Bristling Quotes

Life is bristling with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one's garden. (Voltaire)

Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.

John Updike

filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too-short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It was too meagre for the many roofs, which remained black or rust coloured, shingled roofs like arks and thatched cottages, concealing within them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics-charred-black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists, dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale-black pipes of the Devil's organs.

Bruno Schulz

Saw the English [pilots] coming from the sea in huge bands like the bristling hair of Zeus Jupiter. Heard all destroyed in Frankfurt. Sad...

Max Beckmann

And, in this case, science could learn an important lesson from the literati - who love contingency for the same basic reason that scientists tend to regard the theme with suspicion. Because, in contingency lies the power of each person, to make a difference in an unconstrained world bristling with possibilities, and nudgeable by the smallest of unpredictable inputs into markedly different channels spelling either vast improvement or potential disaster.

Stephen Jay Gould

In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.

Anita Brookner

What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; - show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; - and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

His eyes were almost sunken in his head; His face was thin and fleshless as a bone. His tangled, bristling hair, inspiring dread, And shaggy beard were wild to look upon.

Ludovico Ariosto

One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.

Salvador Dalí

Land of opportunity, land for the huddled masses where would the opportunity have been without the genocide of those Old Guard, bristling Indian tribes?

Edward Hoagland

Poincaré, the strongest figure who succeeded Clemenceau, attempted to make an independent Rhineland under the patronage and control of France. This had no chance of success. He did not hesitate to try to enforce reparation on Germany by the invasion of the Ruhr. This certainly imposed compliance with the treaties on Germany, but it was severely condemned by British and American opinion...A rift opened between Lloyd George and Poincaré, whose bristling personality hampered his firm and far-sighted policies. (Raymond Poincaré)

For the first two weeks of filming, I remember bristling at some of the occurrences on the set, none of which directly involved me. Then I surrendered to the environment, to Michael's method, and became much happier, even though no one knew what to expect.

Madeleine Stowe

He who has iron, has bread. People bow down before bayonets; a disarmed crowd is swept aside. But a France bristling with workers in arms means the advent of socialism. In the presence of armed proletarians, all obstacles, resistances and impossibilities will disappear.

Louis Auguste Blanqui

I am a thornbush, bristling from the overattention of my parents, and he is a man of a million little fatherly stab wounds, and my thorns fit perfectly into them.

Gillian Schieber Flynn

Who is unacquainted with the sparkling eye. The full and quick pulse, the free respiration, the glowing colour, and serene brow of the joyous? Who is not familiar with the trembling aspect, the stammering hesitation, the cold ruffled skin, the bristling hair, the palpitating heart, the uneasiness, the impeded respiration, the paleness, the low pulse, and all the other symptoms occasioned by fear?

Ernst, Baron von Feuchtersleben