1
" Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass growsThe West Wind goes walking, and about the walls it goes.What news from the West, oh wandering wind, do you bring to me tonight?Have you seen Boromir the Tall by moon or by starlight?‘I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey;I saw him walk in empty lands, until he passed awayInto the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more.The North Wind may have heard the horn of the son of Denethor.’Oh, Boromir! From the high walls westward I looked afar.But you came not from the empty lands where no men are.From the mouth of the sea the South Wind flies,From the sand hills and the stones;The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moansWhat news from the South, oh sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.‘Ask me not where he doth dwell--so many bones there lieOn the white shores and on the black shores under the stormy sky;So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing sea.Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!’Oh Boromir! Beyond the gate the Seaward road runs South,But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey seas mouth.From the Gate of Kings the North Wind rides,And past the roaring fallsAnd loud and cold about the Tower its loud horn calls.What news from the North, oh mighty wind, do you bring to me today?What news of Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.‘Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he foughtHis cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest;And Rauros, Golden Rauros Falls, bore him upon its breast.’Oh Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gazeTo Rauros, Golden Rauros Falls until the end of days. "
3
" It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils.
Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold....The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks. "
― Pat Conroy , The Prince of Tides
5
" For example. But I cannot give you an example. It was not so much any one example, any one event, which I recollected which was important, but the flow, the texture of the events, for meaning is never in the event but in the motion through event. Otherwise we could isolate an instant in the event and say that this is the event itself. The meaning. But we cannot do that. For it is the motion which is important. And I was moving. I was moving West at seventy-five miles an hour, through a blur of million-dollar landscape and heroic history, and I was moving back through time into my memory. They say the drowning man re-lives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California. "
― Robert Penn Warren , All the King's Men
6
" Thousands of years hath the sun rose, In the glow of its Eastern hues,Thousands of years doth the West close It in gloom, and in tears, of its dews.Even so, in the Orient morning, Faith, true! – pure, of Allah, The One,Rose, Earth, with its beauty, adorning, And sank, Westward – and darkened, its sun.O, Believers! Have faith in Faith’s morning, Know ye, Allah knoweth the best!See, the Light of the Orient, returning Pure Islamic beams, over the West "
11
" I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land... it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistan
humming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco
Chronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death.
Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil. "
― Khaled Hosseini , The Kite Runner