Cross Eyed Possum Quotes

I am enmeshed in my lies, and I want absolution. I cannot tell the truth because I have felt the heads of men in my womb. The truth would be death-dealing and I prefer fairytales. I am wrapped in lies which do not penetrate my soul. As if the lies I tell were like costumes. The shell of mystery can break and grow again over night. But the moment I step into the cavern of my lies I drop into the darkness. I see a face which stares at me like a cross-eyed man. ~ Anais Nin

Other than his ex-wife and despite appearances with a series of cultivated blondes, Edward de Bono has never publicly aligned himself with a woman. 'I'm looking for a fat, cross-eyed hunchback,' he explains, stifling a giggle. 'A prosthetic hump would do.' His delight evaporates when asked about his three grandchildren. 'Am I a doting grandfather?' He pauses. 'I'm a ... something grandfather, yes.' The fact that De Bono remains unperturbed by this lack betrays an emotionally austere childhood, and his passions for play, toys, and bad jokes tell of the same deprivation. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings. ~ Madeleine Thien

Brushing dirt from his coat, Sam ignored the wild-eyed looks the other three gave him. Surely a house like this had enough staff to clean up a little dirt?
"And who is this young man?" the old lady demanded.
Sam opened his mouth to reply, but froze when he saw just who the old woman was.
"May I present Sam Morgan, Your Highness," Griffin said.
Bloody hell. It was Queen Victoria. They'd just burrowed their way into Buckingham Palace. ~ Kady Cross

The waiting area was jammed with the sort of egalitarian cross-section only genuine misery can provide: Hispanics and blacks and Russians and various indeterminate, red-eyed teenage girls with children you prayed were siblings; junkie veterans petitioning for painkillers they wouldn't get; ~ Jonathan Lethem

There's a lot of Sherlock love in here. In many ways, this book might as well be called 'Deduce THIS, Sexlock Holmes!' with a picture of me licking his meerschaum, cross-eyed and screaming. ~ Caitlin Moran

The worms were beautifully drawn, with their nervous systems and reproductive organs shaded in different colors of highlighter, but the artist had also given them big goofy smiling faces. Grotesque but lovable in a cross-eyed way. ~ L.J.Smith

"My uncle is the head of the family. I owe him my duty. I would marry a bald, cross-eyed idiot if that is what he asked of me."
"Oh, that makes me feel so much better! There goes my plan to shave off my hair. ~ Ellen Oh

What I've got here are my own constraints. I'm challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that's by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It's because the iPod was only meant to last a year! ~ Cory Doctorow

Is it worse to double park if you're cross eyed? ~ Neil Leckman

Today at Nariman Point the tall buildings crowd one another. But when I was young and in love with a grey-eyed man it was a marshy waste. We used to walk aimlessly along the quiet Panday Road or cross the Cuffe Parade to walk towards the sun. We did not have a place to rest. But in the glow of those evening suns, we felt that we were Gods who had lost their way and had strayed into an unkind planet.. ~ Kamala Suraiyya Das

The internet. Can we trust in that? Of course not. Give it six months and we'll probably discover Google's sewn together by orphans in sweatshops. Or that Wi-Fi does something horrible to your brain, like eating your fondest memories and replacing them with drawings of cross-eyed bats and a strong smell of puke. There's surely a great dystopian sci-fi novel yet to be written about a world in which it's suddenly discovered that wireless broadband signals deaden the human brain, slowly robbing us of all emotion, until after 10 years of exposure we're all either rutting in stairwells or listlessly reversing our cars over our own offspring with nary the merest glimmer of sympathy or pain on our faces. It'll be set in Basingstoke and called, Cuh, Typical. ~ Charlie Brooker

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It's like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it's gorgeous. You feel very exposed. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

We walked the circuit, passing the food stands frying funnel cakes and burgers, and the game booths, ceilings bristling with giant, multicolored stuffed animals. I paused in front of the crossbow game.
Nicholas cocked an eyebrow. "Want me to win you a stuffed bunny?"
"Ha." I rubbed my hands together. "I'll win my own stuffed bunny, thanks very much."
Nicholas passed the attendant a few dollars to pay for my turn. "I guess it's nice to see you use your legendary aim for something other than breaking my nose," he teased.
"The night is young," I snapped back, lifting the plastic crossbow. "This is a pathetic weapon," I muttered. "I couldn't stake an undead mouse with this thing."
"It's supposed to be a game, remember?" he whispered, laughter in his dark voice.
I fired my three shots, all crowding into the bull's-eye. With a triumphantly smug toss of my head, I looked at the openmouthed attendant. "I want the purple bunny."
He tugged it down and passed it over to me. I slipped it into my bag while Nicholas shook his head.
"Dump this loser, Lucy, and run away with me. You'll never have to win your own cross-eyed bunny again."
I grinned up at Nicholas's brother Quinn, who was smiling his charming smile, his arm draping casually over my shoulder. Hunter rolled her eyes at me from my other side.
"No way," I said. "My aim's better than yours. Plus, your girlfriend can hurt me."
"Ooh," Quinn said, winking. "Catfight. Hot." He grinn ~ Alyxandra Harvey

