The Sand Reckoner Quotes

Until that moment she had not really noticed him. Now she felt as though she'd stubbed her toe on a rock, and looked down to find that it was part of a buried city. ~ Gillian Bradshaw

The sky above us seems huge, vast. It's clear and crisp and visibility is so good that, when I look up, I feel like I'm staring at an inverted, endless ocean. I'm sure the blue is the colour of water above sand and the tiny, wispy clouds look like waves breaking over distant swells. I envy the birds I see overhead, zipping joyfully from left to right and so far above the death and decay that pollute the lower levels. A day like this should be enjoyed completely. I should be able to forget what dwells in the towns around us, I should find it in myself to dismiss what happened at that crossing, I should. ~ Jack Croxall

I am a performing artist; I perform admiration.
'Come with me', I want my poems to say. 'And do the same ~ Mary Oliver

The afternoon sun was bright above the cloud, lending to the scene a silvery glow that leached the sea of colour and picked out points of white light in the sand. The very raindrops seemed to shimmer in the air; the wind, blowing chill from the ocean, carried with it a pleasant, rusty smell. All this did much to dispel Devlin's torpor, and in very little time at all he was red-cheeked and smiling, his white brimmed hat clamped tight to his head with the palm of his hand. He decided to make the most of his perambulation, and return to Hokitika via the high terrace of Seaview: the site of the future Hokitika Gaol, and Devlin's own future residence. ~ Eleanor Catton

One year, on vacation in Hawaii, I was relaxing at a beach, watching whales in the distance, when a fisherman, obviously a local, drove up in his pick-up truck. He got out with a dozen fishing rods. Not one. A dozen. He baited each hook, cast all the lines into the ocean, and set the rods in the sand. Intrigued, I wandered over and asked him for an explanation. "It's simple," he said. "I love fish but I hate fishin'. I like eatin', not catchn'. So I cast out 12 lines. By sunset, some of them will have caught a fish. Never all of 'em. So if I only cast one or two I might go hungry. But 12 is enough so some always catch. Usually there's enough for me and extras to sell to local restaurants. This way, I live the life I want." The simple fellow had unwittingly put his finger on a powerful secret. The flaw in most businesses, that keeps them always in desperate need - which suppresses prices - is: too few lines cast in the ocean. ~ Dan S. Kennedy

I decide that if I ever get to come back here under different, nonstressful circumstances, I will stay at this hotel and drink fruity drinks and lay in the sand until my skin looks like it had a makeout session with the sun. But today, I'm looking for an inconspicuous way into the water.
We head out of the lobby and get waylaid by hula dancers in grass skirts handing out necklaces of flowers. Apparently Toraf doesn't like necklaces of flowers; as one of the women raises it above his head, he slaps her hand away. I show him, as I accept the gift around my neck, that the woman with the coconut boobs was just trying to be his friend. Just like all the women he's come across so far.
"Humans are too weird," he whispers, unconvinced. I wonder what Toraf would think of Disney World.
Our hotel is right on the water, so we pass through the lobby to the back. The beach is lined with lounge chairs and umbrellas and people scantily clad and people who shouldn't be scantily clad. ~ Anna Banks

It's amazing how the things you remember forever are the things you'd rather forget and the things you desperately want to grasp onto seem to slip away like sand in the wind. ~ Jessica Sorensen

He called the feeling between us "weird," and I had nothing to add. I kissed the backs of his legs and they sang. He reached around and pulled me down onto his back and I lay there, like on the warm sand of a beach. Just that. That is all there is. That is the whole point of everything. ~ Miranda July

Remind me to thank God I don't have a sister."
Caine eyed him critically. He was a filthy heap of blood and soot and sand stuck to the gun oil on his face. "Yeah," without much enthusiasm. "I'll thank Him for ya. ~ V.S. Carnes

It is never prudent to bury our heads in the sand when in distress or faced with adversity; to place our hands over our eyes in a feeble attempt to hide from the inevitable. ~ Carlos Wallace

My Ego taught me a new pride, I teach it to men: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freely, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

12. They had spent a lot of time on the beach, as did everyone for miles around when the sun decided to shine. Theirs was no ordinary beach; it was a gorgeous swathe of golden sand, framed by granite cliffs upon which stood the crumbling walls of an ancient castle. There were caves to explore too, hidden in the cliffs. Children and adults alike would venture deep into them, discovering a dark world that belonged predominantly to birds and sea creatures. ~ Shani Struthers

Draw a line in the sand. "I will no longer be a stumbling block for my husband." With God's help, you'll find yourself being supportive, encouraging. You become his partner rather than his opponent. This attitude of obedience unfolds blessings without end, reaching your heart, his, your children, and the watching world. ~ Amy Williams

Sometimes we'd sit on that bench for hours, talking about nothing much and blowing smoke rings into the air, and we'd see them teetering past, stumble-drunk after closing time with their brown paper bags and late night vinegar running down their arms and the lack of kindness everywhere. And the girls, panda-eyed and lonely, hitching their bravado to their short skirts, were telling themselves that this was living. We said we would never be them. But there was one boy who had kind eyes. His hair was the colour of the sand and his smile promised everything. I told you he wasn't like the rest, but you didn't want to hear it. ~ Maire T. Robinson

You still think like a child, don't you? Clay figurines sunk to their ankles in the sand, one here, one there, standing just so. One says this, the other says that, then you reach down and rearrange them accordingly. Scenes, vistas, stark with certainty. ~ Steven Erikson

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.

