Flood Quotes - page 9
There's feasting spread in gorgeous halls,
The lamps flash round the city walls,
And many a flood of lustre falls
O'er many an honoured name.
Turn thou from this, and enter where
Some mother weeps o'er her despair,
Some desolate bride rends her rich hair,
Some orphan joins the cry !
Then back again to the death plain,
Where lie those whom they weep in vain,
And ask, in gazing on the slain,
What art thou, Victory ?
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. When You were displeased by Noah's generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favour, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!
Elie Wiesel
She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately--- a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers all glaring at us an we in each other's arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks--- a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.
Henry Miller
Their courage dwells not in a troubled flood
Of mounting spirits, and fermenting blood:
Lodged in the soul, with virtue overruled,
Inflamed by reason, and by reason cooled,
In hours of peace content to be unknown.
And only in the field of battle shown:
To souls like these, in mutual friendship joined,
Heaven dares intrust the cause of humankind.
Joseph Addison
[Aldous Huxley] compared the brain to a 'reducing valve'. In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world.
Tom Wolfe
Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.
Jerome K. Jerome
Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
Brian Aldiss
So when ebbing Nile hides himself in his great caverns and holds in his mouth the liquid nurture of an eastern winter, the valleys smoke forsaken by the flood and gaping Egypt awaits the sounds of her watery father, until at their prayers he grants sustenance to the Pharian fields and brings on a great harvest year.
Statius
The peninsula of India would be one of the first peopled countries, and its inhabitants would have all the habits of the progenitors of man before the flood in as much perfection or more than any other nation... In short, whatever learning man possessed before his dispersion may be expected to be found here, and of this, Hindustan affords innumerable traces... notwithstanding ... the fruitless efforts of our priests to disguise it.
Godfrey Higgins
For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.
Samuel Butler (novelist)
There will no man do for your sake, I think,
What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread:
Body for body and blood for blood,
As the flow of the full sea risen to flood
That yearns and trembles before it sink,
I had given, and lain down for you, glad and dead.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
When Hannibal's eyes were sated with the picture of all that valour, he saw next a marvellous sight-the sea suddenly flung upon the land with the mass of the rising deep, and no encircling shores, and the fields inundated by the invading waters. For, where Nereus rolls forth from his blue caverns and churns up the waters of Neptune from the bottom, the sea rushes forward in flood, and Ocean, opening his hidden springs, rushes on with furious waves. Then the water, as if stirred to the depths by the fierce trident, strives to cover the land with the swollen sea. But soon the water turns and glides back with ebbing tide; and then the ships, robbed of the sea, are stranded, and the sailors, lying on their benches, await the waters' return. It is the Moon that stirs this realm of wandering Cymothoe and troubles the deep; the Moon, driving her chariot through the sky, draws the sea this way and that, and Tethys follows with ebb and flow.
Silius Italicus
That crystal river keeps its pools of blue water free from all stain above its shallow bed, and slowly draws along its fair stream of greenish hue. One would scarce believe it was moving; so softly along its shady banks, while the birds sing sweet in rivalry, it leads along in a shining flood its waters that tempt to sleep.
Silius Italicus
