The Towering Sky Quotes

She knew this was reckless; it was dangerous, but like all dangerous things, it had a deep, thrilling undercurrent that was richer and better and more alive than anything safe. ~ Katharine McGee

If Rylin had learned anything by now, it was that in real life, you never quite knew what was coming. You had to take the bad with the good. You had to take a chance, hold your breath, and trust people. After all, the fun of real life stories is that they're still being written. ~ Katharine McGee

Didn't you feel me, loving you from across the ocean? ~ Katharine McGee

No one should have to confess to murder alone. Haven't you heard? That's what best friends are for. ~ Katharine McGee

One day a man came to watch him work on a painting he was doing of Jesus and his disciples. The man sat there all day, and Leonardo only made one stroke the whole time. 'You stood there all day and only made one stroke,' the man said. Leonardo just looked at him. 'Yeah, but it was the right stroke,' he said." Dan sat quietly for a second. I was not sure if he was angry or if he didn't see the relevance of the analogy. Then, all of a sudden, he burst out laughing. "That's pretty good, Nerburn," he said. He reached over and pushed me playfully. "What was that guy's name?" "Leonardo da Vinci." "I've got to remember that. Leonardo Duvishhi. You sure he wasn't an Indian?" "Might have been Wapashaw's long-lost uncle," I said. Dan laughed heartily. "This is a good day, Nerburn. I'm glad you came to visit me." The hawk cut great arcs against the towering sky. The eastern horizon was filling with pinks and lavenders. "So am I, Dan," I said. "It's been too long. ~ Kent Nerburn

Maybe that was just the way love went - it was something that happened to you, and the best preparation you could hope for was the chance to take a deep breath before the wave of it crashed above you and you were in over your head. ~ Katharine McGee

Humanity would sink into eternal darkness, it would fall into a dull and primitive state, were the Jews to win this war. They are the incarnation of that destructive force that in these terrible years has guided the enemy war leadership in a fight against all that we see as noble, beautiful, and worth keeping. For that reason alone the Jews hate us. They despise our culture and learning, which they perceive as towering over their nomadic worldview. They fear our economic and social standards, which leave no room for their parasitic drives. ~ Joseph Goebbels

The setting sun
With yellow radiance lighten'd all the vale;
And as the warriors moved, each polish'd helm,
Corslet or spear, glanced back his gilded beams.
The hill they climbed, and halting at its top,
Of more than mortal size, towering, they seem'd
A host angelic, clad in burning arms. ~ John Home

The remnants of my dress hung like tentacles and from my back arched a pari of towering wings, feather-light but suggesting enourmous power. My hair streamed behind me, and I knew that the ring of light around my head would be brighter than ever.
"Holy crap!" Xavier blurted ~ Alexandra Adornetto

But the name Magnus Bane made him think of a towering sort of figure, with huge shoulders and formal purple warlock's robes, calling down fire and lightning. Not Magnus himself, who was more of a cross between a panther and a demented elf. ~ Cassandra Clare

Abraham Maslow became a towering figure in my life. He was the inspiration for me to look at psychology from a 180-degree-turnabout position. Rather than studying what was weak, infirm, or limited in clients and make an assessment based on overcoming ailments, I began looking for the highest qualities of self-actualization and encouraging clients - and ultimately readers and listeners - to seek their own innate greatness and aspire to these pinnacles. I reasoned that if some among us could be self-actualized, then so could I and anyone else who understood that it was possible. This became a major focus of my professional life and the compass I set for myself to live the principles that Maslow delineated in his writing. ~ Wayne W. Dyer

Suddenly the black torturer laid down the pipes and rose, towering over the writhing white figure. ~ Robert E. Howard

I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered Hades - stood, shone, smiled, delivered a prophecy of conditional pardon, kindled a doubtful hope of bliss to come, not now, but at a day and hour unlooked for, revealed in his own glory and grandeur the height and compass of his promise: spoke thus - then towering, became a star, and vanished into his own Heaven. His legacy was suspense - a worse boon than despair. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Lightning and love are created in very similar ways. There is some debate over how both lightning and love form, but most experts agree that both require the presence of complementary opposites. A towering thundercloud is full of opposites: ice and positive charge at its uppermost point, water and negative change at its base. In electricity and in love, opposites attract, and so as these opposites begin to interact, an electrical field develops. In a cloud, this field eventually grows so powerful that it must burst from the cloud in the form of lightning, visible from miles away. It is essentially the same in a love affair. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Jeremiah ends inconclusively. We want to know the end, but there is no end. The last scene of Jeremiah's life shows him, as he had spent so much of his life, preaching God's word to a contemptuous people (Jer 44). We want to know that he was finally successful so that, if we live well and courageously, we also will be successful. Or we want to know that he was finally unsuccessful so that, since a life of faith and integrity doesn't pay off, we can get on with finding another means by which to live. We get neither in Jeremiah. He doesn't get married and he doesn't get shot.[5] In Egypt, the place he doesn't want to be, with people who treat him badly, he continues determinedly faithful, magnificently courageous, heartlessly rejected - a towering life terrifically lived. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut
hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs
products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"
as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees. ~ David James Duncan

