around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.' And I did. ~ Claudette Colvin

I loved to sing. Before the war, I worried that gift would leave me, the way it often does with boys. We grow, we change, our voices break. It doesn't matter how well you sing when you're nine years old, you know. Not when you're a boy. When the change comes you just have to hope for the best…that your voice settles into something you can love again. My voice broke two years after the invasion. Gods, how I squeaked. And when my voice finally settled, it seemed like a cruel joke. It was too good. I hardly knew what to do with it. I felt so grateful to have this gift…and so angry, for it to mean so little. And now…" He shrugged, a self-deprecating gesture. "Well, I know I'm rusty."
"No," Kestrel said. "You're not. Your voice is beautiful."
The silence after that was soft. ~ Marie Rutkoski

I would tear them apart with my bare hands to save my baby April. I wonder if all mothers feel this way. Suddenly I knew why it is so dangerous to mess with a bear with cubs or any wild animal with babies. I am part and parcel with them when it comes to that. Lord, there is a mountain lion side of me I never knew before. ~ Nancy E. Turner

The glee of it. The ecstasy of It. I can't speak about this It because I know no word. It is just there, It is always there, like death in life. In this instant I know that something terrible is rising that must be seized and turned back upon itself before it twists outward into violence. But that knowing always comes too late, a wild unraveling is under way and I am caught up in it like a coyote seen late one afternoon in an Arkansas tornado-a toy dog spinning skyward, struck white by a ray of sun against black clouds, then black, then white, then gone and lost forever. The wind dies. A dead stillness. Mirror water. That ecstasy that shivered every nerve replaced by the precise knowing that what this self perpetrated is as much a part of the universal will as erupting lava that subsides once more into the inner earth. ~ Peter Matthiessen

The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don't, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again. ~ Alice Weaver Flaherty