the lid QUOTES

4 " After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind. "

― Ali Shaw , The Girl With Glass Feet

6 " If I must die young, bury me
in a music box. I’ll be the pale ballerina with dirt
in her hair. Attach my painless feet to metal springs
and open the lid when you visit.

Watch me rise and pirouette, my arms overhead tickling
the dark night’s belly until I’m dizzy, until the stars
melt and spiral into a halo over my head
and I’ve stirred my death into the sky. "

― Jalina Mhyana , The Wishing Bones

8 " He considered for a moment, then started to play a piece that was very familiar to Ruth, although she had no idea what it was. It was lilting and wistful, and she could have sung the melody if she had wished." Alright?" He raised his eyebrows inquiringly." Yes. Exactly." It was effortless and perfect, and he played it through to the end, closing with the softest and most delicate chords, which hung and faded in the quiet hall like the grains of dust raining through the evening light. Ruth was touched. It was all she had wanted. He did not move until there was complete silence again, then he closed the lid without saying anything, and stood up, shoving back the chair. ... " What was that piece?" " A Brahms waltz." " Hasn't it got a name?" she wanted it to remember." Number fifteen. Opus thirty-nine." It hadn't sounded like numbers to Ruth. "

10 " She slipped off the lid and took out a little hourglass hanging on a silver pivot from a black ribbon, its belly full of twinkling black sand. " Oh, it's beautiful!" " You like it." Her guardian, the antiquarian, who invested every colour, gemstone, beast, and planet with arcane and symbolic meaning, would likely give her a lecture on saturnine influences. Blanche decided not to care. " Yes, I do. "

12 " Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand. In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy. The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing towards self and rights and demands, joy is snuffed out. Anger is the lid that suffocates joy until she lies limp and lifeless. "

― Ann Voskamp , One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

14 " Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep. "

― Virginia Woolf , The Waves

16 " You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off. "

― A.A. Gill