Compulsory Green Slip Quotes

A Quiet Death

Biting your tongue so words don't slip out. The taste of copper, sharp in your mouth. 'Penny for your thoughts' the saying goes, but they could never afford the words buried below. Sentenced to silence, laid unmarked graves, as you're slowly murdered by the things you don't say. ~ John Mark Green

I spent another sleepless night in my apartment and in the early hours of the morning I snuck once more into my little kitchen, to prepare a huge torta di ricotta. I needed a cheesecake: it was the only thing that could give me the peace of mind I craved.
Had I been too hasty in offering to give l'Inglese lessons? I asked myself, as I ground green almonds with my pestle. The power of my wrist quickly turned the almonds to powder. If only I could grind my worries away as easily.
I beat the ricotta, egg yolks, honey, sugar, lemon juice, and rind into the almonds. I beat and beat and beat the mixture until a sweat formed on my brow and my body began to glow with warmth. Even then I did not stop beating. I welcomed the exhaustion that began to creep up on me: I could feel the healing power of my cooking.
Really I knew nothing about l'Inglese. Nothing at all. Except that everything about him spelled danger to an inexperienced woman like me. I was afraid of him, yet could not bear the thought of not seeing him again. I was always thinking of him, imagining our next meeting: amusing myself with every possible scenario.
I whisked the egg whites into peaks in a matter of seconds. I reasoned that I had been right to speak out to him when I did. I knew how I would have hated myself if I had let the moment slip by. I knew how wretched and foolish I would have felt at my impotence, and yet this turbulence inside me was almost as bad. Acrobatic butterflies fluttered in ~ Lily Prior

It was everything I had dreamed of, his hands snaking through my hair, my own wrapped around his back, unable to believe I had been given license to touch this boy I had loved for so long, license to hold him, to slip my tongue in his mouth, listen to him sigh with pleasure. ~ Jane Green

Words slip into a language the way white-green vines slide between slats in a fence. ~ Tim Seibles

He ought to be up there, guarding the pass, or at least striving in some way to keep his country.
His. The thought never failed to thrill him. It was worth death. Worth almost anything to become again the person he had been before the Herran War. Yet here he was, gambling the frail odds of success.
Looking for a plant.
He imagined Cheat's reaction if he could see him now, scouring the ground for a wrinkle of faded green. There would be mockery, which Arin could shrug off, and rage, which Arin could withstand--even understand. But he couldn't bear what he saw in his mind.
Cheat's eyes cutting to Kestrel. Targeting her, stoking his hatred with one more reason.
And the more Arin tried to shield her, the more Cheat's dislike grew.
Arin's hands clenched in the cold. He blew on them, tucked his fingers under his arms, and began to walk.
He should let her go. Let her slip into the countryside, to the isolated farmlands that had no idea of the revolution.
If so, what then? Kestrel would alert her father. She'd find a way. Then the full force of the empire's military would fall on the peninsula, when Arin doubted that the Herrani could deal even with the battalion that would come through the pass in less than two days.
If he let Kestrel go, it was the same as murdering his people.
Arin nudged a rock with his boot and wanted to kick it.
He didn't. He walked.
Thoughts chipped at his sanity, proposing solutions only to reveal pr ~ Marie Rutkoski

I told myself – as I've told myself before – that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown. ~ John Green

Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone's chair, but I'm ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm.

"Sorry, clumsy," she says.

"You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits."

Before she can ask about that I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that's too heavy and too tight. In that moment, I hope on thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man …

She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music. But I hear her – I always did. "Who are you, George?"

