Barbed Quotes

They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then - how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Do you listen to disco?" "I'd rather eat barbed wire. ~ Colleen Hoover

Cassie, I want to be with you. Always. If that involves us being naked and making love in a hundred different ways, every day for the rest of our lives, that's fantastic. If it involves us sitting and talking, wearing barbed wire and cast-iron body suits, that's fantastic, too. I just want you. Now. A week from now. A year. A decade. Whenever you're ready. What I want is never going to change. It's you. Just you. Naked or clothed, doesn't matter to me. ~ Leisa Rayven

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. ~ Sylvia Plath

Later bad things will be said about Stalin; he'll be called a tyrant and his reign of terror will be denounced. But for the people of Eduard's generation he will remain the supreme leader of the people of the Union at the most tragic moment in their history; the man who defeated the Nazis and proved himself capable of a sacrifice worthy of the ancient Romans: the Germans had captured his son, Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, while the Russians had captured Field Marshal Paulus, one of the top military leaders of the Reich, at Stalingrad. When the German High Command proposed an exchange, Stalin responded with disdain that he didn't exchange field marshals for simple lieutenants. Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself on the electrified barbed wire fence of his prison camp. * ~ Emmanuel Carrere

I loved driving with Marlboro Man. I saw things I'd never seen before, things I'd never even considered in my two and a half decades of city life. For the first time ever, I began to grasp the concept of north, south, east, and west, though I imagine it would take another twenty-five years before I got them straight. I saw fence lines and gates made of welded iron pipe, and miles upon miles of barbed wire. I saw creeks--rocky, woodsy creeks that made the silly water hazard in my backyard seem like a little mud puddle. And I saw wide open land as far as the eye could see. I'd never known such beauty.
Marlboro Man loved showing me everything, pointing at pastures and signs and draws and lakes and giving me the story behind everything we saw. The land, both on his family's ranch and on the ranches surrounding it, made sense to him: he saw it not as one wide open, never-ending space, but as neatly organized parcels, each with its own purpose and history. "Betty Smith used to own this part of our ranch with her husband," he'd say. "They never had kids and were best friends with my grandparents." Then he'd tell some legend of Betty Smith's husband's grandfather, remembering such vivid details, you'd think he'd been there himself. I absorbed it all, every word of it. The land around him pulsated with the heartbeats of all who'd lived there before…and as if it were his duty to pay honor to each and every one of them, he told me their names, their stories, their relationship, the ~ Ree Drummond

When our new armies are ready it seems folly to send them to Flanders, where they will chew barbed wire, or be wasted in futile frontal attacks. ~ H. H. Asquith

Beyond all of that, I could see the wall I had seen from inside the train, the wall that runs along the train line. I assumed that there, behind it, was the west, and I was right. I could have been wrong, but I was right.' If she had any future it was over there, and she needed to get to it.
I sit in the chair exploring the meaning of dumbstruck, rolling the word around in my mind. I laugh with Miriam as she laughs at herself, and at the boldness of being sixteen. At sixteen you are invulnerable. I laugh with her about rummaging around for a ladder in other people's sheds, and I laugh harder when she finds one. We laugh at the improbability of it, of someone barely more than a child poking around in Beatrix Potter's garden by the Wall, watching out for Mr McGregor and his blunderbuss, and looking for a step-ladder to scale one of the most fortified barriers on earth. We both like the girl she was, and I like the woman she has become.
She says suddenly, 'I still have the scars on my hands from climbing the barbed wire, but you can't see them so well now.' She holds out her hands. The soft parts of her palms are crazed with definite white scares, each about a centimeter long.
The first fence was wire mesh with a roll of barbed wire along the top. ~ Anna Funder

I ought to have guessed that a person like her
a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us
I ought to have guessed that that kind of person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn't want to answer. ~ Robert Penn Warren

