Weightless Quotes

Makina had never seen snow before and the first thing that struck her as she stopped to watch the weightless crystals raining down was that something was burning. One came to perch on her eyelashes; it looked like a stack of crosses or the map of a palace, a solid and intricate marvel at any rate, and when it dissolved a few seconds later she wondered how it was that some things in the world - some countries, some people - could seem eternal when everything was actually like that miniature ice palace: one-of-a-kind, precious, fragile. ~ Yuri Herrera

I have left behind what tethered me to the lake. The sadness. The self-pity. The dark tentacles of the murky sea monster only I could see. And I have come to appreciate the ocean. How the sun and salt together can leave things weightless, easy, and smooth around the edges. Like sea glass and driftwood. ~ Wendy Wunder

Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam - ~ Marisha Pessl

The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, ever-changing clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and the woods a fresh deep blue. ~ Karen Blixen

Vert skating was the kind of skating that was done in pools, where you could get airborne and be weightless. The other style, which is what I did, was called free style, which was tricks you could do on flat ground. ~ Rodney Mullen

We both thrive in the late hours, appreciate its sad taste and never get in the way of each other's dreams, even though Lude just wants more money, better parties and prettier girls and I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap.
Probably not even real. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

When you look at the Earth from the vantage point of space, our planet looks like a little blue marble. Seeing our world from that vantage point cognitively changes you. My orbital shift happened after breaking bread with my space station crewmates and my shuttle crewmates. it showed me how close we are as countries, as races, as a species. I marveled that on Earth we have all these distances and separations and geographic boundaries, but they vanish quickly in the weightless interior of the space station. ~ Leland Melvin

Swimming is my salvation. Ask me in the middle of winter, or at the end of a grueling day, or after a long stretch at the computer, where I'd most like to be, and the answer is always the same: in the water, gliding weightless, slicing a silent trail through whatever patch of blue I can find. ~ Lynn Sherr

Being confined to a wheelchair doesn't bother me as my mind is free to roam the universe, but it felt wonderful to be weightless. ~ Stephen Hawking

When I float weightless back to the surface, I'm imagining I'm becoming someone else. It's probably the decompression. ~ "Major" Motoko Kusanagi Ghost In The Shell

The astronaut in his technical and complex machine, effortlessly orbiting the earth, alone and weightless in the emptiness of space, is the perfect symbol of man today. Despite our domination of the forces of nature and our highly developed technology, we have come to feel ourselves as empty, alienated, anxious, and lonely, without any real inner purpose or meaning to our existence. ~ Stephen Batchelor

Bits have unique properties, then, that we can use to our advantage: they're super-small, super-fast, easily acquired and created and copied and shared in near-infinite quantity, protected from the ravages of time, and free from the limitations of distance and space. In practice, though, bits reveal several paradoxes: they're weightless, but they weigh us down; they don't take up any space, but they always seem to pile up; they're created in an instant, but they can last forever; they move quickly, but they can waste our time. ~ Mark Hurst

He first saw her in a ray of sunshine. She was dancing and singing in a forest clearing, her golden hair sparkling as it swirled around her. Her voice was the very essence of a happy, sunny day distilled into song. She was as weightless on her toes as golden motes in a drowsy beam, floating their way up to the ceiling. ~ Liz Braswell

I should want to spit at him. Bounce his head off the wall. Tear at his face. But I don't feel angry, I feel nothing. Hollow and weightless. I dig my nails into the palms of my hands just to feel the sensation. ~ Caz Frear

It would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long strings of ones and zeroes, then what kind of creature could be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level, at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name -- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of history of the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to sort of a standard gospel tune, And the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Pain flared in his lower back - so sharp and cold he thought Khione the snow goddess had touched him. Next to his ear, Michael Varus snarled, "Born a Roman, die a Roman." The tip of a golden sword jutted through the front of Jason's shirt, just below his rib cage. Jason fell to his knees. Piper's scream sounded miles away. He felt like he'd been immersed in salty water - his body weightless, his head swaying. ~ Rick Riordan

