Limbs Quotes

1. "A thin yellow curtain hung in front of the corner window as boney tree limbs tapped on the glass like an unwelcome visitor. Despite the tiny buds on the trees outside, the branch at this particular window was still bare."
Author: Abby Slovin

2. "As one climbs up the ladders in society, one starts feeling more and more like an owner, less like a member of it."
Author: B. Barmanbek

3. "Down every hall is a gruesome tangle of impossible creatures, and every one of them is split open or strung with barbs or dragging their insides after them, flailing along on shattered limbs or shredded wings or blasted stumps. I've got the pistol, half a can of spray and a handful of useless shotgun slugs.I'm dead."
Author: Bill Blais

4. "While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic."
Author: Charles Frazier

5. "My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary; Long is the way, and the mountains are wild;Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary Over the path of the poor orphan child.Why did they send me so far and so lonely, Up where the moors spread and gray rocks are piled?Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only Watch o'er the steps of a poor orphan child.Ye, distant and soft, the night-breeze is blowing, Clouds there are none, and clear starts beam mild;God, in His mercy, protection is showing, Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing, Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled,Still will my Father, with promise and blessing, Take to his bosom the poor orphan child.There is a thought that for strength should avail me; Thought both of shelter and kindred despoiled;Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me; God is a friend to the poor orphan child."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

6. "God, Abby, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," he said as he stared out the bay window onto the lake. The serene morning calm of the water was laughing at his riptide of emotions. In all his life, he'd never been as tortured as he was now. Rip his limbs apart, whip his back raw, waterboard him, anything but this. Because this . . . this was far worse. It was her pain. Her torture that was destroying his sanity. He had no control over it. He couldn't stop it.He hated that he wasn't strong enough to withstand this. Most of all, he hated that he cared so much about her. Cause he knew. He knew one certainty in all this. She had managed to touch a piece of his ice-cold heart. And it wasn't letting him go."
Author: Cindy Paterson

7. "Long dormant feelings poured through my dried-up limbs and wound through me, slowly filling the emptiness. Like an irrigated field, I felt myself blossom and grow with new vigor. He was the sun, and the tenderness he showed me was life-giving water."
Author: Colleen Houck

8. "I love you.How much?More than the ocean is large.More than a shark loves human limbs.More than Gavin loves his reflection.More than baseball players love steroids.More than chocolate, more than wine and way, way more than anchovies.More than yesterday, but less than tomorrow.....How much? I type.This much. It's his voice."
Author: Courtney Cole

9. "As a citizen, of course. As a parent, of course. But as an artist, that's where the paradox is - your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk about political or social responsibility, you've amputated the best limbs you've got as an artist."
Author: David Cronenberg

10. "The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light."
Author: Dean Koontz

11. "Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it."
Author: Edmund Hillary

12. "Relaxing me from head to feetLove masters me, the bitter sweetO'er thy limbs breathing;Yea, Eros now, the god born blindSweeps my soul like the mountain windThrough the oaks seething."
Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay

13. "In some ways, my mother was right; a tree does look the same from the top as it does from the bottom: same branches, starting as weighty limbs and narrowing to the tiniest twigs; same leaves, quivering in the slightest breeze or in the rush of the trains; same colors, same rustling, same gentle sway. But from earth, looking up, a tree is hopeful; it might be touching the sky. From above, looking down, you can see--it's stuck in the dust, just like us."
Author: Elissa Janine Hoole

14. "I am in need of music that would flowOver my fretful, feeling finger-tips,Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,A song to fall like water on my head,And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!There is a magic made by melody:A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and coolHeart, that sinks through fading colors deepTo the subaqueous stillness of the sea,And floats forever in a moon-green pool,Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep."
Author: Elizabeth Bishop

15. "ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless wavesWas born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;First, forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;These, as successive generations bloom,New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.Thus the tall Oak, the giant of the wood,Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood;The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main,The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,Of language, reason, and reflection proud,With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod,And styles himself the image of his God;Arose from rudiments of form and sense,An embryon point, or microscopic ens!"
Author: Erasmus Darwin

16. "If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
Author: Frank Lloyd Wright

17. "Ages of happiness. - An age of happiness is quite impossible, because men want only to desire it but not to have it, and every individual who experiences good times learns to downright pray for misery and disquietude. The destiny of man is designed for happy moments - every life has them - but not for happy ages. Nonetheless they will remain fixed in the imagination of man as 'the other side of the hill' because they have been inherited from ages past: for the concepts of the age of happiness was no doubt acquired in primeval times from that condition of which, after violent exertion in hunting and warfare, man gives himself up to repose, stretches his limbs and hears the pinions of sleep rustling about him. It is a false conclusion if, in accordance with that ancient familiar experience, man imagines that, after whole ages of toil and deprivation, he can then partake of that condition of happiness correspondingly enhanced and protracted."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs."
Author: Geoffrey Household