The tiny features below, taken together with the gentle mass of Montblanc towering above them, the Vanoise glacier almost invisible in the shimmering distance, and the Alpine panorama that occupied half the horizon, had for the first time in her life awoken in her a sense of the contrarieties that are in our longings. ~ W.G. Sebald

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals ... It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leaves behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. ~ Tana French

There was a numbness in Clary's hands, a hard pressure in her chest. It was lovely, she could see that: the city rising up beside her like a towering forest of silver and glass, the dull gray shimmer of the East River, slicing between Manhattan and the boroughs like a scar. ~ Cassandra Clare

Vader made most of the naval officers he encountered uncomfortable. To them, he was a towering dark figure outside their chain of command who had emerged from nowhere and possessed powers they did not understand. ~ Paul S. Kemp

The South Pacific is not a paradise, in the sense that Eden wasn't either. There are always apples and snakes. But it is a wonderful place to live. The green vales of Tahiti, the hills of Guadalcanal, the towering peaks about Wau, and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have envied the men and women of the South Pacific ~ James A. Michener

Lula was really the face of Brazil's boom in the previous decade and is one of the most towering politicians in the country today, so for this investigation to find get to him is an enormous deal. ~ Simon Romero

Anger he smiles, towering in shiny metallic purple armor. Queen Jealousy, envy waits behind him, her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground. ~ Jimi Hendrix

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as running mate is the towering example of his poor judgment. Palin's ignorance of public affairs is monumental. ~ Edgar Bronfman, Sr.

A dark and towering shadow, rising like the phoenix from the ashes ... malevolent ... omnipotent ... The Phantom of the Opera! ~ Susan Kay

My nose is Gargantuan! You little Pig-snout, you tiny Monkey-Nostrils, you virtually invisible Pekinese-Puss, don't you realize that a nose like mine is both scepter and orb, a monument to me superiority? A great nose is the banner of a great man, a generous heart, a towering spirit, an expansive soul
such as I unmistakably am, and such as you dare not to dream of being, with your bilious weasel's eyes and no nose to keep them apart! With your face as lacking in all distinction
as lacking, I say, in interest, as lacking in pride, in imagination, in honesty, in lyricism
in a word, as lacking in nose as that other offensively bland expanse at the opposite end of your cringing spine
which I now remove from my sight by stringent application of my boot! ~ Edmond Rostand

The gallantry of his grief did put me into a towering passion. ~ William Shakespeare

Let us be women who Love.
Let us be women willing to lay down our sword words, our sharp looks, our ignorant silence and towering stance and fill the earth now with extravagant Love.
Let us be women who Love.
Let us be women who make room.
Let us be women who open our arms and invite others into an honest, spacious, glorious embrace.

Let us be women who carry each other.
Let us be women who give from what we have.
Let us be women who leap to do the difficult things, the unexpected things and the necessary things.
Let us be women who live for Peace.
Let us be women who breathe Hope.
Let us be women who create beauty.
Let us be women who Love.

Let us be a sanctuary where God may dwell.
Let us be a garden for tender souls.
Let us be a table where others may feast on the goodness of God.
Let us be a womb for Life to grow.
Let us be women who Love.

Let us rise to the questions of our time.
Let us speak to the injustices in our world.
Let us move the mountains of fear and intimidation
Let us shout down the walls that separate and divide.
Let us fill the earth with the fragrance of Love.
Let us be women who Love.

