Quotes about ribbon

A collection of quotes on the topic of ribbon, likeness, doing, look.

Quotes about ribbon

“I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.”

Charles Manson (1934–2017) American criminal and musician

Lie, Thinking, Time

“Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

Evil

“Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

Understanding

“Titles are but nick-names, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it. It reduces man into the diminutive of man in things which are great, and the counterfeit of women in things which are little. It talks about its fine blue ribbon like a girl, and shows its new garter like a child. A certain writer, of some antiquity, says: "When I was a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things."”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Women, Girl

“Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

Mountain

“In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

World, Music

“Far below ran the silver ribbon of the East River, braceleted by shining bridges, flecked by boats as small as flyspecks, splitting the shining banks of light that were Manhattan and Brooklyn on either side.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Light

“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibits with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like a cat-show, but the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: The Educated Imagination

Imagination, Cats, Literature, Hell

“We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees (2002)

Night

“Do you know how, when you are on the verge of a breakdown, the world pounds in your ears; a rush of blood, of consequence? Do you now how it feels when the truth cuts your tongue to ribbons, and still you have to speak it?”

Jodi Picoult Change of Heart

Source: Change of Heart

Truth, World, Feeling

“I'll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.
The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
"That must have been the sun!”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Time, Sun

“He'd laugh in my face, then I'd slice him to ribbons and then he'd break my neck”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bleeds

“It depends. If I don't let you in, will you huff and puff and blow my house down?"
She had no idea. "I'm more of a kick the door open and cut everyone inside to ribbons kind of wolf.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Bayou Moon

Idea, Wolf, Housing, Dependency

“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.

Also, here is a green toothbrush tied in a ribbon. It expresses my feelings inadequately.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Source: We Were Liars

Feeling

“So up I got in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad.
And, "One thing there's no getting by --
I've been a wicked girl," said I;
But if I can't be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Books, Girl, Anger

“In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness. At least a rainbow gives you a tip about the weather.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

World, Music, Weather

“Time cannot be packaged and ribboned and left under trees for christmas morning. Time can't be given. But it can be shared”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Gift

Tree, Time, Christmas

“Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Source: The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

Christmas

“Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

God

“It's a road!"
I patted his back." It's a lovely road. Now which way do we go?"
Corey looked one way, the brown ribbon extending into emptiness. He looked the other way, saw the same thing and his shoulders slumped.
"Damn.”

Kelley Armstrong (1968) Canadian writer

Source: The Calling

Love, Way

“… occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.”

Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967–2020) American author and journalist

“A long white ribbon shot out of the crack in the wall. The ribbon just kept coming, weaving itself into some kind of shape next to Anubis, and my first thought was, My god, he’s got a magic roll of toilet paper.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

God

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

World

“Around his neck a ribbon clung,
Close to his heart a picture hung :
I saw the face — it was not mine;
I saw, too, a small dagger shine,
A curious toy — you know the rest.”

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

(1831-2) The Convict
The Monthly Magazine

Heart

“I risked my life. I came back and wore the ribbons and medals that my commanding officer told me to wear. And now you have the audacity to challenge me after serving this country? You sleep under a blanket of freedom that I helped provide. You should just say thank you.”

Michael Grimm (1970) American politician

To Michael Allegretti, Inside City Hall, NY1, (3 September 2010). http://www.wnyc.org/story/103786-mr-incredible-goes-washington-nycs-michael-grimm/ <br class="br">2010s

Life, Sleep, Freedom, Help

“Hate came in a maelstrom, and we called it several things—racism, pedophilia, justice, righteousness—but all those words were just ribbons and wrapping paper on a soiled gift that no one wanted to open.”

Dennis Lehane book A Drink Before the War

Prologue.
A Drink Before the War (1994)

Hate, Justice

“Even after my old man returned from the wars with all his ribbons and a thousand stories I still struggled for survival without my love. He was so busy rigging up the house to look like a ship, printing the rules of command on little notes which he pinned to the wall above the sink, Attention: Do not waste water … Do not throw garbage in here; in the outhouse and in the washroom, Attention: Toilet paper rules … Use only four sections per use … Do not throw funny paper in commode. I doubt if he noticed my dying condition.”

Oscar Zeta Acosta book Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Source: Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), p. 92.

Love, War, Business, Water

“There is no solid satisfaction in any career for a woman like myself. There is no home, no true freedom, no hope, no joy, no expectation for tomorrow, no contentment. I would rather cook a meal for a man and bring him his slippers and feel myself in the protection of his arms than have all the citations and awards and honors I have received worldwide, including the Ribbon of Legion of Honor and my property and my bank accounts. They mean nothing to me. And I am only one among the millions of sad women like myself.”

