Quotes on Ashes

The smallest atom of truth represents some man's bitter toil and agony; for every ponderable chunk of it there is a brave truth-seeker's grave upon some lonely ash-dump and a soul roasting in hell.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

Tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.

Today at Pearl Harbor, veterans are gathering to pay tribute to the young men they remember who never escaped the sunken ships. And over the years, some Pearl Harbor veterans have made a last request. They ask that their ashes be brought down and placed inside the USS Arizona. After the long lives given them, they wanted to rest besides the best men they ever knew. Such loyalty and love remain the greatest strength of the United States Navy.

We were told that they wished merely to pass through our country. . . to seek for gold in the far west . . . Yet before the ashes of the council are cold, the Great Father is building his forts among us. . . . His presence here is . . . an insult to the spirits of our ancestors. Are we then to give up their sacred graves to be allowed for corn?

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

To us, the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end.

He is very fond of me, almost too fond. I could do with less caressing and more rationality. I should like to be less of a pet and more of a friend, if I might choose; but I won't complain of that: I am only afraid his affection loses in depth where it gains in ardour. I sometimes liken it to a fire of dry twigs and branches compared with one of solid coal, very bright and hot; but if it should burn itself out and leave nothing but ashes behind.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.

Is there any pleasure in anger? Yes, if the fire of my anger appeases the ashes of my friends.

Glory paid to our ashes comes too late.

Of all the trees that grow so fair Old England to adorn,_x000D_ _x000D_ Greater are none beneath the Sun _x000D_ _x000D_ Than Oak, and Ash and Thorn.

E'en from the tomb the voice of nature cries, E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young; let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.

As thou these ashes, little brook, wilt bear _x000D_ Into the Avon, Avon to the tide _x000D_ Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas, _x000D_ Into main ocean they, this deed accursed _x000D_ An emblem yields to friends and enemies _x000D_ How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified _x000D_ By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed.

Something good was happening. My life was rising from the ashes, and the sight of it left me feeling something like hopeful.