1
" From books, I winnowed the glue that held together my psyche as it struggled to stay whole. It was from stories and myths that I learned to dream, to imagine a different life, to realize potentials and probabilities other than those of the painful, poverty-mired existence I found myself in as a child. With a book I could hide in a corner, safe from the heavy hand and belt of my stepfather, and for a while not worry about where our next meal would come from, or where we would be sleeping that night, or when my mother would break and have to be sent yet again to the mental institution. Books, for me, we tiny life rafts that I clung to desperately. "
2
" For long minutes, we stood there. Until I said, “Let’s go find somewhere to eat – outside.”
“Hmmm.” He showed no sign of letting go.
I looked up at last. Found his eyes shining with that familiar, wicked light. “I think I’m hungry for something else,” he purred.
My toes curled in my boots, but I lifted my brows and said cooly, “Oh?”
Rhys nipped at my earlobe, then whispered in my ear as he winnowed us up to our bedroom, where two plates of food now waited on the desk. “I owe you for last night, mate.”
He gave me the courtesy, at least, of letting me pick what he consumed first; me or the food.
I picked wisely. "
― Sarah J. Maas , A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3)
3
" I saw the Tracker—but that’s wrong, really. I saw right to where the tracking thing was. I saw those winnowing tentacles come out again, and the front figure pause, and then—it’s the only word that actually describes it—ooze on again on its via dolorosa. And at that the hind figure seemed to summon all its strength. It seemed to open out a fringe of arms or tentacles, a sort of corona of black rays spread out. It gaped with a full expansion, and even I could feel that there was a perfectly horrible attraction, or vacuum drag, being exerted. That was horrible enough, with the face of the super-suffering man now almost under me resonating my own terror. But the worst thing was that, as the tentacles unwrapped and winnowed out toward their prey, I saw they weren’t really tentacles at all. They were spreading cracks, veins, fissures, rents of darkness expanding from a void, a gap of pure blackness. There’s only one way to say it—one was seeing right through the solid world into a gap, an ultimate maelstrom. And from it was spreading out a—I can only call it so—a negative sunrise of black radiation that would deluge and obliterate everything. Of course it was still only a fissure, a vent, but one realized—This is a hole, a widening hole, that has been pierced in the dike that defends the common-sense, sensuous world. Through this vortex-hole that is rapidly opening, over this lip and brink, everything could slip, fall in, find no purchase, be swallowed up.
It was like watching a crumbling cliff with survivors clinging to it being undercut and toppling into a black tide that had swallowed up its base. This negative force could drag the solidest things from their base, melt them, engulf the whole hard, visible world. And we were right on that brink. What was after us, for I knew now I was in its field, was not a thing of any passions or desires. Those are limited things, satiable things—in a way, balanced things, and so familiar, safe even, almost friendly in comparison with this. You know the grim saying, “You can give a sop to Cerberus, but not to his Master.” No, this was—that’s the technical term, I found, coined by those who have been up against this and come back alive—this was absolute Deprivation, really insatiable need, need that nothing can satisfy, absolute refusal to give, to yield. It is the second strongest thing in the universe, and, indeed, outside that. It could swallow the whole universe, and the universe would go for nothing, because in that gap the whole universe could fill not a bit of it. It would remain as empty, as gaping, as insatiable as ever, for it is the bottomless pit made by unstanchable Lack. "
― Gerald Heard , Dromenon: The Best Weird Stories of Gerald Heard
5
" Biju stepped out of the airport into the Calcutta night, warm, mammalian. His feet sank into dust winnowed to softness at his feet, ad he felt an unbearable feeling, sad and tender, old and sweet like the memory of falling asleep, a baby on his mother's lap. Thousands of people were out though it was almost eleven. He saw a pair of elegant bearded goats in a rickshaw, riding to slaughter. A conference of old men with elegant goat faces, smoking bidis. A mosque and minarets lit magic green in the night with a group of women rushing by in burkas, bangles clinking under the black and a big psychedelic mess of colour from a sweet shop. Rotis flew through the air as in a juggling act, polka-dotting the sky high over a restaurant that bore the slogan " Good food makes good mood" . Biju stood there in that dusty tepid soft sari night. Sweet drabness of home - he felt everything shifting and clicking into place around him, felt himself slowly shrink back to size, the enormous anxiety of being a foreigner ebbing - that unbearable arrogance and shame of the immigrant. Nobody paid attention to him here, and if they said anything at all, their words were easy, unconcerned. He looked about and for the first time in God knows how long, his vision unblurred and he found that he could see clearly. "
6
" What do you know of the Knights?” he asked.
Fin shrugged. “I thought knights were only in children’s stories until a few days ago.”
Jeannot smiled. “A man could do worse than to live in the stories of a child. There is, perhaps, no better remembrance.”
“Until the child grows up and finds out the stories aren’t true. You might be knights, but I don’t see any shining armor,” Fin said.
Jeannot stopped near the gate of the auberge and faced her. “Each time a story is told, the details and accuracies and facts are winnowed away until all that remains is the heart of the tale. If there is truth at the heart of it, a tale may live forever. As a knight, there is no dragon to slay, no maiden to rescue, and no miraculous grail to uncover. A knight seeks the truth beneath these things, seeks the heart. We call this the corso. The path set before us. The race we must run. "
― A.S. Peterson , Fiddler's Green (Fin's Revolution, #2)
8
" ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting. "
― Laura Hillenbrand , Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
9
" People worship god.
I worship this separation from you.
It is worth Haj to a hundred Meccas,
This separation from you.
People say I am as brilliant as the sun,
They say I am famous.
What a fire it has lit in me,
This separation from you.
Behind me is my shadow,
Ahead, is my darkness.
I fear that it might leave me,
This separation from you.
No taint of the body is in it,
Nor litter of the mind,
All has been winnowed out,
By this separation from you.
When sorrow comes, bringing with it
Loneliness and pain,
I pull it close to me,
This separation from you.
Sometimes it colors my words
Sometimes it weaves through my songs,
It has taught me great deal,
This separation from you.
When sorrow, defeated, fell at my feet,
Amazed at my fidelity,
The world came out to see
This separation from you.
Love earned me fame.
People flocked to praise me.
It wept in my embrace,
This separation from you.
The world turned out to tell me,
That I had been unwise.
It sat me on a throne today
This separation from you. "
― Shiv Kumar Batalvi , Shiv Kumar Samuchi Kavita