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lights quotes

  • Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.

    - Matthew Arnold
      The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems,'The Forsaken Merman', l.35^8.

  •    Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

    -Bible (NewTestament)
    James1:17.

  • My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires, My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone My pride struck out new sparkles of her own† Good life be now my task: my doubts are done; (What more could fright my faith thanThree in One?)

    -John Dryden
      The Hind and the Panther, pt.1, l.71^6.

  • I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger† I was out by one. I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities.

    - (Henry) Graham Greene
    Recalling a game of Russian roulette with his brother's revolver in1923.  A Sort of Life, ch.6, pt.2.

  • Um esta   sempre no escuro, so   no u ltimo derradeiro e   que clareiam a sala. Oneisalwaysinthedark, and it isonlyatthelast moment that they turn on the lights in the room.

    -Joa‹  o Guimara‹  es Rosa
      Grande Serta‹  o: Vere  das (translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands,1963).

  • In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide.

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
    Twice-Told Tales,'The Haunted Mind'.

  • Can you imagine the name Zimmermann in bright lights? It would burn you to death!

    - Ethel stage-name of  Ethel Agnes Zimmermann Merman
    Explaining why she took a stage-name.  Attributed.

  • Turn up the lights; I don't want to go home in the dark.

    -O Henry pseudonym of  William Sydney Porter
    Last words. Quoted in Charles  Alphonso Smith O. Henry (1916), ch.9. The words are taken from the popular song by Harry Williams 'I'm afraid to come home in the dark' (1907).

  • Of the two lights of Christendom, one has been extinguished.

    -Pius II real name Enea Silvio de Piccolomini
      Attributed, on hearing of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, 29 May.

  • It will be a gay world. There will be lights everywhere except in the minds of men, and the fall of the last civilization will not be heard above the din.

    - Sir Herbert Edward Read
      Quoted in Hoggart andJohnston, An Idea of Europe (1987), 'Pyramids and Planes'.

  • Modest? My word, no† He was an all-the-lights-on man.

    - Henry Reed
      AVery Great Man Indeed, radio play.

  • I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

    - Dante Gabriel Rossetti
      Poems,'Sudden Light'.

  • A busy manwho can keep up a daily journal resembles a Steel person preparing for bed with the shades up† When such a man publishes parts of his journal, the reader must conclude he always knew the lights were on.

    - Roger Starr
      On George F Kennan Sketches From a Life (1989). In the Washington Post, 8 May.

  • There lies the port; the vessel, puffs her sail: There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheadsyou and I are old: Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep Moans round with many voices.Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows: for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Though much is taken, much abides: and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and hearth: that which we are, we are: One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

    -Tennyson
      Poems,'Ulysses' (published1842), l.44^70.

  • Our little systems have their day; They have their dayand cease to be; Theyare but broken lights of thee, And thou,O Lord, art more than they.

    -Tennyson
      In Memoriam A.H.H., prologue, l.17^20.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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