Weightless (in air), alcohol units 8 (but in-flight so canceled out by altitude), cigarettes 0 (desperate: no-smoking seat), calories 1 million (entirely made up of things would never have dreamt of putting in self's mouth were they not on in-flight tray), farts from traveling companion 38 (so far), variations in fart aroma 0. ~ Helen Fielding

Giving Birth by Marcus Amaker

do you remember
when the earth was just a baby,
settling in its skin,
safe in the arms of mother nature
with fire breathing from within.
you were not shackled by time
and life roamed around your heart
with the weight of dinosaurs,
leaving footprints in your lungs.
and the first time you saw the sun
you could barely breathe
because the possibility of endless light
planted a seed
so you admire the strength of trees,
who naturally grew into
unwavering beauty,
staring down the mouth of
time.

do you remember being 11 years old
when your mother told you
"birth is more painful than dying"
and you burst with dreams
without even trying,
seeking light in your heart,
where shadows now rest
comfortably next to fear.
but you come out of the woods clear,
with nature's breath
under your tongue,
and a weightless bliss,
no longer scared of
death. ~ Marcus Amaker

At this point we must remind ourselves that the idea that the world is made up of weightless atoms surprises us because we have experienced the weight of things. Similarly, we could not admire the lightness of language if we had not also learned to admire language endowed with weight. ~ Italo Calvino

The pictures achieve something rarely articulated about the metaphysical state of swimming: The body, immersed, feels amplified, heavier and lighter at the same time. Weightless yet stronger. ~ Leanne Shapton

I've lived my whole life as a burden. She makes me feel weightless. ~ Martin Pistorius

There is no gravity in space. There is gravity almost everywhere in space. It is reduced but we can't escape gravity because it is a fundamental force of the universe. Astronauts seem weightless because they are orbiting Earth. They are falling towards Earth but they are moving sufficiently sideways to miss it. So they are constantly falling but never landing. ~ James Egan

Researchers can measure what kind of angles your legs take up during the day when they're just trailing around behind you in weightless conditions, and what kind of impacts you feel during your exercise. They're going to compare that with what we do on the ground. ~ John L. Phillips

Matthias was in the dark. And it wasn't the kind of dark that came with a room that didn't have any lights on or when you were walking around at night in the country. This was not even the kind you got when you shut your eyes and wrapped your head in a blanket.

This was the one that seeped in through your skin and filled the spaces between your molecules, the one that polluted your flesh into a permanent state of rotting, the one that wiped clean your past and your future, suspending you in a choking, adhesive solution of sorrow and despair.

He was not alone in this horrible prison.

As he writhed in the weightless void, others did the same, their voices mixing with his own as pleas escaped from cracked lips and the endless begging for mercy rose and fell like the breathing of a great beast. From time to time, he was chosen for special attention, clawed monsters with fanged maws latching on, yanking and pulling. The wounds they imparted always healed as quickly as they were wrought, providing an ever-fresh canvas for their masticating artwork.

Time had no meaning; nor did age. And he knew he was never getting out.

This was his due.

This was his eternal payment for the way he had lived his life: He had earned this place in Hell through his sins upon the earth, and yet still, he argued the unfairness to the others he was trapped with. Tough debate, though. There was little on the good side to support his bid for f ~ J.R. Ward

He could feel himself gliding down like the sail of a weightless craft, forever plunging into the great beyond below where mermaids sing and summon their lovers home, further down into the depths of some complacent serenity, further down where thoughts float away and never return and the lightness is so grand that there is no other worldly place imaginable, for there is no world left to be
considered. There is only the soul, free from the prison of the body, and it is released to travel
another millennium through time, carrying with it the progress and industry gathered from the
mind previously occupied. ~ Matthew Chase Stroud

How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us. ~ Sebastian Barry

I'd prefer to rise in love , she thinks - lifting up to the clouds , not plunging to the earth. She pictures herself , weightless and adored , delirious in ecstasy. ~ Jessie Burton

She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I still feel like I'm jumping on an elevator
weightless and pulled down at the same time. ~ Zoe Trope

