Shrivel Quotes

1. "How could you sleep, knowing that any second your insides might begin to rot, your skin decay to slime, your brain shrivel to dust?""I fell asleep with my throat cut. I am a professional."
Author: A.E. Marling

2. "Oh yet we trust that somehow goodWill be the final goal of ill,To pangs of nature, sins of will,Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;That nothing walks with aimless feet;That not one life shall be destroy'd,Or cast as rubbish to the void,When God hath made the pile complete;That not a worm is cloven in vain;That not a moth with vain desireIs shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,Or but subserves another's gain.Behold, we know not anything;I can but trust that good shall fallAt last—far off—at last, to all,And every winter change to spring.So runs my dream: but what am I?An infant crying in the night:An infant crying for the light:And with no language but a cry."
Author: Alfred Tennyson

3. "All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut."
Author: Anne Brontë

4. "Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain."
Author: Anne Rivers Siddons

5. "To pick up the Sword of the Spirit without the Shield of Faith is to shrivel and dry up in the desert of legalism. To pick up the Shield of Faith without the Sword of the Spirit is to try walking by faith on quicksand."
Author: Beth Moore

6. "Wishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in it's changing and change with it."
Author: Catherynne M. Valente

7. "Love is not a consequence. Love is not a choice. Love is a thirst. A need as vital to the soul as water is to the body. Love is a precious draught that not only soothes a parched throat, but it vitalizes a man. It fortifies him enough that he is willing to slay dragons for the woman who offers it. Take that draught of love from me and I will shrivel to dust. To take it from a man dying of thirst and give it to another whilst he watches is a cruelty I never thought you capable of."
Author: Colleen Houck

8. "I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sharp simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile."
Author: Colm Tóibín

9. "Tackling challenges won't shrivel your muscles, it'll strengthen them."
Author: Constance Chuks Friday

10. "Your eyes meet and you immediately feel yourself shriveling under his gaze. He bears a scale in one hand and appears to be weighing your worth. Finding you wanting, the Horseman of Famine turns his dark steed and trots on."
Author: Daniel Keidl

11. "And she was-definitely-a woman who did not shrink from gauntlets, but stepped up to them, and said, Okay, bring it. Bring your worst. I will get back up. Every time. I will not shrivel and die. So watch out."
Author: Dennis Lehane

12. "He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise."
Author: Edith Wharton

13. "I think she cried at my funeral. It's not that I'm conceited or anything, but I'm pretty sure. Sometimes I can actually picture her talking about me to some guy she feels close to. Talking about me dying. About how they lowered me into the grave, kind of shrivelled up and pitiful, like an old chocolate bar. About how we never really got a chance. And afterwards the guy fucks her, a fuck that's all about making her feel better."
Author: Etgar Keret

14. "Shriveled apple cores stood side by side on the window sill, a long row of them with their seed chambers bitten open and the pointed sees scattered on the floor. The brown, discolored remnants of their flesh bore the imprint of his grandfather's teeth. That was the image This was left with, the one that ever since was the first to recur when he thought of his dead grandfather: shriveled apple cores on the sill of a window that looked out onto an overgrown garden."
Author: Hansjörg Schertenleib

15. "A woman has her needs. What good is a mother to her poor children if she's suffering from low self-esteem and sexual frustration? If you don't get laid soon, you will literally close up. More importantly, you will shrivel. And you will become bitter."
Author: Helen Fielding

16. "He would like to burrow under the earth like a bulb, like a root, to where it is still warm. To hibernate with his thoughts and feelings. To remain silent with a shrivelling mouth. He wishes that all the statements, insults, promises he has uttered would become invalid, forgotten by everyone and he himself forgotten too.But no sooner is he secured in the silence, no sooner does he fancy that he has wrapped himself up like a chrysalis, than he is no longer right. A wet, cold wind blows his absence of expectations around the corner, over a flower-stall filled with evergreens and flowers for the dead. And suddenly he is holding in his hands the snowdrops that he didn't want to buy--he who wanted to go empty-handed! The bells of the snowdrops begin to ring wildly and soundlessly, and he goes to where his ruin awaits him. Filled with expectation as never before, with the expectation and the desire for salvation accumulated through all the years."
Author: Ingeborg Bachmann

