Quotes About Ash

The night of his birth marked the passage from Shrove Tuesday to Ash Wednesday and Boltzmann used to say that his birth date explained why his temper could suddenly change from great happiness to deep depression.

There's a good-sized shantytown of hardcore Third World unemployables, plus a scattering of schizophrenic first worlders who have long ago burned their brains to ash in the radiant heat of their own imaginings.

When I did finally live in the Dandenongs, the mountain ash forests became an important part of my life.

It did cross our minds at one point.Actually it seemed to keep crossing them.Maybe we should put in a crosswalk. Ash

It was one of those dreams that invade the space between seconds, proving sleep has its own physics- where time shrinks and swells, lifetimes unspool in a blink, and cities burn to ash in a mere flutter of lashes.

Beautiful men and women with distorted shadows came and scorched their handprints onto doors before vanishing skyward, drafts of heat billowing behind them with the whumph of unseen wings. Here and there, feathers fell, and they were like tufts of white fire, disintegrating to ash as soon as they touched the ground.

It takes energy for new roads to diverge in new woods, and no energy is spent with complete efficiency, without waste. Where wood has burned, there will be ash. The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.

But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.

Firebirds are such frustating quarry. One minute it's all fiery tail feathers and red talons and the next, nothing but ash and a sore seat.

How to describe hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the din of...if only, hell is two things: the absence of God and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.

Ash took the papers to the copier.

The dark laminated strands heaved, separated and became fiery filaments, then grey stamens of ash upon a glowing corolla.

Poetry is just the evidence of a life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

Winter broke off, finally, a long ash crumbling at the end of a cigarette, burned out, weak and emptied.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.

The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.

That god lives in silence who has scoured the following land with salt and ash.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly.

He sat in his shirt on the edge of the bed and stared into vacancy, desolate. The cigarette ash fell unnoticed on his spotless floor, patterned with the stars, and sun, and moon.

All the rest is a postscript - the cloud of ash that rises into the stratosphere from the volcano, circles around the earth, and continues to rain down on all its continents for years.

Only missed being a jumper, or dying in the collapse, by five minutes. That ash on me, later I thought about it. That was people. Probably people I knew.

I was graduating in two months, but I wasn't to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from the ash.

I think of how the mystics read by the light of their own bodies. What a world of darkness that must have been to read by the flaming hearts that turn into heaps of ash on the altar, how everything in the end is made equal by the wind. — Timothy Liu, from "Vox Angelica," The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University, 2000

When we blanch some ingredients in ash water it removes all their bitterness and astringency, which has opened up a new list of ingredients that we had never considered as edible.