Dampness Quotes

Awkwardly pressed up against him, the Princess seemed to take no notice of their proximity. In the dampness, though, her body heat was near palpable to Luke and he had to force himself to keep his attention on what he was doing. ~ Alan Dean Foster

It is possible too that I was experiencing something known as "anticipatory grief," the mourning that occurs before a certain loss. Anticipatory. Expectatory. Trepidatory. This grief had a dampness. It did not drench or drown me, but it hung in the air like a pallid cloud, thinning but never entirely vanishing. It followed me wherever I went and gradually I grew used to looking at the world through it. ~ Kyo Maclear

Jim walked into the kitchen. He was wearing a white towel around his hips and nothing else. His skin glistened with dampness - he had obviously just taken a shower. I stared at him in horror. He nodded to my aunt, my mother, and the two other women. "Ladies." Then he walked to my silverware drawer, got a fork, took a plate out of my cabinet, walked to the breadbox, speared the steak with his fork, put it on the plate, turned around and walked out. This did not just happen. It did not happen. Aulia looked at me with eyes as big as dessert plates and mouthed, "Wow." All four of them stared at me. ~ Nalini Singh

A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don't take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you've gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can't remember who you were before the war. There's a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.
The Great War was the greatest changer of them all. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

He felt at his face, wondering what the hot dampness was. For a moment he thought he was bleeding. Swearing under his breath, he pushed the tears away, vowing that they would be the last he ever shed. Strength, not weakness, was what he needed from this day forward. ~ Morgan Rhodes

There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas - something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves. ~ Alain De Botton

Autumn clouds, vague and obscure; The evening, lonely and chill. I felt the dampness on my garments, But saw no spot, and heard no sound of rain. ~ Bai Juyi

He'd spent the night in the boat. Next to the spaghetti queen.

William glanced at the hobo girl. She sat across from him, huddled in a clump. Her stench had gotten worse overnight, probably from the dampness. Another night like the last one, and he might snap and dunk her into that river just to clear the air.

She saw him looking. Dark eyes regarded him with slight scorn.

William leaned forward and pointed at the river. "I don't know why you rolled in spaghetti sauce," he said in a confidential voice. "I don't really care. But that water over there won't hurt you. Try washing it off."

She stuck her tongue out.

"Maybe after you're clean," he said.

Her eyes widened. She stared at him for a long moment. A little crazy spark lit up in her dark irises. She raised her finger, licked it, and rubbed some dirt off her forehead.

Now what?

The girl showed him her stained finger and reached toward him slowly, aiming for his face.

"No," William said. "Bad hobo."

The finger kept coming closer. ~ Ilona Andrews

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Two steps before he made it through the doorway, he suddenly smelled her perfume and felt the dewiness of her skin as her consciousness came rushing back to him.
The rest of Joel's body was frozen as his head snapped up to find her standing just inside the door. He blinked several times at the sensations that inundated his mind.
His stunned expression at seeing her face;
Her excitement over the sudden racing of his heartbeat;
The coolness of their wood floor under her bare soles.;
And her concern over the raw soreness of his own feet.
And the blossoming joy of just being in each other's presence again.
Joel could tell by the dampness of her hair that Lilli had just showered…and dressed, though he had no idea why she'd bothered with the latter task.
At hearing his thoughts, she giggled.
"Hi," she said shyly, but he could only shake his head as he finally closed the distance and kissed her. ~ Cerece Rennie Murphy

A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares of the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or 'duende'. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts, she begins to dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls into the awesome risk of her dance.

She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze.

She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon, she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance.

And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no ~ Ben Okri

Her eyes sparkle with a rising dampness. I've seemed to overstep myself,
Samuel. ~ Nathan Reese Maher

Led through lined and grimy streets down to the river and eastward, as he had expected, towards the Isle of Dogs. A raw wind blew up from the water, carrying the smell of salt, stale fish, the overspill of sewage and the cold dampness of the outgoing tide sweeping down from the Pool of London towards the estuary and the sea. Across the gray water endless strings of barges made their heavy way downstream, laden with merchandise for half the earth. Ships passed them outward bound, down towards the docks of Greenwich and beyond. ~ Anne Perry

That after an hour's silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness ... That's all, it took him an hour to work that out. ~ William Gaddis

But in the closeness of the sewing room, Simon can smell her as well as look at her. He tries to pay no attention but her scent is a distracting undercurrent. She smells like smoke; smoke, and laundry soap, and the salt from her skin; and she smells of the skin itself, with its undertone of dampness, fullness, ripeness - what? Ferns and mushrooms; fruits crushed and fermenting. ~ Margaret Atwood

