Vistas Quotes

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space. ~ Ruth St. Denis

On the Gallows Once
Kofi Awoonor

I crossed quite a few
of your rivers, my gods,
into this plain where thirst reigns
I heard the cry of mourners
the long cooing of the African wren at dusk
the laughter of the children at dawn
had long ceased
night comes fast in our land
where indeed are the promised vistas
the open fields, blue skies, the singing birds
and abiding love?
History records acts
of heroism, barbarism
of some who had power
and abused it massively
of some whose progenitors
planned for them
the secure state of madness
from which no storm can shake them;
of some who took the last ships
disembarked on some far-off shores and forgot
of some who simply laid down the load
and went home to the ancestors ~ Kofi Awoonor

One thing which even the most seasoned and discerning masters of the art of choice do not and cannot choose, is the society to be born into - and so we are all in travel, whether we like it or not. We have not been asked about our feelings anyway. Thrown into a vast open sea with no navigation charts and all the marker buoys sunk and barely visible, we have only two choices left: we may rejoice in the breath-taking vistas of new discoveries - or we may tremble out of fear of drowning. One option not really realistic is to claim sanctuary in a safe harbour; one could bet that what seems to be a tranquil haven today will be soon modernized, and a theme park, amusement promenade or crowded marina will replace the sedate boat sheds. The third option not thus being available, which of the two other options will be chosen or become the lot of the sailor depends in no small measure on the ship's quality and the navigation skills of the sailors. Not all ships are seaworthy, however. And so the larger the expanse of free sailing, the more the sailor's fate tends to be polarized and the deeper the chasm between the poles. A pleasurable adventure for the well-equipped yacht may prove a dangerous trap for a tattered dinghy. In the last account, the difference between the two is that between life and death. ~ Zygmunt Bauman

One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad's stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter and who had only just so many years to live. ~ Terrence Malick

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism. ~ Anne Waldman

Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Time makes the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. ~ Kevin Focke

I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before ... One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war. ~ Cynthia Asquith

So quiet and subtle is the beauty of December that escapes the notice of many people their whole lives through.. Colour gives way to form. every branch distinct, in a delicate tracery against the sky.. new vistas obscured all Summer by leafage, now open up. ~ Flora Thompson

Most of all, I remember her laughing. It filled my ears. Her smile, her sparkling eyes, and her infectious laughter, along with the vistas, were limitless and unending and powerful. ~ Sharon E. Rainey

Even the most heartening of philosophical vistas is no match for, say, a toothache, if it happens to be your own. ~ Roger Zelazny

It is important to distinguish between the power of the Internet to make the great change it can, and the limits and vulnerabilities of that change without real-time political mobilization deployed globally to protect those who venture out, especially in closed societies, into the heady new vistas it offers. ~ Naomi Wolf

Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world's pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of power. Impressive and popular as The Lord of the Rings is, it manages its landscapes, vast green-leaved or slag-heaped vistas of pathetic fallacy and implied morality, far better than its people; it leaves the impression that important issues have been turned by sleight of hand and Georgian prettiness into questions of good and bad practice in urban planning and rural conservation. After all, the Grail is only worth seeking if you can believe in a god who put it there to help those who help themselves, in an Avalon to which burned-out heroes can retire with dignity. There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist - the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of kind and ordinary life. ~ Roz Kaveney

This is a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

At sixty, I would like to give my future back its vistas of uncertainty. ~ Mason Cooley

...for most of the ride through British Columbia we were treated to stunning scenery ranging from majestic peaks shrouded in mist to more barren vistas reminiscent of the Old West ... to churning rivers fed by waterfalls twisting down mountains like the woven tassels on the white summer Chanel bag I'd left back home. Do waterfalls ever feel unfashionable after Labor Day ~ Doreen Orion

Over the vistas broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed in vain hope and desire ... If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually, morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever. ~ K.W. Jeter

One of the powerful functions of a library - any library - lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all humanity.
[Browsing in the Western Stacks, Harvard Library Bulletin NS 6(3): 27-33, 1995] ~ Richard F. Thomas

A simple intuition, a single observation, can open vistas of unimagined potential. Once caught in the web of an idea, the researcher is happily doomed, for the outcome is always uncertain, and the resolution of the mystery may take years to unfold. Such was the case in my encounter with the magic toads of the Americas. ~ Wade Davis

We are all spawned from the same great canvas yet we lose ourselves through the melding of its vistas ~ Lorin Morgan-Richards

