Snipe / zip:
The snipe zip away over the frozen bogs
into a sky of Neapolitan enamel.
-- V.S. Pritchett, The Living Novel (1946)
Departing speedboat:
They would skim and turn far off,
tantalizing small shapes
on the shiny silky sea.
-- Pamela Frankau, “The Duchess and the Smugs”
Those rules of old, discovered, not devised,
are nature still, but nature methodised.
-- Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”
Re coming up with new medications by systematically sifting through material found in dirt and so forth, then assembling subparts using a toolkit of techniques:
These molecules had not been discovered so much as imagined into existence.
-- Dr. Dhruv Khullar, in 9 Sept 2025 The New Yorker
For our essays on the theme Discovery versus Invention, see:
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/discovery
The sunlight played through the leaves
on that little party of three generations
grouped tranquilly under the pear-tree,
which had long borne no fruit.
-- John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
The little garden had fallen into shade,
the sun now only reached the wall,
whereon basked a crouching cat.
-- ibid
the pear-tree, with its
top
branches
still gilded by the sun …
-- ibid
Love is no hot-house flower,
but a wild plant,
born of a wet night.
A wild plant that,
when it blooms within the hedge of our gardens,
we call a flower;
and when it blooms outside
we call a weed.
-- ibid
for the swarming stars
the night sky
had hardly space.
-- ibid
The glow died
above the river;
the singing ceased.
The young moon hid
behind a tree,
and all was dark.
-- ibid
Along the pathway of sky
between the hedges of the tree-tops,
the stars clustered forth.
-- ibid
The fog was worse than ever --
crowned with the weird excrescence of the driver,
haloed by a vague glow of lamp-light
that seemed to drown in vapour
before it reached the pavement…
-- ibid
On Irene’s face, a smile wandered up,
and died out
like a flicker of firelight.
-- ibid
The wind had got into the sou’west, too --
a delicious air, sappy!
-- ibid
London, 1880’s:
He had secured the corner seat next the conductor, where his long legs made it difficult for anyone to get in; and at all who passed him, he looked resentfully, as if they had no business to be using up his air.
-- John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)
(For a contemporaneous picture from Vienna, try this:
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/03/late-arrivals.html )
Home itself
was but another bead
in the long rosary
of his regrets.
-- Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, (1841)
The sun went down,
and night came on,
and he was still
quite tranquil.
-- ibid
He looked back, once, before he left the street:
a sight not easily to be erased,
even from his remembrance,
so long as he had life.
-- ibid
every light shadow
thrown by the passing clouds
upon the daisied ground.
-- ibid
the cat sat moping
on the ashy forge
-- ibid
as day deepened into evening,
and darkness crept into the nooks.
-- ibid
Except for the white powder of light from the Nurses’ station
out in the hall,
the dorm is dark.
-- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
The white tubes in the ceiling
begin to pump their refrigerated light.
-- ibid
There was a cold moon at the window,
pouring light into the dorm
like skim milk.
-- ibid
~ ~ ~
The wind lay down and the sun got higher,
chrome-plating the east side of the deep green swells.
George aimed the boat straight out to sea.
-- ibid
George told the doctor he’d have to land his fish
or cut it loose,
because there was a bad sky coming down on us.
-- ibid
Pendant quelque temps fonctionna le système des « fournées », qui permettait, grâce à des fêtes sur lesquelles on faisait le silence, de convier les réprouvés à venir se divertir entre eux, ce qui dispensait de les inviter avec les gens bien.
-- Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe
[Scott-Moncrieff renders:
For some time the 'batch' system was in operation, which enabled her, thanks to parties over which a veil of silence was drawn, to summon the ineligibles separately to entertain one another, which dispensed her from having to invite them with the nice people.]
Depuis ces beaux jours, ce mot de … a fait fortune -- ou plutôt infortune, dans l’arène politique hexagonale. A propos de laquelle, motus; sauf dans ce coin obscure, de philologie appliquée :
https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/06/f-word-of-day-fournee.html
a wan sun
appeared
in the gray sky
-- Janet Malcolm,
From gaol:
Outside,
the day may be blue and gold,
but the light that creeps down
through the thickly muffled glass
of the small iron-barred window
beneath which one sits,
is grey and niggard.
It is always twilight in one’s cell.
-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)
The Reading Room of the British Museum:
Some of the fog had seeped into the great domed space, increasing the gloom, so that the desk lamps seemed like so many street lamps in a miniature city of crecents and circuses as he prowled in search of Amber.
… gaslamps, each with a halo of irradiated fog.
-- David Lodge, A Man of Parts (2011), p. 241-3
Atom-bomb test:
A hundred-times-sun-sized sun
mottled itself with lesser whiteness,
bulked up,
became the perfect sphere…
Tumors of light more brilliant than the sun
sprang up on the mathematical sphere;
yet these, less blazing than the fireball,
appeared as blacknesses.
-- Philip Wylie, “The Answer”
