43 Quotes About Imagery

Fear no more, " said Clarissa. Fear no more the heat o' the sun; for the shock of Lady Bruton asking Richard to lunch without her made the moment in which she had stood shiver, as a plant on the river-bed feels the shock of a passing oar and shivers: so she rocked: so she shivered. Millicent Bruton, whose lunch parties were said to be extraordinarily amusing, had not asked her. No vulgar jealousy could separate her from Richard. But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl. Virginia Woolf

In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape being blown away. My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs out of my sleep-starved brain. Jack London

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness. Rick Perlstein

Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand. Geraldine Brooks

...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver. Gustave Flaubert

Night simply drapes itself over the day As if someone had lowered a curtain. The sky glitters and moves, Filled with shooting stars and fireflies. Margarita Engle

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn’t get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution. Unknown

From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of silver and gold, for instance, there was a clear, unhurried tinkling, as if a djinn with a thousand arms was absent-mindedly practising on a xylophone. Unknown

For the first time she could see a man's head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted through the tunnel of his mouth. Zora Neale Hurston

Power is meant to be shared with the goal of empowering others. Hoarded power weakens others and exalts oneself. Power, when grounded in biblical values, serves others by liberating them. It acknowledges that people bear the image of God and treats them in a way that will nurture the development of that image. In so doing, we honor their Creator. Duane Elmer

It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them). Jean Baudrillard

What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced Jean Baudrillard

So overjoyed were they at their deliverance that they laughed aloud, and the Earth seemed to them like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold. Oscar Wilde

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality. John Lennon

Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air. Oscar Wilde

The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond. Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice. So there is magic beyond the Wall after all. George R.r. Martin

...all kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull ... John Geddes

From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order... Mervyn Peake

One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape. . Unknown

It felt as if I’d been teleported to the dark side of the moon, forced to gaze out at the stars and wonder which one I’d come from. Heather Heffner

In the distance Richard could see the skyscrapers of Los Angeles rising out of the ocean; barnacle crusted concrete and steel emerging from crashing waves. Once a symbol of economic might, they were now a macabre monument to the mortality of man. Alexander Ferrick

And it was at that age .. Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river.  I don't know how or when,  no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence,  but from a street I was summoned,  from the branches of night,  abruptly from the others,  among violent fires or returning alone,  there I was without a face and it touched me.  . Pablo Neruda

I've recovered my tenderness by long looking; I'm a Socrates of small fury. The waves bends with the fish. I'm taught As water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole, I can hear light on a dry day. The world is where we fling it; I'm leaving where I am. Theodore Roethke

We didn't talk much, and the silence hung like a silk curtain, light and lovely. Katherine Reay

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky. Janet Fitch

She is so distinct to me, it's as though I had run my hands all over her. Franz Kafka

The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air--a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves. Neil Gaiman

She wanted to reach up to the night and dig her fingers into it, beg it to stay just a little bit longer. Adi Alsaid

Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality. Long, lean, in his face a touch of race I as yet could only sense, he was as cool as the day was cold, as poised as a king or emperor, as remote as the farthest fixed star, as neutral as a proposition of Euclid. And then, just ere our hands met, a twinkle of--oh--such distant and controlled geniality quickened the many tiny wrinkles in the corner of the eyes; the clear blue of the eyes was suffused by an almost colourful warmth; the face, too, seemed similarly to suffuse; the thin lips, harsh-set the instant before, were as gracious as Bernhardt's when she moulds sound into speech. Jack London

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flowers that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write. Eduardo Galeano

Dad and I leave town in the early dark. It's the second Sunday of the holidays, and we pack up the old blue car with enough clothes for summer and hit the road. It's so early he's wiping hills of sand piled in the corners of his eyes. I wipe a few tears from mine. Tears don't pile, though. They grip and cling and slide in salty trails that I taste until the edge of the city. Cath Crowley

The author distinguishes George Washington's leadership from that of another aristocratic general whose temperament was somewhat cold. Unlike him, Washington made the effort to at least appear to suffer with his troops. John Ferling

The ability to get on the air, which was crucial to any reporter’s career, grew precisely as the ability to analyze diminished. David Halberstam

He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook. Sherry Turkle

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm. Juliet Marillier

He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all. Lauren Groff

...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs. Haruki Murakami

Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head. William Gibson

And just as he had tried, on the southern beach, to find again that unique rounded black pebble with the regular little white belt, which she had happened to show him on the eve of their last ramble, so now he did his best to look up all the roadside items that retained her exclamation mark: the special profile of a cliff, a hut roofed with a layer of silvery-gray scales, a black fir tree and a footbridge over a white torrent, and something which one might be inclined to regard as a kind of fatidic prefiguration: the radial span of a spider’s web between two telegraph wires that were beaded with droplets of mist. She accompanied him: her little boots stepped rapidly, and her hands never stopped moving, moving–to pluck a leaf from a bush or stroke a rock wall in passing–light, laughing hands that knew no repose. He saw her small face with its dense dark freckles, and her wide eyes, whose pale greenish hue was that of the shards of glass licked smooth by the sea waves. Vladimir Nabokov