WELCOME. YOU ARE MOST WANTED.
Come in. I'm R.L. Stine. Welcome to the Goosebumps office.
Glad you made it through the barbed wire fence. Don't worry. Those cuts will stop bleeding in an hour or two.
Why do we have a barbed wire fence? To keep the Abominable Snowman from escaping. I'm surprised you didn't see him. He's creeping up right behind you. Hurry. Step inside and shut the door. You don't want to find out why everyone calls him Abominable.
Hey, don't be scared of Eddie over there. Eddie woke up dead tired one morning. Guess what? He actually was dead. Yes, Eddie is a zombie. But he doesn't like that word. He likes to be called "life-challenged."
He's not much trouble. He only needs to eat human flesh once a day. Don't be nervous. He just finished his breakfast.
Whom did he have for breakfast? I'm not sure. But I haven't seen my brother all morning...
Eddie - what did I tell you about eating the family?
Oh, well. Let me ask you a question before Eddie has to have his next meal. What do you think is the Most Wanted holiday? ~ R.L. Stine

The problem with borders, I was beginning to realize, isn't that they are monstrous, offensive, and unnatural constructions. The problem with borders is the same as the problem with evil that Hannah Arendt identified: their banality. We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape--at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports--because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desires, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else. Borders reinforce the idea of the alien, the Other, stories separate and distinct from ourselves. But would such fictions continue to stand if most of us didn't agree with them, or at least quietly benefit from the inequalities they bolster? The barbed wire begins here, inside us, cutting through our very core. ~ Kate Harris

It was the kind of behavior that could only occur when
people had been trapped for thousands of years, staring at the
same sights, fetishizing everything around them, spiraling
down toward the full-blown insanity of religion. You didn't
need gates and barbed wire to make a prison. Familiarity could
pin you to the ground, far more efficiently. ~ Greg Egan

It was a sunny day in early summer, and he could hear birdsong. In a nearby orchard that had so far escaped shelling, apple trees were blossoming bravely. Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best. ~ Ken Follett

Lux's frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t's and b's of her mother's signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L's reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

All rebel thought, as we
have seen, is expressed either in rhetoric or in a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucretius, the
convents and isolated castles of Sade, the island or the lonely rock of the romantics, the solitary heights of
Nietzsche, the primeval seas of Lautreamont, the parapets of Rimbaud, the terrifying castles of the
surrealists, which spring up in a storm of flowers, the prison, the nation behind barbed wire, the
concentration camps, the empire of free slaves, all illustrate, after their own fashion, the same need for
coherence and unity. In these sealed worlds, man can reign and have knowledge at last. ~ Albert Camus

Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment - far worse than my abandonment - how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in. ~ Charlotte Bronte

I'm secure enough in myself to wear panties with bows on them. Besides, they are comfy and soft."
"I bet." He almost purred.
I gulped. ~ Ilona Andrews

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a massive skull-like head. Its carapace gleamed like oil. ~ Christopher Paolini

The inside of his skull, it tasted like roses and barbed wire and butterflies. Switchblades and heroin and grassy green gardens. ~ Mercedes M. Yardley

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided."
Truth: Obama later said, "This was an example where we had some poor phrasing in the speech and we immediately tried to correct the interpretation that was given. The point we were simply making was, is that we don't want barbed wire running through Jerusalem. ~ Barack Obama

Curran smiled.
"What's so funny?"
"Your panties have a bow," he said.
I looked down. I was wearing a short tank top - not mine - and my blue panties with a narrow white strip of lace at the top and a tiny white bow. Would it have killed me to check what I was wearing before I pulled the blanket down? "What's wrong with bows?"
"Nothing." He was grinning now. "I expected barbed wire. Or one of those steel chains."
Wiseass. "I'm secure enough in myself to wear panties with bows on them. Besides, they are comfy and soft."
"I bet." He almost purred.
I gulped. Okay, I needed to either crawl back into bed and cover myself with the blanket or get the hell to the bathroom and back. Since I didn't fancy peeing on myself, the bathroom was my only option.
"I don't suppose you'd mind giving me a bit of privacy for my trip?"
"Not a chance," he said.
I tried to get off the bed. Everything was under control until my weight actually hit my legs and then the room decided to crawl sideways. Curran caught me. His arm hugged my back, his touch sending an electric shiver along my skin. Oh no.
"Need some help, ass kicker?"
"I'm fine, thanks." I pushed away from him. He held on to me for a second, letting me know that he could restrain me against my will with laughable ease, and let go. I clenched my teeth. Enjoy it while it lasts. I'll be back on my feet soon.
I walked away from him, successfully maintaining vertical position, and ze ~ Ilona Andrews

