Jostling Quotes

1. "[…] detective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn't in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That's why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn't the one starting ‘The murderer is…' – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing – but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone's a suspect.' Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it's a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We've been banished from an Eden of oscillation."
Author: China Miéville

2. "Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other's bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!"
Author: Christopher Isherwood

3. "But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life."
Author: Claire Messud The Woman Upstairs

4. "And on the sidewalks, after they've emerged from the stations, after being sandpapered by the jostling and scraping that a city like this does, all the lives they've hoarded, all the ghosts they've carried, all the inversions they've made for protection, all the scars and marks and records for recognition - the whole heterogeneous baggage falls out with each step on the pavement. There's so much spillage."
Author: Dionne Brand

5. "Trains running in every direction spit hot ash and cinders. Ministers and moralists feared that the vibrations and jostling of such fast travel would throw weak-minded women into sexual frenzies."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

6. "Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter--extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone--beauty is born."
Author: Geoffrey O'Brien

7. "Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon."
Author: James Baldwin

8. "We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and th spectacle we presented, two grown men, jostling each other on the wide sidewalk, and aiming the cherry-pips, as though they were spitballs, into each other's facesm must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up."
Author: James Baldwin

9. "It was all beginning to run together in the back of Eleanor's mind, and the things that had probably really happened were confused with the things that probably hadn't. And every day everything in her whole past life - the real things and the imaginary things - was being pushed farther and farther back, because going to high school was so enormous, so vast! so different from all of Eleanor's life before. The milling crowds in the hall between classes, all those jostling elbows and swollen shoulders and bosoms, all those enormous hands and feet, they pushed and thumped and shoved at Eleanor's childhood, until there was no room anymore for anything but now, right now, a hurrying rushing now that was just incredibly thrilling, or absolutely rotten and just disgusting, this heaving present moment, right now."
Author: Jane Langton

10. "I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out."
Author: Jennifer Donnelly

11. "The sky pulsed with stars. Some people say it makes them lonesome when they stare up at the night sky. I can't imagine why. There's no shortage of company. By now there's not a constellation I can't name. Orion. Lupus. Serpens. Hercules. Draco. My father taught me all of their stories. So when I look up I see a galaxy of adventures and heroes and villains, all jostling together and trying to outdo one another, and I sometimes want to tell them to hush up and not distract me with their chatter. I've glimpsed all the stars ever discovered by astronomers, and plenty that haven't been."
Author: Kenneth Oppel

12. "You could not presume that people were healthy. You could not presume that they would welcome the little nudges and jostlings of life. You had to behave as though everyone you met was walking a thin wire far above the earth, where the slightest wind might rock them off their balance and send them tumbling to the ground."
Author: Kevin Brockmeier

13. "Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell. As it might be pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough; until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come; breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God's throne."
Author: Malcolm Muggeridge

14. "For me, being in the forest is like going to market day at Alnwick, but instead of people's elbows jostling me, it is the low branches whipping across my face, leaves sticking to my hair, roots rising up to trip me."
Author: Maryrose Wood

15. "He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up. What a boy had set out to seek a man had found, found by the act of living."
Author: Mervyn Peake

16. "The sky all at once is overhead dim and grey, puzzle of blocks sprawl, their own horizon; the city looks like a cemetery full of weak daylight, cool and a little wrong, making Ella feel a little put upon, like leap-year day—nothing in itself, but a nudge jostling every other day."
Author: Michael Cisco

17. "The wind funnelled down the covered platform, jostling the passengers and tearing at their clothes. A woman's scarf whipped by overhead, somersaulting as if intoxicated by the sudden taste of freedom."
Author: Philip Sington

18. "People are jostling at the gates of heaven or Department stores Words are bumping into each other("Poem")"
Author: Raymond Radiguet

19. "My model, such as it is, is a mentorship model, which is to say that I care personally, and I involve myself personally/emotionally with the work of each student, and I try to make it such that they want to reach for more, do better, risk more, try new things, abandon limited objectives, individuate, and so on. For me it is personal, to the best of my ability, and it is about making more of the writer and of the writer's task in each case. I also think it's possible to do this, to teach in this way, in a classroom free of rancor and backbiting and competitive jostling. So: my class should be a place of peace, a place where anything is possible, where the code of realism is in disrepute, and the worst thing you can say, the absolutely verboten thing, is the phrase: The New Yorker."
Author: Rick Moody

20. "O, the conflicting selves jostling and joggling within these bags of skin. No wonder we are unable to remain focused on anything for very long; no wonder we invent remote-control channel-hopping devices. If we turned these instruments upon ourselves we'd discover more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of..."
Author: Salman Rushdie

21. "He raged and questioned and mourned. Eventually he found peace—not peace like some still pond, but peace like a river, jostling over rocks, hurtling over falls, whirling in eddies. Authentic, rugged peace."
Author: Sarah Sundin

22. "But Sir, he works with NT? Why would he tell us where to go? Aren't we the competition?' Satya asked. Nagesh shook his head gravely. ‘Actually the competition starts at the headquarters and is between the people who come on TV, and want to make sure their face is noticed by the rival channel, so that they get picked up for a higher salary. Between us camerapersons, there is no rivalry. We don't do piece to cameras, we don't come on TV. We do all the jostling to get you the best visuals to show on the channel. We just want to get the news to the viewers, no matter which logo is pasted on it."
Author: Shweta Ganesh Kumar

23. "The world rides through space on the back of a turtle. This is one of the great ancient world myths, found wherever men and turtles were gathered together; the four elephants were an Indo-European sophistication. The idea has been lying in the lumber rooms of legend for centuries. All I had to do was grab it and run away before the alarms went off.There are no maps. You can't map a sense of humour. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs."
Author: Terry Pratchett

24. "How about Oversized Dickhead?" He shrugged. "Didn't hear you complaining about my oversized—" She shot to her feet, jostling the table. "Can I speak with you in private?" "You need it right now?" He feigned exasperation. "We're in the middle of dinner, woman. You're insatiable."
Author: Tessa Bailey

25. "No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense."
Author: Thomas Carlyle

26. "The jostling of young minds against each other has this wonderful attribute that one can never foresee the spark, nor predict the flash. What will spring up in a moment? Nobody knows. A burst of laughter starts from a scene of emotion. In a moment of buffoonery, the serious enters. Impulses depend on a chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign. A jest suffices to open the door to the unexpected. They are conferences with sharp turns, where the perspective suddenly changes. Chance is the director of these conversations."
Author: Victor Hugo

27. "The idealist withdrew himself, because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain, and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

28. "My lovers suffocate me! Crowding my lips, and thick in the pores of my skin, Jostling me through streets and public halls...coming naked to me at night, Crying by day Ahoy from the rocks of the river...swinging and chirping over my head, Calling my name from flowerbeds or vines or tangled underbrush, Or while I swim in the bath....or drink from the pump on the corner....or the curtain is down at the opera.....or I glimpse at a woman's face in the railroad car; Lighting on every moment of my life, Bussing my body with soft and balsamic busses, Noiselessly passing handfuls out of their hearts and giving them to be mine"
Author: Walt Whitman

Jostling Quotes Pictures