The Crimson Petal And The White Quotes

We're moving towards such a strange time.A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress ~ Michel Faber

The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women's underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine – they're fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It's comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once. ~ Margaret Atwood

Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amalgam. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") ~ Cornell Woolrich

Plants Fed On by Fawns"

All the flowers: the pleated leaves of the hellebore;
And the false blossom of the calla, a leaf like a petal -
The white flesh of a woman bathing - a leaf over-
Shadowing the small flowers hidden in the spadix;
And fly poison, tender little flower, whose cursed root
Pounded into a fine white powder will destroy flies.
But why kill flies? They do not trouble me. They
Are like the fruit the birds feed on. They are like
The wind in the trees, or the sap that threads all things,
The blue blood moving through branch and vine,
Through the wings of dead things and living things....
If I lift my hand? If I write to you? The letters
Can be stored in a box. Can they constitute the shape
Of a love? Can the paper be ground? Can the box
Be altar and garden plot and bed? Can there rise
From the bed the form of a two-headed creature,
A figure that looks both forward and back, keeping
Watch always, one head sleeping while the other wakes,
The bird head sleeping while the lion head wakes,
And then the changing of the guard?.... No,
The flies do not trouble me. They are like the stars
At night. Common and beautiful. They are like
My thoughts. I stood at midnight in the orchard.
There were so many stars, and yet the stars,
The very blackness of the night, though perfectly
Cold and clear, seemed to me to be insub ~ Brigit Pegeen Kelly

They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them. ~ T.H. White

A Storm In April"

Some winters, taking leave,
Deal us a last, hard blow,
Salting the ground like Carthage
Before they will go.

But the bright, milling snow
Which throngs the air today -
It is a way of leaving
So as to stay.

The light flakes do not weigh
The willows down, but sift
Through the white catkins, loose
As petal-drift

Or in an up-draft lift
And glitter at a height,
Dazzling as summer's leaf-stir
Chinked with light.

This storm, if I am right,
Will not be wholly over
Till green fields, here and there,
Turn white with clover,
And through chill air the puffs of milkweed hover. ~ Richard Wilbur

There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal- brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it.
"I feel a lesson coming on," I said ...
"The flower is the good inside every person," he said. "The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall."
"Armor" I said. He nodded.
"Why?"
"Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. ~ Roland Merullo

Fourth Meditation"

1

I was always one for being alone,
Seeking in my own way, eternal purpose;
At the edge of the field waiting for the pure moment;
Standing, silent, on sandy beaches or walking along green embankments;
Knowing the sinuousness of small waters:
As a chip or shell, floating lazily with a slow current...

Was it yesterday I stretched out the thin bones of my innocence?
O the songs we hide, singing only to ourselves!
Once I could touch my shadow, and be happy;
In the white kingdoms, I was light as a seed,
Drifting with the blossoms,
A pensive petal.

But a time comes when the vague life of the mouth no longer suffices;
The dead make more impossible demands from their silence;
The soul stands, lonely in its choice,
Waiting, itself a slow thing,
In the changing body.

The river moves, wrinkled by midges,
A light wind stirs in the pine needles.
The shape of a lark rises from a stone;
But there is no song. ~ Theodore Roethke

The woman, who belonged to the courtesan class, was celebrated for an embonpoint unusual for her age, which had earned for her the sobriquet of "Boule de Suif" (Tallow Ball). Short and round, fat as a pig, with puffy fingers constricted at the joints, looking like rows of short sausages; with a shiny, tightly-stretched skin and an enormous bust filling out the bodice of her dress, she was yet attractive and much sought after, owing to her fresh and pleasing appearance. Her face was like a crimson apple, a peony-bud just bursting into bloom; she had two magnificent dark eyes, fringed with thick, heavy lashes, which cast a shadow into their depths; her mouth was small, ripe, kissable, and was furnished with the tiniest of white teeth. ~ Guy De Maupassant

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them - not one - has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me. ~ Peter Watts