Taylor Caldwell (1900–1985) Novelist

Ask Them Yourself
1970s-

Women, Sadness, Hope, Feeling

“Yonder comes my lady
Rainbow ribbons in her hair
Yonder comes my lady
Rainbow ribbons in her hair
Six white horses and a carriage
She's returning from the fair”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Cyprus Avenue
Song lyrics, Astral Weeks (1969)

Horse

“The idea of a liberal elite is not intellectually robust. It’s never been enunciated with anything approaching scholarly rigor, it has been refuted countless times, and it falls apart under any sort of systematic scrutiny.Yet the idea persists. It did not die with Richard Nixon or peter out with the busing controversy or depart the national scene with the wily Bill Clinton. Indeed, it has greater currency on the street today than do twenty years’ worth of blue-ribbon studies and a lifetime of responsible sociology.”

Thomas Frank book What's the Matter with Kansas?

Ibid. (p. 115).
What's the Matter with Kansas? (2004)

Idea, Study, Time

“"Make them read that it is no longer the fashion to wear birds upon hats. That will afford relief to your poor milliner and at the same time set free thousands of our darling birds who have been so cruelly used."
Popopo thanked the wise king and followed his advice.
The office of every newspaper and magazine in the city was visited by the knook, and then he went to other cities, until there was not a publication in the land that had not a "new fashion note" in its pages. Sometimes Popopo enchanted the types, so that whoever read the print would see only what the knook wished them to. Sometimes he called upon the busy editors and befuddled their brains until they wrote exactly what he wanted them to. Mortals seldom know how greatly they are influenced by fairies, knooks and ryls, who often put thoughts into their heads that only the wise little immortals could have conceived.
The following morning when the poor milliner looked over her newspaper she was overjoyed to read that "no woman could now wear a bird upon her hat and be in style, for the newest fashion required only ribbons and laces."”

L. Frank Baum (1856–1919) Children's writer, editor, journalist, screenwriter

"The Enchanted Types", in American Fairy Tales (1901)
Short stories

Fashion, Business, Bird, Time

“A core function of Army is the application of violence to protect and defend national interests. While violence is an essential part of our business, it is employed in a tightly regulated and controlled manner and we most emphatically do not accept or condone violence outside of these parameters. This is why Army is a Campaign Partner with White Ribbon, which as many of you would know, is a global movement to stop violence against women.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, Business, Parting

“The object of presenting medals, stars, and ribbons is to give pride and pleasure to those who have deserved them. At the same time a distinction is something which everybody does not possess. If all have it it is of less value … A medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, March 22, 1944 "War Decorations" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1944/mar/22/war-decorations-and-medals#column_872. <br class="br">The Second World War (1939–1945)

Pleasure, Star, Time

“Treasure maps; Czarist bonds; a case of stuffed dodos; Scarlett O'Hara's birth certificate; two flattened and deformed silver bullet heads in an old matchbox; Baedeker's guide to Atlantis (seventeenth edition, 1902); the autograph score of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, with Das Ende written neatly at the foot of the last page; three boxes of moon rocks; a dumpy, heavy statuette of a bird covered in dull black paint, which reminded him of something but he couldn't remember what; a Norwich Union life policy in the name of Vlad Dracul; a cigar box full of oddly shaped teeth, with CAUTION: DO NOT DROP painted on the lid in hysterical capitals; five or six doll's-house-sized books with titles like Lilliput On $2 A Day; a small slab of green crystal that glowed when he opened the envelope; a thick bundle of love letters bound in blue ribbon, all signed Margaret Roberts; a left-luggage token from North Central railway terminus, Ruritania; Bartholomew's Road Atlas of Oz (one page, with a yellow line smack down the middle); a brown paper bag of solid gold jelly babies; several contracts for the sale and purchase of souls; a fat brown envelope inscribed To Be Opened On My Death: E. A. Presley, unopened; Oxford and Cambridge Board O-level papers in Elvish language and literature, 1969-85; a very old drum in a worm-eaten sea-chest marked F. Drake, Plymouth, in with a load of minute-books and annual accounts of the Winchester Round Table; half a dozen incredibly ugly portraits of major Hollywood film stars; Unicorn-Calling, For Pleasure & Profit by J. R. Hartley; a huge collection of betting slips, on races to be held in the year 2019; all water, as far as Paul was concerned, off a duck's {back]”

Tom Holt (1961) British writer

The Portable Door (2003)

Love, Life, Death, Pleasure

“Gifts have ribbons, not strings.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Holiday advice from Bonta essay "Ribbons vs. Strings" adapted to Christmas audio Tale "It's the Gift That Counts" (Holiday Magic 2005 CD). Vanna Bonta Has Holiday Gift Advice http://www.waleg.com/celebrities/archives/006180.html WAlEG Celebrities; December 16, 2006

“Someday I must be able to paint truly remarkable colors. Yesterday I held in my lap a wide, silver-gray satin ribbon which I edged with two narrower black, patterned silk ribbons. And I placed on top of these a plump, bottle-green velvet bow. I'd like to be able to paint something one day in those colors.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

‎note in her Journal, 3 June, 1902; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker, the Letters and Journals, ed. Günter Busch and ‎Liselotte von Reinken (1998), p. 278
1900 - 1905
Variant: Someday I must be able to paint truly remarkable colors. Yesterday I held in my lap a wide, silver-gray satin ribbon which I edged with two narrower black, patterned silk ribbons. And I placed on top of these a plump, bottle-green velvet bow. I'd like to be able to paint something one day in those colors.