Walking across campus made me feel sad, and I thought to myself, I wasn't happy there. Then, after reading, we walked past Butler Library. It was dark, but the light inside illuminated the windows. Students were reading and working, and those lit windows gave me a wonderful, weightless feeling. I understood for the first time how happy I had been there - in the library. ~ Siri Hustvedt

When we arrived, my sisters pulled the wheelchair out of the trunk and placed it next to the car door. They opened the door and Jennifer leaned down and with one swift motion lifted me up like a nearly weightless child and placed me in the chair. I laughed it off.
"My sister's strong. She's really strong," I boasted on her behalf.
Sara, Katherine, and Jennifer were laughing the whole time because I didn't realize how scrawny I was, how much weight I had lost. Jennifer could pick me up with no problem because I practically weighed nothing at all. ~ Noah Galloway

Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the life, the sky, the flowers, the sounds. When you live without your own language you feel weightless and, at the same time, overloaded. Your breathe another type of air, at a different altitude. You are always aware of the difference. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

And he leans in, so carefully. Breathing
and not breathing and hearts beating
between us and he's so close, he's so close and I can't feel my legs anymore. I can't feel my fingers or the cold or the emptiness of this room because all I feel is him, everywhere,filling everything and he whispers
"Please."
He says "Please don't shoot me for this."
And he kisses me.
His lips are softer than anything I've ever known, soft like a first snowfall, like biting into cotton candy, like melting and floating and being weightless in water. It's sweet, it's
so effortlessly sweet.
And then it changes.
"Oh God - "
He kisses me again, this time stronger,
desperate, like he has to have me, like he's dying to memorize the feel of my lips against his own. The taste of him is making me crazy; he's all heat and desire and peppermint and I want more. I've just begun reeling him in, pulling him into me when he breaks away.
He's breathing like he's lost his mind andhe's looking at me like something has brokeninside of him, like he's woken up to find that
his nightmares were just that, that they never existed, that it was all just a bad dream that felt far too real but now he's awake and he's safe and everything is going to be okay and
I'm falling.
I'm falling apart and into his heart and I'm a disaster. ~ Tahereh Mafi

The boat heaves and plunges, temporarily weightless awash. Juliet believes it is unsinkable. She also believes that taxis and buses never crash, that every movie that ever makes it to the theatre must be objectively good, and that her own hands clasped in a certain special formation across her waist will act as effectively as a seatbelt in a moment of emergency. ~ Carrie Snyder

I wanna feel reckless
I wanna live it up, just because
I wanna feel weightless
Cause that would be enough ~ All Time Low

They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him."
Even then, her words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and now he realized it was only a matter of chance that Tereza loved him and not his friend Z. Apart from her consummated love for Tomas, there were, in the realm of pos­sibility, an infinite number of unconsummated loves for other men.
We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspir­ing, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.
Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not "Es muss sein!" (It must be so), but rather "Es konnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise). ~ Milan Kundera

For a moment we are weightless, eyes open and locked underwater, flowers drawn down with us, swirling around us in a current of white bubbles. My hair floats around us both like black silk. His hands are still around my waist, mine pressed against his bare chest. My lamp drifts between us.
Aladdin plants his feet against the bottom of the pool and kicks off, pushing us upward to burst through the surface. He gasps in air and shakes the wet hair from his eyes. Without pulling away, we float in silence, and I cannot take my gaze from him. Water runs down his cheeks and lips, dripping from his jaw. A lock of his hair is stuck to his forehead, and I gently lift it away, curling it around my finger before letting it go.
"What are we doing?" he whispers, pulling me closer.
I cannot reply. I don't trust my own voice. He brings his forehead down to rest against mine, and everything outside this pool and this moment ceases to exist. All that matters is the gentle sound of our breathing, our reflections on the water, the feel of his hands around me. ~ Jessica Khoury

I began to understand that dancing well had everything to do with believing you could. Like those dreams of flying- dipping gracefully through the air in your weightless body- if in your sleep, you stopped to think about it for more than half a second, you'd crash like a sack of dead ducks onto the roof of a church. ~ Laura Kasischke

Falling in love isn't about expectations or an outcome.

