Pale Quotes - Page 27

• If you go through any newspaper or magazine and look for active, kicking verbs in the sentences, you will realize that this lack of well used verbs is the main trouble with modern English writing. Almost all nonfiction nowadays is written in a sort of pale, colorless sauce of passives and infinitives, motionless and flat as paper.

  Rudolf Flesch

  Writing, Editing, Kicking

  Rudolf Flesch (1946). “The Art of Plain Talk”

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• O cruel cloudless space,
  And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
  Why do we feel restored
  As in a sacramental place?
  Here Mystery is artifice,
  And here a vision of such peace is stored,
  Healing flows from it through our eyes.

  May Sarton

  Lying, Healing, Eye

  May Sarton (2014). “In Time Like Air: Poems”, p.55, Open Road Media

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• A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.

  John Steinbeck

  Song, Eye, Dark

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.106, Penguin

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• I suppose everybody has a mental picture of the days of the week, some seeing them as a circle, some as an endless line, and others again, for all I know, as triangles and cubes. Mine is a wavy line proceeding to infinity, dipping to Wednesday which is the colour of old silver dark with polishing and rising again to a pale gold Sunday. This day has a feeling in my picture of warmth and light breezes and sunshine and afternoons that stretch to infinity and mornings full of far-off bells.

  Angela Thirkell

  Morning, Sunshine, Sunday

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• I have made tremendous efforts to work in a darker register and express the sinister and tragic quality of the place, given my natural tendency to work in light and pale tones.

  Claude Monet

  Light, Effort, Quality

  Claude Monet (2014). “Monet by Himself: Paintings, Drawings, Pastels, Letters”, Chartwell

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• God endowed you with a glory when he created you, a glory so deep and mythic that all creation pales in comparison.

  John Eldredge

  Coaching, Glory, Creation

  John Eldredge (2008). “Eldredge 3 in 1 - Sacred Romance , Waking the Dead, Desire”, p.259, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.

  Betsy Lerner

  Believe, Writing, Blue

  Betsy Lerner (2010). “The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor's Advice to Writers”, p.19, Penguin

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• The dark is settling in. The sky glows yellow- pale- anemic from the city lights. The Tenderloin at night is a real horror show. Every 3 feet someone is accosting you with a plea for a handout or the offer of drug or sex. The men and women wander the streets and alleys with a threatening, violont want. Takers looking to take, hustlers looking to hustle, all trying to satisfy a craving that is parpatually unsatisfiable. And tonight I'm one of them.

  Nic Sheff

  Sex, Real, Dark

  Nic Sheff (2012). “Tweak: Growing up on Crystal Meth”, p.45, Simon and Schuster

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• History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.

  Winston Churchill

  Passion, Past, Echoes

  Sir Winston Churchill, Winston Churchill (1965). “Great destiny: sixty years of the memorable events in the life of the man of the century recounted in his own incomparable words”

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• The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sunshine, Fog, Weather

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• I’ll tell you now. That silence almost beat me. It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.

  Mark Lawrence

  Fear, Writing, Quiet Moments

  Mark Lawrence (2011). “Prince of Thorns”, p.26, Penguin

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• The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a time warp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his dead cart through the streets and does he call his trade to each? Dear friend he is not to be dwelt upon for it is by just such wise that he's invited in

  Cormac McCarthy

  Wise, Horse, Night

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “Suttree”, p.4, Pan Macmillan

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• Later when I thought of the chickens, one of those rare pale blue eggs rose up into my throat. The chickens had been part of our family, and the egg in my throat was the feeling of something missing. It was hard and smooth and heavy, but also so fragile it might break and make me cry. It was the feeling of growing out of a favorite shirt, milk spilled on the floor, the last bit of honey in the jar, falling apple blossoms. It was the lump in the throat behind everything beautiful in life.

  Melissa Coleman

  Beautiful, Fall, Blue

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• The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist... what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.

  Plato

  Art, Mean, Men

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• What I fear and desire most in this world is passion. I fear it because it promises to be spontaneous, out of my control, unnamed, beyond my reasonable self. I desire it because passion has color, like the landscape before me. It is not pale. It is not neutral. It reveals the backside of the heart.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Passion, Heart, Self

  Terry Tempest Williams (2008). “Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert”, p.195, Vintage

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• She has seen the mystery hid Under Egypt's pyramid: By those eyelids pale and close Now she knows what Rhamses knows.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Egypt, Pyramids, Mystery

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1872). “Poetical Works”, p.507

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• With sharpen'd sight pale Antiquaries pore, Th' inscription value, but the rust adore. This the blue varnish, that the green endears; The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years.

  Alexander Pope

  Sight, Blue, Years

  Alexander Pope (1797). “Moral essays”, p.305

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• They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Eye, Heart, Sick

  Fyodor Dostoevsky (2015). “Crime and Punishment: Dostoevsky's Collections”, p.483, 谷月社

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• The Holy Night We sate among the stalls at Bethlehem; The dumb kine from their fodder turning them, Softened their horned faces To almost human gazes Toward the newly Born: The simple shepherds from the star-lit brooks Brought visionary looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my kingly One!

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Sweet, Baby, Stars

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• Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is slicked o'er with the pale cast of thought

  William Shakespeare

  Coward, Doe, Hue

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• The worst excesses of the Congress of the 1980s pale in comparison with what is going on in Washington today.

  Marty Meehan

  Excess, Today, Congress

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• Then fear will grow pale and fade away, and you will be free, through your faith in our strong and living Savior, Jesus Christ.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Jesus, Strong, Christ

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2012). “The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer”, p.61, Fortress Press

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• I wish I were the lily's leaf To fade upon that bosom warm, Content to wither, pale and brief, The trophy of thy paler form.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Wish, Lilies, Trophies

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• Bursts as a wave that from the clouds impends, And swell'd with tempests on the ship descends; White are the decks with foam; the winds aloud Howl o'er the masts, and sing through every shroud: Pale, trembling, tir'd, the sailors freeze with fears; And instant death on every wave appears.

  Homer

  Clouds, Wind, White

  Homer (1818). “The Iliad of Homer. Translated by A. Pope. A new edition. Adorned with plates”, p.342

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• The night crept on apace, the moon went down, the stars grew pale and dim, and morning, cold as they, slowly approached. Then, from behind a distant hill, the noble sun rose up, driving the mists in phantom shapes before it, and clearing the earth of their ghostly forms till darkness came again.

  Charles Dickens

  Morning, Nature, Stars

  Charles Dickens (1872). “A Cyclopedia of the Best Thoughts of Charles Dickens”, p.333

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