Stiff Man Quotes

1. "...And friends abroad must bear in mindFriends at home they leave behind.Oh, I shall be stiff and coldWhen I forget you, hearts of gold;The land where I shall mind you notIs the land where all's forgot.And if my foot returns no moreTo Teme nor Corve nor Severn shore,Luck, my lads, be with you stillBy falling stream and standing hill,By chiming tower and whispering tree,Men that made a man of me.About your work in town and farmStill you'll keep my head from harm,Still you'll help me, hands that gaveA grasp to friend me to the grave."
Author: A.E. Housman

2. "Because I liked you betterThan suits a man to say,It irked you, and I promisedI'd throw the thought away.To put the world between usWe parted stiff and dry:'Farewell,' said you, 'forget me.''Fare well, I will,' said I.If e'er, where clover whitensThe dead man's knoll, you pass,And no tall flower to meet youStarts in the trefoiled grass,Halt by the headstone shadingThe heart you have not stirred,And say the lad that loved youWas one that kept his word."
Author: A.E. Housman

3. "As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus. Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused.)Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. "The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find," one miner told me wryly."
Author: Amy Chua

4. "Underneath my stiffened gownIs the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,A basin in the midst of hedges grownSo thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,But she guesses he is near,And the sliding of the waterSeems the stroking of a dearHand upon her."
Author: Amy Lowell

5. "Maxwell Arbus was the reason Saul lost an eye?" "Yes," Millie answers stiffly. "But that was a long time ago. Saul has moved on. So have I." Whatever checks I'd held on my emotions shatter. "Moved on?!" Whirling around, I storm at Millie, waving my arms like a maniacal marionette. "I don't care if it was so long ago we could only get with a TARDIS! There is no moving on because it's happening right now!"
Author: Andrea Cremer

6. "Now,' [her father] barked.She stiffly followed, still fully dressed in the elaborate navy-and-white gown she had worn all evening. It was hard not to feel as if the bare walls and surfaces she passed had been bled, leeched, into the cloth encasing her. Stripped paint and sacrificed heirlooms clinging to her, demanding she make everything right once more."
Author: Anne Mallory

7. "Whoa. Not too stiff," Cody said. "Secure, strong, but calm. Like you're caressing a beautiful woman, remember?"That made me think of Megan.I lost control, and a green wave of smoky energy burst from my hand and flew out in front of me. It missed the pipe completely, but vaporized the metal leg of the chair it sat on. Dust showered down and the chair went lopsided, dumping the pipe to the floor with a clang."Sparks," Cody said. "Remind me to never let you caress me, lad."
Author: Brandon Sanderson

8. "The Lawyers Know Too Much THE LAWYERS, Bob, know too much.They are chums of the books of old John Marshall.They know it all, what a dead hand wrote,A stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling,The bones of the fingers a thin white ash. The lawyers know a dead man's thoughts too well.In the heels of the higgling lawyers, Bob,Too many slippery ifs and buts and howevers,Too much hereinbefore provided whereas,Too many doors to go in and out of.When the lawyers are throughWhat is there left, Bob?Can a mouse nibble at itAnd find enough to fasten a tooth in?Why is there always a secret singingWhen a lawyer cashes in?Why does a hearse horse snickerHauling a lawyer away?The work of a bricklayer goes to the blue.The knack of a mason outlasts a moon.The hands of a plasterer hold a room together.The land of a farmer wishes him back again. Singers of songs and dreamers of plays Build a house no wind blows over.The lawyers—tell me why a hearse horse snickers hauling a lawyer's bones."
Author: Carl Sandburg

9. "So he stopped at the first of them, a frigid hothouse whose front tipped forward over the street in defiance of gravity, taste, and ordinance; inside, the tender daytime flowers could be seen huddling in family groups beneath a constant, unseen sun, and behind them was the hermetic door to the dark Cactus Room where the shy nocturnal plants, genus cereus, could bloom in privacy at any hour. Vivien, once out of the car, appeared less constrained. She did not have that stiffness so many have on first entering bars, that air of waiting stubbornly for alcohol to loosen them, which so often presages their manner when it comes' time for bed. She was already excited when the martinis came."
Author: Douglas Woolf

10. "But, surely, if the mind is too long directed to one object only, it will get stiff and rigid, and unable to take in many interests."
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

