Quotes about dust
page 3

“All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like god in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some of the dust was really gold.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

1920s, A Peck of Gold (1926)

God, Children, Appearance

“.. I need to immerse my gaze in your eyes, it is in their mirror that I see myself as I would like to be, and it is only in seeing myself as I feel I should be. I think, therefore I am, my Beautiful One, to both of us, every day we recreate the world, every day a paradise falls in our hands, to darken in the dust of many paradises... The paradises will fall in our hands, will sink in the dust and will be born again according to our will.”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

World, Beauty, Feeling, Thinking

“You're going to be roped!
And you're going to be caged!
And, as for your dust speck – hah!
That we shall boil in a hot steaming kettle of Beezle-Nut Oil!”

Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who!

Horton Hears a Who! (1954)

“Great contest follows, and much learned dust
Involves the combatants; each claiming truth,
And truth disclaiming both.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book III, The Garden, Line 161.

Truth, Learning

“Memory and dust, he thought, link us to the past.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time and Again

Source: Time and Again (1951), Chapter XLIII (p. 224)

Memory, Past

“Evidently, there is a political element in the attack on The Satanic Verses which has killed and injured good if obstreperous Muslims in Islamabad, though it may be dangerously blasphemous to suggest it. The Ayatollah Khomeini is probably within his self-elected rights in calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, or of anyone else for that matter, on his own holy ground. To order outraged sons of the Prophet to kill him, and the directors of Penguin Books, on British soil is tantamount to a jihad. It is a declaration of war on citizens of a free country, and as such it is a political act. It has to be countered by an equally forthright, if less murderous, declaration of defiance…. I do not think that even our British Muslims will be eager to read that great vindication of free speech, which is John Milton’s Areopagitica. Oliver Cromwell’s Republic proposed muzzling the press, and Milton replied by saying, in effect, that the truth must declare itself by battling with falsehood in the dust and heat…. I gain the impression that few of the protesting Muslims in Britain know directly what they are protesting against. Their Imams have told them that Mr Rushdie has published a blasphemous book and must be punished. They respond with sheeplike docility and wolflike aggression. They forgot what Nazis did to books … they shame a free country by denying free expression through the vindictive agency of bonfires…. If they do not like secular society, they must fly to the arms of the Ayatollah or some other self-righteous guardian of strict Islamic morality.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

'Islam's Gangster Tactics', in the London Independent newspaper , 1989
Writing

War, Truth, Books, Thinking

“Fine colour implies a unified relationship, in which each part is subordinate to the whole, and the transitions between them are felt to be as precious and beautiful as the colours themselves. In fact, the colours themselves must be continuously modified and broken as part of the transition. Ruskin said in his Elements of Drawing, "Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel-pit, a little whitening, and some coal dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture, if you give me time to gradate my mud, and subdue my dust."”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

In many works by the greatest colourists — Rembrandt and Watteau are examples — there are very few identifiable colours.
Source: The Romantic Rebellion (1973), Ch. 10: Turner II: The Liberation of Colour

Beauty, Time, Parting, Drawing

“My difficulty with working class writers is that they don't make the working class come alive—Leslie Halward is an exception, but as you imply he is not very important. They give me information and they give their comrades gratification, but that's all; gloom, indignation, aspiration in plenty, and plenty of stains on the tablecloth and coal-dust in the mine—but no living beings to experience them.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

Letter 350, to John Lehmann, 21 December 1940
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“Think about every example, every time someone comes up with religion as the reason why they want to impose it. It is always stupid. It is always imposing bigotry or limitations against somebody else’s freedom because you want to pretend in your special brand of pixie dust that is different from the gods and monsters other people want to make up. That’s what it is all about. There is simply no true religion because literally none of it is true.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

God, People, Stupidity, Religion

“I got my finger on the trigger
But I don't know who to trust.
When I look into your eyes
There's just devils and dust.
We're a long, long way from home, Bobbie.
Home's a long, long way from us.
I feel a dirty wind blowing
Devils and dust.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Devils & Dust"
Song lyrics, Devils & Dust (2005)