"Someone you knew in another life, honey. ~ Stephen King

The children on the playground all heard her. They took off running together, as far away as possible from Antonia Owens, who might hex you if you did her wrong, and from her aunts, who might boil up garden toads and slip them into your stew, and from her mother, who was so angry and protective she might just freeze you in time, ensuring that you were forever trapped on the green grass at the age of ten or eleven. ~ Alice Hoffman

First, make sure
the ocean is rolled
by an older woman
whose quick fingers
have been rolling the ocean
for as long as you've been alive –
She'll fatten the rice in hot,
sugared water spiked
with rice vinegar
then make a soft bed of it to wrap
a slip of fish muscle,
squeezing the bamboo rolling mat
until the ocean's circumference
is compacted in seaweed's
brittle corsetry.
It takes her just moments
to dress the ocean,
its nudity a pink tongue
poking
from iridescent green nori wrap ~ Jalina Mhyana

When a mood of "not belonging" is haunting our mind and tolling the bell for relief or happiness, life may be like a scar on the canvas of our dreams. Now is the time to wake up and slip back to the basics, in the vein of crawling back to mum's lap. ("The grass was greener over there") ~ Erik Pevernagie

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceasless crying: he was alreday forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the this slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky. ~ Anthony Doerr

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? - Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks glasses! of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster - tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? ~ Herman Melville

Truth be told, happiness is like the artist's muse. She is very whimsical and loves to play little tricks on us. If we search too hard, happiness will slip away. And then, when we are not really concentrating on capturing her, she will suddenly appear in our peripheral vision wearing a green silk gown, winking at us. ~ Jamie Cat Callan

Sometimes at Christmas she would slip into neighborhoods just like this one. She would walk along the streets and peer into windows at family and holiday gatherings, and marvel at the shiny gold, crimson and green decorated trees covered with tinsel and twinkling colored lights, while she wondered what it must be like to experience the beauty of such an ordinary, unattainable life. ~ Thea Harrison

He gave Sophie the smile which had no doubt charmed the Witch of the Waste and possibly Lettie too, firing it along the fork, across the cream, straight into Sophie's eyes, dazzlingly. "If you can bully Calcifer, the King should give you no trouble at all."
Sophie stared through the dazzle and said nothing. This, she thought, was where she slithered out. She was leaving. It was too bad about Calcifer's contract. She had had enough of Howl. First green slime, then glaring at her for something Calcifer had done quite freely, and now this! Tomorrow she would slip off to Upper Folding and tell Lettie all about it. ~ Diana Wynne Jones

One of the bravest, grandest champions of human liberty the world has ever seen.

{Darrow on the great Robert Ingersoll} ~ Clarence Darrow

Here's the second joke: Two psychiatrists meet on the street and say hello. "How are you?" asks one. "Eh, not so good," says the other. "I had a stupid misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue. I was visiting my mother out at the old folks' home. We were having lunch and I asked her to pass me the salt, but instead I said, 'You fucking bitch you ruined my life. ~ David Rakoff

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc. ~ John Green

I like to carry a concealer palette that has a green, a yellow, and a tan color. I like to carry the green one because when I have a pimple, it's good to use that to contrast the red. Then you put the yellow over it, and it helps it disappear. ~ Francia Raisa

He has also worked as a shop assistant, bicycle-repair mechanic, journalist, actor, eccentric dancer, and mail-order bride. He has never worked for MI5. Don't believe anyone who tel s you otherwise. He is, however, secretly Superman. ~ Simon R. Green

Step, step, step, I fall and they lift me, slip-slop, slip-slop, through the watery mud. Each step is a heartbeat on my way to the grave, and the longest walk I will ever take. Plip, plip, I slip and they gather me. How strong are these savages, and how tight is their grip! Plip, plip, plip patters the rain, and I fall, and I call, and I stall for more time.