11. "You will then. Listen here...I've always got this to look forward to: I'll settle down by that man's side. I'll be as virtuous as any woman. I've made up my mind to it and I'll be it. And I'll be bored stiff for the rest of my life. Except for one thing. I can torment that man. And I'll do it. Do you understand how I'll do it? There are many ways. But if the worst comes to the worst I can always drive him silly...by corrupting the child!' She was panting a little, and round her brown eyes the whites showed. 'I'll get even with him. I can. I know how, you see. And with you, through him, for tormenting me. I've come all the way from Brittany without stopping. I haven't slept...But I can..."
Author: Ford Madox Ford

12. "That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room, too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of the stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams."
Author: Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

13. "He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched school-days, the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfish dishonour leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, all its squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to the hut, to the fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the river to Sulyma, to the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavours to destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a hallucination! He knew it was. A hallucination merely. For a moment he snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on the bracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at him... With the stiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb of his arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.("Pollock And The Porrah Man")"
Author: H.G. Wells

14. "However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it."
Author: Herman Melville

15. "You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters."
Author: Honoré De Balzac

16. "Bit it's what bein a hard man is aw aboot; its a journey, a fucking self destructive quest tae find yir limits, cause they fuckin limits eywis come in the form ay a harder man. A big. strong, stiff hard man whae can dae it for ye, whae can teach ye, show ye whaire ye stand, where yir fuckin parameters ur."
Author: Irvine Welsh

17. "The public must suffer untold pangs from the stiffness, the deliberate stifling of emotion, on the part of many British actors."
Author: Ivor Novello

18. "One of the side effects of Viagra is blurred vision. Sounds great! When I'm taking a pill to pop a stiffy, how great is it that any woman I look at has blurred features and therefore is as beautiful as an impressionistic painting?"
Author: Jarod Kintz

19. "Behind Nat someone chuckled. Nat turned. Dr. Bentley was looking at him with a twinkle. "Is this a political argument?"Nat shrugged. "No argument at all. Ben's got an article there that talks against the President. I said I didn't want to hear it. I said that sort of thing ought to be stopped."To Nat's amazement, Dr. Bentley shook his head. "No, Nat. We can't have freedom—unless we have freedom."Nat stiffened. "Does that mean right to tell lies?"Dr. Bentley smiled. "It means the right to have our own opinions. Human problems aren't like mathematics, Nat. Every problem doesn't have just one answer; sometimes you get several answers—and you don't know which is the right one."
Author: Jean Lee Latham

20. "Oh, I see how it is. Baby finds her Johnny Castle, and all of a sudden, she forgets about the small matter of her BFF?"There was only one person in the world who could deliver that line with a straight face. Until I'd heard his voice, I hadn't realized just how much I'd missed it."Devon!"Chase stiffened as Dev's name left my lips, and Devon beamed at me, doing a good impression of someone who hadn't been bristling a moment before, when I'd buried myself in Chase's arms."In the flesh," Devon said. "When you call, Bronwyn, I answer. Always." It was a testament to the gravity of the moment that he didn't treat everyone present to an impromptu performance of "Ain't No Mountain." Lest Devon decide the situation did call for some tunes, I pushed on."
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

21. "There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important."
Author: John Boorman

22. "Sirrah, my companion chooses to engage you in knightly combat!" Halt said. The horseman stiffened, sitting upright in his saddle. Halt noticed that he nearly lost his balance at this unexpected piece of news.Nightly cermbat?" he replied, "Yewer cermpenion ers no knight!"Halt nodded hugely, making sure the man could see the gesture.Oh yes he is!" he called back. "He is Sir Horace of the Order of the Feuille du Chene." He paused and muttered to himself, "Or should that have been Crepe du Chene? Never mind."What did you tell him?" Horace asked, slinging his buckler around from where it hung at his back and setting it on his left arm.I said you were Sir Horace of the Order of the Oakleaf." Halt said to him, then added uncertainly, "At least, I think that's what I told him. I may have said you were of the Order of the Oak Pancake."
Author: John Flanagan

23. "One of these, bearing the name of Crampton, is an adorable blonde with a shrill voice, a long slender body imprisoned in a shiny brass corset, and supple catlike movements; a smart golden blonde whose extraordinary grace can be quite terrifying when she stiffens her muscles of steel, sends the sweat pouring down her steaming flanks, sets her elegant wheels spinning in their wide circles, and hurtles away, full of life, at the head of an express or a boat-train.The other, Engerth by name, is a strapping saturnine brunette given to uttering raucous, guttural cries, with a thickset figure encased in armor-plating of cast iron; a monstrous creature with her disheveled mane of black smoke and her six wheels coupled together low down, she gives an indication of her fantastic strength when, with an effort that shakes the very earth, she slowly and deliberately drags along her heavy train of goods-wagons."
Author: Joris Karl Huysmans