Way, Feeling, Home

“That original intelligence, say the MAGIANS, who is the first principle of all things, discovers himself immediately to the mind and understanding alone; but has placed the sun as his image in the visible universe; and when that bright luminary diffuses its beams over the earth and the firmament, it is a faint copy of the glory which resides in the higher heavens. If you would escape the displeasure of this divine being, you must be careful never to set your bare foot upon the ground, nor spit into a fire, nor throw any water upon it, even though it were consuming a whole city. Who can express the perfections of the Almighty? say the Mahometans. Even the noblest of his works, if compared to him, are but dust and rubbish. How much more must human conception fall short of his infinite perfections? His smile and favour renders men for ever happy; and to obtain it for your children, the best method is to cut off from them, while infants, a little bit of skin, about half the breadth of a farthing. Take two bits of cloth, say the Roman catholics, about an inch or an inch and a half square, join them by the corners with two strings or pieces of tape about sixteen inches long, throw this over your head, and make one of the bits of cloth lie upon your breast, and the other upon your back, keeping them next your skin: There is not a better secret for recommending yourself to that infinite Being, who exists from eternity to eternity.”

David Hume The Natural History of Religion

Part VII - Confirmation of this doctrine
The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Men, Children, Lie, Secret

“The secret to successful scrying was to realize that the future was not fixed and there was no way of predicting it. None. All one could do was to identify what already existed unacknowledged. Lovers pledged themselves to each other long before their first kiss. Murder was implicit in friendship. A carcinoma that looked like a speck of dust on the X-ray spelled death. So much of what appeared to be random event was simply the working out of consequences.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 13 (p. 222)

Death, Friendship, Secret, Way

“Yes, let the Angel blow!
A peal from the parted heaven,
The first of seven!—
The warning, not yet the sign, of woe!
That men arise
And look about them with wakened eyes,
Behold on their garments the dust and slime,
Refrain, forbear,
Accept the weight of a nobler care
And take reproach from the fallen time!”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

"Gabriel" in The Century : A Popular Quarterly, Volume 18 (1874), p. 617.

Men, Angels, Time, Parting

“The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,
While underneath such leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport, st. 2 (1858).

Death, Sleep, Tree

“Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth

:lie—
Dust unto dust—
The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who

:die
As all men must;

Mourn not your captive comrades who must

:dwell—
Too strong to strive—
Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell,
Buried alive;

But rather mourn the apathetic throng—
The cowed and the meek—
Who see the world’s great anguish and its

:wrong
And dare not speak!”

Ralph Chaplin (1887–1961) American writer, artist and labor activist

Mourn Not The Dead

Men, Lie, World, Strong

“Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.”

William Wordsworth book The Prelude

Bk. I, l. 340.
The Prelude (1799-1805)

Music

“These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes — nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the "good" and the "bad," to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil — all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called "insecticides," but "biocides."”

Rachel Carson book Silent Spring

Silent Spring (1962)

Life, Home, Bird, Fish

“When the honoured month of Ramazdn, 588 H., the season of mercy and pardon, arrived, fresh intelligence was received at the auspicious Court, that the accursed Jatwan, having admitted the pride of Satan into his brain, and placed the cup of chieftainship and obstinacy upon his head, had raised his hand in fight against Nusratu-d din… The armies attacked each other "like two hills of steel, and the field of battle became tulip-dyed with the blood of the warriors."… The Hindus were completely defeated, and their leader slain." Jatwan, who was the essence of vice and turbulence, and the rod of infidelity and perverseness, the friend of grief, and the con- panion of shame, had his standards of God-plurality and ensigns of perdition lowered by the hand of power;" "and the dust of the field of battle was commingled with the blood of that God- abandoned wretch, and the whole country was washed from the filth of his idolatry.'"”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

About the flight of Jatwan and his death in battle, Kutbu-d din (general of Muhammad of Ghor). Hasan Nizami. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 217-218. Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