I suppose it could be said that indeed all my roads to Arthur have led to my novel, The Green Knight's Apprentice. I read Malory when I was very young and my first reading left me with very v
ivid images that haunt me still: white stags, headless damsels, horns hanging from tree limbs, and giants. Oh yes, I had the usual sword in the stone, lady of the lake, and Holy Grail images, too, I assure you. ~ Virginia Chandler

The black man in North America was economically sick and that was evident in one simple fact: as a consumer, he got less than his share, and as a producer gave least. The black American today shows us the perfect parasite image - the black tick under the delusion that he is progressing because he rides on the udder of the fat, three-stomached cow that is white America. ~ Malcolm X

Antiheroes
Aren't just black and white; they exploit the mystery and allure of shadow, of shades of grey. For the writer, they offer more story possibilities than heroes. They could tip either way, either supporting or fighting him. Reformed antiheroes could revert to bad ways, and even on the side of good, but they cab still use methods that would make a true hero blush or flinch. The only problem is that the characteristics that make them antiheroes can, if use for good, transform them into heroes; and then life tends to be much less entertaining. ~ Helen McCarthy

And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats
then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water
seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. ~ Elizabeth Strout

The first theatre I ever found was in the backyard of a new suburban community in the foothills of the Poconos. My dad was a young FBI agent at his first or second posting - we're all from New York. He was posted in Scranton, Pennsylvania and he put the family in a brand new red-brick apartment. It was in a C-shape and behind it was a small hill that led up to the woods. There was a white-washed brick wall that was a perfect theatre! There were windows and all the ladies behind the windows in their apartments. I would go out there after lunch every day and sing opera. ~ Constantin Stanislavski

Yeah, this country's founding fathers are a bunch of dead rich white men, but they did set things up so you could come and sit at the table, so don't piss in the finger bowls, all right? Thank you. In return for unfettered economic opportunity and no government death squads, try to get along with your new stepmotherland, and don't be resentful if there's a set of house rules already in place. ~ Dennis Miller

It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win - a conviction with much grounding in experience - which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all?

On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect bee ~ Bayard Rustin

The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks into its army. But in the nineteenth century, the idea of the soldier was heavily entwined with the notion of masculinity and citizenship. How could an army constituted to defend slavery, with all of its assumptions about black inferiority, turn around and declare that blacks were worthy of being invited into Confederate ranks? As it happened, they could not. 'The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of our revolution,' observed Georgia politician Howell Cobb. 'And if slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.' There could be no win for white supremacy here. If blacks proved to be the cowards that 'the whole theory of slavery' painted them as, the battle would be lost. But much worse, should they fight effectively--and prove themselves capable of 'good Negro government'--then the larger war could never be won. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

(from a prayer for inclusiveness):
O god whose face changes as we move and learn and change, whose image becomes less like ours and more like that of the stranger we treat as a friend; the god whom we create from the sum of all we know that is wonderful, generous, true and wise: May we see ourselves in the god-ness of others and ourselves in their image of you. ~ Bronwyn Angela White

Though the whole troop wore white garments, no two whites were alike amoung them. Some approached pure blanching, some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters (which has possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a cadavourous tint, and to a georgian style. ~ Thomas Hardy

At the very least, given this symbolic process and its ideological consequences, mass incarceration's racial disparities will rarely provoke a crisis of conscience for those ensconced in white dominant society. To be sure, there will be some white analysts who insist that knowledge of the disparity and the conditions of mass incarceration should generate society-wide shame and so indict a whole society for the indignity and inhumanity that U.S. prison institutions have institutionalized. ~ Mark Lewis Taylor

Where now is Britain? . Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks were stood her capitols, and hears The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks From the dismaying solitude. ~ Henry Kirke White

Apparently being a mermaid is dead dull. I watched The Little Mermaid with her once a few years ago - she thought it was freaking hilarious. She couldn't stop laughing about the shell-bra thing, given that mermaids aren't mammals. Plus, as she put it, Prince Eric was far too hairy and "peach colored" for her taste. I always thought he was pretty hot, but then again, I am a mammal. ~ Kiersten White

The right thing to do is so easy to see when you're seventeen years old and don't have to make any big decisions. When you know that no matter what you do, someone will take care of you and fix everything. But when you're grown up, the world is not that black and white, and the right thing doesn't a tidy little arrow pointing to it. ~ Huntley Fitzpatrick

