the ash QUOTES

1 " Trust the Oak,” said she; “trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech. Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable. But shun the Ash and the Alder; for the Ash is an ogre,—you will know him by his thick fingers; and the Alder will smother you with her web of hair, if you let her near you at night. "

― George MacDonald , Phantastes

2 " Kurt pick his way around testing for heat before taking each step and avoiding places where the ash was heaps up. "

3 " Then you think, is this a better world, closer to theone before you knew of wars—earth wars? Before you found that canary in its cagelaying, barely heaving. And you took it outside and said, Go Free! Go free!But it died there, right in your hands…like all of life.Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of Godbetter than the visions themselves? Then you think,none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigaretteand think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts. "

4 " Is the ash in trees, babies, flowers, and visions of Godbetter than the visions themselves? Then you think,none of this is tangible or concrete. So you have another cigaretteand think about the (not one) but many ghosts you keep tucked away,under sheets, under beds, in notes, within other ghosts. "

5 " In retrospect, I came to Nagasaki for the regenerative properties. The second atomic bomb blast so many years ago, which had swept up most of the city in a plutonium cloud, had made the city radioactively peace-loving. Reversing the usual cycle that turns victim into perpetrator, the people who stepped from the rubble filled their hearts with a fervent devotion to peace in all its forms.

In my mind's eye I see them: wounded and dying, their lungs filled with ash and smoke. The ash sits there for some time, and when they exhale, miraculously, something akin to love comes out. "

― Daniel Clausen , The Ghosts of Nagasaki

6 " See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?”
And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.
Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?
And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?
These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true. "

― Lauren Oliver , Annabel (Delirium, #0.5)

7 " Hopeful dreams - even where crack kings’ and dope fiends feast. Dust from the ash and rubble "

8 " Here's to adrenaline.
Here's to dramatic abandon of protocol.
Here's to treasured pain and purple rain.
Here's to chasing our souls,

burning across to sky.

Here's to drinking the ash as it falls,
and not asking why. "

― Virginia Petrucci

9 " What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.
When people die they are sometimes put into coffins which means that they don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin rots.
But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burnt and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antartic, or coming down as rain in rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere. "

― Mark Haddon , The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

10 " The last year of her college career was wheeling slowly round. She could see ahead her examination and her departure. She had the ash of disillusion gritting under her teeth. Would the next move turn out the same? Always the shining doorway ahead; and then, upon approach, always the shining doorway was a gate into another ugly yard, dirty and active and dead. Always the crest of the hill gleaming ahead under heaven: and then, from the top of the hill only another sordid valley full of amorphous, squalid activity. "

― D.H. Lawrence , The Rainbow

11 " Get inches from the mirror and tell yourself what happened. Give yourself the news like an autopsy. At 10:02 on Saturday, he discarded you. At oh-nine-hundred-hours, you were overlooked. At whatever time of whenever day, it didn’t work, and it wasn’t what you thought, and it left you in the ash and the rain. Cry and holler and selectively remember whatever it is you want. It will be whatever you want. "