Picture salvation as a house that you live in. It provides you with protection. It is stocked with food and drink that will last forever. It never decays or crumbles. Its windows open onto vistas of glory. God built it at great cost to Himself and to His Son, and He gave it to you. The purchase agreement is called a 'new covenant.' The terms read: 'This house shall become and remain yours if you will receive it as a gift and take delight in the Father and the Son as they inhabit the house with you. You shall not profane the house of God by sheltering other gods nor turn our heart away after other treasures.' Would it not be foolish to say yes to this agreement, and then hire a lawyer to draw up an amortization schedule with monthly payments in the hopes of somehow balancing accounts. You would be treating the house no longer as a gift, but a purchase. God would no longer be the free benefactor. And you would be enslaved to a new set of demands that he never dreamed of putting on you. If grace is to be free - which is the very meaning of grace - we cannot view it as something to be repaid. ~ John Piper

Italy doesn't need American football. For what? I've been. Wine, women, song, shopping, unbelievable vistas and landscapes ... Do they need Titans vs. Panthers? Uh, no. ~ Michael Wilbon

At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it - if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can't see anything green during the day? Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea. Upon ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Someday our piecing together of knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas we shall either go mad or flee into the safety of a new dark age. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

I love Fayetteville. I like hills and vistas and hardworking people and fighting snow in winter and chiggers in the summer. ~ Ellen Gilchrist

With the goal of crafting a course that fits harmoniously with its surroundings, we took full advantage of the dramatic vistas, indigenous flora and beautiful rolling terrain to create a memorable golf experience for members and resort guests. ~ Pete Dye

Daughter, daughter, shining bright
Precious jewel within mine sight
Oh, if I could soar with thee
As you seek your destiny.

To see with you the caves and skies
Vistas grand beneath your eyes
Taking wing to horizons new
Let us wonder who waits for you.

A dragon bright?
A dragon dark?
Victor of duels with battle mark?
A dragon strong?
A dragon keen?
Singer of honors and triumphs seen?

Red, Gold, Bronze, and Blue
To your lord you shall be true,
Copper, Silver, Black, and White,
Who will win your mating flight?

For in your hearts our future rests
To see our line with hatchlings blessed
And for those who threaten clutch of flame,
To feel the wrath of dragon-dame. ~ E.E. Knight

The more we know about this universe, the more mysterious it is. The old world that Job knew was marvelous enough, and his description of its wonders is among the noblest poetry of the race, but today the new science has opened to our eyes vistas of mystery that transcend in their inexplicable marvel anything the ancients ever dreamed. ~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Each morning is the open door to a new world - new vistas, new aims, new tryings. ~ Leigh Mitchell Hodges

I have spent many an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had impelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that I did not waste more of them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down? ~ Henry David Thoreau

As for school, well, the only kids who read books for pleasure, who read outside of when a teacher was literally standing over them in the classroom, were the freaks. The kids like ... like him. Docherty. The Professor. Strange and unexpected then when I discovered under Mr Cardew's encouragement that what seemed to me to be tracts of boredom and torture actually contained un imaginable vistas, entire worlds of escape. (And you were much in need of escape then, weren't you?) That you could open one of them and start turning the pages and that, instead of time slowing down and refusing to pass, you would look up at the clock (that clock, in its mesh cage) and the deadly, endless afternoon ahead of you would have vanished. ~ John Niven

The scenic vistas of North Carolina and Tennessee make you feel like you're looking at a work of art, but crossing through the rural countryside of southwest Virginia and caressing the tall grass with your fingertips, you feel like you're part of the painting. ~ Jennifer Pharr Davis

Food of Love
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end. -Samuel Butler II

I'm going to murder you with love;
I'm going to suffocate you with embraces;
I'm going to hug you, bone by bone,
Till you're dead all over.
Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.

You will become my personal Sahara;
I'll sun myself in you, then with one swallow
Drain you remaining brackish well.
With my female blade I'll carve my name
In your most aspiring palm
Before I chop it down.
Then I'll inhale your last oasis whole.

But in the total desert you become
You'll see me stretch, horizon to horizon,
Opulent mirage!
Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen.
Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.

So you will summon each dry grain of sand
And move towards me in undulating dunes
Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine:
A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;
Obstinate verdue, creeping inland, fast renudes
Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,
Surprising life! And I will be that green.

