sand quotes

No horse's cry was that, most like the roar Of some pained desert lion, who all day Hath trailed the hunter's javelin in his side, And comes at night to die upon the sand.

- Matthew Arnold
  Poems:  A New Edition,'Sohrab and Rustum', l.501^4.

And it is the colour of sand, The darkness, as it sifts through your hand.

-John Lawrence Ashbery
  The Tennis Court Oath,'How Much Longer Will I Be  Able To Inhabit The Divine Sepulcher†'.

Mock on, mock on,Voltaire Rousseau; Mock on, mock on,'tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again.

-William Blake
^3  MS Notebooks, p.7.

To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.

-William Blake
c.1803  Auguries of Innocence, l.1^4.

And with as delicate a hand Could twist as tough a rope of sand; And weave fine cobwebs, fit for skull That's empty when the moon is full; Such as take lodgings in a head That's to be let unfurnishe'  d.

- Samuel Butler
  Hudibras, pt.1, canto1, l.155^60.

   The Walrus and the Carpenter Were walking close at hand; They wept like anything to see Such quantities of sand: 'If this were only cleared away,' They said,'it would be grand!'

-Dodgson
  Tweedledee. Through the Looking-Glass, ch.4, 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee'.

When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand.

-JohnWilliam Cheever
  Collected in The Journals,'The Late Forties and Fifties'.

   There's sand in the porridge and sand in the bed, And if this is pleasure we'd rather be dead.

- Sir Noe«  l Peirce Coward
  'The English Lido' (song).

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.

- Daniel Defoe
  Robinson Crusoe.

  Love all God's creation, thewhole of it and every grainof sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's lights. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.

-James Harold Doolittle
^80  The Brothers Karamazov, bk.6, ch.3.

The Divine is everywhere, even in a grain of sand, here I have represented it in bull-rushes.

- Caspar David Friedrich
Remark to the German artist Peter Cornelius, quoted in S Hinz Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen (1968).

Nous avons ba"  ti sur le sable Des cathe  drales impe  rissables. We have built immovable cathedrals In the sand.

- Andre   Paul Guillaume Gide
  Paludes.

Know yourself as a snowdrift on the sand Heaped for two days, or three, then thawed and gone.

- Omar Khayya m
c.1100  Ruba  iya  t, stanza16 (translated by Robert Graves and Omar  Ali-Shah,1972).

They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon.

- Edward Lear
Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and  Alphabets,'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat'.

'My father is deceased.Come,Gaveston, And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.' Ah, words that make me surfeit with delight! What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston Than live and be the favourite of a king? Sweet prince, I come; these, these thyamorous lines Might have enforced me to have swum from France, And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand, So thou would'st smile, and take me in thy arms.

- Christopher Marlowe
c.1591  Gaveston is reading a letter from King Edward. Edward II (published1594), act1, sc.1.

Safe upon solid rock the ugly houses stand: Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand.

- Edna St Vincent Millay
  A Few Figs From Thistles,'Second Fig'.

   Your anger was a climate I inhabited like a desert in a dry frigid weather of high thin air and ivory sun, sand dunes the wind lifted into stinging clouds that blinded and choked me where the only ice was in the blood.

- Marge Piercy
  Stone, Paper, Knife,'TheWeight'.

At last America is in my view; a dreary waste of white barren sand, and melancholy, nodding pines. In the course of many miles, no cheerful cottage has blest my eyes. All seems dreary, savage and desert; and was it for this such sums of money, such streams of British blood have been lavished away? Oh, thou dear land, how dearly hast thou purchased this habitation for bears and wolves. Dearly has it been purchased, and at a price far dearer still it will be kept. My heart dies within me, while I view it.

-Janet   b.c.1730 Schaw
c.1776  On her first sight of the country around Cape Fear. Journal of a Lady of Quality; BeingtheNarrative of aJourney from Scotland to theWest Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years1774 to1776.

Gin by pailfuls, wine in rivers, Dash the window-glass to shivers! For three wild lads were we, brave boys, And three wild lads were we; Thou on the land, and I on the sand, And Jack on the gallows-tree!

- Sir Walter Scott
  Guy Mannering, ch.34.

There lived a singer in France of old By the tideless dolorous midland sea. In a land of sand and ruin and gold There shone one woman, and none but she.

- Algernon Charles Swinburne
  Poems and Ballads,'TheTriumph ofTime'.

We write in sand, our language grows, And like our tide ours overflows.

- Edmund Waller
  'Of EnglishVerse'.

America cannot be an ostrich, with its head in the sand.

- (Thomas) Woodrow Wilson
  Speech, New Mexico,1 Feb.

Givea manthesecure possessionof a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him a nine years' lease on a garden, and he will convert it into a desert† The magic ofturns sand to gold.

- Arthur Young
PROPERTY1787  Journal entries, 30 Jul and 7 Nov, published in Travels in France and Italy (1794).