What You Should Know to be a Poet"

all you can know about animals as persons.
the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
the names of stars and the movements of planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind.
at least one kind of traditional magic:
divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot;

dreams.
the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods.
kiss the ass of the devil and eat sh*t;
fuck his horny barbed cock,
fuck the hag,
and all the celestial angels
and maidens perfum'd and golden-

& then love the human: wives husbands and friends
children's games, comic books, bubble-gum,
the weirdness of television and advertising.

work long, dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted
and lived with and finally lovd. exhaustion,
hunger, rest.

the wild freedom of the dance, extasy
silent solitary illumination, entasy

real danger. gambles and the edge of death. ~ Gary Snyder

It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts on nights when the moon comes too close ... ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

That missleproof glass might as well have been electrified fence and barbed wire. No one could fashion a prison so perfect, so complete, as the one the masters of humanity had created for themselves. ~ S.J. Kincaid

The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.
The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.
1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.
2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.
3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy. ~ Diriye Osman

I feel as though I can chew up nails and spit out a barbed wire fence. ~ Khloe Beutler

Little by litter life returned to normal. The barbed wire which fenced us in did not cause us any real fear. We even thought ourselves rather well off; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic ... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department - a whole government machinery.
Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares. Our fear and anguish were at an end. We were living among Jews, among brothers. ~ Elie Wiesel

Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations.
And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won't intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs.
You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It's been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we'd get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We're already here. ~ Rudolph Herzog

[B]ut once the bureaucrats sink their barbed pens into the lives of Indians, the paper starts flying, a blizzard of legal forms, a waste of ink by the gallon, a correspondence to which there is no end or reason. That's when I began to see what we were becoming, and the years have borne me out: a tribe of file cabinets and triplicates, a tribe of single-space documents, directives, policy. A tribe of pressed trees. A tribe of chicken-scratch that can be scattered by a wind, diminished to ashes by one struck match. ~ Louise Erdrich

The religion and it's many barbed indoctrinating tendrils just start to become what makes you who you are, so you have to kind of destroy yourself to be able to rebuild yourself and make yourself whole again. ~ Mat McNerney

Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences, quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of truth as they would a cold bath. ~ Luther Burbank

More hearts are breaking in this world of ours Than one would say. In distant villages And solitudes remote, where winds have wafted The barbed seeds of love, or birds of passage Scattered them in their flight, do they take root, And grow in silence, and in silence perish. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican. ~ David Berlinski

David set his foot in a gap higher up the barbed wire ... When would the searchlight come?They could not be certain of hitting him in the dark ... and if they did not hurry, he would be over ... Why didn't they hurry up. Then he stopped. He would run no more.When the beam of light caught him,they should see him walking away quite calmly. Then they would not enjoy it so much; they would feel cheated. The thought filled David with triumph. I am David ~ Anne Holm

This was the Karachi now – barbed wires protecting consulates, the pretentious covering themselves with faces of those who were hiding behind those barbed wires. This was Karachi – gaudy and luxurious, with a façade of glamor, ignoring the truth underneath. But Sophie was no cynic, and still loved the city she had returned to. 'You can't hate what's yours,' she smiled to herself. ~ Umair Naeem

I'd rather hug Magic Johnson after he rolled around in barbed wire. ~ Jim Norton

Cutting is a fence you build upon your own body to keep people out but then you cry to be touched. But the fence is barbed. What then? ~ Kathleen Glasgow

A collection of huts surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and in the huts lived 500 of the original inhabitants of our area. And so it went with many country towns around Australia. ~ Phillip Noyce

The two of them had fallen into the habit of bartering knowledge whenever she visited. He schooled her in jazz, in bebop and exotic bossa nova, playing his favorites for her while he painted- Slim Gaillard, Rita Reys, King Pleasure, and Jimmy Giuffre- stabbing the air with his brush when there was a particular passage he wanted her to note. In turn, she showed him the latest additions to her birding diary- her sketches of the short-eared owl and American wigeon, the cedar waxwing and late warblers. She explained how the innocent-looking loggerhead shrike killed its prey by biting it in the back of the neck, severing the spinal cord before impaling the victim on thorns or barbed wire and tearing it apart.
"Good grief," he'd said, shuddering. "I'm in the clutches of an avian Vincent Price. ~ Tracy Guzeman