Let us listen for those who have been silenced.
Let us honor those who have been devalued.
Let us say, Enough! with abuse, abandonment, diminishing and hiding.
Let us not rest until every person is f ~ Idelette McVicker

Great-Uncle Merry, coming back towards the car from the Grey House, had suddenly stopped in his tracks in the middle of the road. He was gazing down at the sea; and she realised that he had caught sight of the yacht. What startled her was the expression on his face. Standing there like a craggy towering statue, he was frowning, fierce and intense, almost as if he were looking and listening with senses other than his eyes and ears. He could never look frightened, she thought, but this was the nearest thing to it that she had ever seen. Cautious, startled, alarmed . . . what was the matter with him? Was there something strange about the yacht? Then ~ Susan Cooper

The years, the months, the days, and the hours have flown by my open window. Here and there an incident, a towering moment, a naked memory, an etched countenance, a whisper in the dark, a golden glow these and much more are the woven fabric of the time I have lived. ~ Howard Thurman

As he approached Dillon's door, Gavin ducked his towering six foot three inch frame in an attempt to see below mini-blinds covering up half the glass. Gavin's eyes landed on Dillon's back. He stood in front of his desk, his arms crossed. In one swift motion, Gavin swung open the door and closed it. In another, he twisted the lock, sealing them off from anyone who might try to enter.
Let the motherfucking games begin.

McHugh, Gail (2013-09-17). Pulse: Book Two in the Collide Series (Kindle Locations 1912-1915). Atria Books. Kindle Edition. ~ Gail McHugh

Max felt his eye twitching. He knew he should be yelling, but his limbs wouldn't move. This was what it felt like to be paralyzed with rage. Yes, he was going to do it. He was going to finally go utterly psychotic and prove the whole town right. He was going to walk over to those arrogant assholes and take the first one apart. Then he'd beat the other one to death with his dead brother's leg. He looked to his own brother. Rye would save him from his towering rage. Rye would have calming words. Rye would talk him down.
Rye's face was red as he pointed at the young cowboys. You, kill now, Max. ~ Sophie Oak

Are you some sort of pervert?"
The grey eyes turn from terrified to indignant. "Do you mind keeping your voice down, I have a perfectly innocent explanation." He unravels himself and straightens up, towering over us like some freshly escaped genie. ~ Susan Lodge

Aunt Hattie, when you wrote that book, I imagine you were thinking of something radical: the abolition of slavery itself. You were only one small woman, and you were looking up at an enormous edifice, towering and monolithic, but what you wrote made the whole structure start to tremble and shudder, and finally, it all came down, thundering and crashing. It wasn't just because of your book, of course, but your book made it impossible for people to think of slavery in the old way. ~ Roxana Robinson

Oh, Gray, she said. Oh, gray, indeed. As in, oh Gray what the holy hell has come over you and what the devil do you intend to do about it?
He took the coward's way out. He looked away.
"I thought you were painting a portrait. Of me."
She turned her head, following his gaze to her easel. A vast seascape overflowed the small canvas. Towering thunderclouds and a violent, frothy sea. And slightly off center, a tiny ship cresting a massive wave.
"I am painting you."
"What, am I on the little boat, then?" It was a relief to joke.
The relief was short-lived.
"No," she said softly, turning back to look at him. "I'm on the little boat. You're the storm. And the ocean. You're…Gray, you're everything."
And that was when things went from "very bad" to "worse."
"I can't take credit for the composition. It's inspired by a painting I once saw, in a gallery on Queen Anne Street. By a Mr. Turner."
"Turner. Yes, I know his work. No relation, I suppose?"
"No." She looked back at the canvas. "When I saw it that day, so brash and wild…I could feel the tempest churning in my blood. I just knew then and there, that I had something inside me-a passion too bold, too grand to keep squeezed inside a drawing room. First I tried to deny it, and then I tried to run from it…and then I met you, and I saw you have it, too. Don't deny it, Gray. Don't run from it and leave me alone."
She sat up, still rubbing his cheek with her thumb. Grasping his oth ~ Tessa Dare

I want to move to the mountains. I want to live in a little cabin next to a towering, tenacious mountain fourteen thousand feet above sea level and eat a bowl of raisin bran every morning in its shadow. ~ Jess Riley

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let's face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself. ~ Ann Patchett

On the other hand, I compared the disquisitions of the ancient moralists to very towering and magnificent palaces with no better foundation than sand and mud: ~ Rene Descartes

My favorite times were spent in his backyard where he and his roommates had "let nature take its course," the weeds towering above our heads. We placed two chairs in the middle of that jungle and discussed what we didn't know we were discussing: What brings a writer and an engineer together? How can we reconcile our diverse interests into a pointed goal, a single aphorism on life? More simply stated: Why are we falling in love? ~ Megan Rich

In my Craft or Sullen Art
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
. On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and palms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages, ~ Dylan Thomas