But my time has run out. ~ Louise Blackwick

Death is not rare, alas! nor burials few,
And soon the grassy coverlet of God
Spreads equal green above their ashes pale. ~ Bayard Taylor

Lieutenant Commander Sibley added a few final flourishes as he brought the Jade up to cruising speed. "If you have to hurl, Staff Sargent, bite the black tab at the base of your faceplate. It'll open a pouch."
No answer. Not even the sound of a lost lunch.
"Staff?"
Her telltales were green. She was conscious. Heart pumping at sixty/sixty. Respiration slow and steady.
Then it dawned on him. While he'd been flying a pattern designed to test the limits of Human physiology, his passenger had gone to sleep. ~ Tanya Huff

I don't believe in monsters."
"Well, Red, I think you might want to start." Pike turned and looked him in the eye. "What do you think those green things were? And what do you think is trying to smash its way in here? A pony? ~ Jack Keely

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans
vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

But he had already planned. Already planned the holiday. The proposal. Even the ring.............., he loved her, but he wasn't sure that love was enough. ~ Jane Green

These people go on to tell us that mobile phones will cook our children's ears, that long-haul flights will fill our legs with thrombosis and that meat is murder. They want an end to all deaths – and it doesn't stop there. They don't even see why anyone should have to suffer from a spot of light bruising.
Every week, as we filmed my television chat show, food would be spilt on the floor, and every week the recording would have to be stopped so it could be swept away. 'What would happen,' said the man from health and safety, 'if a cameraman were to slip over?' 'Well,' I would reply, 'he'd probably have to stand up again. ~ Jeremy Clarkson

From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense. ~ Noreena Hertz

He places a hand on either side of the bar, locking me in. 'And why won't you admit it?' he asks.
I'm so startled by his new, gentler tone that I hazard a glance. My breath catches in my throat. Jared's eyes have changed to that sumptuous green, huge and mesmerizing, the pupils dilating like a cat's. I can't see to look away as he inches forward, until he's standing all but a hair's breadth away from me. ~ L.E. Sterling

Perhaps if they all remained silent for as long as possible, they'd slip out of this moment into the next one, and then the next one, until all the preceding moments were erased from memory and everything could start all over again. The ultimate American dream: the eternal present, where nothing has ever happened before what is happening now. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

We make the beet salad by steaming the beets until soft, about thirty minutes, plunging into cold water, and removing the skins. After cutting the beets into small cubes, we toss them with a vinaigrette of orange juice, vinegar, olive oil, and shallots, adding crumbles of goat cheese and green onion, for color and taste and crunch, at the end. ~ Christina Baker Kline

Former brownfields, depressed urban areas, and hard-hit rural towns blossom as eco-industrial parks, green enterprise zones, and eco-villages. Farmers' markets, community co-ops, and mobile markets get fresh, organic produce to the people who can't afford to shop at health-food stores. ~ Van Jones

She could feel the coolness, a whole childhood of it, falling through her. Rain on the coral beach in Galway. White tennis balls on the broken court. Her brother at his shortwave radio. A nest of wires and voices. Her father's cattle huddled on a laneway. The broken church bell. A grass verge of green in the laneway. High windows. Too tall for the school chairs. The milk came in small silver cans. She would not cry or whimper. She had always refused him that. ~ Colum McCann

Crash took a long drag off his cigarette and gave me a smug little smile. He always looked smug. His hair was dyed Kool-Aid green. Maybe that's what he was looking smug about today, despite the fact that it clashed with his olive drab army duster. Or maybe he knew my ass stung with every step I took- either because he was an empath who hot "feelings" about what everyone was experiencing, or because he'd taken it up the ass from Jacob himself. Crash's smirk widened and I looked away. One day I'd probably slap him. And then I'd regret it, because he was probably into stuff like that. ~ Jordan Castillo Price

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. ~ George Santayana

I suppose your boobs are all squished under that green lace, your nipples crushed. They're going to need some consolation. I'll suck on them until they're happy again. And then afterwards, when your nipples are stiff and throbbing and wondering if that's all there is, I'll give them something else to think about. I'll spread your legs wide open and put my hard dick inside you so slowly you'll be begging me to shove it in. But I won't – I'll make you wait until I give you permission to come. ~ C.C. Gibbs

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out. ~ Winston S. Churchill

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don't force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. ~ Ray Bradbury

Without pain, How can we know joy? ~ John Green

I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay? ~ John Green