God, Intelligence, Fight, Country

“Of course what makes breakfast in bed so special is you're lying down and eating bacon, the most beautiful thing on Earth. Bacon's the best, even the frying of bacon sounds like an applause. (sizzling sounds) YEAAAA BACON!!!! You wanna hear how good bacon is? To improve other food they wrap it in bacon. If it wasn't for bacon we wouldn't even know what a water chestnut is. "Thank you bacon. Sincerely, Water Chestnut the third". And those bits of bacon, bits of bacon are like the fairy dust of the food community. "you don't want this baked potato," bbbrrriinnnggg! it's now your favorite part of the meal. "not interested in a salad?" bippady boppidy bacon! Just turned it into an entre. And once you put bacon into a salad it's no longer a salad, it just becomes a game of find the bacon in the lettuce. It's like you're panning for gold, hmmmmm, EUREKA! bacon! not many ways to prepare bacon, you can either fry it or get botulism. It's amazing the shrinkage that occurs. You start with a pound you end up with a book mark. You know the only bad part about bacon is it makes you thirsty… for more bacon! I never feel like I get enough bacon. at breakfast it's like they're rationalizing it. "Here's your two strips of bacon." "But I want more! More bacon!" Whenever you're at a brunch buffet and you see that metal tray filled with the four thousand strips of bacon, don't you almost expect a rainbow to be coming out of it? "I found it I found the source of all bacon!"”

Jim Gaffigan (1966) comedian, actor, author

That bacon tray is always at the end of the buffet, you always regret all the stuff on your plate. "What am I doing with all this worthless fruit? I should have waited! If I had known you were here I would've waited...."
King Baby

Books, Food, Beauty, Way

“One of the present values of the past is as a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions we no longer ask. One corresponding role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us to consider what we think of it.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Source: Liberty Before Liberalism (1998), p. 112

Question, Thinking, Past

“On the dust of our heroic ancestors we too sit ballot-boxing, saying to one another, It is well, it is well! By inheritance of their noble struggles, we have been permitted to sit slothful so long. By noble toil, not by shallow laughter and vain talk, they made this English Existence from a savage forest into an arable inhabitable field for us; and we, idly dreaming it would grow spontaneous crops forever,—find it now in too questionable a state.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Dreams, Question, Laughter, Box

“The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Who Can Replace a Man?” p. 19 (originally published in Infinity Science Fiction, June 1958)
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

War

“I’ve had 37 orthopedic operations. I ground my feet up into dust. I’ve got a new knee. I‘ve got a new spine. I’m the lucky one… I never thought going through all of it that I would be healthy at the end. And I almost wasn’t.”

Bill Walton

"The Thing Bill Walton Still Can't Forgive Himself For" https://www.gq.com/story/bill-walton-back-from-the-dead-interview, interview with GQ (March 26, 2016).

“Who then to frail mortality shall trust
But limns the water, or but writes in dust.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

The World (1629)

Water

“If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble to dust; but if we work on men's immortal minds, if we impress on them with high principles, the just fear of God and love for their fellow-men, we engrave on those tablets something which no time can efface, and which will brighten and brighten to all eternity.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Address Delivered by the Hon. Daniel Webster in Faneuil Hall (22 May 1852), at the Request of the City Council of Boston; City Document No. 31. Boston: J.H. Eastburn (1852)

Love, Men, God, Fear

“Aesop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1830s, Boswell's Life of Johnson (1832)

Flying

“For I had expected always
Some brightness to hold in trust,
Some final innocence
To save from dust”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"What I Expected Was" (l. 25–28). . .

“…because city honours are not village honours. Like certain wines, they do not travel; carry them back to the village and you find they are dust in your hands.”

Laurie Lee (1914–1997) British writer

An Obstinate Exile, p. 44.
I Can't Stay Long (1975)

Travel, Wine

“The artist's studio will be like a glass-bell or a hollow crystal. The painter himself must be white, which is to say, without tragedy or sorrow. The pallet must be of glass; the brush must be square and hard, dust-free and as immaculate as a surgical instrument. Doubtless there is much to learn from a medical laboratory... The studio of the modern painter must reflect the ambiance of mountains which are nine thousand feet high and topped with a eternal cap of snow. There the cold kills the microbes.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Van Doesburg's article 'Elementarism', as cited in De Stijl – Van Doesburg Issue, January 1932, pp. 17–19
1926 – 1931

Mountain, Learning

“You held me down, but I got up
Already brushing off the dust.
You hear my voice, you hear that sound,
Like thunder, gonna shake the ground.
You held me down, but I got up,
Get ready cause I’ve had enough.
I see it all, I see it now.I got the eye of the tiger, a fighter, dancing through the fire.
Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me ROAR.
Louder, louder than a lion,
Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me ROAR.
Oh oh oh oh oh oh,
You’re gonna hear me roar.”