In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc. ~ Anna Funder

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others - Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She'd be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they'd be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They'd come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they'd walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man's-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they'd simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself. ~ Libba Bray

Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led to the Fall? Souls in Heaven said "We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it's great!" - Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teeth, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how. ~ Jack Kerouac

My father only saw six months of combat before being taken prisoner. How did they capture him? They were advancing over a frozen lake while the enemy's artillery shot at the ice. Few made it across, and those who did had just spent their last strength swimming through freezing water; all of them lost their weapons along the way. They came to the shore half-naked. The Finns would stretch out their arms to rescue them and some people would take their hands, while others…many of them wouldn't accept any help from the enemy. That was how they had been trained. My father grabbed one of their hands, and he was dragged out of the water. I remember his amazement: "They gave me schnapps to warm me up. Put me in dry clothes. They laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, 'You made it, Ivan!' " My father had never been face to face with the enemy before. He didn't understand why they were so cheerful… The Finnish campaign ended in 1940…Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes…Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. "Brothers! Friends!" they threw themselves on their comrades. "Halt! Another step and we'll shoot!" The column was surrounded by soldiers with German Shepherds. They were led to specially prepared barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The interrogations began…"How were you taken prisoner?" the interrogator asked my father. "The Finns pull ~ Svetlana Alexievich

An unjust acquisition is like a barbed arrow, which must be drawn backward with horrible anguish, or else will be your destruction. ~ Jeremy Taylor

The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred, at least. Like the sidewalks, it's red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top. No one goes through those gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even as far as the Wall, from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible. Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men's Salvaging early this morning. I didn't hear the bells. Perhaps I've become used to them. We ~ Margaret Atwood

Many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,
oftener sooner than late,
is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Samson caused the house to collapse, knowing his death would also result. Despite Samson's deliberate suicide, Samson died faithful after having judged Israel for 20 years. His name rightly appears among men who, through faith, were made powerful. (Jg 15:20; 16:29-31; Heb 11:32-34)
We are surrounded by thousands of unseen cruelties, that mostly go unseen. The total amount of suffering each year is beyond comprehension. This world is barbed, dangerous and painful - too painful for some. Give them their space.
On any given day, your nod of approval may perpetuate cruelties that rasp away at the soul of another. We are all bound together in this delicate web of consequence. Tread light. Be kind. Many among us make unseen bargains to push ourselves onward - another hour, another day, another week. Occasionally their bargains create a deadly, unstoppable momentum.
Consider King Saul: When he realized that he would not survive his final battle against the Philistines, rather than letting his enemy humiliate him, or extort Israel, "Saul took the sword and fell upon it." –1Sam 31:4
pg 75 ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

I have a whole box full of pieces of the Berlin Wall and a heart made from the barbed wire of the Iron Curtain. It's - they're cherished treasures to me now, of course. ~ Carol Guzy

I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it's a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes." (Grossman, p. 99) He noted that "In people's day-to-day struggle to live, in the extreme efforts workers put forth to earn an extra ruble through moonlighting, in the collective farmers' battle for bread and potatoes as the one and only fruit of their labor, he [Ivan Grigoryevich] could sense more than the desire to live better, to fill one's children's stomachs and to clothe them. In the battle for the right to make shoes, to knit sweaters, in the struggle to plant what one wished, was manifested the natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature. He had seen this very same struggle in the people in camp. Freedom, it seemed, was immortal on both sides of the barbed wire." (Grossman, p. 110) ~ Vasily Grossman

Nevertheless"

you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food

than apple seeds - the fruit
within the fruit - locked in
like counter-curved twin

hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't

harm the roots; they still grow
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear -

leaf clinging to a barbed wire,
a root shot down to grow
in earth two feet below;

as carrots from mandrakes
or a ram's-horn root some-
times. Victory won't come

to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till

knotted thirty times - so
the bound twig that's under-
gone and over-gone, can't stir.