How sorry she felt for white people, who couldn't do any of this (sit talking with friends and growing melons) and who were always dashing around and worrying themselves over things that were going to happen anyway. What use was it having all the money if you could never sit still or just watch your cattle, and yet they did not know it. Every so often you met a white person who understood, who realized how things really were; but these people were few and far between and the other white people often treated them with suspicion. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The interlocking network of stalks and branches and creepers was skeletal, the fossil yard of an extinct species of fineboned insectoid creatures. all of these bones, then, seemed to have been stained by sun and earth from an original living white to brown, and not the tough fibrous flower and seed-spilling green they actually once had been. Howard wondered about a man who had never seen summer, a winter man, examining the weeds and making this inference
that he was looking at an ossuary. the man would take that as true and base his ideas of the world on that mistake. ~ Paul Harding

I know i don't get the happily ever after. My knight and shinning armor took the highway detour around this godforsaken shit hole. I've made peace with that. That doesn't mean i'm going to lie down like a doormat and let every cocky prick in the trailer have his way with me. - White Trash Beautiful ~ Teresa Mummert

Jaidee never told her how they first met, not even after they were married. It was too humiliating to admit to what she had seen in him that night on the street. To tell her that the man she loved was that other fool as well.

And now he prepares to do something worse. He puts on his white dress uniform while Niwat and Surat watch. They are solemn as he prepares to bring himself low in their eyes. He kneels before them.

"Whatever you see today, do not let it shame you."

They nod solemnly, but he knows they do not understand. They are too young to understand pressures and necessity. He pulls them close, and then he goes out into blinding sunlight. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Such Africans soon encounter the many contradictions inherent in colonialism as a civilizing institution and agent of European culture on the one hand, and colonialism as an oppressive, exploitative, and violent political and economic system and agent of white supremacy on the other. ~ John Mukum Mbaku

I can't really hear the audience applause when I'm on stage. I'm totally immersed in the piece. But sometimes I get a lot of it and wonder, "Now, why did they applaud here?" If it's a white crowd, they usually applaud because they think it's a pretty movement. If it's a black crowd, it's usually because they identify with the message. ~ Judith Jamison

Early in March the crocuses crept alight, then blazed yellow and purple in the park. In fact it is about five o'clock in the evening that the first hour of spring strikes - autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day. The air, about to darken, quickens and is run through with mysterious white light; the curtain of darkness is suspended, as though for some unprecedented event. There is perhaps no sunset, the trees are not yet budding - but the senses receive an intimation, an intimation so fine, yet striking in so directly, that this appears a movement in one's own spirit. This exalts whatever feeling is in the heart. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Guy thought of the Greek word agon, wasn't it at once an athletic contest and a style of suffering, an agony? ~ Edmund White

Whether

Whether anger quickens a lagging stride,

and periodic burn-offs in the forest

revitalize exhausted soil and flora - .

Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat


jubilation of a lightning bolt

that whips its silver vein of genesis

through the night sky, flash-photo of a white

birch upended, the root-system buckled


to swollen thunderheads - . And whether naming

an offense amounts to sour grapes and common

bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense

of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping


insult to civilized behavior - . Whether

a July rainstorm, even when it drenches

the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles

traffic, might be extravagant, a joy,


like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos

of Gillespie's upraised horn, cascading pitches

a countersong to meteoric chalk marks

Perseids burn across the House of Leo - .


And whether peaceful ecstasy might float

up from a fifteen-second avalanche

reflected in the skier's goggles, his jacket

a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope,


waiting for the homeward track to clear. ~ Alfred Corn

If you come across someone who isn't cussing in the time of great anguish and distress then you've met the one causing everyone else to cuss." ~ Shellyanna Tidwell Preston.