17. "Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless — a perfect part of a perfect tapestry."
Author: Irvin S. Cobb

18. "Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:The ivy whines upon the wallAnd whines and twines upon the wallThe ivy whines upon the wallThe yellow ivy on the wallIvy, ivy up the wall.Did any one ever hear such drivel?"
Author: James Joyce

19. "The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I."
Author: Janet Fitch

20. "The world needed changing - that I knew. Global warming threatened to give us all a lethal tan; war and poverty decimated whole nations; crops worldwide were shriveling; even our brethren beasts menaced us with their monkey pox and bird flu and mad cow disease."
Author: Jeff Deck

21. "And then I see them. In the glow of the flashlight, I see the corses. Stacks of them. Some are shriveled. Some are putrid. Most still have their clothes on. Not one has its head on. "No. No way. No way! This can't be. Fresh dead people? They said the bodies were two hundred years old. This is bad. Really bad. We've got to call someone. Frontline. Nightline. Anderson Cooper."
Author: Jennifer Donnelly

22. "Your penis will not shrivel up and die if you admit you want an umbrella instead of standing in the rain acting like a little water never hurt anyone. It's an unbrella, not a purse."
Author: Jenny O'Connell

23. "Our imaginations are strong as children. Sometimes they get shoved aside, these imaginations. They get dusty and mildewed with age. The imagination is a muscle that has to be put to use or it shrivels."
Author: Julianna Baggott

24. "It appears time has two different effects on the heart," I say, still looking at the leaves. "It either makes it swell with love or shrivel with bitterness."
Author: Katie Kacvinsky

25. "Do blood clots get stuck in your teeth? What if someone's anemic; are you hungry again an hour later? Has anyone ever bitten you? If you run out of blood, do you shrivel up like a really old orange?"
Author: Katie MacAlister

26. "It is a terrible and exquisitely human irony that children inadequately nurtured almost never give up on the breast. The thirst for love from a mother or father who cannot provide it is seemingly unquenchable. I have treated sixty- and seventy-year-old business executives, politicians, and physicians still desperate for approval from shriveled, emotionally barren men and women in their eighties and nineties. (257)"
Author: Keith Ablow

27. "It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality."
Author: Kelly J. Cogswell

28. "Maggie faces me, forcing herself to smile again. It looks unnatural, as if that smile wants to shrivel and crawl away to a dark corner to weep."
Author: Kelsey Sutton

29. "Sort of. I can feel the arrangement of the virus or bacteria or whatever. And once I learn it, I can replicate that specific disease." She shot Conall a smirk. "Khileshi cockfire is a favorite."Wraith laughed. Conall paled. Eidolon looked at her like she was responsible for every case of the excruciating, dick-shriveling venereal disease he'd ever treated. The guy was so freaking uptight he probably starched his freaking underwear."
Author: Larissa Ione

30. "The only thing constantly changing is changeThe living only become deadYour hair falling outYour liver swelled upYour teeth rot your gums and your chinYour ass starts to sagYour balls shrivel upYour cock swallowed up in its sackThe only thing constantly changing is changeAnd it's always change on your back."
Author: Lou Reed

31. "The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left. Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious!"
Author: Louis Ferdinand Céline

32. "We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men"
Author: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

33. "Speaking biologically, fruit in a slightly shriveled state is holding its respiration and energy consumption down to the lowest possible level. It is like a person in meditation: his metabolism, respiration, and calorie consumption reach an extremely low level. Even if he fasts, the energy within the body will be conserved. In the same way, when mandarin oranges grow wrinkled, when fruit shrivels, when vegetables wilt, they are in the state that will preserve their food value for the longest possible time."
Author: Masanobu Fukuoka

