“Imprisoned under all our layers of long underwear, thick socks, shirts, vests, jackets, coats and hoods were these tropical bodies; the steam and hot water brought color back into the pallor, found the nacreous hollow in a hip, detected the subtly raised triceps, rinsed a sharp clavicle in a softening flood, swirled dull brown hair into a smooth black cap and pulled evening gloves of light over raw hands and skinny, blue-veined forearms.Just as each shell held to the ears roars with a different ocean timbre, each of these bodies spoke to me with a different music, though all sounded to me unlike my own and only with the greatest effort could I remember I was longing after my own sex. Indeed, each of these beings seemed to possess his very own sex.”

— Edmund White , book A Boy's Own Story

Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 153).

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Edmund White 28

American novelist and LGBT essayist 1940

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

“The Empire Pool” Conclave: A Journal of Character, Issue 5, (Spring, 2013)
2010-

“The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood
On dusty shelves, when held against the ear
Proclaims its stormy parent, and we hear
The faint, far murmur of the breaking flood.
We hear the sea. The Sea? It is the blood
In our own veins, impetuous and near.”

Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907) English poet and translator

Sonnet. Sea-shell Murmurs, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "Gather a shell from the strewn beach / And listen at its lips: they sigh / The same desire and mystery, / The echo of the whole sea's speech", Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Sea Hints; "I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach; But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech. Hold to thine ear / And plain thou'lt hear / Tales of ships", Charles Henry Webb, With a Nantucket Shell.

“I can mix and match a cute shirt with some skinny jeans under a leather jacket and it looks fun and unique.”

Miley Cyrus (1992) American actor and singer-songwriter

Reading Eagle http://www.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=118422 (December 20, 2008)

“this blue shirt i have is practically the same color as my jeans, and looking all-blue is something only cookie monster can pull off.”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. ‘’Ours’’ is different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”

Aravind Adiga book The White Tiger

The First Night.
The White Tiger (2008)

“I too had some of the ‘Indian’ things in my bags. A pressure cooker, Parle-G, Maggi, desi ghee, underwear (a lot of them), some more Maggi, shirts, pants, socks, thermal wear, jackets, chappals, soap, some more Parle-G and the list goes on and on.”

Gaurav Sharma (author) (1992) Author and novelist

Gone are the Days (2016)

“And if you should say that the shells were carried by the waves, being empty and dead, I say that where the dead went they were not far removed from the living; for in these mountains living ones are found, which are recognisable by the shells being in pairs; and they are in a layer where there are no dead ones; and a little higher up they are found, where they were thrown by the waves, all the dead ones with their shells separated, near to where the rivers fell into the sea, to a great depth; like the Arno which fell from the Gonfolina near to Monte Lupo, where it left a deposit of gravel which may still be seen, and which has agglomerated; and of stones of various districts, natures, and colours and hardness, making one single conglomerate. And a little beyond the sandstone conglomerate a tufa has been formed, where it turned towards Castel Florentino; farther on, the mud was deposited in which the shells lived, and which rose in layers according to the levels at which the turbid Arno flowed into that sea. And from time to time the bottom of the sea was raised, depositing these shells in layers, as may be seen in the cutting at Colle Gonzoli, laid open by the Arno which is wearing away the base of it; in which cutting the said layers of shells are very plainly to be seen in clay of a bluish colour, and various marine objects are found there. And if the earth of our hemisphere is indeed raised by so much higher than it used to be, it must have become by so much lighter by the waters which it lost through the rift between Gibraltar and Ceuta; and all the more the higher it rose, because the weight of the waters which were thus lost would be added to the earth in the other hemisphere. And if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers — as we see them now in our time.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XVI Physical Geography

“Rays were blazing through the atmosphere of the earth, the horizon became bright orange, gradually passing into all the colors of the rainbow: from light blue to dark blue, to violet and then to black. What an indescribable gamut of colors! Just like the paintings of the artist Nicholas Roerich.”

Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) Soviet pilot and cosmonaut, the first human in space

Statement of April 1961, as quoted in Warrior of Light : The Life of Nicholas Roerich : Artist, Himalayan explorer and visionary (2002) by Colleen Messina, p. 46

“Not only was there a layer of ice above the atmosphere, the Bible teaches that the earth also had a layer of water UNDER the crust of the earth. The earth’s crust today is about 10-25 miles thick. Many who have studied this topic agree that the earth had huge reservoirs of water maybe ten miles down, when the earth was first created. Psalm 24:1-2, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. For He hath founded it UPON the seas, and established it UPON the floods..””

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Was the earth founded on the water? Psalm 136:6 tells us that God “stretched out the earth ABOVE the waters.”
Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 46

“It was a dark, clean-cut face, with a three-inch scar showing whitely down the sunburned skin of the right cheek. The eyes were wide and level under straight, rather long black brows. The hair was black, parted on the left, and carelessly brushed so that a thick black comma fell down over the right eyebrow. The longish straight nose ran down to a short upper lip below which was a wide and finely drawn but cruel mouth. The line of jaw was straight and firm. A section of dark suit, white shirt and black knitted tie completed the picture.”

Ian Fleming book From Russia, with Love

Source: From Russia with Love (1957), Ch. 6 : Death Warrant

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Edmund White 28

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