Cyclone Quotes

“Thomas had no concept of time as he went through the Changing.It started much like his first memory of the Box—dark and cold. But this time he had no sensation of anything touching his feet or body. He floated in emptiness, stared into a void of black. He saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. It was as if someone had stolen his five senses, leaving him in a vacuum.Time stretched on. And on. Fear turned into curiosity, which turned into boredom.Finally, after an interminable wait, things began to change.A distant wind picked up, unfelt but heard. Then a swirling mist of whiteness appeared far in the distance—a spinning tornado of smoke that formed into a long funnel, stretching out until he could see neither the top nor the bottom of the white whirlwind. He felt the gales then, sucking into the cyclone so that it blew past him from behind, ripping at his clothes and hair like they were shredded flags caught in a storm.The tower of thick mist began to move toward him—or he was moving toward it, he couldn’t tell—increasing its speed at an alarming rate. Where seconds before he’d been able to see the distinct form of the funnel, he now could see only a flat expanse of white.And then it consumed him; he felt his mind taken by the mist, felt memories flood into his thoughts.Everything else turned into pain.”

“Be the cyclone of love to extinguish the fire of hatred.”

“Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone.”

“The ultimate goal of a meteorologist is to set up differential equations of the movements of the air and to obtain, as their integral, the general atmospheric circulation, and as particular integrals the cyclones, anticyclones, tornados, and thunderstorms.”

“The hours are slow in passing as they always are when you are waiting in fear for you know not what: I am reminded of the moments before the coming of a cyclone, when you have barricaded yourself into your dwelling and have nothing else to do but wait. The moments will not pass, the air hangs still and heavy; it is as though time itself has been slowed by the friction of fear.”

“No up. No down. No sky. No ground. Just endless dark shot through with tiny spears of sunlight older than you and your entire species stacked end to end. You want to feel small? Spend sixty seconds in a Cyclone's cockpit, chum. Look out at the nothing and feel it looking back. Then you know exactly how much you add up to.”

“When we have learnt to call storms, storms, and death, death, and birth, birth, when we have mastered the sailor's horn-book and Mr Piddington's law of cyclones, Ellis's anatomy and Lewer's midwifery, we have already made ourself half blind. We have become hypnotized by words and names. We think in words and names, not in ideas; the commonplace has triumphed, the true intellect is half crushed.”

“You were talking about the wind," the Fillyjonk said suddenly. "A wind that carries off your washing. But I'm speaking about cyclones. Typhoons, Gaffsie dear. Tornadoes, whirlwinds, sandstorms... Flood waves that carry houses away... But most of all I'm talking about myself and my fears, even if I know that's not done. I know everything will turn out badly. I think about that all the time. Even while I'm washing my carpet. Do you understand that? Do you feel the same way?”

“For he had never heard anything like it--did not know such music existed in the world--and it was hard to believe that a man he knew could play it with his own two hands. There were parts of it like birdsong, and parts like rolling thunder and hard rain, and parts that glittered like fresh snow when the sun comes out and it’s so cold the air takes your breath away. And parts were like a dust devil spinning past, or a cyclone on the horizon, and all of it cried out for words that he had only read in books and had never said aloud.”