When you are fed and watered, flourishing
With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire,
Till you are resurrected field in bloom,
I will devour you, my natural food,
My host, my final supper on the earth,
And you'll begin to die again. ~ Carolyn Kizer

I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I think the mirror should be tilted slightly upward when it's reflecting life
toward the cheerful, the tender, the compassionate, the brave, the funny, the encouraging, all those things
and not tilted down to the gutter part of the time, into the troubled vistas of conflict. ~ Greer Garson

She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part - vistas of probable triumphs - the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won. ~ Thomas Hardy

You do remember things that people say in movies. You remember particular lines and things that are funny. But, you also remember really strong images. Images have a way of bypassing your brain and hitting you emotionally. There are so many things from movies that are remembered, that are just looks on people's faces or incredible vistas or beautiful pictures. That is a very important part of cinema. ~ Miranda Otto

Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude - even "decadent," if that word means anything. ~ George Orwell

A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. Creators have to unlearn what they knew before they can see the fresh, uncharted vistas stretching before them. ~ Dave Morris

Isn't that petty?"
"Anna, you have not yet seen pettiness. When a couple of tough guys like the general and Lugala Tsu decide to confront each other, vistas of pettiness open up that you and I can barely comprehend. ~ Eleanor Arnason

The camera can push the new medium to its limits - and beyond. It is there - in the "beyond" - that the imaginative photographer will compete with the imaginative painter. Painting must return to the natural world from time to time for renewal of the artistic vision. The key sector of renewal of vision today is the new vistas revealed by science. Here photography, which is not only art but science also, stands on the firmest ground. ~ Andreas Feininger

I ask the reader to remember that what is most obvious may be most worthy of analysis. Fertile vistas may open out when commonplace facts are examined from a fresh point of view. ~ Lancelot Law Whyte

I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them. ~ Italo Calvino

The canvases which Mr. St. Jones referred to with a paintbrush that was long and slightly bowed: for the most part interiors, or undergrounds, of pocked and craggy holes, rock vaults with mossy floors and slimy walls, or narrow scenic vistas that skinny silver streams squirmed through like sidewinders flipped on their backs, beneath downward grasping tentacles of roots, stalactites dagger-sharp and dangling by threads of stone, stalagmites teetering, all doused, frozen in molten electric white that suggested what a glimpse of hell might be, too beautiful, some still lifes too, great bulbous beets, hoary legumes, giant scallions, white carrots, tomatoes, berries, squash in huge radiant bowls, and portraits, signed by Ionia, of shadows, from which gleamed eyes and teeth and nails and, here and there, a glowing bubble, or scrotum, caught the eye. Near the door a counter clacked but rather quietly. ~ Douglas Woolf

How long will this last, this delicious feeling of being alive, of having penetrated the veil which hides beauty and the wonders of celestial vistas? It doesn't matter, as there can be nothing but gratitude for even a glimpse of what exists for those who can become open to it. ~ Alexander Shulgin

Life was a bloody battlefield until I conquered the enemy and won the war. Now, life is a journey, and I am a warrior. Prepared for anything and weakened by nothing. There are hills and dales, mountains and plateaus, blind spots and brilliant vistas, but none of that matters. All that matters is my second chance, and the only thing capable of disrupting my path, is myself. ~ B.G. Bowers

Science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary-an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal; and immediate care; a world in which you are His peculiar concern. ~ Isaac Asimov

I could walk forever with beauty. Our steps are not measured in miles but in the amount of time we are pulled forward by awe. This is another gift from our national parks, to be led by the vistas, to forget what nags us at home and remember what sustains us, the horizon. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

When you meditate, you take charge of your life. You bring your conscious awareness to a new high point, where the vista is beyond any horizon. ~ Frederick Lenz

Generally, social networking sites can be hugely promising and beneficial in opening new friendships and vistas and knowledge of the world, but they are also fraught with peril, when young people are reckless or headless. ~ Richard Blumenthal

Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters. Moments of intensity are also moments of power and control; yet we have so little understanding of this that we wait passively for some chance to galvanize the muscle that created the intensity.

