Quivering Quotes - page 2
That Somerset Maugham anthology Cakes and Ale. How destructive he is, venomous, pulling everything down in biting, corrosive cynicism. Yet somewhere deep down under all the conceit, sarcasm and snobbery is real quivering pain, helpless bewilderment at the inexplicable fact that human nature is chequered. And what perplexes him is less the common, mean element in decent people than the goodness and kindness of wicked, vicious ones.
Ida Friederike Görres
There are many trials in life which do not seem to come from unwisdom or folly they are silver arrows shot from the bow of God, and fixed inextricably in the quivering heart they are meant to be borne they were not meant, like snow or water, to melt as soon as they strike but the moment an ill can be patiently borne it is disarmed of its poison, though not of its pain.
Henry Ward Beecher
There is a streak of cruelty that runs through the human race. You find it everywhere you look, on every page of recorded history. Man is not satisfied with inflicting death alone, he must inflict it with many painful frills. A boy pulls the wings off flies and ties tin cans to a dog's tail. The Assyrians flayed screaming thousands while they were still alive. The Aztecs cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices with a blunt stone knife. The Saxons threw men into the serpent pits or flayed them living and rubbed salt into the quivering flesh as the pelt peeled off.
Clifford D. Simak
The spider hung motionless, like a dull brown gem in an intricate necklace. The web was complete, now, the last strands laid delicately in place; it stretched from one side of the ceiling corner to the other, quivering gently in the rising air as though strummed by invisible hands.
For a moment Isgrimnur lost the thread of talk, important talk though it was. His eyes had drifted from the worried faces huddled near the fireplace in the great hall, roving up to the darkened corner, and to the tiny builder at rest.
There's sense, he told himself. You build something and then you stay there. That's the way it's meant to be. Not this running here, running there, never see your blood-family or your home roofs for a year at a time.
Tad Williams
But still the great public opinion of the free States was unmoved. It cried angrily, 'You're only making matters worse. It's very hard, but what can we do? It's none of our business. It's none of our business'. But when 1850 came, and theory was found to be fact, when the man who was angrily crying, 'It's none of my business, what have I to do with slavery?' suddenly felt the quivering, panting fugitive clinging to his knees - a wretched, forlorn, outcast, hunted man, guilty of no crime but color, and begging the succor that no honest man would refuse to a cur cowering on his threshold - then, as he stood aghast and heard Slavery thundering at his door, 'I am the law. Give me my prey! Give me my prey!
George William Curtis
Faith has in it the recognition of the certainty and the justice of a judgment that is coming down crashing on every human head; and then from the midst of these fears and sorrows and the tempest of that great darkness there rises up in the night of terrors the shining of one perhaps pale, quivering, distant, but divinely given hope, "My Saviour! My Saviour! He is righteous; He has died; He lives! I will stay no longer; I will cast myself upon Him!"
Alexander Maclaren
I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State --neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The moon, full-orbed, forsakes her watery cave,
And lifts her lovely head above the wave;
The snowy splendours of her modest ray
Stream o'er the glistening waves, and quivering play;
Around her, glittering on the heaven's arched brow,
Unnumbered stars, enclosed in azure, glow,
Thick as the dew-drops of the April dawn,
Or May-flowers crowding o'er the daisy lawn;
The canvas whitens in the silvery beam,
And with a mild pale-red the pendants gleam;
The masts' tall shadows tremble o'er the deep;
The peaceful winds a holy silence keep;
The watchman's carol, echoed from the prows,
Alone, at times, awakes the still repose.
William Julius Mickle
"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked.
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is." Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.
Aldous Huxley
If we reason, we would be understood if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another s if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lightly tripping o'er the land,
Deftly skimming o'er the main,
Scarce our fairy wings bedewing
With the frothy mantling brine,
Scarce our silver feet acquainting
With the verdure-vested ground;
Now like swallows o'er a river
Gliding low with quivering pinion,
Now aloft in ether sailing
"Leisurely as summer cloud;"
Rising now, anon descending,
Swift and bright as shooting stars,
Thus we travel glad and free.
Hartley Coleridge
Later attempts sometimes involved outer space...I don't remember them. My wife parodied them all, not unkindly, as "His long green ears quivering, Fimo slipped from the rig.”...there was always something akin to "the rig.” Some unimagined (by me), hence unnamed, element of technology. But already I sensed that even if I had somehow come to know what the rig was, what it was for, it was better not to tell the reader just then. "Javnaker slipped from the quantum universe-splitter that wasn't actually a time machine” would not be good for the reader.
William Gibson
The cardinal sin, strange as it may seem in an institution of learning, is talking. There are others, of course - sins, I mean, and I seem to have committed a good number. Yesterday I was playing my record of Gielgud reading Shakespeare. I had brought my own phonograph to school (no one could find the Requisition Forms for "Audio-Visual Aids" - that's the name for the school record player) and I had succeeded, I thought, in establishing a mood. I mean, I got them to be quiet, when - enter Admiral Ass, in full regalia, epaulettes quivering with indignation. He snapped his fingers for me to stop the phonograph, waited for the turntable to stop turning, and pronounced:
"There will be a series of three bells rung three times indicating Emergency Shelter Drill. Playing records does not encourage the orderly evacuation of the class."
Bel Kaufman