19. "Strip by strip the lash carved into Grace's shuddering flesh. My tears were falling by then, heavy drops, joining in the leaf dust with the blood that had begun to trickle from the table. My limbs were so weak that I could not even raise a hand to wipe the mucus that dripped from my nose.She had been lying with her head faced away from me. She lifted it then, and turned, so that we looked at one another. If an anvil had fallen from the sky at that moment and landed upon me, I could not have felt more crushed.(pg 39)"
Author: Geraldine Brooks

20. "Farewell sweet earth and northern sky,for ever blest, since here did lieand here with lissom limbs did runbeneath the Moon, beneath the Sun,Lúthien Tinúvielmore fair than Mortal tongue can tell.Though all to ruin fell the worldand were dissolved and backward hurled;unmade into the old abyss,yet were its making good, for this?the dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea?that Lúthien for a time should be."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

21. "The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle."
Author: James Henry Breasted

22. "At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw."
Author: James Merrill

23. "Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world."
Author: Jane Austen

24. "With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times--simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used were more literal, enriching the tired phrase with meaning: "He is made from your meat and bone." It had caused Ruma to acknowledge the supernatural in everyday life. But death, too, had the power to awe, she knew this now-that a human being could be alive for years and years, thinking and breathing and eating, full of a million worries and feelings and thoughts, taking up space in the world, and then, in an instant, become absent, invisible."
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

25. "You do not want a war.You have known violence, you have suffered loss, but you have seen nothing of war. War is not just the business of death; it is the anti-thesis of life. Hope, tortured and flayed, reason, dismembered, grinning at its limbs in its lap. Decency, raped to death...You will be a murderer and more."
Author: Joss Whedon

26. "Of course the edges of the wound struggle to close upand the clock wants to be set going(how awkward to be pointing permanently to half past one)amputated limbs feel phantom pain"
Author: Katarina Mazetti

27. "Staring in the darkness, trying to sleep. My body was aching with tiredness. My limbs were numb. My sightless eyes were crazed with light/ I was dying of oblivion, but it wouldn't come. I didn't think I've ever sleep again."
Author: Kevin Brooks

28. "Your dad just threw down and I just laid it out," Shy started when I didn't speak. "Now's the time to share, Tabby.""I love you," I whispered. "Good, but don't say that shit to me three feet away. Get the fuck over here."I launched off on a foot, took one step and flew through the air. Shy, as he'd been doing awhile, caught me. I wrapped my limbs around him and looked down in his beautiful green eyes. "I love you," I whispered again."
Author: Kristen Ashley

29. "Still, I may have been glad to scratch the dry surface of our day-to-day peaceableness the way Violetta had clawed the sere crust on her limbs, anything to get something bright and liquid flowing again, out in the open and slippery between our fingers."
Author: Lionel Shriver

30. "Count yourself fortunate." He made an elegant sweep of his hand toward the sun. "Daylight does not make them turn to ash, but they become bloody damn infants, whinging on about irritated eyes and sluggish limbs and so forth."
Author: Lynn Viehl

31. "I once met a woman who'd been in therapy... and it seemed like the big thing she'd learned was to ignore everything she thought in the first hour of the day. That's when the negative stuff will try to bring you down, she said, and she was right about that but not much else. You come back from the night with your head and your soul empty, and bad things try to fill you up. There's a lot to get exercised about, if you let it. But if you've got a task, something to fill your head and move your limbs, by the time you've finished it the day has begun ands you're onto the next thing. You're over the hump, like I said."
Author: Michael Marshall Smith

32. "But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals."
Author: Michelangelo

33. "He would drift through the house in search of the coolest spot to read through the long summer afternoons that had a touch of eternity to them, altering the arrangement of his limbs as much for comfort as for the fear that his undisturbed shadow would leave a stain on the wall."
Author: Nadeem Aslam

34. "Lethargy. It's a word I know, because it's in one of my father's favorite expressions. Lethargy breeds lethargy. It means the more you lie around doing nothing, the more you want to lie around doing nothing. Your limbs and your mind feel so heavy that it becomes a major effort just to lift your arm to channel surf."
Author: Neal Shusterman

35. "People think alcoholics are violent. They don't hold down jobs or they're out drinking every night. No offense to the people who believe that, but they don't know jack. Sometime, people do it to DEAL. Because fate sat down and decided, 'Hey, let's see how much shit we can throw at this person before they break.' Before all the skinned knees and bruised limbs keep them from getting up after one last fall."
Author: Nyrae Dawn

36. "Persistent, flowing through fallen shadows,excavating tunnels, drilling silences,insisting, running under my pillow,brushing past my temples, covering my eyelidswith another, intangible skin made of air,its wandering nations, its drowsy tribesmigrate through the provinces of my body,it crosses, re-crosses under the bridges of my bones,slips into my left ear, spills out from my right,climbs the nape of my neck,turns and turns in my skull,wanders across the terrace of my forehead,conjures visions, scatters them,erases my thoughts one by onewith hands of unwetting water,it evaporates them,black surge, tide of pulse-beats,murmur of water groping forwardrepeating the same meaningless syllable,I hear its sleepwalking deliriumlosing itself in serpentine galleries of echoes,it comes back, drifts off, comes back,endlessly flings itselfoff the edges of my cliffs,and I don't stop fallingand I fall"
Author: Octavio Paz

