Imagery Quotes

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

“The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.”
― Scott Westerfeld, Uglies

“their heart grew cold
they let their wings down”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. [...] The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique.”
― Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

“Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.”
― Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera

“What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.”
― Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“A slow smile curved over my face, and I leaned down over him. "No," I said. "Wishes are lies. Tell me you're going to leave. Tell me you're not going to stay. Tell me that it's only for a while so I can enjoy today," I whispered in his ear, as if saying it louder would break me. "And when you go, don't think me cold when I don't cry. I can't cry anymore, Pierce. It hurts too much.”
― Kim Harrison

“Ghosts have a way of misleading you; they can make your thoughts as heavy as branches after a storm.”
― Rebecca Maizel, Infinite Days

“]sing to us
the one with violets in her lap
]mostly
]goes astray”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air--a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“And my life went to pieces, like a love letter in the rain.”
― Will Christopher Baer, Kiss Me, Judas

“A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.”
― Updike, John, Rabbit, Run

“The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“They're endless, stretching beyond the horizon and spreading around me like forever. They heave and moan, frothing over each other, cresting and falling. The pure depth and vastness of it all beyond comprehension, my eyes unable to focus on any individual. Instead I'm drowned in their need. They ripple and swell, the bodies of the Mudo, like the ocean. Like the dead-tossed waves.”
― Carrie Ryan

“The sun had become a light yellow yolk and was walking with red legs across the sky.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Seraph on the Suwanee

“Tonight the sun has died like an Emperor ... great scarlet arcs of silk ... saffron ... green ... crimson ... and the blaze of Venus to remind one of the absolute and the infinite ... and along the lower rim of beauty lay the hard harsh line of the hills ...”
― John Coldstream, Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters

“The night crackled ... Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“We are in the dark places of the earth," said Madman. "Where all the ancient and most dangerous secrets are kept. There are Old Things down here, sleeping all around us, in the earth and in the living rock, and in the spaces between spaces. Keep your voices down. Some of these old creatures sleep but lightly, and even their dreams can have force and substance in our limited world. We have come among forgotten gods and sleeping devils, from the days before the world settled down and declared itself sane.”
― Simon R. Green, Hex and the City

“Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She'd take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free of any dust with a tiny brush, lower the needle ever so gently onto the record. When the record was finished, she'd spray it and wipe it with a felt cloth. Finally she'd return the record to its jacket and its proper place on the shelf. Her father had taught her this procedure, and she followed his instructions with a terribly serious look on her face, her eyes narrowed, her breath held in check. Meanwhile, I was on the sofa, watching her every move. Only when the record was safely back on the shelf did she turn to me and give a little smile. And every time, this thought hit me: It wasn't a record she was handling. It was a fragile soul inside a glass bottle.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“But then I'm distracted by movement in the Forest, a glimpse of red at the edge of my vision. She's no longer running, no longer even walking or standing, but crawling now. Dragging her broken body across the ground toward me, her fingers clawing at the dirt. Her progress is slow, unbearably so. Such that it's almost sad to see her reduced to this. Her body has used up it's stores of energy and has begun collapsing in on itself.”
― Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth)

“The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,
made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Night came walking through Egypt swishing her black dress.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

“I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended legs, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face ... "Vale."

The thrill of it all!

Yes," I said, "it was devastating.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.”
― Juliet Marillier, Heir to Sevenwaters

“Grampie's boat was a little double-ender, a model not built nowadays. She was narrow, so that she pitched and rolled something wicked in almost any sea. He could handle her, but he said she was probably the boat Christ got out of and walked away from on the water.”
― Ruth Moore, Candlemas Bay

“Under the low-hanging light of the moon, Roma was a black-and-white study of sorrow.”
― Chloe Gong, These Violent Delights

“In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape being blown away. My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs out of my sleep-starved brain. ”
― Jack London, The Mutiny of the Elsinore