0829536
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"Xerxes, I read, 'halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction' the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain...you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven't you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered...there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse...and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. "He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life." We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn't it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don't know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore."
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fate
seeing
free
light
poem
prayer
nature
poetry
freedom
joy
spirit
wonder
faith
beauty
religion
science
god
philosophy
enoughness
exultant
illumination
intricacy
joyfulness
living-in-the-present-moment
religious-diversity
stalking-the-gaps
the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it
gaps
philosopher-s-stone
multiplicity
praying
prayers
hallelujah
life-force
seeking
exploration
praise
joyful
mindfulness
epiphany
tolerance
grace
energy
disbelief
watching
growth
belief
fearless
humility
consciousness
walking
fire
mystery
curiosity
power
soul
poet
creation
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Annie Dillard |
20b4244
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Never doubt in the darkness what God has given us in the light.
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light
doubt
god
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Francine Rivers |
3b41102
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"Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, "an infinite storm of beauty." The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth's face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth's surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life."
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fate
seeing
free
light
poem
prayer
nature
poetry
freedom
joy
spirit
wonder
faith
beauty
religion
science
god
philosophy
ring-the-bells
enoughness
exultant
illumination
intricacy
joyfulness
living-in-the-present-moment
religious-diversity
stalking-the-gaps
the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it
gaps
philosopher-s-stone
multiplicity
praying
prayers
hallelujah
life-force
seeking
exploration
praise
joyful
mindfulness
epiphany
tolerance
grace
energy
disbelief
watching
growth
belief
fearless
humility
consciousness
walking
fire
mystery
curiosity
power
soul
poet
creation
|
Annie Dillard |
6744dc1
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Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings...They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn't that have been a sight to see?
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fate
seeing
free
light
poem
prayer
nature
poetry
freedom
joy
spirit
wonder
faith
beauty
religion
science
god
philosophy
ring-the-bells
enoughness
exultant
illumination
intricacy
joyfulness
living-in-the-present-moment
religious-diversity
stalking-the-gaps
the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it
gaps
philosopher-s-stone
multiplicity
praying
prayers
hallelujah
life-force
seeking
exploration
praise
joyful
mindfulness
epiphany
tolerance
grace
energy
disbelief
watching
growth
belief
fearless
humility
consciousness
walking
fire
mystery
curiosity
power
soul
poet
creation
|
Annie Dillard |
e8657a9
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"Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman's tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn't find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn't make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, "that was a good time then, a good time to be living." And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean's shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, "yes, that's how it was then, that part there was called France." I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.
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fate
seeing
free
light
poem
prayer
nature
poetry
freedom
joy
spirit
wonder
faith
beauty
religion
science
god
philosophy
ring-the-bells
enoughness
exultant
illumination
intricacy
joyfulness
living-in-the-present-moment
religious-diversity
stalking-the-gaps
the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it
gaps
philosopher-s-stone
multiplicity
praying
prayers
hallelujah
life-force
seeking
exploration
praise
joyful
mindfulness
epiphany
tolerance
grace
energy
disbelief
watching
growth
belief
fearless
humility
consciousness
walking
fire
mystery
curiosity
power
soul
poet
creation
|
Annie Dillard |
099ad33
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Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn't hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients' ultima Thule, the modern explorer's Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis's jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom's nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?
|
|
fate
seeing
free
light
poem
prayer
nature
poetry
freedom
joy
spirit
wonder
faith
beauty
religion
science
god
philosophy
exultant
illumination
intricacy
joyfulness
religious-diversity
stalking-the-gaps
the-tree-with-the-lights-in-it
gaps
philosopher-s-stone
multiplicity
praying
prayers
hallelujah
life-force
seeking
exploration
praise
joyful
mindfulness
epiphany
tolerance
grace
energy
disbelief
watching
growth
belief
fearless
humility
walking
fire
mystery
curiosity
power
soul
poet
creation
|
Annie Dillard |
7c081fb
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It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness... how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.
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light
women
philosophy
gender
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
c593622
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There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.
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light
the-black-prince
iris-murdoch
description
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Iris Murdoch |
adfc118
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Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surround us or we light a candle to see by. We can surely no longer pretend that our children are growing up into a peaceful, secure, and civilized world. We've come to the point where it's irresponsible to try to protect them from the irrational world they will have to live in when they grow up.... Our responsibility to them is not to pretend that if we don't look, evil will go away, but to give them weapons against it.
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good
light
inspiration
darkness
raising-children
growing-up
evil
|
Madeleine L'Engle |
4acfc80
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You cannot let the darkness overcome the light.
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light
stolen
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Melissa de la Cruz |
d2939fb
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Know that we never have to walk in darkness. Even when we get into dark times or dark situations, God's light is always there to be found!
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light
god
life
quotes
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Stormie Omartian |
d07f580
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- Merci d'etre ma lumiere dans l'obscurite.