Katy Perry (1984) American singer, songwriter and actress

Roar, written by Katy Perry, Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin, Bonnie McKee, and Henry Walter
Song lyrics, Prism (2013)

Dance

“It is these two thoughts of union and peace which appear to me to be especially appropriate for our consideration on this day. Like all else in human experience, they are not things which can be set apart and have an independent existence. They exist by reason of the concrete actions of men and women. It is the men and women whose actions between 1861 and 1865 gave us union and peace that we are met here this day to commemorate. When we seek for the chief characteristic of those actions, we come back to the word which I have already uttered — renunciation. They gave up ease and home and safety and braved every impending danger and mortal peril that they might accomplish these ends. They thereby became in this Republic a body of citizens set apart and marked for every honor so long as our Nation shall endure. Here on this wooded eminence, overlooking the Capital of the country for which they fought, many of them repose, officers of high rank and privates mingling in a common dust, holding the common veneration of a grateful people. The heroes of other wars lie with them, and in a place of great preeminence lies one whose identity is unknown, save that he was a soldier of this Republic who fought that its ideals, its institutions, its liberties, might be perpetuated among men. A grateful country holds all these services as her most priceless heritage, to be cherished forevermore.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Women, Men, War, People

“Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”

James Shirley The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

sc. iii. Compare: "The sweet remembrance of the just Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust", Tate and Brady, Psalm cxxii.
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

“Patience! Hence—that word was made
For brutes of burthen, not for birds of prey;
Preach it to mortals of a dust like thine,—
I am not of thine order.”

George Gordon Byron book Manfred

Act II, scene i.
Manfred (1817)

Bird, Patience

“(When asked about pop music) Pop music has become the largest farce in music history. It is soul-less, mechanical, and only made for the sole purpose of making the fastest dollar possible, with more emphasis on imagery than the music. I would much rather remain an independent recording artist who can dictate his own creativity and make it available to a smaller community of fans then sign with a major label under conditions of compromising my work just to sell lunch boxes and sound like every other thing out there. The only artists that have any longevity are the ones that pioneer a movement not follow a movement. The hundreds of following wannabes always get left in the dust or remain one-hit-wonders.”

Frank Klepacki (1974) American musician, video game music composer and sound director

Gameplay magazine

Music, Soul, History, Communication

“But in this world every thing has its evil; the dust is on the wheels of the conqueror's chariot—the silken-wrought tapestry covers the mouldering wall;”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

World, Evil

“In what people irritatingly call "iconic" terms, Bin Laden certainly had no rival. The strange, scrofulous quasi-nobility and bogus spirituality of his appearance was appallingly telegenic, and it will be highly interesting to see whether this charisma survives the alternative definition of revolution that has lately transfigured the Muslim world. The most tenaciously lasting impression of all, however, is that of his sheer irrationality. What had the man thought he was doing? Ten years ago, did he expect, let alone desire, to be in a walled compound in dear little Abbottabad?…Ten years ago, I remind you, he had a gigantic influence in one rogue and failed state—Afghanistan—and was exerting an increasing force over its Pakistani neighbor. Taliban and al-Qaida sympathizers were in senior positions in the Pakistani army and nuclear program and had not yet been detected as such. Huge financial subventions flowed his way, often through official channels, from Saudi Arabia and other gulf states…. Then, not only did he run away from Afghanistan, leaving his deluded followers to be killed in very large numbers, but he chose to remain a furtive and shady figure, on whom the odds of a successful covert "hit," or bought-and-paid-for betrayal, were bound to lengthen every day…It seems thinkable that he truly believed his own mad propaganda, often adumbrated on tapes and videos, especially after the American scuttle from Somalia. The West, he maintained, was rotten with corruption and run by cabals of Jews and homosexuals. It had no will to resist. It had become feminized and cowardly. One devastating psychological blow and the rest of the edifice would gradually follow the Twin Towers in a shower of dust. Well, he and his fellow psychopaths did succeed in killing thousands in North America and Western Europe, but in the past few years, their main military triumphs have been against such targets as Afghan schoolgirls, Shiite Muslim civilians, and defenseless synagogues in Tunisia and Turkey. Has there ever been a more contemptible leader from behind, or a commander who authorized more blanket death sentences on bystanders?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2011-05-02
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/05/death_of_a_madman.html
Death of a Madman
Slate
1091-2339
2010s, 2011

