#line

One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life." The Fog Horn blew. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#fog #loneliness #sadness #life

We are small but we are many We are many we are small We were here before you rose We will be here when you fall ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#gaiman #lyrics #lyrics

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone. ↗

— William Makepeace Thackeray

#vanity

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

#español #first-lines #latin-america #spanish #spanish

If you're going to read this, don't bother. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#opening-lines #first-sentence

The root of impatience in discipline is really the same as that of overindulgence. In both instances, parents want to make up for lost time, to speed up a process that takes time. ↗

— Russell Moore

#discipline #parenting #timing #family

I often think of you all, one cannot do what one wants in life. The more you feel attached to a spot, the more ruthlessly you are compelled to leave it, but the memories remain, and one remembers - as in a looking glass, darkly - one's absent friends. ↗

— Vincent Van Gogh

#loss #moving-forward #solitude #the-yellow-house #life

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife. ↗

— Nikki Gemmell

#marriage #love

It was Wang Lung's marriage day. ↗

— Pearl S. Buck

#opening-lines #marriage

Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, the processes of coordination and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the coordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#discipline #disintegration #hater #love #mob