The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.
Interpretation
The quote compares a Montana sunset to a bruise, suggesting beauty combined with a sense of danger or poison in the sky.
In this quote, F. Scott Fitzgerald uses vivid imagery to describe a Montana sunset, likening it to a giant bruise that signifies beauty marred by harm or toxicity. The metaphor suggests that while sunsets can be breathtaking, there is an underlying darkness or foreboding represented by the 'darkened arteries' and 'poisoned sky', prompting reflection on the relationship between nature's beauty and its potential for negativity.
In practice
In a nature documentary, when discussing the complexities of environmental beauty and degradation.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.
There's no palette as rich as a garden. And the intensity of it - I make this statement all the time: You can't plan nature; you court her.
All we can hope for is that the thing is going to slowly and imperceptibly shift. All I can say is that 50 years ago there were no such thing as environmental policies.
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes less than themselves.
I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests.
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