Coal Dust Explosions

Famous quotes containing the words coal dust, coal, dust and/or explosions:

    Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
    Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961)

    And in their blazing solitude
    The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
    “Blow bright, blow bright
    The coal of this unquickened world.”
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    Custom calls me to’t.
    What custom wills, in all things should we do’t,
    The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
    And mountainous error be too highly heaped
    For truth to o’erpeer.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Our Lamaze instructor . . . assured our class . . . that our cervix muscles would become “naturally numb” as they swelled and stretched, and deep breathing would turn the final explosions of pain into “manageable discomfort.” This descriptions turned out to be as accurate as, say a steward advising passengers aboard the Titanic to prepare for a brisk but bracing swim.
    Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)