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light
shadows
|
Jack Thorne |
3acc391
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With every fall of the sun and rise of the moon, I can hear it. The Prophecy. It echoes through the halls of time. It is written on the surface of every star. Even the sun and moon cannot withhold the news of the second coming. I hear it. And I fear it.
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young-adult
light
fiction
moon
epic-fantasy
sun
fantasy-fiction
young-adult-fiction
novel
|
Brian A. McBride |
c4e616f
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But it is written that it is better to burn one city than to curse the darkness.
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light
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Roger Zelazny |
bb02fed
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A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.
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light
love
mauled
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Michael Cunningham |
c96eb7e
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It's lovely when the dark is your friend, isn't it? When you turn on the light, it makes the dark your enemy... and it glowers in at you resentfully.
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light
enemy
friend
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L.M. Montgomery |
ce30b4a
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There were countless injustices and difficulties in this world, but small points of light too, where the darkness was held back.
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injustice
light
hope
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Alexander McCall Smith |
7badb97
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My mother always closes her bedroom drapes tight before going to bed at night. I open mine as wide as possible. I like to see everything, I say. What's there to see? Moon. Air. Sunrise. All that light on your face in the morning. Wakes you up. I like to wake up.
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light
poem
poetry
drapes
waking-up
sleeping
morning
|
Anne Carson |
f6e06a7
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[...]at the end of a breathless day when the air seemed so heavy and full of molten light, everyone sweated drops of gold instead of brine.
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light
nature
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Patricia A. McKillip |
7ec3313
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The April sun, weak but determined, shone through a castle window and from there squeezed itself through a small hole in the wall and placed one golden finger on the little mouse.
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light
sun
mouse
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Kate DiCamillo |
b7a92e8
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People can look different from hour to hour depending on the angle of daylight.
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looks
light
daylight
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Colum McCann |
cb9dcb8
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When all of it is given meaning in the larger story of Jesus Christ, it destroys us, then pours our melted selves back into another form that still bears the marks of how we got there. Then we become something that can bear light, the brightness of which is not diminished, even when divided and borrowed.
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light
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Nadia Bolz-Weber |
27b8d45
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She takes no notice of him; she seems to know nothing but the morning.
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light
notice
knowing
morning
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Anthony Doerr |
9349c3d
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The room was dark, though weak autumnal light filtered in through arched windows high on the walls, illuminating the room's rich aubergine brocade wallpaper. Its color cast a soft violet haze that floated through the bedroom, twinkling the huge diamond-shaped crystals that dropped from two immense, many-tiered silver chandeliers. They were larger than any I had ever seen, things out of a palace or a fairy tale. An imposing, heavily carved wardrobe, which looked as if it had been in place since the early fifteenth century, faced the bed where I lay. Beside it on the wall hung a large bronze shield with an iron French cross at its center, crowned by a gilded fleur-de-lis with a dazzling gemstone in the middle of the petal. Large portraits of nude ladies, odalisques that looked as if an Italian master- Titian, perhaps?- had painted them graced the adjacent wall. A heavy crystal vase of white long-stemmed roses sat on a table at the bedside, their petals tight, but their sweet perfume filling the air, mingling with the aroma of fresh baked bread. I ran my hands down my body. I was not in my own nightdress but in a pale green gown of fine quality damask silk with a triangular neckline and long, full sleeves that cupped my wrists, draping white lace over my hands to the fingers. I had never seen such a rich garment. I imagined it was something that the queen's daughters would have worn.
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light
chandelier-crystals
damask
wardrobe
mina-harker
purple
titian
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Karen Essex |
9d685e1
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"My wife believes in it not one whit, but is scrupulous in its observance," said Charles Leiden, sipping from his glass. "A curious state of affairs, don't you think? We are kosher, Fermi probably attends synagogue, Albert believed in Spinoza's God and helped raise money for Israel, Teller may end up teaching in a Jewish parochial school one day, Szilard has the soul of a Jewish prophet. And we tinker with light and atomic bombs, with the energy of the universe. Do you wonder that the world doesn't know what to make of its Jews? No one is on more familiar terms with the heart of the insanity in the universe than is the Jew, and no one is more frenetic and untidy in the search for the an answer."
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light
judaism
|
Chaim Potok |
ac370d1
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"When he placed a candle on the shelf across the room from him and lit its wick, he came to realize that in fact everything he saw was a flat surface, like a screen - that in fact dimension was an illusion. Everything was a flat surface and the pinpoints of light, whether from a candle on the shelf or a gaslamp above the street, were punctures in that surface - gashes made by somebody behind the screen. He realized then that beyond everything he saw there was an entire realm of blazing sunfire, and that colors were only the silhouettes of people in that realm - walking, eating, dancing, doing whatever they were doing behind the screen.
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light
reality
truth
impressions
shadows
|
Steve Erickson |
e03db7e
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Pois eu tinha me esquecido de tanta luz que ha no mundo, ate voce devolve-la a mim.
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light
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Ursula K. Le Guin |