But whether you use the negative methods of relaxation (which is fundamentally 'transcendental meditation') or the positive method of intense alertness and concentration, the result is the same: a realization of the enormous vistas of reality that lie outside our normal range of awareness. You recognize that the chief obstacle to such awareness is that we don't need it to get through an ordinary working day. I can make do fairly well with a narrow awareness and a moderate mount of vital energy. I have 'peak experiences' when I occasionally develop more awareness and more energy than I need for the task in hand; then I 'overflow', and realize, for a dazzled moment, what a fascinating universe I actually inhabit. It is significant that Maslow's 'peakers' were not daydreaming romantics, but healthy, practical people... ~ Colin Wilson

Such utterance staggers and offends among the listeners. But it also opens vistas of possibility where we had not thought to go and where in fact, we are most reluctant to go. ~ Walter Brueggemann

Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive. ~ Tom Robbins

Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world - all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation ... the vastness of St. Peter's the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina. ~ George Eliot

I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mo ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

Still, now and then they seemed to be holding behind them the surprising, the magic vistas of childhood - the sudden snow at night, whirling and furring without sound against the window; the full moon and all its shadows on the lawn; the Christmas sleigh and reindeer in the sky. ~ Rosamond Lehmann

I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] ... but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary. ~ Linus Torvalds

Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There's no truly right or wrong way to get there, either--there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds.
But that said, once you have a good grounding in it,you get a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.) ~ Jim Butcher

SLEEPAWAY"

When teenage boys go to sleepaway camps every summer

they arrive with big hearts and nervous apprehension -


do they throw their duffels to the ground

and go straight to the basketball court


or


do they pause

and have earnest conversations:


How was your year?

How is your mother?

What are you passionate about lately?


Each,


broken down later in life in cars with their wives on superhighway shoulders,

glorious desert vistas in their ice-caked windshields,

frozen stiff by the whiskey winds,


they are rocked,

frayed forever. ~ David Mait

What we initially conceived as a fairly simple geologic experiment on Mars ultimately turned into humanity's first real overland expedition across another planet. Spirit explored just as we would have, seeing a distant hill, climbing it, and showing us the vista from the summit. And she did it in a way that allowed everyone on Earth to be part of the adventure. ~ Steve Squyres

Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art. ~ Stephen Davis

It often seemed to her that she thought too much about herself, you could have made her blush any day of the year, by telling her she was selfish. She was always planning out her own development, desiring her own perfection, observing her own progress. Her nature had for her own imagination a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring bows, of shady bowers and of lengthening vistas, which made her feel that introspection was, after all, an exercise in the open air, and that a visit to the recesses of one's mind was harmless when one returned from it with a lapful of roses. ~ Henry James

My photos tend to be confusing. I show a great many vistas. ~ Ezra Stoller

The Soul which is approaching its' liberation, as it looks back over past lives ... down the vistas of the centuries along which it has slowly been climbing, ... is able to see there the way in which the bonds were made, the causes which set it in motion. It is able to see how many of those causes have worked themselves out and ... how many ... are still working themselves out. ~ Annie Besant

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes. ~ Pat Conroy

Jesus did not only teach or expound His message. He was identical with His message. "In Him," say the Scriptures, "dwelt the fullness of the Godhead bodily." He did not just proclaim the truth. He said, "I am the truth." He did not just show a way. He said, "I am the Way." He did not just open up vistas. He said, "I am the door." "I am the Good Shepherd." "I am the resurrection and the life." "I am the I AM." In ~ Ravi Zacharias

You stand on the edge of eternity, with a vista that is so incredible, so powerful, so perfect that it's overwhelming. You are so overwhelmed - you no longer exist. ~ Frederick Lenz

There are vistas never dreamed of, there are joys never even known, there are glories no past glory ever surpassed. These wait for you but only if you accept my legacy and help bring these things about. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

We have looked first at man with his vanities and greed and his problems of a day or a year; and then only, and from this biased point of view, we have looked outward at the earth he has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction. ~ Rachel Carson

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. "His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. ~ William James

If our knowledge is, as I believe, only an island in an infinite sea of ignorance, how can we in our short lifetime find satisfaction in exploring our little island? How can we persuade ourselves to be exhilarated by our meager knowledge and yet not be discouraged by the ocean vistas? ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting.
The woods are acres of sticks: I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. ~ Annie Dillard

An afternoon drive from Los Angeles will take you up into the high mountains, where eagles circle above the forests and the cold blue lakes, or out over the Mojave Desert, with its weird vegetation and immense vistas. Not very far away are Death Valley, and Yosemite, and Sequoia Forest with its giant trees which were growing long before the Parthenon was built; they are the oldest living things in the world. One should visit such places often, and be conscious, in the midst of the city, of their surrounding presence. For this is the real nature of California and the secret of its fascination; this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth. "You are perfectly welcome," it tells him, "during your short visit. Everything is at your disposal. Only, I must warn you, if things go wrong, don't blame me. I accept no responsibility. I am not part of your neurosis. Don't cry to me for safety. There is no home here. There is no security in your mansions or your fortresses, your family vaults or your banks or your double beds. Understand this fact, and you will be free. Accept it, and you will be happy. ~ Christopher Isherwood

