“The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.”

—  Cormac McCarthy , book The Road

Source: The Road

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment…" by Cormac McCarthy?
Cormac McCarthy photo
Cormac McCarthy 270
American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter 1933

Related quotes

Nicholas Sparks photo
Virginia Woolf photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“Financial "synergy" is a will-o'-the-wisp. It looks good on paper, but it fails to work out in practice.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 3, p. 707

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Ah! love and song are but a dream,
A flower's faint shade on life's dark stream.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

All from The Vow of the Peacock (Title Poem - Introduction)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson photo
Gerald Durrell photo

“Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim, cypress-trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress-trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.
The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuschia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake's head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent's progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillaea that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny iron balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuschia-hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects.”

My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Boris Yeltsin photo

“A man must live like a great brilliant flame and burn as brightly as he can. In the end he burns out. But this is far better than a mean little flame.”

Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) 1st President of Russia and Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR

Statement to a TImes reporter in 1990, as quoted in "The wit and wisdom of Boris" in Guardian Unlimited (23 April 2007)
1990s

Steven Moffat photo

“Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepts it.”

Steven Moffat (1961) Scottish television writer and producer

Lines written for River Song, in Forest of the Dead [4.9] (7 June 2008)
Context: When you run with the Doctor, it feels like it'll never end. But however hard you try you can't run forever. Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepts it.

Fred Weatherly photo
Richelle Mead photo

“See? There it is again. My flame in the dark.”

Source: The Indigo Spell

Related topics