Shape And Form Quotes

1. "He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster."
Author: A.S. Byatt

2. "But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It's got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet's tectonic plates -hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents - but thy can't plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts.The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole"
Author: Anderson Cooper

3. "[O]ne has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to embark on the project of recovering lost life. And I think it may be possible to review 'the chronicles of wasted time.' William Morris wrote in The Dream of John Ball that men fight for things and then lose the battle, only to win it again in a shape and form that they had not expected, and then be compelled again to defend it under another name. We are all of us very good at self-persuasion and I strive to be alert to its traps, but a version of what Hegel called 'the cunning of history' is a parallel commentary that I fight to keep alive in my mind."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

4. "He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

5. "Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued."
Author: David Eagleman

6. "Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another."
Author: Deb Caletti

7. "But see, amid the mimic routA crawling shape intrude!A blood-red thing that writhes from outThe scenic solitude!It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangsThe mimes become its food,And seraphs sob at vermin fangsIn human gore imbued.Out- out are the lights- out all!And, over each quivering form,The curtain, a funeral pall,Comes down with the rush of a storm,While the angels, all pallid and wan,Uprising, unveiling, affirmThat the play is the tragedy, "Man,"And its hero the Conqueror Worm."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

8. "There is too much pain in the world,in all shapes and forms.That is what these people represent.Pain from losing their homes,the death of a loved one,failing an exam,having a leg amputated,not getting a resident permit after years of hoping for a better life...That's what binds them,That's what they potray.Pain."
Author: Esther Verhoef

9. "Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light."
Author: Franz Liszt

10. "For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross,is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly; you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance"
Author: George Eliot

11. "I blew a strand of black hair from my face. "A demon treating another with kindness is something I have yet to see.""Careful," the demon whispered. "You may have already seen the rough shape and form it takes in this world, and yet you do not recognize it."
Author: Heather Heffner

12. "All I knew when I moved to Nashville was that I wanted to make music in whatever shape and form I could."
Author: Hunter Hayes

13. "I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form."
Author: Ian McEwan

14. "Love is different and more difficult. It has nothing to do with sex.This is what I tried to make my voices understand. QUietly does lovehappen. You're not even thinking about romance, then she smiles andyou notice for the first time that she's not all that plain, her face isreally quite sweet. You watch for her smile and notice that it pushes hercheeks up into two mango shapes, why should this shape be sopleaSing, I don't know. Then one evening she puts kajal round her eyesand brushes her hair, looks quite transformed, and suddenly SonaliBendre is not so desirable as this one who's been under your nose forso long, who's all dolled up to go somewhere you're not going, cannever go."
Author: Indra Sinha

15. "Evans-Pritchard's confession reveals the way the power advantage of the subject whose definition of a situation prevails in the larger social context (in this case the majority of the Azande) shapes the environment and behavioral constraints that impact the subject who, although does not define the situation the same way, has to behave according to the former subject's definition in order to obtain the needed resources (in this case Evans-Pritchard, who is interested in gaining knowledge of the social organization of the Azande). For Evans-Pritchard, while living among the Azande, the actual world is as if there were magical forces around, true oracles and evil witches, as his whole daily life is structured around those nonexistent entities."
Author: István Aranyosi

16. "As McMasters raised the shotgun, the man removed his glasses. There were fields of stars where his eyes should have been. But they weren't reflections of the night sky. These stars were a glimpse of a dim and distant future where the very laws of physics had been reduced to relics of a forgotten age. Feeble as dying embers, they were the palsied mourners at time's wake.McMasters could hear the ultimate silence and feel the biting cold of the one true void. The promise of the eternal nothing beckoned to him. There was a sort of peace in the death it represented, not the death of mind and body but of shape and form. It was the final revelation, the casting off of life's illusion in favor of the void's embrace. from "Riders of the Necronomicon"
Author: James Pratt

17. "The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts."
Author: Janet Frame

18. "Live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

19. "I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you'd placed it. And then you would have given it away."
Author: Jennifer Egan

20. "We enter people's lives and then realize we've walked into a deep and long history that shapes and gives form to our every moment."
Author: Jill Bialosky

