"I led by three or four feet, with Biggy (John Biglow) surging closer on each stroke. I hated him in those last few seconds; he was the only reason my guts were being strewn over the water like an oil slick ... I pressed one last time, and looked at the finish-line flagman. In that instant the flag jumped down and then up. The up stroke, identifying the second place finisher, was for me. John Biglow was the victor. I stared into the green-brown water watching my bloody soul drop through the depths, slowly rocking back and forth, occasionally glinting in the light, and then finally disappearing."
Light quotes
Light
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Light quotes (page 91 of 446)
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"The truth isn't always a blinding light. Sometimes it's a deep and dazzling darkness, that illuminates - and burns - just as surely."
"In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time."
"What would you not have accomplished if you had been free?" "Possibly nothing at all; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced — from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination."
"I've been accused of darkness by my inner light."
"Somebody who has been in a very bad wreck is going to be very conscientious about not speeding through a yellow light... You just learn so many good lessons when you go through a failed marriage."
"Vegemite is pretty good if you've got the right spread of butter and you spread your Vegemite light. Sometimes people spread it too thick and it's not the right consistency for it to be what it is."
"No need to fear death. There will be a tunnel and light."
"It is increasingly clear to me that my art relates more and more to a sublimation of my closeness to the natural world, it's events, light itself, and the positive it is a personal expression based on observation and reaction, that I am not able to define except in terms of the work itself."
"In order to cure a feeling of malaise, you have to throw light on it."
"The fixation of the theater in one language--written words, music, lights, noises--betokens its imminent ruin."
"If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little."
"People ask what those women saw in me. Let's face it, I wasn't a bad-looking stud. But that's not it. It's the music; it's standing up there under the lights. A lot of women just flip; looks have nothing to do with it. You call Mick Jagger good-looking?"
"The poet's function is to make his imagination . . . become the light in the mind of others. His role, in short, is to help people to live their lives."
"Let the men do their duty & the women will be such wonders; the female life lives from the light of the male: see a man's female dependants, you know the man."
"The atoms of Democritus And Newton's particles of light Are sands upon the Red Sea shore, Where Israel's tents do shine so bright."
"What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate, and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death."
"To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth."
"No sky is heavy if the heart be light"
"I am not sure one is capable of reflecting absurdity without having a strong sense of meaning. Absurdity makes sense only against a meaningful background. It is the deeper meaning that is shedding light on the absurdity. There must be a vanish point, a metaphysical horizon if you will where absurdity and meaning merge."