34. "Faith idles when character shrivels."
Author: Miroslav Volf

35. "Love- the infatuation kind- 'he's so handsome, she's so beautiful'- that can shrivel. As soon as something goes wrong, that kind of love can fly out the window."
Author: Mitch Albom

36. "Bullying someone is like cake dough, it shrivels up in the oven if you open the door before it is fully baked."
Author: Mitch Kynock

37. "Morgan said that his mother said that Miss Kildaire is sitting on a shelf."Zach had to think about that one for a few seconds. "He said she's on the shelf?""Uh-huh." An emphatic nod. "I don't know why Miss Kildaire would sit on a shelf, but that's what Morgan said.""I'm guessing there's more.""And then Morgan said that his mother said that Miss Kildaire was too fat to get a man."What a load of horseshit, Zach thought. Morgan's mother was probably some shriveled-up jealous twit. "I see.""And then Morgan said she was a cripple."Zach had a sudden urge to punch out the little rat himself."
Author: Nalini Singh

38. "..though silence must add intensity to your intimate moments, it must also shrivel your soul to lie beside someone who doesn't talk to you."
Author: Nuala O'Faolain

39. "MRS ARBUTHNOT For me the world is shriveled to a palm's breath, and where I walk there are thorns.HESTER It shall not be so. We shall somewhere find green valleys and fresh waters, and if we weep, well, we shall weep together."
Author: Oscar Wilde

40. "The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea."
Author: Patricia A. McKillip

41. "Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way—the way of art—for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa's head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction—is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa's head shrivels and the automaton runs down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free?"
Author: Paul Celan

42. "Sobs force their way out of my throat. I feel like I'm trapped in a disaster movie where everything is shriveling into darkness and ash. Sunflowers are being uprooted. Puppies are being trampled. Whole cities are crumbling to dust."
Author: Paula Stokes

43. "Paper MatchesMy aunts washed dishes while the unclessquirted each other on the lawn withgarden hoses. Why are we in here,I said, and they are out there?That's the way it is,said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one.I have the rages that small animals have,being small, being animal.Written on me was a message,"At Your Service,"like a book of paper matches.One by one we were taken outand struck.We come bearing supper,our heads on fire."
Author: Paulette Jiles

44. "It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps."
Author: Peter Straub

45. "Bloated!" he cried. The corresponding hieroglyph flew through the air, bursting against a demon's chest in a spray of light. Instantly, the demon swelled like a water balloon and rolled screaming down the pyramid."Flat!" Thoth blasted another demon, who collapsed and shriveled into a monster-shaped doormat."Intestinal problems!" Thoth yelled. The poor demon who got zapped with that one turned green and doubled over."
Author: Rick Riordan

46. "Negotiating with memories isn't easy: how to choose between those panting to be told, those still ripening, those already shriveling, and those destined to be mangled by language and come out pulverized?"
Author: Steve Toltz

47. "The old orchid hunter lay back on his pillow, his body limp... 'You'll curse the insects,' he said at least, 'and you'll curse the natives... The sun will burn you by day and the cold will shrivel you by night. You'll be racked by fever and tormented by a hundred discomforts, but you'll go on. For when a man falls in love with orchids, he'll do anything to possess the one he wants. It's like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine... it's a sort of madness..."
Author: Susan Orlean

48. "It's there. The white rose among the dried flowers in the vase. Shriveled and fragile, but holding on to that unnatural perfection cultivated in Snows greenhouse. I grab the vase, stumble down to the kitchen, and throw its contents into the embers. As the flowers flare up, a burst of blue flame envelops the rose and devours it. Fire beats roses again."
Author: Suzanne Collins

49. "The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time."
Author: Terry Eagleton

50. "To hold her, to keep her -- just as she was -- with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don't believe it, but suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in me and in life ---"
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Shrivel Quotes Pictures