It is about the sheer, weightless, joyous terror of falling into the universal embrace. ~ Joyce Wycoff

The Relics"

I slipped them into my friend's palm  -  
the tiny crucifix, and dove,
from off my mother's pendant watch  -  
and I asked her to walk them up through the brush
toward timberline, and find a place
to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now,
she writes, "I walked up the canyon at dusk,
warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon,
came to an outcrop, above a steep
drop  -  far below, a seasonal
creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder
and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the
love in the world, and I sent the talismans
flying off the cliff. They were so small,
and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or
heard them land." My mother is where
I cannot find her, she is gone beyond
recall, she lies in her sterling shapes
light as the most weightless bone in the body, her
stirrup bone, which was ground up
and sown into the sea. I do not know
what a soul is, I think of it
as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she
is wild now with it, she touches and is
touched by no one knows  -  down, or
droppings of a common nighthawk,
root of bird's foot fern, antenna of
Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the
huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was
something deeply right about
the physical elements  -  atoms, and cells,
and marrow  -  of my mother's body,
when I was young, and now her deli ~ Sharon Olds

It is difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son is not the legend of one who didn't want to be loved. When he was a child everyone in the house loved him. He grew up knowing nothing different and, being a child, he grew accustomed to their tenderness of heart. But once he became a youth he wanted to cast all that aside. He wouldn't have been able to say it, but even when he spent the whole day wandering around outdoors he didn't want the dogs with him ever again because they loved him as well; because looking in their eyes he could read watchfulness, sympathy, expectation, and concern; because when they were with him there was nothing he could do that didn't either delight them or hurt their feelings. But what he was aiming for at the time was that indifference of heart which early in the morning out in the fields sometimes seized him inwardly and with such purity that he would start to run in order to leave himself no time or breath to be more than a weightless moment in the morning's returning consciousness. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word. ~ Alan Lightman

Instead I often felt unusually light and swift-paced, as if I were on a weightless bicycle and sprinting through the star world. ~ Saul Bellow

Weightless inside a gem, her heart unchained like a pardoned prisoner. ~ Bibiana Krall

It is a hot summer day in Tennessee in the midst of the sixth decade of this century. The girl has climbed the fence to get to the swimming hole she has visited so many summers of her life in the time before this part of the land was enclosed. She stands now at the edge of it. Her body is sticky with heat. The surface of the water moves slightly. Sunlight shimmers and dances in a green reflection that seems as she stares at it to pull her in even before her skin is wet with it. Drops of water on the infant's head. All the body immersed for baptism. Do these images come to her as she sinks into the coolness? The washing of hands before Sunday's midday meal. All our sins washed away. Water was once the element for purification. But at the bottom of this pool, There is no telling what is there now. This is what the girl's father will say to her finally: corroded cans of chemical waste, some radioactive substances. That was why they put the fence there. She is not thinking of that now. The words have not yet been said, and so for her no trouble exists here. The water holds up her body. She is weightless in this fulsome element, the waves her body makes embracing her with their own benediction. Beneath her in the shadowy green, she feels the depth of the pond. In this coolness as the heat mercifully abates, her mind is set free, to dream as the water dreams. ~ Susan Griffin

Flying was just what she did, what she loved to do. In the air her problems dropped away and she felt weightless and free. A little bit like how she felt with Parker, actually. ~ Jill Shalvis

She never worried about falling; such a thing was never possible in this weightless world ~ Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

You're weightless. The world hasn't touched you yet. You're not heavy with the weight of pain, and guilt, and selfishness. ~ Kandi Steiner

I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Fog spilled from the heights of San Francisco like the liquid it almost was. On better days it spread across the bay and took over Oakland street by street, a thing you saw coming, a change you watched happening to you, a season on the move. Where it encountered redwoods, the most local of rains fell. Where it found open space, its weightless pale passage seemed both endless and like the end of all things. It was a temporary sadness, the more beautiful for being sad, the more precious for being temporary. It was the slow song in minor that the rock-and-roll sun then chased away. ~ Jonathan Franzen

