Quotes About Quicksilver

Like alchemists // who looked for the philosopher's stone // in elusive quicksilver, // I shall make ordinary words - // the marked cards of the sharper, the people's coinage - // yield up their magic which was theirs // when Thor was inspiration and eruption, // thunder and worship. …

You'll be found, your nickels, dimes and Indian-heads fused by electroplating. Abe Lincolns melted into Miss Columbias, eagles plucked raw on the backs of quarters, all run to quicksilver in your jeans. More! Any boy hit by lightning, lift his lid and there on his eyeball, pretty as the Lord's Prayer on a pin, find the last scene the boy ever saw! A box-Brownie photo, by God, of that fire climbing down the sky to blow you like a penny whistle, suck your soul back up along the bright stair!

Once he'd had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver. There was the heat of tears suddenly in his eyes and he shook his head angrily. He would not think about it, he would never think of that again. It was long ago in an ancient past. To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget. They made happiness a pink marshmallow.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.

Music is quicksilver, gossamer; careers are measured in butterfly lifetimes.

Power is an instrument of fatal consequence. It is confined no more readily than quicksilver, and escapes good intentions as easily as air flows through mesh.

Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They're quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell.

looked like a small sea of quicksilver was flowing

Here lies resting, out of breath, Out of turns, Elizabeth Whose quicksilver toes not quite Cleared the whirring edge of night.

A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver—in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.

ÆTHIOPS-MINERAL  (Æ'THIOPS-MINERAL)   n.s. A medicine so called, from its dark colour, prepared of quicksilver and sulphur, ground together in a marble mortar to a black powder. Such as have used it most, think its virtues not very great.Quincy.

They writhed at her wrists, quicksilver loops of nanotech.

A politician is like quicksilver if you try to put your finger on him, you will find nothing under it.

Love is like quicksilver in the hand.

Ideas and theories, I have suggested, are like quicksilver in our hands. We can lose an idea altogether by being too tight fisted or too open handed, but if we carry an idea we cannot avoid imposing our own shape upon it. And when we do, we ought to know what we have done, for only in this way does the practice of history raise the consciousness of us all.

That's what's so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you're so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half-blind from reading old grimoires that you can't remember what happens next.

Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle's weather, and not merely because of it's ambivalence. He liked it's subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive.

Miami is nothing like me, and that's why I need to be here - it's the opposite. I'm practical, where this place is moody, I'm stolid in my interior, where this place has a certain flair, and I'm materialistic in a sense that this place is fundamentally spiritual - there's a quicksilver quality about this place.

My men think you are dead now, and won't waste balls on you," Jack said. "In fact I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by 'Half-Cocked' Jack Shaftoe, L'Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!

Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they'd ever been there, save perhaps for an evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.

and large outdoor furnaces where the ore was refined, and mounds of earth in long rows where quicksilver was being used to extract silver from lower-grade ore. To Jack it was a toss

I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by 'Half-Cocked' Jack Shaftoe, L'Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!

Life was like that, full of quicksilver changes. Joy reappeared as unexpectedly as sunlight

The dark edges fell back again, receded until there was only here, only now. A sunlit day, a celebration, a family. Life was like that, full of quicksilver changes. Joy appeared as unexpectedly as sunlight.