Death, People, World, Way

“No one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 2 (p. 15)

War, Country

“I had wanted to go after her, to explain my part in what had happened. But I knew it would do no good, so why lose face? When a fairy tale blows up and the dream dust settles and you find yourself standing there, knowing that the last line will never be written, why not omit any exercises in futility?”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 8 (p. 187)

Dreams, Exercises, Parting

“In the first televised presidential debate, Nixon thought he was upholding some puritan gravitas by refusing makeup; by choosing the citizen’s black suit; choosing the poor man’s version of natural aristocracy. Nixon was easily the more able in his grasp of history and the workings of government. John F. Kennedy, gold-dusted and ghostwritten, appeared completely natural. Nixon perspired. In an instant, I saw what many other Americans saw that night: Harvard College will always beat Whittier College in America. The game is fixed and there is nothing to be done about it.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

History, Game, Nature, Appearance

“Oh, give me again the rover's life — the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into thy saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea.”

Herman Melville book White-Jacket

Source: White-Jacket (1850), Ch. 19

Life, God, Lie, Way

“Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.”

Tanith Lee book Vazkor, Son of Vazkor

Book Two, Part II “The Wolf Hunt”, Chapter 1 (p. 166)
Vazkor, Son of Vazkor (1978)

Time

“As for me, I consider myself as a speck of the dust of the devotee's feet.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 210

“Life is a torrid day,
Parched with the dust and sun;
And death's the calm cool night,
When the weary day is done.”

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

(17th December 1825) Poetic Fragmants - Fifth Series
The London Literary Gazette, 1825

Life, Death, Sun, Night

“Some write their wrongs in marble: he more just,
Stoop’d down serene and wrote them in the dust,—
Trod under foot, the sport of every wind,
Swept from the earth and blotted from his mind.
There, secret in the grave, he bade them lie,
And grieved they could not ’scape the Almighty eye.”

Samuel Madden (1686–1765) Irish writer

Boulter's Monument (1745), dedicated to Frederick, Prince of Wales, who had been Madden's student.

Lie, Secret, Sport

“I didn’t really like doing commercials. You had to behave like you were on angel dust or something.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

The New York Times, March 25, 2007.

Angels

“The brilliance of Midwestern California, the California that is founded upon discontent, and the reason why so much technological innovation springs from the West Coast, is that having confronted the finitude of the coastline, technologists in Silicon Valley have shrunk the needed commodity—the future (thousands of miles of Zen pathway)—to the size of a fleck of gold dust, to a microchip.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Spring, Future

“There is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right. We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box—Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 11 (pp. 346-347)

People, Fear, Beauty, Way

“It was necessary that the very noble form of man, which is the image and likeness of God… should be joined to the substance of dust and darkness, the source of all defect and loss. For these reasons the Creator gave to the form of man power, rule, and dominion over the substance;—the form can subdue the substance, refuse the fulfillment of its desires, and reduce them, as far as possible, to a just and proper measure.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.8

God, Loss

“Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.”

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

To His Coy Mistress (1650-1652)

Beauty, Thinking

“They were German hussars and they streamed out of the dunes leaving a trail of dust, their drawn blades glittering.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Prey (2001)

“She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.”

Stephen King book The Eyes of the Dragon

The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)

Pleasure, Game, Decision, Childhood

“Oh my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh my friends and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an ironhanded and a grinding despotism! Oh my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and fellow-men! I tell you that the hour is come, when we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon the holy and eternal privileges of Brotherhood!”