For the first time, I don't feel the giant hands pressing around my heart. Instead, I feel weightless, as if someone has untied a knot inside me and I am slowly unfolding. ~ Stewart Lewis

The water you kids were playing in, he said, had probably been to Africa and the North Pole. Genghis Khan or Saint Peter or even Jesus may have drunk it. Cleopatra might have bathed in it. Crazy Horse might have watered his pony with it. Sometimes water was liquid. Sometimes it was rock hard- ice. Sometimes it was soft- snow. Sometimes it was visible but weightless- clouds. And sometimes it was completely invisible- vapor- floating up into the the sky like the soals of dead people. There was nothing like water in the world, Jim said. It made the desert bloom but also turned rich bottomland into swamp. Without it we'd die, but it could also kill us, and that was why we loved it, even craved it, but also feared it. Never take water forgranted, Jim said. Always cherish it. Always beware of it. ~ Jeannette Walls

If Lana Walters had given any thought to dying, she'd have assumed it would hurt more. Instead, when the bus hit her, the lights simply went out. One moment of inattention and then, nothing. Next she knew, she was weightless, flying above Boston. ~ Mae Archer

Mankind, ignorant of the truths that lie within every human being, looked outward - pushed ever outward. What mankind hoped to learn in its outward push was who was actually in charge of all creation, and what all creation was all about.
Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.
It flung them like stones.
These unhappy agents found that what had already been found in abundance on Earth - a nightmare of meaninglessness without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remain terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values.

For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible.

Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater ~ Charles A. Lindbergh

The feeling it gave me was an odd combination of weightless self-pity and excitement. I understood my life was meaningless, and this knowledge freed me up to accomplish absolutely anything. ~ Matt De La Pena

Until recently the locus of sexual fantasy was peopled with images actually glimpsed or were sensations actually felt, or private imaginings taken from suggestions in the real world, a dream well where weightless images from it floated, transformed by imagination. It prepared children, with these hints and traces of other people's bodies, to become adults and enter the landscape of adult sexuality and meet the lover face to face. Lucky men and women are able to keep a pathway clear to that dream well, peopling it with scenes and images that meet them as they get older, created with their own bodies mingling with other bodies; they choose a lover because of a smell from a coat, a way of walking, the shape of a lip, belong in their imagined interior and resonate back in time deep into the bones that recall childhood and early adolescent imagination. ~ Naomi Wolf

It's my secret, my saviour. It's reliable. It saves me from the unpredictable mind, where the thoughts are a cesspool, swirling, eddying with rip tide. When I starve, the sinking, pressing, black sadness lifts off me and I feel weightless, empty, light. No racing thoughts, no need to move, no reasons to hide in the dark. When I throw up, I purge all the fears, paranoia, the thoughts. The eating disorder gives me comfort. I couldn't let it go if I tried.

It is what I need so badly, a homemade replacement for what a psychiatrist would prescribe for me if he knew: a mood stabilizer. My eating disorder is the first thing I have found that works. It becomes indispensable as soon as it begins. I am calm in my starvation, all my apprehensions focused. No need to control my mind-I control my body, so my mood levels out. I live in single-minded pursuit of something very specific: thinness, death. I act with intention, discipline. I am free. ~ Marya Hornbacher

His house of cards had collapsed, and he lay among the ruins - but he was free. He felt euphoric, weightless, years younger. The only thing he missed was Indiana, but she too belonged to the past; she too had been carried off by the wind. ~ Isabel Allende

Riding high and above the waves on extemporaneous notions of an afterlife, Michael brought one foot forward and let it dangle over the roof's edge. He knew that he did not have much time before the other would follow. Some patients below could see the figure atop the building from
the courtyard. They started to rile with anticipation, their irate murmurings incomprehensible. A
groundskeeper looked up to see what justified the commotion. Michael could hear the shouts
from below. He almost toppled when the wind picked up again, but recovered and kept one foot
dangling with the other anchored to the roof. The hoots came louder now, almost calling him
toward them like sirens guiding ships in the night. From below it was impossible to make out the
face of the balancing figurine now poised in suspended descent. Another gust came. He closed
his eyes, felt the levity manifesting, and felt the complete freedom inside. He could feel himself
gliding down like the sail of a weightless craft, forever plunging into the great beyond, below
where mermaids sing and summon their lovers home, further down into the depths of some
complacent serenity, further down where thoughts float away and never return and the lightness
is so grand that there is no other worldly place imaginable, for there is no world left to be
considered. There is only the soul, free from the prison of the body, and it is released to travel
another millennium ~ Matthew Chase Stroud