Quote from the book "Shellyanna ~ A. White

I have been so great in boxing they had to create an image like Rocky, a white image on the screen, to counteract my image in the ring. America has to have its white images, no matter where it gets them. Jesus, Wonder Woman, Tarzan and Rocky. ~ Muhammad Ali

Or how he was once found on the well regarded Rabbi's front lawn, bound in white string, and said he tied one around his finger to remember something terribly important, and fearing he would forget the index finger, he tied a string around his pinky, and then one from waist to neck, and fearing he would forget this one, he tied a string from ear to tooth to scrotum heel, and used his body to remember his body, but in the end could only remember the string. Is this someone to trust for a story? ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The idea of giving a man a rim job provoked the squeamishness I felt at thirteen when I accidentally stumbled upon my first porn, Women Who Love Big White Cocks. I was repulsed that a woman would put her mouth on a man's penis. After all, that's where he pees. I got older. I discovered my sexuality and on countless occasions, put my mouth where a boy peed. He put his mouth where I peed, put his fingers where I pooped, put where he peed where I pooped, and we swapped saliva the entire time. Men forgot that the female breasts that ignited their hard-ons fed them as infants. We didn't realize that although the meaning changed, our "dirty places" remained the same. ~ Maggie Young

Maybe black and white is the best medium for landscapes, I don't know. ~ Fay Godwin

AFTERNOON TEA---
GUIDELINES FOR YOUNG OFFICERS' WIVES
By Audrey J. Rudman

Use your loveliest tablecloth. Have fresh flowers on the table. In winter, candles may be lit. Colored candles are sometimes seen, but white are in better taste.
Offer small fancy cakes, plain cookies, and tiny sandwiches, with a choice of fillings. Meat paste or cucumber are always acceptable. The service of tea is presided over by the ranking officer's wife. The courtesy should be extended to the CO's wife, if she cares to pour. ~ Laurie Graham

Late one night, during a toss-and-turn fretful sleep, I pondered my crisis. No solutions were on the horizon. I, again, wasted my psychic energy with prayer. Nothing. No angel on a white cloud. No rainbow's pot of gold. No way to control the people I loved. As I rolled over and put the pillow over my head attempting to block all that was negative, I silently screamed for rescue. Then, in a far away and distinct part of my brain, a small voice said, "You have to do this on your own."

I thought, "Was that the best You can do?" This god, to whom I was desperately sending burnt offerings of my own humiliation, couldn't send an avenging angel or a wise man imparting wisdom? All You can give me is this feeble message of abandonment? At that moment, I quit believing in that god. ~ David W. Earle

Huiann swallowed, her hands clasped together and her eyes glassy with tears, then she spoke some more.
"Her heart is full of feeling for you, but she knows it is wrong for her to stay with you. She wishes for you to find a white woman who will fit into your life and be the wife you need."
Alan started shaking his head before Dong Li even finished translating. "No. Tell her she makes me happy. She is exactly the wife I need." He breathed deeply, steadying the quaver in his voice. "Ask Chua Huiann if she will do me the honor of marrying me."
Dong clicked his tongue, but offered Alan's proposal.
Huiann's eyes opened wide and she spoke rapidly.
"How would your family and your people react to you marrying a foreign bride? You would be ostracized. It cannot be." Dong added his own thoughts to the translation. "The girl speaks sense and sees more clearly than you."
Alan frowned. He couldn't promise his family would accept Huiann or ever welcome them home as a couple, but he didn't care. Maybe she was seeing reason, but he was only seeing her. ~ Bonnie Dee

I don't encourage any act of murder nor do I glorify in anyone's death, but I do think that when the white public uses it's press to magnify the fact that there are lives of white hostages at stake, they don't say "hostages," every paper says "white hostages." They give me the impression that they attach more importance to a white hostage and a white death, than they do the death of a human being, despite the color of his skin. ~ Malcolm X

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,
The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:
The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,
The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.
The moss is slippery, though there's been no rain
The pine sings, but there's no wind.
Who can leap the world's ties
And sit with me among the white clouds? ~ Gary Snyder

I'm the death investigator," the man said in a dry voice. He was wearing gray chinos, plain black walking sneakers, a tucked-in white short-sleeved polo shirt with a pen inserted on the placket, and a gray windbreaker. His head was slightly over-large and his hair was thinning. If he was going for the look of 'quietly angry engineer who will one day explode,' or 'DI by day, super-villain by night,' he had succeeded. ~ Nina Post