Charles Dickens book Hard Times

Bk. II, Ch. 4
Hard Times (1854)

Men, God, Family, Suffering

“God has removed from our societies the prejudice and the prides of the ignorant time, when the societies divided to either faithful pious or the ignorant time, when the societies divided to either faithful pious or transgressor oppressors. The people are representing the children of Adam and Adam was created from the dust, and there will be no greatness of Arab above foreigner except by the way of pious and humbleness.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, as quoted by Ahmed Shendy Yousef in The Brotherhood in Islam, Message to the Jews, Christians and Muslims page 30.
Sunni Hadith

God, Children, People, Faith

“I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day," said Mr. Irwine. "No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

Time

“It is surely unnecessary to dwell on the interest and importance of a study which instructs us that every pebble we tread upon bears the impress of the Almighty's hand, and affords evidence of Creative wisdom; that every grain of sand, every particle of dust scattered by the wind, may be composed of the aggregated skeletons of beings, so minute as to elude our unassisted vision, but which possessed an organization as marvellous as our own;—a science discoveries have realized the wildest imaginings of the poet,—whose realities far surpass in grandeur and sublimity the most imposing fictions of romance;—a science whose empire is the earth, the ocean, the atmosphere, the heavens;—whose speculations embrace all elements, all space, all time;—objects the most minute, objects the most colossal;—carrying its researches into the smallest atom which the microscope can render accessible to our visual organs,—and comprehending all the phenomena in the boundless Universe, which the powers of the telescope can reveal.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

The Medals of Creation or First Lessons in Geology (1854)

Wisdom, Imagination, Reality, Study

“!-- Setting forth once more, embarking upon the search once again: the narrow path that snakes among livid rocks and desolate, camel-colored hills; white houses hanging suspended from cliffs, looking as though they were about to let go and fall on the wayfarer’s head; the smell of sweating hides and cow dung; the buzz of afternoon; the screams of monkeys leaping about amid the branches of the trees or scampering along the flat rooftops or swinging from the railings of a balcony; overhead, birds circling and the bluish spirals of smoke rising from kitchen fires; the almost pink light on the stones; the taste of salt on parched lips; the sound of loose earth slithering away beneath one’s feet; the dust that clings to one’s sweat-drenched skin, makes one’s eyes red, and chokes one’s lungs; i --> Images, memories, fragmentary shapes and forms — all those sensations, visions, half-thoughts that appear and disappear in the wink of an eye, as one sets forth to meet…. The path also disappears as I think of it, as I say it.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 1

Color, Search, Bird, Thinking

“The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"The Knight's Tomb" (c. 1817)

Soul

“I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Money, People, Sadness, Angels

“Let’s return now to the dust as the dust we are”

Aaron Weiss

February 1878.
Ten Stories

“Again and again Gould has been seen to charge into battle, sometimes hardly visible in the struggling mass. Strangely immune to seemingly lethal lunges he finally re-emerges. Eventually the dust and confusion die down. Gould announces to the awestruck onlookers that our present understanding of evolutionary processes is dangerously deficient and the theory is perhaps in its death throes. We look beyond the exponent of doom, and there standing in the sunlight is the edifice of evolutionary theory, little changed.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 10.

Death, Understanding, Change

“To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata.”

David Weinberger book Everything is Miscellaneous

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007), p. 233

“Now there were screams. then dust. Then crumbling and roaring. I turned round and round in a circle. I had done this…You did it, Arturo. This is the wrath of God…Great clouds of dust…Up in that room on that bed you did it.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

God

“But each day brings its petty dust
Our soon-chok’d souls to fill,
And we forget because we must,
And not because we will.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Absence" (1857), st. 3

Soul, Forgetting

“Stamping around, waiting, I cursed England aloud, hands dug deep into pockets, dancing to the wind that knocked in vain at the Sunday shops. Cigarette-packets, football fixtures, bus-tickets sailed by in dust-ghosts of Saturday. A woman with a puce face and a blancmange-coloured prayer-book was waiting also for The Priest and Pig, and she looked puce disapproval at me. Twenty minutes late, the bus yawned in from town, near-empty, and it swallowed us in a gape of Sunday ennui. So we sundayed along, rattling and creaking in Sunday hollowness, I upstairs, tearing my elevenpenny ticket while I read the prospectus of Winter Commercial Classes stuck on the window.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Right to an Answer (1960)