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu, There's a little marble cross below the town, There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew, And the yellow god forever gazes down. ~ J. Milton Hayes

He just lingers long enough to see his plane put to bed properly, then grabs a cab at the airport-gate. "The Settlement" and forgetting that he's not inland any more, that Shanghai's snappier than Chicago, "Chop-chop."

"Sure, Mike," grins the slant-eyed driver. "Hop in."

A change has come over the city since he went away, he can feel that the minute they hit the outskirts, clear the congested native sections, and cross the bridge into the Settlement. Shanghai is already tuning-up for its oncoming doom, without knowing it. A city dancing on the brink of the grave. There's an electric tension in the air, the place never seemed so gay, so hectic, as tonight; the roads opening off the Bund a welter of blinking, flashing neon lights, in ideographs and Latin letters alike, as far as the eye can see. Traffic hopelessly snarled at every crossing, cops piping on their whistles, packed sidewalks, the blare of saxophones coming from taxi-dance mills, and overhead the feverish oriental stars competing with inter-crossed searchlight beams from some warships or other on the Whang-poo. Just about the right town and the right night to have fifteen thousand bucks in, all at one time. ("Jane Brown's Body") ~ Cornell Woolrich

The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed. ~ John Chamberlain

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can't plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head. ~ Ian McDonald

At the Lamaze class, they had me hold a block of ice for a full minute to stimulate labor pain, saying "Hee-haw, hee-haw," and doing my breathing excercises. They made the husbands try it first. Your father made it through the whole minute. The vision of him shouting "Hee-haw," cross-eyed with pain, was singular. The first really great laugh I've had in weeks. ~ Suzanne Finnamore

In some of the early northern European paintings, Christ looks like you flushed him out from under a bridge, but in Sunday-school books and the sorts of pictures they sell at Christian supply stores, he falls somewhere between Kenny Loggins and Jared Leto, always doe-eyed and, of course, white, with brown - not black - hair, usually wavy. And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which - face it - was practically designed to make a man's stomach and shoulders look good.

What would happen, I often wonder, if someone sculpted a morbidly obese Jesus with titties and acne scars, and hair on his back? On top of that, he should be short - five foot two at most. "Sacrilege!" people would shout. But why? Doing good deeds doesn't make you good-looking. ~ David Sedaris

And I emerge so icky and befouled and cross-eyed from the guy's right hook that I blow what should have been a very legitimate shot at the title in the Men's Best Legs Contest, in which I end up placing third but am told later I would have won the whole thing except for the scowl, swollen and strabismic right eye, and askew swimcap that formed a contextual backdrop too downright goofy to let the full force of my gams' shapeliness come through to the judges. ~ David Foster Wallace

At high school I was never comfortable for a minute. I did not know about Lonnie. Before an exam, she got icy hands and palpitations, but I was close to despair at all times. When I was asked a question in class, any simple little question at all, my voice was apt to come out squeaky, or else hoarse and trembling. When I had to go to the blackboard I was sure - even at a time of the month when this could not be true - that I had blood on my skirt. My hands became slippery with sweat when they were required to work the blackboard compass. I could not hit the ball in volleyball; being called upon to perform an action in front of others made all my reflexes come undone. I hated Business Practice because you had to rule pages for an account book, using a straight pen, and when the teacher looked over my shoulder all the delicate lines wobbled and ran together. I hated Science; we perched on stools under harsh lights behind tables of unfamiliar, fragile equipment, and were taught by the principal of the school, a man with a cold, self-relishing voice - he read the Scriptures every morning - and a great talent for inflicting humiliation. I hated English because the boys played bingo at the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, mad ~ Alice Munro

My sister Wendy has a husband and two children, and they have a family photo on top of the VCR, where they're all looking slightly to the left. As though something is going on over there! I guess something happened over to the left that made everybody happy! Except my sister is cross-eyed, so she can't quite pull it off. One eye is right-on. ~ Mitch Hedberg