21. "I love you." Why it worked right then, why the webbing of my godmother's spell frayed as though the words had been an open flame, I don't know. I haven't found any explanation for it. There aren't any magical words, really. The words just hold the magic. They give it a shape and a form, they make it useful, describe the images within. I'll say this, though: Some words have a power that has nothing to do with supernatural forces. They resound in the heart and mind, they live long after the sounds of them have died away, they echo in the heart and the soul. They have power, and that power is very real. Those three words are good ones."
Author: Jim Butcher

22. "There, I was just a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting the inevitability of mediocrity and decay. But here, in the Juliaverse... energy was never lost, merely converted from one form to another. Here, I took butter and cream and meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance."
Author: Julie Powell

23. "I've learned a thing or two from Barrons: Power is sexy. It shapes my spine, infuses my beckoning hand. I have not been devastated by Barrons' death. The alchemy of grief has forged a new metal. I have been transformed. There's only one way I can make his death okay. Undo it."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

24. "Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch."
Author: Ken Follett

25. "His anger took many shapes: sometimes soft and familiar, like a round stone he had caressed for so long that is was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin and sharp like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the form of a star, radiating his hatred in all directions, leaving him numb and empty inside."
Author: Laila Lalami

26. "A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean."
Author: Laird Barron

27. "Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever."
Author: Lev Grossman

28. "Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds before them, clouds which writhed into different shapes, melted into rain or darkened, bruised themselves against an unseen antagonist and went on their way, laced with forking rivers of lightning, complete with white electric tributaries. Out of this infinite vision an infinity of details could be drawn, but Sonny had settled on one, and from the endless series a particular beach was chosen and began to form around Laura - a beach of iron-dark sand and shells like frail stars, and a wonderful wide sea that stretched, neither green nor blue, but inked by the approach of night into violet and black, wrinkling with its own salty puzzles, right out to a distant, pure horizon."
Author: Margaret Mahy

29. "Life is like molten glass. It flows, it's flexible, it can be molded and shaped and...what do you say? Ah, yes. It holds vast potential. You have a number of uncertainties in your melt right now. But they will always be there in one form or another. Always. Unlike molten glass, life can't be fixed or frozen into a pretty vase and placed on a shelf to gather dust."
Author: Maria V. Snyder

30. "Ectoplasm is shapeless, it is "informe," a kind of primordial paste—and to show itself as this, it annexes semiotic markers that designate intermediate spirit worlds. When looking at these fluid, inchoate forms, sometimes imprinted with a face, it is worth recalling that the word larva, used in English for the early stage of a caterpillar, meant "ghost" or "specter" in Latin, but is also used by Horace to designate a mask, such as might frighten an observer, while the verb larvo meant "to bewitch" or "enchant." Ectoplasmic masks are indeed larval: they promise the emergence of forms, but don't deliver them. The term pseudopod catches this relationship with the embryonic—and indeed with abortion."
Author: Marina Warner

31. "It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true—unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there."
Author: Martin Amis

32. "The Psalms are the steady, sustained subcurrent of healthy Christian living. They shaped the praying and vocation even of Jesus himself. They can and will do the same for us. The Psalms do this, to begin with, simply because they are poetry set to music: a classic double art form. To write or read a poem is already to enter into a different kind of thought world from our normal patterns. A poem is not merely ordinary thought with a few turns and twiddles added on to make it pretty or memorable. A poem (a good poem, at least) uses its poetic form to probe deeper into human experience than ordinary speech or writing is usually able to do, to pull back a veil and allow the hearer or reader to sense other dimensions. Sometimes"
Author: N. T. Wright

33. "Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?"
Author: Naomi Wolf

34. "This usually occurs at the moment when my head hits the pillow at night; my eyes close and … I see imagery. I do not mean pictures; more usually they are patterns or textures, such as repeated shapes, or shadows of shapes, or an item from an image, such as grass from a landscape or wood grain, wavelets or raindrops … transformed in the most extraordinary ways at a great speed. Shapes are replicated, multiplied, reversed in negative, etc. Color is added, tinted, subtracted. Textures are the most fascinating; grass becomes fur becomes hair follicles becomes waving, dancing lines of light, and a hundred other variations and all the subtle gradients between them that my words are too coarse to describe."
Author: Oliver Sacks

35. "I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity.However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al.For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future."
Author: Phillip Adams

36. "Above all, trust in the slow work of God.We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability— and that it may take a very long time.And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste.Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete."
Author: Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

37. "Meaning grows in the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains."
Author: Ralph Ellison In Juneteenth