THIS ISN'T CHINA

Hold me close
and tell me what the world is like
I don't want to look outside
I want to depend on your eyes
and your lips
I don't want to feel anything
but your hand
on the old raw bumper
I don't want to feel anything else
If you love the dead rocks
and the huge rough pine trees
Ok I like them too
Tell me if the wind
makes a pretty sound
in the billion billion needles
I'll close my eyes and smile
Tell me if it's a good morning
or a clear morning
Tell me what the fuck kind of morning
it is
and I'll buy it
And get the dog
to stop whining and barking
This isn't China
nobody's going to eat it
It's just going to get fed and petted
Ok where were we?
Ok go if you must.
I'll create the cosmos
by myself
I'll let it all stick to me
every fucking pine needle
And I'll broadcast my affection
from this shaven dome
360 degrees
to all the dramatic vistas
to all the mists and snows
that moves across
the shining mountains
to the women bathing
in the stream
and combing their hair
on the roofs
to the voiceless ones
who have petitioned me
from their surprising silence
to the poor in the heart
(oh more and more to them)
to all the thought-forms
and leaking mental objects
that you get up here
at the end of your ghostly l ~ Leonard Cohen

Bicycling beyond the Divide did what all great books do: it told me about me. In its tale of a journey made by two different men-both of them Daryl Farmer-this book offers us not only moving vistas and meaningful people, but also hope, that rarest of literary commodities these days. I didn't want this to end. ~ Bret Lott

To You"

What is more beautiful than night
and someone in your arms
that's what we love about art
it seems to prefer us and stays

if the moon or a gasping candle
sheds a little light or even dark
you become a landscape in a landscape
with rocks and craggy mountains

and valleys full of sweaty ferns
breathing and lifting into the clouds
which have actually come low
as a blanket of aspirations' blue

for once not a melancholy color
because it is looking back at us
there's no need for vistas we are one
in the complicated foreground of space

the architects are most courageous
because it stands for all to see
and for a long long time just as
the words "I'll always love you"

impulsively appear in the dark sky
and we are happy and stick by them
like a couple of painters in neon allowing
the light to glow there over the river ~ Frank O'Hara

In spite of the fact that religion looks backward to revealed truth while science looks forward to new vistas and discoveries, both activities produce a sense of awe and a curious mixture of humility and arrogance in their practitioners. All great scientists are inspired by the subtlety and beauty of the natural world that they are seeking to understand. Each new subatomic particle, every unexpected object, produces delight and wonderment. In constructing their theories, physicists are frequently guided by arcane concepts of elegance in the belief that the universe is intrinsically beautiful. ~ Paul Davies

The breath had become as much a trick as breathing. Things were not dual merely, but multiple. I had become a cage of mirrors reflecting vacuity. But vacuity once stoutly posited I was at home and what is called creation was merely a job of filling up holes. The trolley conveniently carried me about from place to place and in each little side pocket of the great vacuum I dropped a ton of poems to wipe out the idea of annihilation. I had ever before me boundless vistas. I began to live in the vista, like a microscopic speck on the lens of a giant telescope. There was no night in which to rest. It was perpetual starlight on the arid surface of dead planets. Now and then a lake black as marble in which I saw myself walking amidst brilliant orbs of lights. So low hung the stars and so dazzling was the light they shed, that it seemed as if the universe were only about to be born. What rendered the impression stronger was that I was alone; not only were there no animals, no trees, no other beings, but there was not even a blade of grass, not even a dead root. In that violet incandescent light witihout even the suggestion of a shadow motion itself seemed to be absent. It was like a blaze of pure consciousness, thought become God. And God, for the first time in my knowledge, was dean-shaven. I was also clean-shaven, flawless, deadly accurate. I saw my image in the marble black lakes and it was diapered with stars. Stars, stars... like a clout between the eyes and all remembrance fast ~ Henry Miller

Can I tell you something about Seattle? Everyone there is a filthy liar. They're all, 'Don't move to Seattle - it's so rainy!' And yet every time I've been there, a tiny amount of rain falls before the whole sky explodes into rainbows and sunlight. Seattleites mean to hog up all the stunning vistas and good coffee and flowering bushes for themselves. Bet on it. ~ Jen Lancaster

