New Testament, KJV (Matthew 14:30)
"But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me."
Old Testament, KJV (Numbers 21:9)
"And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."
King Solomon's Mines (chp. 12; pg. 182-3)
"I shook my head and looked again at the sleeping men, and to my tired and yet excited imagination it seemed as though Death had already touched them. My mind's eye singled out those who were sealed to slaughter, and there rushed in upon my heart a great sense of the mystery of human life, and an overwhelming sorrow at its futility and sadness. To-night these thousands slept their healthy sleep, tomorrow they, and many other with them, ourselves perhaps among them, would be stiffening in the cold; their wives would be widows, their children fatherless, and their place know them no more for ever. Only the old moon would shine on serenely, the night wind would stir the grasses, and the wide earth would take its rest, even as it did eons before we were, and will do eons after we have been forgotten.
"Yet man dies not whilst the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is lost, indeed, but the breath he breathed still stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spake yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he knew are our familiar friends--the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also!
"Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever."
The Last Samurai (2003)
Katsumoto: "Perfect...They are all...perfect... "
A Tale of Two Cities (chp. 15)
"I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day."
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Part 2: chp. 2)
"Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Nomanlands, more loathsome far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes. Even to the Mere of Dead Faces some haggard phantom of green spring would come; but here neither spring nor summer would ever come again. Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light."
Philip Marlowe, "Gilded Mountains"
What do I tell him about the gold,
When his mind already stays there
And in the stench of death he prays there?
The blood of many men and mine
Have stained that jagged mountainside,
And some have never left.
In the darkest reaches of the cold,
We lied for warmth and hugged our gold.
Fear alone outweighed our hate
And empty eyes became our faith.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Howard: "I know what gold does to men's souls."
The Big Sleep (1946)
Lash Canino: "What's the matter? Haven't you ever seen a gun before? What do you want me to do, count three like they do in the movies?"
Casino Royale (2006)
Dryden: "Made you feel it, did he?"
-- Boscoe the Bear
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