38. "Do you know the rest?"Doug asked me expectantly. "What?The Achilles was a dysfuctional psychopath? Yeah I know that." "Well, yeah, everyone knows that. I mean the really cool part. About Thetis and Peleus." I shook my head, and he continued, professor-like, "Thetis was a sea mymph, and Peleus was a mortal who loved her. Only, when he went to woo her, she was a real bitch about it." "How so?" "She was a shape-shifter." I nearly dropped the book. "What?" Doug nodded. "He approached her, and she turned into all sorts of shit to scare him off - wild animals, forces of natures, monsters, whatever." "What... what'd he do?" "He held on. Grabbed her and wouldn't let go through all of those terrible transformations. No matter what she turned into, he just held on."
Author: Richelle Mead

39. "Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it."
Author: Ridley Scott

40. "However, Hardy's relationship with nature is a dialectical one. While he indicates that he recognizes how human perception shapes nature, he nevertheless accepts nature as possessed of its own agency, as working through its cycle regardless of human perception, understanding, or attempted control. In essence, it claims a power apart from that with which humans may have imbued it. Even when humanity has lost faith in the possibility of renewal through nature, nature as Hardy describes it fights back, attempting to force human consciousness to acknowledge her power, her ability to transform life."
Author: Shirley A. Stave

41. "Imagine an organization where the physical plant honors the mission, celebrates the employees, shares information, holds people accountable, shapes the outside world's view and helps drive performance. That would be an organization which uses visual management."
Author: Stewart Liff

42. "After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?"
Author: Tad Williams

43. "Where there were once several competing approaches to medicine, there is now only one that matters to most hospitals, insurers, and the vast majority of the public. One that has been shaped to a great degree by the successful development of potent cures that followed the discovery of sulfa drugs. Aspiring caregivers today are chosen as much (or more) for their scientific abilities, their talent for mastering these manifold technological and pharmaceutical advances as for their interpersonal skills. A century ago most physicians were careful, conservative observers who provided comfort to patients and their families. Today they act: They prescribe, they treat, they cure. They routinely perform what were once considered miracles. The result, in the view of some, has been a shift in the profession from caregiver to technician. The powerful new drugs changed how care was given as well as who gave it."
Author: Thomas Hager

44. "To me, football is so much about mental toughness, it's digging deep, it's doing whatever you need to do to help a team win and that comes in a lot of shapes and forms."
Author: Tom Brady

45. "Friends are a strange, volatile, contradictory, yet sticky phenomenon. They are made, crafted, shaped, molded, created by focused effort and intent. And yet, true friendship, once recognized, in its essence is effortless.Best friends are formed by time.Everyone is someone's friend, even when they think they are all alone.If the friendship is not working, your heart will know. It's when you start being less than perfectly honest and perfectly earnest in your dealings. And it's when the things you do together no longer feel right.However, sometimes it takes more effort to make it work after all.Stick around long enough to become someone's best friend."
Author: Vera Nazarian

46. "It is a peculiar monthly Affliction inducing them [the men of Regency England] to take on various unnatural shapes—neither quite demon, nor proper beast—and in those shapes to roam the land; to hunt, murder, dismember, gorge on blood, consume haggis and kidney pie, gamble away their familial fortune, marry below their station (and below their statue, when the lady is an Amazon), vote Whig, perform sudden and voluntary manual labor, cultivate orchids, collect butterflies and Limoges snuff boxes, and perpetrate other such odious evil—unless properly contained."
Author: Vera Nazarian

47. "Can human nature ever be wholly and radically transformed? Can the man whom God made good be made wicked by man? Can the soul be reshaped in its entirety by destiny and made evil because destiny is evil? Can the heart become misshapen and afflicted with ugly, incurable deformities under disproportionate misfortune, like a spinal column bent beneath a too low roof?"
Author: Victor Hugo

48. "There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey.To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts."
Author: Victor Hugo

49. "Of every aspect of the moor, the earth and stone and rain and fire, the wind is the strongest one in Near. Here on the outskirts of the village, the wind is always pressing close, making windows groan. It whispers and it howls and it sings. It can bend its voice and cast it into any shape, long and thin enough to slide beneath the door, stout enough to seem a thing of weight and breath and bone. "The wind was here when you were born, when I was born, when our house was built, when the Council was formed, and even when the Near Witch lived,"
Author: Victoria Schwab

50. "I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

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