Color, Painting

“He looked like he could have snapped the chains that held him as easily as you might snap the ribbons on a Christmas present, but when you looked in his face, you knew he wasn't going to do anything like that.”

Stephen King book The Green Mile

The Green Mile (1996)

Christmas

“As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These “humanitarian parts” are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its “antirent and anticapital parts,” means to get rid of the poodle.”

Daniel De Leon (1852–1914) American newspaper editor

"The Daily People" editorial, "Trimming the Poodle" (November 2, 1908) <br class="br"> Complete online text of "Trimming the Poodle" http://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/works/1908/081102.htm

Law, Parting

“"Do you know what this is, Lord Vorkosigan?" Giaja asked.
Miles eyed the medallion of the Order of Merit on its colored ribbon, glittering on a bed of velvet. "Yes, sir. It is a lead weight, suitable for sinking small enemies. Are you going to sew me into a silk sack with it, before you throw me overboard?"”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)

Color

“The higher the trail the steeper it grows
Ten thousand tiers of dangerous cliffs
The stone bridge is slippery with green moss
Cloud after cloud keeps flying by
Waterfalls hang like ribbons of silk
The moon shines down on the bright pool
I climb the highest peak once more
To wait where the lone crane flies”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Waiting, Flying

“And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!”

Henry Newbolt (1862–1938) English poet and writer

Describing a game of cricket. <br class="br"> Vitai Lampada http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/influences/vitai.html

Hope, Game, Selfishness, Season

“Well saturday gives what sunday steals,
And a child is born on his brother's heels,
Come sunday morn the first-born is dead,
In a shoebox tied with a ribbon of red.”

Nick Cave (1957) Australian musician

Song lyrics, The Firstborn Is Dead (1985), Tupelo

Dead

“I have tried, in this book, to do three things. I try first to bring a greater awareness of the way in which the differences and the similarities in the bodies of human beings are the basis on which all our learnings about our sex, and our relationship to the other sex, are built. Talking about our bodies is a complex and difficult matter. We are so used to covering them up, to referring to them obliquely with slang terms or in a borrowed language to hiding even infants' sex membership under blue and pink ribbons. It is difficult to become aware of those things about us which have been, and will always be, patterned by our own particular modesties and reticences. We reject, and very rightly, catalogues of caresses arranged in frequency tables, or accounts of childhood that read like a hospital chart…”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Male and Female (1949), p. 4-5

Books, Sex, Way, Learning

“And there lies my dilemma here tonight. I know that my work in this case is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels. We know their names. They number a thousand for each one of the red ribbons that we wear here tonight. They finally rest in the warm embrace of the gracious creator of us all. A healing embrace that cools their fevers, that clears their skin, and allows their eyes to see the simple, self-evident, common sense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all and was written down on paper by wise men, tolerant men, in the city of Philadelphia two hundred years ago. God bless you all. God have mercy on us all. And God bless America.”

Tom Hanks (1956) American actor

66th Academy Award Speech (1994)

Men, God, Truth, Angels

“Wonderful baby, nothin' to fear.
Love whom you will, but doubt what you hear.
They'll whisper sweet things to make untrue.
So be good to yourself, that's all you can do.You're a wonderful baby livin' on love
The sandman says maybe he'll take you above,
Up where the girls fly on ribbons and bows,
Where babies float by, just counting their toes.”

Don McLean (1945) American Singer and songwriter

Wonderful Baby
Song lyrics, Homeless Brother (1974)

Love, Fear, Girl, Baby

“And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Cars

“Now if we had the power
To bring our neighbors home from war,
They would have never missed a Christmas,
No more ribbons on their door.
And when you trust your television,
What you get is what you got.
Because when they own the information, oh
They can bend it all they want.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Waiting on the World to Change
Song lyrics, Continuum (2006)

War, Home, Christmas

“It is a thorny rose, which draws red blooddrops from thine heart—
The delicate bright ribbon of the rainbow, o’er thee hung.”

Zabel Sibil Asadour (1863–1934) Armenian writer

Tears http://armenianhouse.org/blackwell/armenian-poems/zabel-assatour.html

Heart, Drawing

“As I go walking this ribbon of highway
I see above me the endless skyway
And all around me the wind keeps saying:
This land is made for you and me.”