The weak overcomes its
menace, the strong over-
comes itself. What is there

like fortitude! What sap
went through that little thread
to make the cherry red! ~ Marianne Moore

Whitman himself "accepted" a great deal that his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the "grey sick faces of onanists," etc., etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world. The "democratic vistas" have ended in barbed wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle, endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous attitude and become a passive attitude - even "decadent," if that word means anything. ~ George Orwell

Now, okay, important knitting life lesson right here: don't go acrylic. Just don't. Acrylic's what you're gonna find at, like, Wal-Mart, and acrylic is crap. I have it on good authority that it's like knitting with barbed wire, that it's squeaky, yeah, that's right, squeaky, and that – although I can't vouch for this one personally – apparently it's what Satan uses to make Christmas sweaters for the ninth-circle sinners. ~ Hannah Johnson

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled. ~ Marisha Pessl

We are to blame for this destruction, we who don't speak your tongue and don't know how to keep quiet either. We who didn't come by boat, who dirty up your doorsteps with our dust, who break your barbed wire. We who came to take your jobs, who dream of wiping your shit, who long to work all hours. We who fill your shiny clean streets with the smell of food, who brought you violence you'd never known, who deliver your dope, who deserve to be chained by neck and feet. We who are happy to die for you, what else could we do? We, the ones who are waiting for who knows what. We, the dark, the short, the greasy, the shifty, the fat, the anemic. We the barbarians. ~ Yuri Herrera

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night. ~ Charles Stross

I don't believe that in the name of the holiness of the city you have to put barbed wires, machine gun nests, mine pins and everything of that, in the name of the holiness of Jerusalem. ~ Yitzhak Rabin

Eiffel Tower"
To Robert Delaunay

Eiffel Tower
Guitar of the sky

Your wireless telegraphy
Attracts words
As a rosebush the bees

During the night
The Seine no longer flows

Telescope or bugle

EIFFEL TOWER

And it's a hive of words
Or an inkwell of honey

At the bottom of dawn
A spider with barbed-wire legs
Was making its web of clouds

My little boy
To climb the Eiffel Tower
You climb on a song

Do
re
mi
fa
sol
la
ti
do

We are up on top

A bird sings
in the telegraph
antennae

It's the wind
Of Europe
The electric wind

Over there

The hats fly away
They have wings but they don't sing

Jacqueline
Daughter of France
What do you see up there

The Seine is asleep
Under the shadow of its bridges

I see the Earth turning
And I blow my bugle
Toward all the seas

On the path
Of your perfume
All the bees and the words go their way

On the four horizons
Who has not heard this song

I AM THE QUEEN OF THE DAWN OF THE POLES
I AM THE COMPASS THE ROSE OF THE WINDS THAT FADES
EVERY FALL
AND ALL FULL OF SNOW
I DIE FROM THE DEATH OF THAT ROSE
IN MY HEAD A BIRD SINGS ALL YEAR LONG
Vicente Huidobro

Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony. ~ William S. Burroughs

You don't want the United States to become South America, where you have a super collection of rich people at the tippy-top of society, they are surrounded by barbed wire living in McMansions with security guards, and the rest of the society is suffering, and you've got a broken educational system and a broken government. ~ Anthony Scaramucci

Basketball courts ringed with barbed-wire fence. ~ Donna Tartt

All this Americanising and mechanising has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. ~ D.H. Lawrence

This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life's beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and
telegraph poles, and tomorrow you'll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that
extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you'll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget. ~ Romain Gary

A goddess of dawn
scooted under a zing of barbed wire
to witness your birth. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own.
Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting - set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women's domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble. ~ Alice Munro

Blue sky beyond barbed wire I wish I were sky. ~ Paul B. Janeczko

Getting many tourists these days?"
"No."
The word was so flat and final, Shelby nearly laughed. "You could always try land mines and barbed wire. It amazes me how anyone so in tune with people could dislike them so much."
"I don't dislike them." Grant heaped eggs on another plate. "I just don't want to be around them. ~ Nora Roberts

What made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting small things first ... it's amazing how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree's heartwood. ~ Ron Rash

An age that needs security guards is, of course, without security.
What do we have in the dull old days? Old man janitors in the schools; watchmen in the factories, and the watchman was usually the turbanned bearded Bombay armed only with a stick, drowsing on a stool by a gate. How his strong odor remembered now seems the very smell of safety!
In his place now lurks the man in uniform, armed with pistol and club and submachine gun: the "security" that stands for the insecurity of our times, being the human equivalent of the iron bars at the window, the barbed wire on the wall. ~ Nick Joaquin