There's another aspect about the Seventies. Blazing Saddles, as wonderful as it was, sort of hurt the Western. It made such fun of them, that you almost couldn't take them seriously from that point on. That's why only Westerns that had the stink of Watergate or Vietnam could be taken seriously. There were so few Westerns made since then, from the Eighties on, that the few directors who did were so pleased with themselves and so happy to have the opportunity that they got lost in visuals, they got lost in the vistas and the pretty scenery. ~ Quentin Tarantino

Perhaps a great love is never returned. ~ Dag Hammarskjold

Vision encompasses vast vistas outside the realm of the predictable, the safe, the expected. ~ Charles R. Swindoll

The light that illumines it, and reveals to a man the cathedral of his soul, can be of many strengths – from a candle to a sun – but it burns on one fuel only: his integrity. The vision contains an element of eternity that has nothing to do with time, but everything to do with the width and breadth of his life. It is measurable, but indivisible. Betrayed, it will avenge itself. The action would contradict both it and a man's ineradicable knowledge of it, leaving him, should he survive the cataclysm, a mechanical, insensate manqué, drained of all future capacity for the sublime and earthly joy. Betrayed, it will become his worst nemesis, and he the impotent enemy of the implacable justice of its memory. Animate, it can make him maddeningly intolerant and insufferably imperial, together contemptuous of lesser souls and indifferent to them. It could cause him to say to others, should he be provoked to speak to them in his thoughts: You think in terms of nooks and crannies, of niches and pigeonholes, of ruffles and fringes; I think in terms of vistas and frescoes, of oceans and continents, peopled by gods, heroes, and myself. ~ Edward Cline

The common baron caterpillar did not, for example, anticipate the benefits of camouflage. Elephants no sooner considered in advance the potential rewards of growing large ears than the artic rabbit contemplated the profit of shrinking theirs. Encystment was not a survival strategy devised by protozoa, bacteria, and many species of nematodes because they foretasted some future hardship and made preparations when times were good and danger was rare. Ancestral wildebeest did not carefully plot out their species' enormous migratory patterns because of an innate love of travel and a fondness of new vistas. ~ John Zande

They climb the mountain like beasts, stupid and sweating; it seems that no one bothered to tell them that there are beautiful vistas along the way. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If books were roads, some would be made for driving quickly - details are scant, and what details there are appear drab - but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be make for walking - the trajectory of the road mattering far less than the vistas these roads might afford. The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel. ~ Peter Mendelsund

Throughout the open space, and a two-story fireplace. The bedrooms all have mountain vistas, and the patio has a multimillion-dollar view of a great, green, tree-studded lawn. Edmund Washburn, a big teddy bear of a man, had fired up the ~ James Patterson

Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn, A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding; And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away. ~ Walt Whitman

Many of the green places and open spaces that need protecting most today are in our own neighborhoods. In too many places, the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development. ~ Al Gore

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends - books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smokey London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another ... ~ Diane Duane

In that instant when I had seen ... the Star Maker, I had glimpsed, in the very eye of that splendor, strange vistas of being; as though in the depths of the hypercosmical past and the hypercosmical future also, yet coexistent in eternity, lay cosmos beyond cosmos ... ~ Olaf Stapledon

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train.

And it was this that awed him - the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge - movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, ~ Thomas Wolfe

When you're single, your weekend days are wide-open vistas that extend in every direction; in a relationship, they're like the sky over Manhattan: punctured, hemmed in, compressed. ~ Adelle Waldman

It's only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance and begun to understand the great vistas of nonknowledge that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all. ~ Helmut Walcha

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

A map has no vocabulary, no lexicon of precise meanings. It communicates in lines, hues, tones, coded symbols, and empty spaces, much like music. Nor does a map have its own voice. It is many-tongued, a chorus reciting centuries of accumulated knowledge in echoed chants. A map provides no answers. It only suggests where to look: Discover this, reexamine that, put one thing in relation to another, orient yourself, begin here... Sometimes a map speaks in terms of physical geography, but just as often it muses on the jagged terrain of the heart, the distant vistas of memory, or the fantastic landscapes of dreams. ~ Miles Harvey

If I lived anywhere else for the sheer love of it, it would only be farther and farther north, chasing the boreal up to the Yukon or the Northwest Territories. There's something about living beside a great stretch of forest, both as participant and as witness, that is endlessly absorbing, at once enchanting and distressing. The former because there are vistas and qualities of light in the spaces of the everyday that are otherworldly, requiring an absolute halting of all activity and an undivided attention to just that light at that time. The latter because there is an incredible amount to learn to feel as though you have some small right to be here, holding fast on the patch of ground you stand on. ~ Jenna Butler

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough