"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
— Charles Bukowski (Factotum)

"When she awoke, the world was on fire."
— Scott Westerfeld (Uglies)

""Dark and difficult times lie ahead. Soon we must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.""
— J.K. Rowling

" The first building she reached appeared to be an old barn. Only one young guard stood before its bolted door, staring at her with wide eyes, holding up his sword in defense, She heated his sword and he dropped it, his expression barely changing, as if he had been expecting that. She held up her two swords to his throat, but they were two heavy, so she dropped one and held the other with both hands. "Where are the two Bayern boys kept?" The soldier shook his head. BURN HIM, prompted the fire. The excitement of burning was simmering in her, heating her up for more action."
— Shannon Hale (Enna Burning)

"As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly."
— Clive Barker (Mister B. Gone)

"The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith."
— Anaïs Nin

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there."
— Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

"Maybe I could just James Bond my way down the cable if I draped the scarf over it, clinging to the ends as my body careened down it to safety-- Careened. What an ugly word that was"
— Katie MacAlister

""They courted the face on the screen, the face of translucence, the face of wax on which men found it possible to imprint the image of their fantasy.""
— Anaïs Nin

"Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.

~Hebrews 12:28-29"
— Various (Holy Bible: King James Version)

"The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame.
He might get burned, but he's in the game.
And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll
Beat his wings 'til he burns them black...
No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . .
The Moth don't care if The Flame is real,
'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweetheart deal.
And nothing fuels a good flirtation,
Like Need and Anger and Desperation...
No, The Moth don't care if The Flame is real. . . "
— Aimee Mann

"Once upon a time, man had a love affair with fire."
— Robert R. McCammon (Swan Song)

"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
— Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West)

"Silverstream: You idiot!!! What are you doing in my territory???
Graystripe:...Drowning?
Silverstream: Can't you do that in your own territory?
Graystripe: Ah, but who would rescue me there?"
— Erin Hunter

"It's a power that I can't explain. As it flows and it grows and it shapes my faith. There've been hundreds of moments I can't deny. When it brushe against the fire or dwelt in the Fire of God."
— Kenneth Copeland

"Fire is no laughing matter. In a drunken attempt to appear womanly, my neighbor tried to burn her pubes off when she was fifteen, but it hurt too much to get it completely smooth. My friend had sex with her two years later and said her clit looked like a chestnut. I’ve been pro-bush ever since. "
— Brian Celio (Catapult Soul)

"The world's flattery and hypocrisy is a sweet morsel:
eat less of it, for it is full of fire.
Its fire is hidden while its taste is manifest,
but its smoke becomes visible in the end. "
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"The spark that has stopped its flight
Is just flake of soot.
"
— George Konstantinov

"It is among the commonplaces of education that we often first cut off the living root and then try to replace its natural functions by artificial means. Thus we suppress the child's curiosity and then when he lacks a natural interest in learning he is offered special coaching for his scholastic coaching for his scholastic difficulties."
— Alice Duer Miller

"Zembla is a site devoted to the life and works of author, translator, and lepidopterist.

"
— Vladimir Nabokov

"The hotter you are, the faster they come."
— The Fire Department!

"Some say the world will end in fire,
some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if i had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
— Robert Frost

"Each one's no longer conscious
Of the high wall, or the rest:
Since the one enduring fortress,
Is the soldier's iron breast.

If you’d live unconquered,
Quickly arm, and fight the real foe:
Every wife an Amazon bred,
And every child a hero."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Why can't you see what they're doing to thee? Is it fair that you all die in vain?"
— Dragonforce Black Fire

""Coming near him like a ballet dancer she took a leap towards him, and he, frightened by her vehemence, and fearing that she would crash against him, instinctively became absolutely rigid, and she felt herself embracing a statue.""
— Anaïs Nin

"He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed."
— Karen Joy Fowler (Sarah Canary)

"A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well."
— Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen)

"On the bright side, I'm sure this isn't the last time you'll ever get firebombed, so maybe you'll have better luck next time."
— Janet Evanovich (Finger Lickin' Fifteen)

"She held out her hand, like a man. He hesitated, then took the hand and shook it. It was very warm. You could not help but be aware of the wild passage of blood on the other side of its wall, veins, capillaries, sweat glands, tiny factories in the throes of complicated manufacture. [He] looked at the eyes and, knowing how eyes worked, was astonished, not for the first time, at the infinite complexity of Creation, wondering how this thing, this instrument for seeing, could transmit so clearly its entreaty while at the same time—-Look, I am only an eye—-denying that it was doing anything of the sort."
— Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda)

"Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!'"
— Anaïs Nin

"Why can't you see what they're doing to thee? Is it fair that you all die in vain?"
— Dragonforce Black Fire