When a person becomes happy, the world becomes lighter! If all becomes happy, the world will be weightless! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Weightless and endless. Timeless and restless. Hopelessly breathless ~ Amy Harmon

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it, scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laden.

- Maiden Name ~ Philip Larkin

What is a shadow? It is the self without a face or a name, all outline and no feature, the self on the verge of being erased. It is the incidental child of matter and light. Look how it spreads itself on the ground, weary but weightless, unable to leave a trace. ~ Conchitina Cruz

Silence can be as irrepressible as laughter. And it can accumulate, like weightless snowflakes. It can collapse a ceiling. "I'm not sure," Julia said. Jacob ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Those who floated in the ark were weightless and had weightless thoughts. They were neither hungry nor satisfied. They had no happiness and no fear of losing it. Their heads were not filled with petty official calculations, intrigues, promotions, and their shoulders were not burdened with concerns about housing, fuel, bread, and clothes for the children. Love, which from time immemorial has been the delight and the torment of humanity, was powerless to communicate to them its thrill or its agony. Their prison terms were so long that no one even thought of the time when he would go out into freedom. Men with exceptional Intellect, education, and experience, but too devoted to their families to have much of themselves left over for their friends, here belonged only to friends. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap. It's probably not even real. ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do. ~ Philip Levine

Fireflies and Fame
As a child I would collect fireflies,
stuff them in a Coke bottle
capped with a wad of cotton
from my asthma medicine.
Tired of being just a collector
I turned Ted Bundy,
peeled off their wings,
then lined up their weightless bodies
into an elegant cursive script
spelling my name.
I stomped them all
like an Indian on a warpath
and for fifteen seconds of fame
my name lit up in Vegas neon
just like Liberace's. ~ Beryl Dov

My first breath was just ... it just seemed impossible that you could actually breathe underwater. I knew in my mind it was possible, but actually experiencing it was such a gulp of joy and I feel it every time I go under the ocean. I love doing it, to be able to feel weightless, to spin on one finger, to do somersaults, to be like a graceful ballerina - even with a huge tank on your back you can do the most extraordinary things. ~ Sylvia Earle

The living world had disappeared. Darkness fell around us, black, weightless, and absolute. We were in the Fold. ~ Leigh Bardugo

If a dream stubbornly returns from seemingly weightless nights; then give him your trust. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

This is what I know: memory is the same as water. It permeates and saturates. Quenches and satiates. It can hold you up or pull you under; render you weightless or drown you. It is tangible, but elusive. ~ T. Greenwood

No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.
But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.
Birth stripped our birthright from us,
tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us. ~ Adrienne Rich

We labored to understand before we learned how dear knowledge had become, that in the war between nations to dominate so much new territory, ideas had transmuted into a new currency recognizable to all and immediately transferable. Intellectual property rights now serve as an ephemeral gold, weightless and invisible, priceless artifacts one can slip into the folds of his or her brain and smuggle anywhere, undetected. ~ Hugh Howey

One thing is certain: your essence in my life is essential. It has been from the beginning. Even when I was a kid, it was as if I were waiting for you to enter the picture. Starting over in a new country, adjusting to the strange calm that takes hold when you've left everything that defines you, I had the feeling of weightless suspension. It stayed with me until the day I met you. ~ Louisa Hall

Via Negativa

Sometimes it's too hard with words or dark or silence.
Tonight I want a prayer of high-rouged cheekbones
and light: a litany of back-lit figures,
lithe and slim, draped in fabrics soft and wrinkleless and pale
as onion slivers. Figures that won't stumble or cough:
sleek kid-gloved Astaires who'll lift
ladies with glamorous sweeps in their hair -
They'll bubble and glitter like champagne.
They'll whisper and lean and waltz and wink effortlessly
as figurines twirling in music boxes, as skaters in their dreams.