I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep.

There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces. ~ Jean Lorrain

The night above. We two. Full moon.
I started to weep, you laughed.
Your scorn was a god, my laments
moments and doves in a chain.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.
Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the frozen spout
of unstaunched blood.
The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

- Night of Sleepless Love ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Giving advice to a child is like flinging sand at an obsidian wall. Nothing sticks. The brutal truth is that we each suffer our own lessons - they can't be danced round. They can't be slipped past. You cannot gift a child with your scars - they arrive like webs, constricting, suffocating, and that child will struggle and strain until they break. No matter how noble your intent, the only scars that teach them anything are the ones they earn themselves. ~ Steven Erikson

Life isn't always easy but so long as we have hope that we will find someone to help us through the darkness things will always get better. When we find that person, life suddenly explodes and darkness turns into a riot of colour. We're always looking for someone, what we need to remember is that someone is out there looking for us too. ~ George Sand

Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness. ~ George Sand

We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

Why do we have to go to Summerwind Abbey tonight? Why couldn't we have waited until I at least combed the sand out of my hair? She heard the whine in her voice and realized she'd been reduced to petulance. With any luck at all, she'd become a nag and make Jermyn a dreadful wife. ~ Christina Dodd

Others may not notice it, because an angry Toraf is truly a rare thing to behold, but Galen can practically feel the animosity emanating from his friend. Which is why he casually bumps into him, taking care to be overly apologetic.
"Oh, sorry about that, minnow. I didn't even see you there." Galen mimics Toraf's demeanor, crossing his arms and staring ahead of them. What they're supposed to be staring at, he's not sure.
His effort is rewarded with a slight upward curve of his friend's mouth. "Oh, don't think twice about it, tadpole. I know it must be difficult to swim straight with a whale's tail."
Galen scowls, taking care not to glance down at his fin. Ever since they went to retrieve Grom, he's been sore all below the waist, but he'd just attributed it to tension from finding Nalia, and then the whole tribunal mess-not to mention, hovering in place for hours at a time. Still, he did examine his fin the evening before, hoping to massage out any knots he found, but was a bit shocked to see that his fin span seemed to have widened. He decided that he was letting his imagination get the better of him. Now he's not so sure. "What do you mean?" he says lightly.
Toraf nods down toward the sand. "You know what I mean. Looks like you have the red fever."
"The red fever bloats you all over, idiot. Right before it kills you. It doesn't make your fin grow wider. Besides, the red tide hasn't been bad for years now." But Toraf already knows what the red fever lo ~ Anna Banks

Are we etched in stone or just scratched in the sand
Waiting for the waves to come and reclaim the land?
tightrope - stone roses ~ Matt Squire

Laurel: Hello, ever hear of the Olympics?
Holly: Or the Panathenaia?
Laurel: Sand courts were everywhere back then. Ancient Greeks wrestled and boxed in them.
Holly: Called them palaestrae. Singular: palaestra
Laurel: After Palaestra, the goddess who invented wrestling.
Holly: Hear that, boys? The goddess of wrestling.
Laurel: Girl power!
Holly: They wrestled naked.
Laurel: So no place to hide weapons.
Holly: Palaestra ruled the ring
Laurel: Like we ruled the court. ~ Rick Riordan

I came to you one rainless August night.
You taught me how to live without the rain.
You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
You are sand, wind, sun, and burning sky,
The hottest blue. You blow a breeze and brand
Your breath into my mouth. You reach - then bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
I wake to you at dawn. Never break your
Knot. Reach, rise, blow, Sálvame, mi dios,
Trágame, mi tierra. Salva, traga, Break me,
I am bread. I will be the water for your thirst. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

From the beginning, man could look up at a vast universe dotted by innumerable stars to find every evidence that he was nothing. This evidence only grows stronger as science and technology record an expanse of galaxies filled with planetary solar systems beyond any visible end. Man is but a grain of sand lost on an endless seashore, and yet he believes with conviction in his own greatness. He is either a divine soul intuitively aware of his inherent, limitless potential - or he is a blind fool. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

As summer neared, as the evening lengthened there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind- of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which cloud forever and shadows form, dreams persisted; and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if you questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumph, happiness prevails, order rules, or to resist the extra ordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand which would render the possessor secure. Moreover softened and acquiescent, the spring with their bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloud about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and fights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her knowledge of the sorrows of mankind. ~ Virginia Woolf

The entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex - they were not - but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition. The ~ Edward Abbey

A thin ungracious drink is the well-spring, a drink for queasy-stomached skipjacks: for sand-levericks, not for men. And like it is the dayspring: an ungrateful sapless hour, an hour for stab-i'-the-backs and cold-blooded betrayers. Ah, give me wine, and noon-day vices, and brazen-browed iniquities. ~ E.R. Eddison

Who will remember Todd?
Who will remember what he did?
Todd -
Todd -
And my heart breaks even more -
Breaks forever -
And I fall to my knees in the snow and sand -
And I yell out, wordless and empty -
And I drop the weapon. ~ Patrick Ness