That night, the tent that I had been alone in for so long was suddenly heaving with bodies, and piles of rope and kit--with Neil, Geoffrey, and Graham squeezed in beside me.
I tried to drink as much boiled water as I could get down. I knew that I would need to be as hydrated as I could possibly be to tackle what lay ahead. So I drank and I peed. But still my pee was dark brown.
It was almost impossible to hydrate at this altitude.
The ritual of peeing into a water bottle had become second nature to us all, even in the dark, and even with someone's head inches away from the bottle. We each had two bottles: one for pee, one for water. It was worth having a good system to remember which was which.
At 10:00 P.M. I needed to pee--again. I grabbed my bottle, crouched over and filled it. I screwed it shut--or so I thought--then settled back into my bag to try and find some elusive sleep.
Soon I felt the dampness creeping through my clothes.
You have got to be joking. I swore to myself as I scrambled to the crouch position again.
I looked down. The cap was hanging loosely off the pee bottle.
Dark, stinking brown pee had soaked through all my clothes and sleeping bag. I obviously hadn't done it up properly. Brute of a mistake. Maybe an omen for what lay ahead.
On that note I fell asleep. ~ Bear Grylls

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

She faced Chaol. The wind ripped a few strands of hair from her braid, and she tucked them behind her ears.
"No matter what happens," she said quietly, "I want to thank you."
Chaol tilted his head to the side. "For what?" Her eyes stung, but she blamed it on the fierce wind and blinked away the dampness.
"For making my freedom mean something." He didn't say anything; he just took the fingers of her right hand and held them in his, his thumb brushing the ring she wore.
"Let the second duel commence," the king boomed, waving a hand toward the veranda. Chaol squeezed her hand, his skin warm in the frigid air.
"Give him hell," he said. ~ Sarah J. Maas

A long time later, after the bath had cooled, Lottie dressed in a fresh white nightgown and approached the bedroom table, where Nick was standing. She felt herself color as he stared at her with a half-smile. "I like the way you look in this," he said, brushing his fingers over the high-necked bodice of the gown. "Very innocent."
"Not any longer," Lottie said with an abashed smile.
He lifted her against his body, his face rubbing into the cool dampness of her hair. His beguiling mouth found her neck. "Oh, yes, you are," he said. "It's going to require a great deal of time and effort to debauch you completely."
"I have every faith you'll succeed," she said, and sat before a plate loaded with ham, vegetable pudding, potatoes, and open-faced tarts.
-Nick & Lottie ~ Lisa Kleypas

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.
From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam. ~ Italo Calvino

The music became a siren song. The melody was my lodestone, and I was powerless against its lure. With each step, I savored the dampness of the grass beneath my bare feet. I didn't remember when I'd lost my shoes. ~ Sarah J. Maas

I guess the difference is that dampness comes down but dankness rises up out of rot and fermentation. ~ John Steinbeck

Some days i'm bursting at the seams
With all my half remembered dreams
And then it shoots me down again
I feel the dampness as it creeps
I hear you coughing in your sleep
Beneath a broken window pane
Tomorrow girl i'll buy you chips
A lollipop to stain your lips
And it'll all be right as rain
This ain't no love that's guiding me
~ David Gray

But then Lalita did something odd. Well, not odd, but beautiful. She shifted the clay pot of water from her right hip to her left. She pushed it up against the curve of her waist, wrapped her arm around the neck of the pot, and disappeared around the bend. Mohan knelt to the ground; he could taste the earthen dampness clinging to her waist. He knew then that he'd been wrong: she wasn't simply happy; happiness could not possibly explain the strange loveliness, the utter seductiveness, of that gesture. No, what Lalita had was something even more audacious than happiness. What was it? Mohan trembled....

Sitting on his bed that afternoon, after lunch, Mohan decided that the clay of the pot and the bronze of Lalita's skin were the only true substances. They were why the rains fell, why the sun rose. His fingers traced them all his life. Then he knew. He knew what Lalita had that the others didn't, that he didn't; she had sex. In fact, he realized, what she had was the opposite of what he had. But what was it that he had? What was the opposite of sex? It seemed like a question without an answer. Like where does reality stop and unreality begin? Or, what goes deeper, the human soul or the human imagination? But this one had an answer. That much Mohan knew. He knew that the opposite of sex was fear. And fear was something he had an abundance of. ~ Shobha Rao

My ears filled with sounds
Of the paddling of canoes
My feet filled with the dampness
Of the early morning dew
My eyes filled with the road ahead
And all that comes into view
My minds filled with thoughts
That remind me of you ~ Eric Overby

I'm so sorry, sweetheart," he whispers. "This was all my fault. I should have told you everything." His face brushes against mine, leaving dampness behind. His tears shatter me all over again. "I'll do anything…Anything it takes to fix this. I can't live without you, Nat. I love you so much. Tell me you still love me."
"I do, Flynn. I still love you."
And then he's kissing me. ~ M.S. Force