And the prayer will not be crowded.
You'll hear each click of staccato heel
echo through the glassy ballrooms - too few shimmering skirts;
the prayer will seem to ache
for more. But the prayer will not ache.
When we enter, its chandeliers and skies
will blush with pleasure. Inside
we will be weightless, and our goodness will not matter
in a prayer so light, so empty it will float. ~ Mary Szybist

Dead Butterfly
By Ellen Bass
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend's house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived - so briefly - in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?
This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar. ~ Ellen Bass

But was this the touted bliss of love that she'd read about in Madame Sand's spicy novels? It was not the crushing sensation she'd expected, but rather feathery and weightless. How lightly had his hand covered hers! And how much it assured: to keep her safe, to guide and delight. Such a simple act, holding hands. We are a pair, it said. Two in harmony against this inattentive, suffering world. ~ Enid Shomer

The warm water makes me feel weightless. It carries my burdens for me, understanding that I need a moment to relieve my shoulders of this weight. To close my eyes and relax. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Amar loosed a breath. "I understand, you know."
I looked up.
"The forced silence…the voices of this palace."
We stood there, not saying anything. I felt too aware of the space between us. Even with Akaran's secrets spiraling in the shadows of my head, I couldn't ignore the weightless feeling that had gripped me. Standing beside Amar did something to me. Like my center had shifted to make room for him.
"You do not trust me, do you?"
"No," I said. I had no reason to lie. "I told you in the Night Bazaar that trust is won in actions and time. Not words."
"I wish you trusted me."
"I don't place my faith in wishes," I said. "How can I? I can't even--"
I bit back the rest of my words. I can't even see your face. Perhaps Gupta was lying and he really did have a disfiguring scar. Amar moved closer until we were only a hand space apart.
"What?" he coaxed, his voice hovering between a growl and a question.
"I can't even see your face."
A strange chill still curled off of him like smoke and even though the glass garden was teeming with little lights, shades veiled him.
"Is that what you want?" he said. "Would it make you trust me?"
"It would be a start."
"You are impossible to please."
I said nothing. Amar leaned forward, and I felt the silken trails of his hood brush across my neck. My breath constricted. "Is that what you want? An unguarded gaze can spill a thousand secrets."
"I would know them anyway," I s ~ Roshani Chokshi

Energy in expression is silent. The knowing of what no words can say. A chasm of gravity could ever hold,; Weightless, it is part of all living things ~ S.L. Northey

The real pleasure was having the chance to enjoy being weightless, and the other was to spend some time looking out at this beautiful Earth that we're all lucky to inhabit. ~ Robert Crippen

They were slowing down. The noise of the rope as they reached the full extent of the jump sounded like the ricochet crack of the sail on a tall ship. And now they were accelerating again, up, up and suddenly they were hanging suspended: weightless in space. No up or down. The feeling of disorientation absolute. ~ Natasha Mostert

Max: [...] I just sort of wish that last night's dream balloon never came down to earth again:
Alice: Why? What happened on the balloon?
Max: Oh, you don't remember? Would it help if I reminded you?
Alice: It's not just helpful, it's important. Crucial to research as a matter of fa-.
Alice: Sometimes when you kiss me, I become completley weightless. ~ Lucy Keating

For a minute, I can feel it: the sense of peace as my mind goes quiet, like I'm already dead. I am weightless and free. Nothing and no one to fear, not even myself. ~ Jennifer Niven

I squeeze her and she laughs and looks up at me, "Jules, you incorrigible rake," she scolds, and then gives me a smile that makes me feel we're in zero gravity. Floating inches above the floor. weightless and timeless, and I wish this song would last forever. ~ Amy Plum

