Fire Quotes - Page 37

• Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.

  Naomi Klein

  Stress, Cities, Numbers

  Naomi Klein (2014). “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”, p.436, Penguin UK

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• Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming. We think this frost-fire is a portent somehow: a promise that the continent has given us. Life, too, we think, is capable of taking fire in this country; of creating beauty never seen.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Country, Fall, Autumn

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• Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
  In late December before the fire's daze
  Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.

  Allen Tate

  Christmas, Hands, Guilt

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.103, Macmillan

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• The day's at end and there's nowhere to go,
  Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying;
  Get up and once again politely lying
  Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe.

  Allen Tate

  Christmas, Lying, Dying

  Allen Tate (1947). “Poems, 1920-1945: A Selection”

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• Despite my asbestos gloves,
  the cough is filling me with black,
  and a red powder seeps through my veins.

  Anne Sexton

  Black, Asbestos, Burning

  Anne Sexton, “Love Letter Written In A Burning BuILDIng”

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• The day of fire is coming, the thrush
  will fly ablaze like a little sky rocket.

  Anne Sexton

  Sky, Rockets, Littles

  Anne Sexton (1974). “The death notebooks”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Light, Long, Ungrateful

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• we, in
  that instant, lost,
  
  breathless to be witnesses,
  as if we stood
  ourselves refreshed among
  the shining fauna of that fire.

  William Carlos Williams

  Shining, Vision, Lost

  William Carlos Williams, Charles Tomlinson (1985). “Selected Poems”, p.150, New Directions Publishing

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• Prosecutors insist they are mounting a "thorough investigation," which sometimes means thorough and sometimes, historically, has meant long enough to let the fire burn down in an incendiary case. A thorough investigation is fine; an interminable one is disgraceful.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mean, Justice, Long

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• Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital
  In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.
  Selfishness is like listening to good jazz
  With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.

  Philip Larkin

  Love, Morning, Order

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• I lived for a long time under vast porticos
  That maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires,
  And whose great pillars, straight and majestuous
  In the evening made seem like basaltic caves.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Long, Pillars, Sun

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• It is hard to hate what one has loved, and a half-extinguished fire is soon relit.

  Pierre Corneille

  Love, Hate, Half

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• There are few of us, if any, who don't walk the refiner's fire of adversity and despair, sometimes known to others but for many quietly hidden and privately endured. Most of the heartache, pain, and suffering we would not choose today. But we did choose. We chose when we could see the complete plan. We chose when we had a clear vision of the Savior's rescue of us. And if our faith and understanding were as clear today as it was when we first made that choice, I believe we would choose again.

  Richard C. Edgley

  Pain, Believe, Heart

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• It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with hisblack wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.

  Johan Huizinga

  Powerful, Struggle, Wings

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• Love is a blazing, crackling, green-wood flame, as much smoke as flame; friendship, married friendship particularly, is a steady,intense, comfortable fire. Love, in courtship, is friendship in hope; in matrimony, friendship upon proof.

  Samuel Richardson

  Friendship, Love Is, Flames

  Samuel Richardson (1804). “The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson ...: Selected from the Original Manuscripts, Bequeathed by Him to His Family, to which are Prefixed, a Biographical Account of that Author, and Observations on His Writings”, p.188

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• There was the murdered corpse, in covert laid,
  And violent death in thousand shapes displayed;
  The city to the soldier's rage resigned;
  Successless wars, and poverty behind;
  Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores,
  And the rash hunter strangled by the boars;
  The newborn babe by nurses overlaid;
  And the cook caught within the raging fire he made.

  Geoffrey Chaucer

  Death, War, Fighting

  John Dryden, Geoffrey Chaucer (1897). “Palamon and Arcite”

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• What is desire?--
  The impulse to make someone else complete?
  That woman would set sodden straw on fire.

  Theodore Roethke

  Desire, Impulse, Straws

  Theodore Roethke (2011). “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”, p.161, Anchor

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• That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know how to manage himself in the affairs of life than an infant just born.

  George Berkeley

  Mean, Sleep, Men

  George Berkeley (2013). “Principles of Human Knowledge”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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• The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh
  and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals,
  water to sound, fire to form: life flickers
  uncounted into the supple arms of love.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Blood, Color, Rocks

  Muriel Rukeyser (1994). “Out of Silence: Selected Poems”, p.52, Northwestern University Press

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• I shall venture to affirm, that there never was a popular religion, which represented the state of departed souls in such a light,as would render it eligible for human kind, that there should be such a state. These fine models of religion are the mere product of philosophy. For as death lies between the eye and the prospect of futurity, that event is so shocking to nature, that it must throw a gloom on all the regions which lie beyond it; and suggest to the generality of mankind the idea of Cerberus and Furies; devils, and torrents of fire and brimstone.

  David Hume

  Death, Lying, Philosophy

  David Hume, John Charles Addison Gaskin (1998). “Dialogues and Natural History of Religion”, p.127, Oxford University Press, USA

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• I know with certainty, that [an honest man] is not to put his hand into the fire, and hold it there, till it be consumed: And thisevent, I think I can foretell with the same assurance, as that, if he throw himself out at the window, and meet with no obstruction, he will not remain a moment suspended in the air.

  David Hume

  Men, Thinking, Air

  David Hume (1894). “An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding: And An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals”

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• I want to hear the chanting
  Around a heathen fire
  Of a strange black race.

  Gwendolyn B. Bennett

  Race, Singing, Black

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• Never bring a cannon on stage in Act I unless you intend to fire it by the last act.

  Anton Chekhov

  Lasts, Stage, Cannons

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• The trouble is that no devastating or redeeming fires have ever burnt in my life.... My life began by flickering out.

  Ivan Goncharov

  Life, Passion, Apathy

  1859 Oblomov, pt.2, ch.4 (translated by David Magarshak).

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• Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch's biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!

  Franz Grillparzer

  Reading, Hero, Heart

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