Books, Tear, Winter, Waiting

“Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are!
From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins,
That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war,
Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate in chains.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

On the Entry of the Austrians into Naples (1821).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

War

“…the concentration of human beings in towns…is contrary to nature, and…this abnormal existence is bound to issue in suffering, deterioration, and gradual destruction to the mass of the population…countless thousands of our fellow-men, and still a larger number of children…are starved of air and space and sunshine. …This view of city life, which is gradually coming home to the heart and understanding and the conscience of our people, is so terrible that it cannot be put away. What is all our wealth and learning and the fine flower of our civilisation and our Constitution and our political theories – what are all these but dust and ashes, if the men and women, on whose labour the whole social fabric is maintained, are doomed to live and die in darkness and misery in the recesses of our great cities? We may undertake expeditions on behalf of oppressed tribes and races, we may conduct foreign missions, we may sympathise with the cause of unfortunate nationalities; but it is our own people, surely, who have the first claim upon us…the air must be purified…the sunshine must be allowed to stream in, the water and the food must be kept pure and unadulterated, the streets light and clean…the measure of your success in bringing these things to pass will be the measure of the arresting of the terrible powers of race degeneration which is going on in the countless sunless streets.”

Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1836–1908) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Belmont (25 January 1907), quoted in John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 588
Prime Minister

Life, Women, Men, Children

“Life carries on
In the people I meet
In everyone that’s out on the street
In all the dogs and cats
In the flies and rats
In the rot and the rust
In the ashes and the dust
Life carries on and on and on and on.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

I Grieve
Song lyrics, City of Angels: Music from the Motion Picture (1998)

Life, People, Dogs, Cats

“For the tourist's
brown pennies scattered at the old church door,
the ragged papooses jump, and bite the dust.”

A. M. Klein (1909–1972) writer, journalist, lawyer

Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga (1983)

“Man's books are but a climbing stair,
Lain step by step, like stairs of stone;
The stairway here, the temple there —
Man's lampad honor, and his trust,
The God who called him from the dust.”

Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge

"The Larger College".
In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890)

God, Books

“We sometimes live to three hundred years, but when we cease to exist here we only become the foam on the surface of the water, and we have not even a grave down here of those we love. We have not immortal souls, because Estelle is a star and we shall never live again; but, like the green sea-weed, when once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more. Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid
Fairy Tales (1835)

Love, Soul, Star, Water

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Mark Twain book Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

People, Secret, Age, World

“[My father] was always very adamant about one thing - if you can't trust the Book of Genesis as literal history, then you can't trust the rest of the Bible. After all, every single doctrine of biblical theology is founded in the history of Genesis 1-11. My father had not developed his thinking in this area as much as we have today at Answers in Genesis, but he clearly understood that if Adam wasn't created from dust, and that if he didn't fall into sin as Genesis states, then the gospel message of the New Testament can't be true either.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World: Leaving a Lasting Legacy (2008)

Books, History, Thinking

“The dream on the pillow,
That flits with the day,
The leaf of the willow
A breath wears away;
The dust on the blossom,
The spray on the sea;
Ay,—ask thine own bosom—
Are emblems of thee.”

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

(29th March 1823) Song - The dream on the pillow.
The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Dreams, Sea

“When all through earth and heaven dust storms rise,
how hard and rough, the road a woman walks!
O those who rule in yonder blue above,
who is the cause and maker of this woe?”

Đặng Trần Côn (1710–1745) writer

Source: Chinh phụ ngâm, Lines 1–4

“The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles. If you would have seen it with your own eyes, you would have been very pleased, and your heart would have been filled with joy.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

As quoted in "The Most Wanted Man in the World" http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010924/wosama.html (16 September 2001), Time magazine profile. <br class="br">2000s, 2001

Heart, Joy, Flying

“O Earth! all bathed with blood and tears, yet never
Hast thou ceased putting forth thy fruit and flowers;
And hast thou then no pity for mankind?
Can thy maternal breast receive again
Their dust, and yet not throb?”

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

Translations, From the French

Flowers, Tear, Maternity