HER BARBED-WIRE SMILE
LIFTED YOU TO HEAVEN
BUT I HAVE TO ASK
DID GOD LOOK LIKE HER VOICE ~ Amy King

I read about a guy in Michigan this winter who was cruising along on his snow mobile. "Whoo hoo!" Didn't see a barbed wire fence. FOOM
cut his head right off. And I'll be honest with you, my first thought was ... That's how I want to go. Having the time of your life, "whoo hoo!" FOOM. I want the last thought in my head to be, 'Hey, check out that headless snow mobile driver. He's got a jacket just like mine.' ~ David Crowe

before he left, he wrapped my heart in layers of briars & barbed wire to make sure that no one else could ever get in, but you were more than willing to bloody your hands for me. ~ Amanda Lovelace

The Los Angeles River is small, but mean. People who don't know the truth of it make fun of our river; all they see is a tortured trickle that snakes along a concrete gutter like some junkie's vein. They don't know that we put the river in concrete to save ourselves; they don't know that the river is small because it's sleeping, and that every year and sometimes more it wakes. Before we put the river in that silly trough centered on a concrete plain at the bottom of those concrete walls, it flashed to life with the rain to wash away trees and houses and bridges, and cut its banks to breed new channels almost as if it was looking for people to kill. It found what it looked for too many times. Now, when it wakes, the river climbs those concrete walls so high that wet claws rake the freeways and bridges as it tries to pull down a passing car or someone caught out in the storm. Chain-link fences and barbed wire spine along the top of the walls to keep out people, but the walls keep in the river. The concrete is a prison. The prison works, most of the time. ~ Robert Crais

nub. Tori nearly came unglued and started rocking and trembling so hard, the bed shook beneath her. The fleeting caress of Sam's tongue stretched her body taut, stringing her nerve endings tighter than a barbed-wire fence. "Sam . . . please . . . I need . . . " "I know, babe. I know what you need." "I need it now . . . Please!" Tori thought she'd die if Sam didn't touch her again. She lifted her butt and felt his hands clamp around her hips, and then that wonderful magic feeling of his tongue on her flesh sent her soaring into a maelstrom of sensations too powerful to resist. Sam held on to Tori as he laved her with his tongue, milking her orgasm for several moments before finally moving ~ Anne Marie Novark

This is how your heart gets
snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away. ~ Pete Wentz

Barbed banter was the coin of their realm and heartfelt admissions of affection were rejected out of hand as counterfeit. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death? ~ Elie Wiesel

Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity. ~ C.S. Lewis

Let me rephrase," he added, sharper than barbed steel. "I'm coming with you."
"Excuse me?" Solara came to a sudden stop, forcing him to do the same. "You'll go wherever I send you."
"I'm not - "
"Don't interrupt."
He sealed his lips shut.
"Our relationship is simple," she told him. "I say 'Jump,' and you say 'Through which window, Miss Brooks?' You don't make demands of me. Are we clear? ~ Melissa Landers

Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp. ~ George Takei

When there are no gas chambers, no barbed wire, and no concentration camps, many don't recognize the perpetration of new genocides and other targeted mass atrocity crimes because they may not look the same. ~ John Prendergast

George Washington once wrote that leading by conviction gave him "a consolation within that no earthly efforts can deprive me of." He continued: "The arrows of malevolence, however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me. ~ George W. Bush

WHEN I STILL USED, I WAS ONCE WORKING IN IBIZA, HEDONISM capital of the nineties and the turn of the millennium. People swayed in sweaty swathes and stayed, pilled-up for days. I couldn't participate, because I was too shy or broken, caught on some taut barbed wire in my mind. Me and my mate Matt, high one night, lost ourselves, found ourselves in a wood and pretended to be animals. It was just us, and we prowled and circled around. We locked eyes and growled and danced. "Let's pretend we're animals" was forgotten, and we were animals. We are animals. We are free animals with a divine spark, we're not in a farm or a zoo or a theme park, we're free. We've forgotten that we're free. ~ Russell Brand

All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed their luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundreds other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to die tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today? ~ Primo Levi

...he couldn't help wondering how it had felt: refugees turning up from concentration camps, from a broken Europe, to find this bleak estate; its squat huts their new homes.There'd been watch towers and barbed wire fences. It can't have looked like freedom. But freedom was measured, he supposed, by what you were leaving behind. ~ Mick Herron