For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then

the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
"Don't love you life
too much," it said,

and vanished
into the world. ~ Mary Oliver

Floating in the void free of gravity I made my way along the side of the ship. I listened to my own breaths. It was so dark and I was so weightless that I had to look for my bubbles to be sure which way was up. I swam backward a little away from the boat and into outer space and waved my arm through the water. Sure enough the phosphorescents appeared trailing my movement like the tail of a shooting star. I let myself tip upside down and floated there watching the gentle snowstorm marveling that a world of such strangeness existed here all the time just under the surface. ~ Elisabeth Eaves

Lucy woke to the sound of rain. A benediction, gently pattering. For the first time in more than a year, her body relaxed. The release of tension was so sudden that for a moment she felt as if she were filled with helium. Weightless. All her sadness and horror sloughed off her frame like the skin of a snake, too confining and gritted and dry to contain her any longer, and she was rising. She was new and clean and lighter than air, and she sobbed with the release of it. And then she woke fully, and it wasn't rain caressing the windows of her home but dust, and the weight of her life came crushing down upon her once again. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Victoria sighed deeply as the clock tower bell chimed midnight.
Light snowflakes, almost weightless, began drifting down from the sky. Tiny, white butterflies danced in the wind among the bare trees.
The two young people turned their eyes up towards the dark sky.
"The fairies are weeping," she whispered.
"What?" asked Ted, looking back at her.
Victoria turned her grey eyes back at him and smiled.
"In the lands of the north they say that when snowflakes fall at midnight, they are the tears of fairies falling on the ground. The fairies are weeping. ~ Carragh Sheridan

Lacey, you don't understand." He felt weightless, benumbed. He had nothing to fight with, not even a blade. "We're totally unarmed. I've seen what he can do." "There are weapons more powerful than guns and knives," the woman replied. Her face held no fear, only a sense of purpose. "It is time for you to see it." "See what?" "What you came to find," said Lacey. "The Passage. ~ Justin Cronin

It is a different sensation than watching the stars while lying in a field, something Bailey has done many times. There are no trees creeping into the edges, and the gentle swaying of the carriage makes him feel almost weightless. And it is incredibly quiet. As the carriage moves along in what seems to be a circular pattern, Bailey can hear nothing but a soft creak and the sound of Poppet breathing next to him. It is as though the entire circus has faded away into the darkness. He glances over at Poppet, who is looking at him instead of the sky. She gives him a grin and then turns away. Bailey wonders if he should ask if she sees anything in the stars. ~ Erin Morgenstern

Moving into the hallway, I make the mistake of looking down. The floor seems to drop out from under me, with nothing solid to support me but my own reflection.
I take a step, watching the sole of my bare left foot meet its twin rising up on the flipside. I get the weirdest sensation that I won't fall as long as I have the reversed images of my own feet to walk on. ~ Graham McNamee

This has been a perfect day," Anne said quietly.
"Almost," Daniel whispered, and then she was in his arms again. He kissed her, but it was different this time. Less urgent. Less fiery. The touch of their lips was achingly soft, and maybe it didn't make her feel crazed, like she wanted to press herself against him and take him within her. Maybe instead he made her feel weightless, as if she could take his hand and float away, just as long as he never stopped kissing her. Her entire body tingled, and she stood on her tiptoes, almost waiting for the moment she left the ground.
And then he broke the kiss, pulling back just far enough to rest his forehead against hers. "There," he said, cradling her face in his hands. "Now it's a perfect day. ~ Julia Quinn

I still dream about being on the space station with the feeling of being weightless. The weightlessness is the most amazing, relaxing and natural feeling. ~ Helen Sharman

When you're moved to find out who you are, study the graves you encounter as you pass by.Inside rest the bones and weightless dust of men once kings and tyrants, wise men, and those who took pride in their noble birth or wealth, their fame, or their beautiful bodies. Yet what good was any of that against time? All mortals come to know Hades in the end. Look toward these to know who you are. ~ Menander

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They're often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway. ~ Anne Lamott

The thought of hovering above the earth, weightless in a lilac sky, appealed to her, in the same way imaginary friends appealed to her, or talking alligators. ~ Sarah Addison Allen