Home > Topic > the lights
101 " Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia. "
― Margaret Atwood
102 " Here’s the thing, people: We have some serious problems. The lights are off. And it seems like that’s affecting the water flow in part of town. So, no baths or showers, okay? But the situation is that we think Caine is short of food, which means he’s not going to be able to hold out very long at the power plant.”“How long?” someone yelled.Sam shook his head. “I don’t know.”“Why can’t you get him to leave?”“Because I can’t, that’s why,” Sam snapped, letting some of his anger show. “Because I’m not Superman, all right? Look, he’s inside the plant. The walls are thick. He has guns, he has Jack, he has Drake, and he has his own powers. I can’t get him out of there without getting some of our people killed. Anybody want to volunteer for that?" Silence.“Yeah, I thought so. I can’t get you people to show up and pick melons, let alone throw down with Drake.”“That’s your job,” Zil said.“Oh, I see,” Sam said. The resentment he’d held in now came boiling to the surface. “It’s my job to pick the fruit, and collect the trash, and ration the food, and catch Hunter, and stop Caine, and settle every stupid little fight, and make sure kids get a visit from the Tooth Fairy. What’s your job, Zil? Oh, right: you spray hateful graffiti. Thanks for taking care of that, I don’t know how we’d ever manage without you.”“Sam…,” Astrid said, just loud enough for him to hear. A warning.Too late. He was going to say what needed saying.“And the rest of you. How many of you have done a single, lousy thing in the last two weeks aside from sitting around playing Xbox or watching movies?“Let me explain something to you people. I’m not your parents. I’m a fifteen-year-old kid. I’m a kid, just like all of you. I don’t happen to have any magic ability to make food suddenly appear. I can’t just snap my fingers and make all your problems go away. I’m just a kid.”As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Sam knew he had crossed the line. He had said the fateful words so many had used as an excuse before him. How many hundreds of times had he heard, “I’m just a kid.”But now he seemed unable to stop the words from tumbling out. “Look, I have an eighth-grade education. Just because I have powers doesn’t mean I’m Dumbledore or George Washington or Martin Luther King. Until all this happened I was just a B student. All I wanted to do was surf. I wanted to grow up to be Dru Adler or Kelly Slater, just, you know, a really good surfer.”The crowd was dead quiet now. Of course they were quiet, some still-functioning part of his mind thought bitterly, it’s entertaining watching someone melt down in public.“I’m doing the best I can,” Sam said.“I lost people today…I…I screwed up. I should have figured out Caine might go after the power plant.”Silence.“I’m doing the best I can.”No one said a word.Sam refused to meet Astrid’s eyes. If he saw pity there, he would fall apart completely.“I’m sorry,” he said.“I’m sorry. "
103 " One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out. "
― James Carlos Blake
104 " There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space. "
― Alastair Reynolds , Chasm City
105 " Greatness radiates from the lights of love and wisdom. "
― Debasish Mridha
106 " Ironically, to my children, bedtime is a punishment that violates their basic rights as human beings. Once the lights are out, you can expect at least an hour of inmates clanging their tin cups on the cell bars. "
― Jim Gaffigan , Dad Is Fat
107 " The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking the rivers of the avenuesfeeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphaltwatching the lights turn on in the towerswalking as I’ve walked beforelike a man, like a woman, in the citymy visionary anger cleansing my sightand the detailed perceptions of mercyflowering from that angerif I come into a room out of the sharp misty lightand hear them talking a dead languageif they ask me my identitywhat can I say butI am the androgyneI am the living mind you fail to describein your dead languagethe lost noun, the verb survivingonly in the infinitivethe letters of my name are written under the lidsof the newborn child "
― Adrienne Rich , Diving Into the Wreck
108 " Once in a while, I smell Clive on my skin and it stops my day. It's a train crossing; I wait to pass. Eventually the lights stop flashing, the barriers lift. I keep moving. "
― Marie-Helene Bertino , Safe as Houses
109 " Stars are everything and nothing that we think they are.They are their own world, but through an act of will we make them part of ours. They are the diamonds of the gods, the lights at a stadium where angels play a midnight game of baseball.They’re fairy farts that have been set ablaze! Mostly, they’re just an untouchable beauty that’s so far away, it’s the only place safe enough to store our secret hopes and dreams. When we see a shooting start, we all make a wish. But what nobody admits is how afraid they are of actually catching something that fell from heaven. I’m not afraid to burn. ~Hadrian "
― J.M. Evans
110 " Do you miss being friends with Santangelo?" I ask her after the lights are out and we're almost asleep." What makes you think were friends?" " Everything." I hear her yawn." Being enemies with him is better." she tells me. There's a long pause and I think she's going to say something more but she doesn't and it's just silence for a long while. "
111 " A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds "
112 " If you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do. "
― Clive James
113 " This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven. "
― Rick Bragg
114 " Noah's eyes held my face. I swallowed hard. The juxtaposition of him sitting in a room full of people while staring at no one but me was overwhelming. Something shifted inside of me at the intimacy of us, eyes locked amid the scraping of twenty graphite pencils on paper.I shaded his face out of nothingness. I smudged the slope of his neck and darkened his delinquent mouth, while the lights accented the right angle of his jaw against the cloudy sky outside. I did not hear the bell. I did not hear the other students rise and leave the room. I did not even notice that Noah no longer sat at the stool. "
― Michelle Hodkin , The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #1)
115 " Sofi could see the lights in the distance, like the stars hanging above and the planet perched in the sky. Waiting breathless by the moon for them to visit in their rocket ship. "
― Mary Weber , The Evaporation of Sofi Snow (The Evaporation of Sofi Snow, #1)
116 " The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?”“Darling, what do you mean?”“There wasn’t a person there who enjoyed it,” she said, her voice lifeless, “or who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.”“Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.”“How? By being stupid? "
― Ayn Rand , Atlas Shrugged
117 " To smile is to turn the lights on, the lights of existence within you! "
― Mehmet Murat ildan
118 " David: And you think it can just evaporate? Even if at one time they loved one another?Marx: That's one of the sad truths of existence. Nothing in this world is permanent. Even the characters created by the great Shakespeare will, in millions of years, cease to exist—when the universe runs its course and the lights go out. "
― Woody Allen , Three One-act Plays: Riverside Drive/Old Saybrook/Central Park West
119 " Vegas changed people, creating monsters and broken men. It was easy to let the lights and stolen dreams seep into your blood. "
― Jamie McGuire , Beautiful Disaster (Beautiful, #1)
120 " Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! - and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! - high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winder, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world. "
― Jack Kerouac , Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954