Polite contempt. The barbed and poisonous weapon of the righteous. ~ Joanne Harris

take it from an old man like me, life's too short to get hung up on a little bit of barbed wire ~ Theresa Shea

Something dangerous is beginning:
I am coming late to my own self.
I made an appointment with my thoughts-
the thoughts were snatched from me.
I made an appointment with Faulkner-
but they made me go to a banquet.
I made an appointment with history,
but a grass-widow dragged me into bed.
Worse than barbed wire
are birthday parties, mine and others',
and roasted suckling pigs hold me
like a sprig of parsley between their teeth!
Led away for good
to a life absolutely not my own,
everything that I eat, eats me,
everything that I drink, drinks me.
I made an appointment with myself,
but they invite me to feast on my own spareribs.
I am garlanded from all sides
not by strings of bagels, but by the holes of bagels,
and I look like an anthology of zeros.
Life gets broken into hundreds of lifelets,
that exhaust and execute me.
In order to get through to myself
I had to smash my body against others',
and my fragments, my smithereens,
are trampled by the roaring crowd.
I am trying to glue myself together,
but my arms are still severed.
I'd write with my left leg,
but both the left and the right
have run off, in different directions.
I don't know- where is my body?
And soul? Did it really fly off,
without a murmured 'good-bye! '?
How do I break through to a faraway namesake,
waiting for me in the cold somewhere ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Argentine was a hard king to serve. He had a barbed whip for a tongue and it drew blood whenever he spoke. ~ Jeff Wheeler

Among the lessons learned in my lifetime is the ease with which corruption can enter high places in the mask of friendship. Sometimes the recipient is not aware of the barbed hook under the gift; often, he who gives may not know but be the unwitting agent of a craftier mind. ~ Carlos P. Romulo

The world was a shitpot with a barbed-wire handle and the further he could kick it the better he liked it. ~ Jim Thompson

Although I know very little of the Steppenwolf's life, I have all the same good reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe and very pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine that makes the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and upbringing. But in this case the attempt to destroy the personality and to break the will did not succeed. He was much too strong and hardy, too proud and spirited. Instead of destroying his personality they succeeded only in teaching him to hate himself. It was against himself that, innocent and noble as he was, he directed during his whole life the whole wealth of his fancy, the whole of his thought; and in so far as he let loose upon himself every barbed criticism, every anger and hate he could command, he was, in spite of all, a real Christian and a real martyr. ~ Hermann Hesse

But I do, and the barbed wire tightens once more, until my heart is strangled and broken. ~ A.G. Howard

Is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can't afford to turn it away, who need its jobs or revenue, who must endure the quiet violence of its physical presence - its "Don't Pick Up Hitchhikers" warning signs, its barbed fences - the same way a place must endure the removal of its mountaintops and the plundering of its seams: because a powerful rhetoric insists we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones. ~ Leslie Jamison

The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing; we were entirely among ourselves. A ~ Elie Wiesel

Glory looks at the two small scars on her hands, one in the center of each palm, the body doing its work. [...] The girl who stood up and fell back down, who grabbed onto a barbed wire fence and stopped herself from falling again. The girl who walked barefoot across the desert and saved her own life. She can't imagine any other way to tell the story. ~ Elizabeth Wetmore

True Love Isn't Hearts & Flowers. It's Blood & Guts & Bouquets Of Barbed Wire ~ Dean Cavanagh

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders ... The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip. ~ Ronald Reagan

Cuba is just a slave-prison. Our only crime is brith, but our sentence is life behind barbed wire and prison bars. ~ Jaxy Mono

For five years the refugees of Eastern Europe had been pouring into Austria through every fast-closing gap in the barbed wire: crashing frontiers in stolen cars and lorries, across minefields, clinging to the underneath of trains, to be corralled and questioned and decided over in their thousands, while they played chess on wooden packing cases and showed each other photographs of people they would never see again. They came from Hungary and Romania and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and sometimes Russia, and they hoped they were on their way to Canada and Australia and Palestine. They had travelled by devious routes and often for devious reasons. They were doctors and scientists and bricklayers. They were truck drivers, thieves, acrobats, publishers, rapists and architects. ~ Adam Sisman