24. "I turned around slowly, and looked up at him. He stiffened and sucked in a shallow breath. After a moment, he touched my cheek."Such naked pain," he whispered.I turned my face into his palm and closed my eyes. His fingers threaded into my hair, cupped my head, and brushed the brand. It heated at his touch. His hand tightened at the base of my skull and squeezed, and he raised me slowly to my tiptoes. I opened my eyes and it was my turn to inhale sharply. Not human. Oh, no, not this man."Never show it to me again." His face was cold, hard, his voice colder."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

25. "You really know when people are lying?"He nodded."Prove it.""Got a boyfriend?""No.""Is there a man you're interested in?""No.""You're lying."I stiffened. "I am not.""Yes, you are. He may not be a boyfriend but there's someone you're interested in enough that you're thinking about having sex with him."I glared. "I am not. And you can't possibly know that."He shrugged. "Sorry, Mac, I hear the truth even when the person isn't admitting it to themselves." One dark brow lifted. "I don't suppose it might be me?"I blushed. He'd just made me think it. Us. Naked. Wow. I was a perfectly healthy woman, and he was a gorgeous man. "No," I said, embarrassed.He laughed, gold eyes glittering. "Lie. A whopper. Gotta love that. Have I told you I'm a big believer in fulfilling a woman's fantasies?"
Author: Karen Marie Moning

26. "TODAY I THINK MY RELATIONSHIP WITH HELL IS OVER. It was hell, the ancient hell. Hell: I believed that if I loved V enough, we would love each other.All I know is that I've been returned to earth violently; I've a duty to myself to survive and to see what is. I have to deal with the truth, with nothing else.Did V's charity to me almost cause my death?I, starving, fed on the dream that V loved me and I lived a lie. So forgive me, You who knows that only truth matters.Yes—this dawn is at best difficult.The blood he let out of my skin, now dried and stiff, hurts me and there's nothing else in my life but memories of him. Mental war is constant.Nonetheless, this is the eve before the morning.May I accept the influxes of vigor and whatever real tenderness floats by in these barren waters. And when dawn comes, armed with my patience which burns, I shall see the cities of humans which are splendid.The imagination is nothing unless it is made actual."
Author: Kathy Acker

27. "I see." The nurse nodded. "How can I help you?""I'm Inspector Mc—" Phineas halted, obviously having second thoughts about using his real name."Man-boob," Brynley finished for him.He stiffened."What can I do for you, Inspector McMan-boob?" the nurse asked.He gritted his teeth. "It's muscle.""Inspector Muscle?" the nurse asked."Yes. Exactly." He gave Brynley a triumphant look. "And this is my assistant, Nurse—""Doctor," Brynley corrected him."Doctor . . ." He glanced down at her chest. "A-cup.""B-cup!"He arched a brow. "You'll have to prove it."
Author: Kerrelyn Sparks

28. "He is a very reasonable person,Mr. Redmond. I know for a fact that he would like to find a suitable compromise between your position and his.""With all due respect, Mrs. Rayne," Damon said stiffly, "I didn't have that impression yesterday.""I am certain that many people think of him as being very..progressive-""Very tactfully put-""Perhaps too progressive."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

29. "Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness. None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively."
Author: Martinus Hendrikus Benders

30. "A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist. The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation. If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen, caries that form. All of which, moreover, is as uninteresting as humanly possible - the collagen which makes muscles stiffen, the appearance of microbic cavities in the gums."
Author: Michel Houellebecq

31. "He lifted a single eyebrow as he adjusted his pants, zipping his fly. The sound made my back stiffen and I realized how close we'd just been to copulating in the back of a car."I think you look good just like that."I stared at him for two seconds before I smacked him on his infuriatingly well-muscled shoulder."My shirt is ripped open and…" I frantically twisted in my seat and may have shrieked, "Where are my underwear?!"There was no amusement in his voice when he responded, "Someplace safe."My eyes widened further and, I knew, my mouth hung open dumbly. I was about to lose my mind."Give them back-""You don't need them-""-to me right now-""-and you should try new things-""I am not leaving this limo while commando!"The passenger door on Quinn's side opened and I yanked the skirt I was wearing back to my midcalf.I didn't miss his dark smile when it was clear that I was not likely to push the underwear issue further until we were in private. And, by then, it likely wouldn't matter."
Author: Penny Reid