Envy, that enemy of happiness, is rife in Moldova. It's an especially virulent strain, one devoid of the driving ambition that usually accompanies envy. So the Moldovans get all of the downsides of envy without any of its benefits - namely, the thriving businesses and towering buildings erected by ambitious men and women out to prove they are better than everyone else. Moldovans derive more pleasure from their neighbor's failure than their own success. I can't imagine anything less happy. ~ Eric Weiner

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven. ~ Lauren Oliver

Forty minutes later, I leaned back in my chair, and looked at the thousand or so pages of manuscript towering on my desk. It hit me. Holy cow. This author had total control over this book. Total. And it was one of seven. One. Of. Seven. ~ Carla Bolte

Jonas went and sat beside them while his father untied Lily's hair ribbons and combed her hair. He placed one hand on each of their shoulders. With all of his being he tried to give each of them a piece of the memory: not of the tortured cry of the elephant, of their towering, immense creature and the meticulous touch with which it had tended its friend at the end.
But his father had continued to comb Lily's long hair, and Lily, impatient, had finally wriggled under her brother's touch. "Jonas," she said, "you're hurting me with your hand. ~ Lois Lowry

~Of course, rather than the choice between what you threaten, and our allowing you to escape, we might engage with you on the instant, to prevent you from carrying out either.
~I never did tell you my whole name, did I?
~You did not. Many have remarked that your name would appear to be part of a longer one, and yet, unusually, even uniquely, nobody has heard the whole of it.
~May I tell you it now?
~Please do.
~My full name is the Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Mere Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath. Cool, eh?
~Such braggadocio. That smacks of smokescreen, not power.
~Take it as you will, chum. But how many Culture ships do you know of that exaggerate their puissance? ~ Ian M. Banks

Men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed. ~ Emma Goldman

Towering pines and hemlocks, was it? I thought, clambering over the burled knots of a fallen tree. The monstrous trunks rose so high that the lowest limbs started twenty feet above my head. Longfellow had no idea. ~ Diana Gabaldon

A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing, and in the middle,
a darkness - the object or concept holding the visible together. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

A German or a Russian mamaloschen (mother tongue) pedigree made for two wildly different translations of the same verse by the American Yiddish poet H. Leyvik.

"Dos turemdike lebn in der turemdike shtot", translated "The towering life of the towering city" (Yiddish turem, "tower," of German origin) became in another version "The imprisoned life of the prison city" (via turme, "prison", from Russian).

I discovered this old "plot" in a recent lecture, a volume on American Yiddish Poetry, by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. One of those gentle epiphanies that only apparently obscure footnotes or references could reveal.

In a frivolous gesture, I concocted an improbable rendition based on both translations, a slice of contemporary universal metropolitan spleen:

The imprisoned life of the towering city. ~ Harshav

Dawn came and matters were worse for it. Because now, emerging from the darkness, I could see, what before I had only felt, the great curtains of rain crashing down on me from towering heights and the waves that threw a path over me and trod me underfoot one after another. ~ Yann Martel

When the clowns of British politics - arch-Brexiteer cartoon characters 'Boorish Johnson' and 'JackOff Grease-Smug' advocate ad infinitum that Britain should leave the EU in order to be free to sign her own trade deals; they seem to have overlooked the towering elephant in the room, namely the current occupant of the White House (another clown) - who appears hell-bent on destabilising world trade via crude protectionist policies. Both Tories, despite receiving the best British education money can buy, would do well to revisit their post war history books and be reminded of one of the key objectives of the European Project and in due course the European Union - specifically to promote peace and prosperity amongst previously warring neighbours by forming a unified trading bloc which in time, due to its effective size, also acted as a useful counterweight to US hegemony. Go find another circus for your buffoonery and leave the deadly serious business of politics to principled individuals with the true national interest at heart ! ~ Alex Morritt

I watched the shadow of our plane hastening below us across hedges and fences, rows of poplars and canals … Nowhere, however, was a single human being to be seen. No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link them, one sees the smoke rising from their houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one sees not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth, extending their dominion by the hour, moving around the honeycombs of towering buildings and tied into networks of a complexity that goes far beyond the power of any one individual to imagine, from the thousands of hoists and winches that once worked the South African diamond mines to the floors of today's stock and commodity exchanges, through which the global tides of information flow without cease. If we view ourselves from a great height, it is frightening to realize how little we know about our species, our purpose and our end, I thought, as we crossed the coastline and flew out over the jelly-green sea. ~ W.G. Sebald