Gleam Quotes - Page 5

• How can I teach your children gentleness and mercy to the weak, and reverence for life, which in its nakedness and excess, is still a gleam of God's omnipotence, when by your laws, your actions and your speech, you contradict the very things I teach?

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Children, Law, Omnipotence

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• The vital elements are often momentary, change-sent things ... a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing the threshold. Sometimes they are a matter of luck, sometimes of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that you have seen. It is usually some incidental detail that heightens the effect of a picture, stressing a pattern, deepening the sense of atmosphere.

  Bill Brandt

  Stress, Cat, Light

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• Last year's troubles, They shine up so prettily, They gleam with a lustre they don't have today.

  Suzanne Vega

  Years, Shining, Today

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• Is it a spiral of water in the tragic gleam of a revolver, an egg, a glistening arc or the floodgate of reason, a keen ear attuned to a mineral hiss, or a turbine of algebraic formulas? (On Man Ray's first photograms, 1921.)

  Tristan Tzara

  Men, Eggs, Water

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• Let me tell you about Australia. It's really, really, really, far from wherever you live on Earth. You fly and you fly and you fly. Then relativity takes over and you get younger and younger. And when you land, you're a gleam in your father's eye.

  Greg Proops

  Father, Eye, Land

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• A primatologist told me you can find love in the eyes of an orangutan. It's that old primate gleam that goes back thousands of years and can penetrate the deepest gloom of the jungle. Nothing can deter that gleam, which is why we primates have survived for so long to meet and procreate. In prison, the survival of romance is not easy, but it finds a way ... In Canada, there has been a succession of romances between prisoners and female guards, nurses, librarians, and one Catholic nun who married the convict after he divorced his wife.

  Shawn Thompson

  Eye, Years, Nurse

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• Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is "the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders," as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project.

  Lauren Groff

  Dark, Creative, Research

  Interview with Jason Skipper, therumpus.net. August 24, 2012.

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• The sheen of ocean gleams on the blue fish-plate.

  Mason Cooley

  Ocean, Blue, Fishing

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• For some, bottles of liquor gleam like the towers of Eldorado.

  Mason Cooley

  Towers, Bottles, Liquor

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• And just as a little thread of gold, running through a fabric, brightens the whole garment, so women's work at home, while only the doing of little things, like the golden gleam of sunlight runs through and brightens all the fabric of civilization.

  Laura Ingalls Wilder

  Running, Home, Civilization

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• What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life - the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Time, Heart, Joy

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow (1938). “Works”

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• A club there is of smokers--dare you come
  To that close, clouded, hot, narcotic room?
  When, midnight past, the very candles seem
  Dying for air, and give a ghastly gleam;
  When curling fumes in lazy wreaths arise,
  And prosing topers rub their winking eyes.

  George Crabbe

  Eye, Past, Air

  George Crabbe, John Crabbe (1834). “The poetical works of the Rev. George Crabbe: in eight volumes”, p.180

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• One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set it. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.

  Jonathan Raban

  Drama, Fall, Eden

  Jonathan Raban (1992). “For Love and Money: A Writing Life”, Perennial

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• I have faced Death. I have been caught in the wild weed tangles of Her hair, seen the gleam of her jade eyes. I will go when it is time - no choice! - but now I want life.

  Keri Hulme

  Weed, Eye, Hair

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• The desert came into view ... sand and palm trees, a way of life that revolved around human beings without possessions or skills, who had to rely on their imaginations to contrive a way of making their hearts beat faster or even to keep them at a normal pace; to search unaided for a hidden gleam of light, and to live with two seasons a year instead of four.

  Hanan al-Shaykh

  Heart, Views, Years

  Hanan Al-Shaykh (2010). “Women of Sand and Myrrh”, p.352, A&C Black

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• If one but tell a thing well, it moves on with undying voice, and over the fruitful earth and across the sea goes the bright gleam of noble deeds ever unquenchable.

  Pindar

  Moving, Sea, Voice

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• The wind and the rain, gives this place a gleam that just isn't natural. And the ground, alive with crawling things, crawling death.

  Ed Wood

  Nature, Rain, Wind

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• I can see others in the sunlight; I can see our boats' crews and our athletic young men on the glistening water, or speckled with the moving lights of sunlit leaves; but I myself am always in the shadow looking on. Not unsympathetically, - God forbid! - but looking on alone, much as I looked at Sylvia from the shadows of the ruined house, or looked at the red gleam shining through the farmer's windows, and listened to the fall of dancing feet, when all the ruin was dark that night in the quadrangle.

  Charles Dickens

  Nature, Moving, Fall

  Charles Dickens (2014). “Hard Times (And Other Stories)”, p.595, Jazzybee Verlag

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• Some moralist or mythological poet
  Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
  I am satisfied with that,
  Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
  Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Swans, Mirrors

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.177, Wordsworth Editions

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• Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
  For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
  Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
  Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
  And Usna's children died.

  William Butler Yeats

  Beauty, Dream, Children

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.28, Wordsworth Editions

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• At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Simple, Thinking

  Charles Darwin (1896). “Charles Darwin's Works: The life and letters of Charles Darwin... ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2v”

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• And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen?... The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and the fire glowing in her cheeks.

  Angela Carter

  Mother, Air, Glowing

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• Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beauty, Sunset, Vision

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.242, Modern Library

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• The union of hearts-the union of hands-And the flag of our Union forever. - George Pope Morris.
  Your flag and my flag,
  And how it flies today
  In your land and my land
  And half a world away!
  Rose-red and blood-red
  The stripes for ever gleam;
  Snow-white and souldwhite-
  The good forefathers' dream;
  Sky-blue and true-blue, with stars to gleam aright-
  The gloried guidon of the day; a shelter through the night.

  Wilbur D. Nesbit

  Dream, Stars, Heart

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• Well do I remember that dark hot little office in the hospital at Begumpett, with the necessary gleam of light coming in from under the eaves of the veranda. I did not allow the punka to be used because it blew about my dissected mosquitoes, which were partly examined without a cover-glass; and the result was that swarms of flies and of 'eye-flies' - minute little insects which try to get into one's ears and eyelids - tormented me at their pleasure

  Ronald Ross

  Eye, Dark, Science

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