“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”
Source: Heart of Darkness
“From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.”
—
Doris Lessing
,
book
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing. <!-- 128
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Doris Lessing 94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … 1919–2013Related quotes
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.”
A reference to George Meredith's style.
The Decay of Lying (1889)
“Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.”
Franz Grillparzer
(1791–1872) austrian dramatic and writer
Wartet nur! [Only Wait!] in Poems for the Times ; also in Poems of Heinrich Heine: Three Hundred and Twenty-five Poems (1917) Selected and translated by Louis Untermeyer, p. 262
“With lightning, you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about”
W.B. Yeats
(1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright
Reconciliation http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1568/
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)
Context: Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With lightning, you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you--but now
We'll out, for the world lives as long ago;
And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit,
Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.
Canto III, line 153.
The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717)