37. "There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we'll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life."
Author: Pema Chödrön

38. "They pointed at each other, with starlight burning in their limbs like daggers and icicles and fireflies, and then fell to judging their limbs again, each finding himself intact, hot, excited, stunned, awed, and the other, ah yes, that other over there, unreal, a ghostly prism flashing the accumulated light of distant worlds….…Now Tomas laughed. "You're blind!""I see very well. You are the one who does not see."
Author: Ray Bradbury

39. "The second wolf dove straight into the free platter. Fibres of flesh ripped apart with the same terrible tearing sound of sacking stretched and broken. Red sprayed. Limbs flailed. The bloody gurgle of a scream tore from Logan's throat as he struggled against gnashing teeth. The same slow motion bubble slotted over Violet's head, vacuuming the sound. Time seemed to ripple around her. Her extra senses reached out, screaming as they felt Logan's existence fray. She moved without consideration, Simon close on her heels, his noises numb to her brain."
Author: Rebecca Clare Smith

40. "Nature has granted man no better gift than the shortness of life. The senses grow dull, the limbs are numb, sight, bearing, gait, even the teeth and alimentary organs die before we do, and yet this period is reckoned a portion of life." - Pg. 82"
Author: Robert Harris

41. "Every time she considered getting up and doing something, her limbs wouldn't move."
Author: Sara Shepard

42. "Sitting at the old patio table she'd cleared of leaves, she smiled and leaned back. The stars looked twisted in the limbs of the trees, like Christmas lights. She felt like part of the hollow around her was filling. She'd come here with too many expectations."
Author: Sarah Addison Allen

43. "She saw that Devin's bedroom door was still closed, and a sudden, irrational fear gripped her that Devin might not be there. But she opened her door and saw her sleeping on her back, her limbs spread out like points of a star. Her glasses were perched on her bedside table as if watching her, as if lonely for her."
Author: Sarah Addison Allen

44. "Max felt his eye twitching. He knew he should be yelling, but his limbs wouldn't move. This was what it felt like to be paralyzed with rage. Yes, he was going to do it. He was going to finally go utterly psychotic and prove the whole town right. He was going to walk over to those arrogant assholes and take the first one apart. Then he'd beat the other one to death with his dead brother's leg. He looked to his own brother. Rye would save him from his towering rage. Rye would have calming words. Rye would talk him down.Rye's face was red as he pointed at the young cowboys. "You, kill now, Max."
Author: Sophie Oak

45. "Do you know," he says, closing the cover of the journal only to lay his hand on top of it. Protecting it. Staring at it. "I couldn't sleep for days after I read that entry. I kept wanting to know which people were chasing you down the street, who it was you were running from. I wanted to find them," he says, so softly, "and I wanted to rip their limbs off, one by one. I wanted to murder them in ways that would horrify you to hear."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

46. "I'm wearing dead cotton on my limbs and a blush of roses on my face."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

47. "I didn't sleep at all last night, my heart and mind plagued and conflicted and I cant feel my limbs, I cant taste the food I'm not eating and I cant see straight, I cant focus on the things I'm supposed to be hearing. All I can think about are all the casualties and Warner's lips on my neck, his hands on my body, the pain and passion in his eyes and the many possible ways I could die today. I can only think about Warner touching me, kissing me, torturing me with his heart and Adam sitting beside me, not knowing what I've done."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

48. "His chest, heaving harder this time. His words, almost gasping this time. "You destroy me."I am falling to pieces in his arms.My fists are full of unlucky pennies and my heart is a jukebox demanding a few nickels and my head is flipping quarters heads or tails heads or tails heads or tails heads or tails"Juliette," he says, and he mouths the name, barely speaking at all, and he's pouring molten lava into my limbs and I never even knew I could melt straight to death."I want you," he says. He says "I want all of you. I want you inside and out and catching your breath and aching for me like I ache for you." He says it like it's a lit cigarette lodged in his throat, like he wants to dip me in warm honey and he says "It's never been a secret. I've never tried to hide that from you. I've never pretended I wanted anything less."
Author: Tahereh Mafi

49. "Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark - weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more - but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. Stranger things happen all the time everywhere. You know. I know you know. One question is who is responsible? Another is can you read?"
Author: Toni Morrison

50. "Not ill? No truly, I am young, healthful, and strong; the blood flows freely in my veins; my limbs obey my will; I am robust in mind and body, constituted for a long life. Yes, all this is true; and yet, nevertheless, I have an illness, a fatal illness,--an illness given by the hand of man!"
Author: Victor Hugo

Limbs Quotes Pictures