32. "Good-bye, Mrs Bartholemew," said tom, shaking hands with stiff politeness; "and thank you very much for having me.""I shall look forward to our meeting again," said Mrs Bartholemew, equally primly. Tom went slowly down the attic stairs. Then, at the bottom, he hesitated: he turned impulsively and ran up again - two at a time - to where Hatty Bartholemew still stood...Afterwards, Aunt Gwen tried to describe to her husband that second parting between them. "He ran up to her, and they hugged each other as if they had known each other for years and years, instead of only having met for the first time this morning. There was something else, too, Alan, although I know you'll say it sounds even more absurd...Of course, Mrs Bartholemew's such a shrunken little old woman, she's hardly bigger than Tom; anyway: but, you know, he put his arms right round her and he hugged her good-bye as if she were a little girl."
Author: Philippa Pearce

33. "He [Babur] was a type of mastiff, bred to fight against wolves, dogs, and humans. . . . The mastiff is perhaps the oldest breed of dog in the world. . . . The dogs of Ghor . . . were always regarded as particularly special mastiffs. . . . 'so powerful that in frame and strength every one of them is a match for a lion."
Author: Rory Stewart

34. "To stop Maria before she ruined everything, he grabbed her about the waist, hauled her against him, and sealed his mouth to hers. At first she seemed too stunned to do anything. When after a moment, he felt her trying to draw back from him, he caught her behind the neck with an iron grip."Oh," Gran said in a stiff voice. "Beg pardon."Dimly he heard the door close and footsteps retreating, but before he could let Maria go, a searing pain shot through his groin, making him see stars. Blast her, the woman had kneed him in the ballocks!As he doubled over, fighting to keep from passing out, she snapped, "That was for making me look like a whore, too!"
Author: Sabrina Jeffries

35. "A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness--"Truth," "Knowers," "the Good," "Man"--but we can by no means deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about "values."
Author: Saul Bellow

36. "Peter Pan," I whisper into her ear."I'm afraid.""Afraid of what?" I kiss the opposite corner. She's not as stiff as she was a minute ago. I kiss her mouth full on and close my eyes at the feel ofher lips. God, I am so whipped by this woman."Of how vulnerable you make me."
Author: Tarryn Fisher

37. "And then she closed her eyes, and they could no longer touch her. She no longer embraced what they threatened. Linh was there, and when she reached for his hand, her own had become stiff and brittle, her arms become branches, and from her kees to her groin to her belly to her breasts came a covering, an armor of gnarled bark, and her hair, when she reached for it, had th easpect of leaves. She opened her eyes, alive, and she turned to look deeply and without fear into her boy soldier's face......the leader came and knelt down to look at Helen, and her mouth so full of liquid she gagged, spitting out Buddha and fragments of stone. The man picked up the small medallion and stared at her in wonder."
Author: Tatjana Soli

38. "When I arrived in the stables, he startled me from behind the door. Without a word, he grabbed me up in his arms and carried me into the loft. There he had lit a dozen candles, and strewn rose petals and blankets over a bed of sweet-smelling hay.""A dozen lit candles in a stable full of dry hay? You're lucky you survived the experience, sweetheart. You could have been tinder."Sophia raised her eyebrows and stiffened her posture. "Our love was an inferno. I thought I would go up in flames, so glorious was our pleasure that night."He covered his eyes with a hand and laughed, loud and long. "What a vivid romantic imagination you have."
Author: Tessa Dare

39. "Shit now is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse inside the whiteman's warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That's what the toilet is for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet's the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white emblems the very emblem of Odorless and Official death."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

40. "Whoa there, Tobias," says the man to my left. "Weren't you raised a Stiff? I thought the most you people did was... graze hands or something.""Then how do you explain all the Abnegation children?" Tobias raises his eyebrows."They are brought into being by sheer force of will," the woman on the arm of the chair interjects. "Didn't you know that, Tobias?""No, I wasn't aware." He grins. "My apologies."
Author: Veronica Roth

41. "The "stiff, dead, retracted pelvis" is one of man's most frequent vegetative disturbances. It is responsible for lumbago as well as for hemorrhoidal disturbances. Elsewhere, we shall demonstrate an important connection between these disturbances and genital cancer in women, which is so common.Thus, the "deadning of the pelvis" has the same function as the deadening of the abdomen, i.e., to avoid feelings, particularly those of pleasure and anxiety."
Author: Wilhelm Reich

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