We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, ...
Yes," Nicholas replied, in a bored voice. "The name is Dutch. Dragonwyck, meaning place of the dragon. It derives from an Indian legend about a flying serpent whose eyes were fire and whose flaming breath withered the corn." "Heavens!" With a light l...
We only came close to dying six or seven times, which I thought was pretty good. Once, I lost my grip and found myself dangling by one hand from a ledge fifty feet above the rocky surf. But I found another handhold and kept climbing. A minute later A...
Miranda,' she called again. 'Miranda!' In the breathless silence her voice seemed to belong to somebody else, a long way off, a harsh little croak fading out amongst the rocky walls. 'Come back, all of you! Don't go up there - come back!' She felt he...
Love is not a shining star. Love is not the warm glow of the sun. Love is a river. Sometimes it’s shallow and other times a mile deep. It flows toward some and away from others. It’s rocky, slippery, and you can drown in it if you’re not carefu...
[Apollo is looking thru a book of Philadelphia fighters] Jergens: What exactly are you looking for Apollo? Apollo Creed: This is who I'm looking for. The Italian Stallion. Jergens: Rocky Balboa? Never heard of him. Apollo Creed: Look it's the name ma...
Musicians add to songs and they evolve: For as was true of human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky ...
They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman's beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a bear. That made a bond that looked as fine as a ribbon of silk, but, s...
Sometimes in the summer evenings they walked up the hill to watch the afterglow clinging to the tops of the western mountains and to feel the breeze drawn into the valley by the rising day-heated air. Usually they stood silently for a while and breat...
Oceans recede and coastlines wither and crack. Nations lapse; others soon swagger in their places. Mountains crumble to dust, rains vanish into the sea, winds return whence they came, and every city men build has but a jumble of bones for its foundat...
I'd like to hold you in the mountains, like to kiss you by the sea. Take you far, far from here to a place where you feel free. Cause we are safe, we are true, we are going to make it through. Crashing worlds, falling stars, breaking all of who we ar...
The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell, a word, a place, th...
I knew by the signs it would be a hard winter. The hollies bore a heavy crop of berries and birds stripped them bare. Crows quarreled in reaped fields and owls cried in the mountains, mournful as widows. Fur and moss grew thicker than usual. Cold rai...
It was a cruel fate, Yet not so cruel as Mago's will be. I promise you that, by the old gods and the new, by the lamb god and the horse god and every god that lives. I swear by the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. Before I am done with ...
Death for [the Buddhist] is the shadow on the face of life, for the opposite of death is birth, not life; that which is born must die. Life has no opposite, for life goes on; only its forms must change unceasingly. It is life which creates, uses and ...
Someday,” she said in a voice as serene as a high mountain lake, “I’m going to break your neck. Then I’m going to saw it off with a hacksaw so I can take my time.” Venom’s grin creased his cheeks. “I knew you had it in you, kitty.” (V...
The world was so unbearably pretty, and it continued being so all the way down the mountain to school. I felt slightly high because of the beauty, and the inside of my head tickled. I wondered if this is how artists go through life, with all of its s...
Belief is one of the most powerful organic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can. People get exactly the wrong idea about belief. They think it works back to front. They think the s...
When you stand at the bottom of the mountain and look up at the mountaintop, the path looks hard and stony, and the top is obscured by clouds. But when you reach the top and you look down, you realize that there are a thousand paths that could have b...
In the woods it was not so much that it was quiet as that the few sounds were loud and distinct, not the orchestra tuning-up of the city but individual grace notes. Birdcalls broken into pieces like a piano exercise, a tree branch snapping sharp and ...