If you meet a cross-eyed person
you must plunge into the grass,
alongside the chilly ants,
fish through the green fingernails
and come up with the four-leaf clover ... ~ Anne Sexton

This girl is some strange cross-pollination of wide-eyed innocence and tear-your-balls-off scrappiness and all I can think is, where the hell has she been all my life? ~ Autumn Doughton

Who can tell me which president had a cross-eyed wife with a bad case of the uglies?" Chaney asked.
"Make sure you get that down," Travis whispered. "I'm gonna need to know that for job interviews. ~ Jamie McGuire

Oh Florence, Florence, patroness
of the lovely tyrannicides!
Where the tower of the Old Palace
pierces the sky
like a hypodermic needle,
Perseus, David and Judith,
lords and ladies of the Blood,
Greek demi-gods of the Cross,
rise sword in hand
above the unshaven
formless decapitation
of the monsters, tubs of guts,
mortifying chunks for the pack.
Pity the monsters!
Pity the monsters!
Perhaps, one always took the wrong side -
Ah, to have known, to have loved
too many David and Judiths!
My heart bleeds for the monster.
I have seen the Gorgon.
The erotic terror
of her helpless, big-bosomed body
lay like slop.
Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone,
her severed head swung
like a lantern in the victor's hand. ~ Robert Lowell

The seer crow was outraged. "Mangiz does not forget an insult, hedgepig."
Ambrose smiled cheekily. "Good, then here's a few more for you to remember, you pot-bellied, cross-eyed, feather-bottomed excuse for a duck. ~ Brian Jacques

On the radio, turned low, Reba sang of hard times with the full authority of a cross-eyed redheaded millionaire. ~ Christopher Moore

There was no way to lead up to this gently. With a surge of assertiveness driven by desire as well as a couple of cosmopolitans, she took both his hands in hers and mustered up her confidence. "I want you to lick me cross-eyed."
"You want me to what?"
"Okay, that sounded better inside my head." She squeezed his hands. "I want sex. Great sex. Alex, let's do it. ~ Selena Robins

He kissed her lightly on the nose, and she laughed. Blue eyed her with faux seriousness. "How was that? Any weakness?"
"No. But I don't think there would have been anyway."

"Well, then, how about this?" His lips brushed hers, his mouth teasing her lower lip, and her eyes closed and she shivered as his fingers caught her hair. And then suddenly, there wasn't any space between them. The sensation of drowning was there, but it wasn't like her strength was leaving her. It was like she wanted to be part of him. Like she didn't know or care where she ended and he began.

When they drew apart, she whispered, "No weakness."
"Really?" he said. "'Cause I'm feeling a little weak." She felt him smile against her mouth. And they both laughed, shook with it. Their faces were too close, noses and cheeks pressed awkwardly together, but neither one of them moved. She tightened her arms around him, and he held her just as tightly. His breath murmured against her cheek.

"You're safe with me, Mira. And I'm safe with you. ~ Sarah Cross

Any more packages for Solange?"
"Twelve letters, three packages, and a box of puppies."
I winced. "Puppies?"
"They're fine. Isabeau took them all."
"Good. Who eats puppies?" I shook my head.
"Yeah, Isabeau swore in French. A lot."
"Hot."
"Yeah, Logan nearly went cross-eyed."
"Chapter 12 ~ Alyxandra Harvey

him to shoot anyone who even looked cross-eyed at him. "Web English is such a subtle tongue," he said. "That phrase is older than the Web," I said. "Just do it. ~ Dan Simmons

Most people think of criminals as hunchbacked, cross-eyed little monsters slithering through the dark leaving a trail of slime. They're not. They're human beings. ~ George R. Dekle Sr.

The markets of my memory were city markets, London markets, crammed into narrow streets or cobbled squares, with hoarse-voiced vendors hawking their wares and all around me the relentless press of people, people everywhere. It was a pleasant change to see the bright-striped awnings gaily ringing around the weathered market cross, and the sunlight beating cheerfully down upon the market square. There were crowds here too, to be sure, but these were friendly country folk, their voices clear and plain, with honest faces scrubbed red by the wind and weather.
"What do you think?" Rachel asked me.
I could only gape, wide-eyed, like an entranced child, and she laughed her lovely musical laugh, grabbing my hand to lead me down into the thick of the crowd. We were jostled and bumped, but I found I did not mind it, and to my amazement I heard myself laughing as the final shreds of oppression fell away from me. The breeze lifted my hair and the sun warmed my face, and I felt suddenly, gloriously alive. ~ Susanna Kearsley