Woody Guthrie (1912–1967) American singer-songwriter and folk musician

This Land Is Your Land (1940; 1944)

“Through their work in highlighting the role of the leader, making workforce flexibility a mainstream of Australian workplaces and looking for, and implementing "game changing" initiatives they are making a telling contribution to this vital area. I am deeply proud to be a Male Champion of Change and an Ambassador for White Ribbon. The values and aspirations inimical to both are completely aligned to those I hold as the Chief of the Australian Army.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Game, Change

“The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding —
Riding — riding —
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”

Alfred Noyes book The Highwayman

The Highwayman (1907)

Tree, Sea

“He moved away to the next picture. It was of a man with a fat smiley face and a red ribbon round him and a lot of medals. My great uncle Ambrose Fudge said Bernard carelessly.
He looks a thourough ancester said Ethel kindly.
Well he was said Bernard in a proud tone he was really the Sinister son of Queen Victoria.
Not really cried Ethel in excited tones but what does that mean.
Well I dont quite know said Bernard Clark it puzzles me very much but ancesters do turn quear at times.”

Daisy Ashford book The Young Visiters

Source: The Young Visiters (1919), Chapter 3

Time

“It is not uninteresting to observe in society the opinions of its different classes respecting honours conferred on science. Military and naval men, especially the most eminent, feel that genius is limited by no profession, and themselves sympathizing with it, would gladly hail as brothers in the same distinction, the philosopher and the poet. With lawyers the case is reversed; genius dwells not in their courts : industry and acuteness, monopolised by one absorbing professional subject, exclude larger views; and ribbons not being amongst the honoraria of their own profession, they reprobate their application to science. To this there are, however, some noble exceptions. Amongst the brightest ornaments, of their own profession, men are to be found of larger experience and more extended views than it often produces, who are themselves qualified to have become discoverers in other sciences. It is much to be regretted when such powers are applied to the mere administration, instead of to the reformation, of the laws of their country.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. 224

Men, Law, Feeling, Science

“Oh, Jesus Christ, he wasn't to know,
Like a chicken with a fox,
He couldn't win the war with ego.
Give the kid the pick of pips,
And give him all your stripes and ribbons.
Now he's sitting in his hole,
He might as well have buttons and bows.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)

War, Christ

“Since ever and ever the world began
They danced like a ribbon of flame,
They have sung their song through the centuries long,
And yet it is never the same.
And though you be foolish or though you be wise,
With hair of silver or gold,
You can never be as young as the fairies are,
And never be as old.”

Rose Fyleman (1877–1957) British writer

The Fairies

World, Dance

“The men seldom have any real, concrete notions of what combat is like. Their minds are full of romanticized, Hollywood versions of their future activity in combat, colored with vague ideas of being a hero and winning ribbons and decorations.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: Men Under Stress, 1945, p. 44

Men, Color, Idea, Future

“Writing is simple. First you have to make sure you have plenty of paper… sharp pencils… typewriter ribbon. Then put your belly up to the desk… roll a sheet of paper into the typewriter… and stare at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead.”

Jeff MacNelly (1947–2000) American cartoonist

Prof. Cosmo Fishhawk, in Shoe

Appearance

“Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse”

Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970) American writer

Of Poland, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, ch. 9 (1950)

Learning, Horse

“Standing bareheaded at the foot of the reviewing stand, I received the last salute of these gallant soldiers, their ribbons and streamers recalling our battles together. They had put stars on my shoulders and medals on my chest. I owed my future to them, and I was grateful.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 110-111
Context: My days in Europe with the 101st were nearly at an end. I suddenly received orders relieving me from the Division and assigning me as Superintendent of West Point. On August 22 I took an emotion-laden leave of my troops in a division review at Auxerre. For all their hard-boiled reputation, generals can be terribly sentimental about their units and their men. Standing bareheaded at the foot of the reviewing stand, I received the last salute of these gallant soldiers, their ribbons and streamers recalling our battles together. They had put stars on my shoulders and medals on my chest. I owed my future to them, and I was grateful.

Star, Future

Clive Staples Lewis book Perelandra

Perelandra (1943)
Context: And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity — only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern thereby disposed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also (but the word "seeing" is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells — people, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences and the like — ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were the things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner more delicate cords were the beings that we call short lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things we think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours form beyond our spectrum were the lines of personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some of them were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: But afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole figure of these enamored and inter-inanimate circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped further and further behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of sky, and all simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from a trance, and coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation he looked about him…

People, Art, History, Light

“That evening, as I watched the sunset’s pinwheels of apricot and mauve slowly explode into red ribbons, I thought: The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on.”

Diane Ackerman book A Natural History of the Senses

Source: A Natural History of the Senses (1990), Chapter 5 “Vision” (p. 256)

Making love