I expected everyone to file out of the room, but the wedding party began to embrace happily. Raymond grabbed me. "God, you're a mess." He wiped the dampness on my cheeks with his index finger. "Such a mush. ~ Santino Hassell

He had no idea what missing was. Missing was lying in the dampness of your tears night after night. Missing was a constant hollow spot in the center of your chest. Missing was a yawning ache that was never satisfied. ~ Denise Hunter

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule. ~ Djuna Barnes

I took a breath, seeing from across the room the rain on his eyelashes. A sudden need to brush them free filled me. I could almost feel the dampness of the rain on my fingers, how soft it would feel. ~ Kim Harrison

He pressed the herb to his nose. Thyme. He loved the name and he loved the smell. He looked out the window at the illusion of deep woods. His face too was out there, hung on a tree and returning his gaze. He drew close to the glass to lose the mirror effect. Outside, the forest panted its beefy halitus; the soil held the breaths of gloom in its dampness. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacier had sliced through this park he was living in, bringing with it the nutrients from all its travels. Fifteen thousand years ago human beings were the fable that frightened the dark woods. ~ Nancy Zafris

But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year. ~ John Edward Williams

An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

She made herself ill remembering her last words to him, hearing them over and over as she carried her bucket up and down the stairs, as she ate her lonely soup, as she sat in the confessional before the priest.
"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." She leaned on the partition, feeling the dampness at her forehead and her breast from the holy water's anointment. "It has been one month since my last confession."
"And what sins have you committed since then?" Father Marche's question was so familiar, his cadence always precisely the same, kind but tired, a little bored.
Violetta always gave her rote response: acts of laziness and selfishness, disobeying the prioress, taking the Lord's name in vain. Not today. Her words choked her. She could hardly get them out.
"I have lied to a friend."
Father looked at her through the grate. He'd never done that. "This weighs on you."
She nodded; tears spilled from her eyes. "It is unforgivable."
"Nothing is unforgivable with penance and contrition," he said with a kind of faith Violetta could not muster. He went on about Hail Marys; she said them aloud in a daze. He gave her absolution, but it did nothing to ease her mind or heart. As she left the confessional, she felt diseased by her own actions.
Mino thought she didn't care. But apart from music, he was the best thing in her life. ~ Lauren Kate

The desolate rocky terrain, the bone-chilling dampness, the low moaning carried by the wind - they seemed too real to be just a dream. Real, and frightening. Somehow I had entered another world. I'd heard that eating pizza before bedtime can cause nightmares, but I didn't think it could transport a person. ~ Rick Riordan

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression. ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me. ~ Claire Fullerton

The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility. ~ Thomas Hardy

Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply. ~ Roger Caillois

I ran to Joe and pulled him in. I pushed my face into his jacket and breathed in the wool and dry-cleaning. Joe's height was always a narcotic for me, the way my head hit him at the chest. I dug my fingers under his shoulder blades and turned my cheek so my nose touched flesh. The dampness of his clavicle, the tickle of his chest hair. The smell of Joe. My man. ~ Maria Semple

The warm dampness of her breath made me shiver at the mix of the familiar and the unknown, with a soft exhalation she shifted her head and her lips found my collarbone, teasingly shy of my old scar. Tendrils pulsed in time with my heart, building on the ones before to an unseen height. ~ Kim Harrison

If I release you, you won't scream? I'd rather not continue the conversation like this."
She shook her head, and he freed her. She scrambled away from him, feeling the grooves of the headboard bite into her back when she slammed into it.
He sat back on her bed, his hands on his jean-clad thighs. The hair at his neck curled from dampness. "You don't have to be afraid of me."
She almost laughed. "A stranger breaks in, and I'm supposed to be cool with that?"
"Amy, we're not strangers. ~ Jaime Rush

I found the sea air invigorating, and the unfamiliar smells and sounds I encountered every day fascinated me. There was, first of all, the pervading sea-salt odor, and the smell of the wind, bringing with it the faintest tang of the land it had blown over. There was the rich smell of the fresh-caught fish - so different from those sold in markets - and the musty dampness of the soaked ropes. The tar and resin found everywhere on board gave off a warm, raisinlike aroma that grew stronger as the sun rose.
As for the sounds, I loved the slap-slap-slap of the water against the hull of the ship; it lulled me to sleep. The creaking of the rigging and the whoosh of the sail as it filled and deflated was like nothing else. How ordinary the sounds of street and market were by comparison.
Water had lost its terror for me, for which I was deeply grateful. First I had ventured the harbor, then the Nile, now the open sea - I was cured of my fear, thanks be to all the gods! ~ Margaret George

Look at a plant in the midst of its range! Why does it not double or quadruple its numbers? We know that it can perfectly well withstand a little more heat or cold, dampness or dryness, for elsewhere it ranges into slightly hotter or colder, damper or drier districts. In this case we can clearly see that if we wish in imagination to give the plant the power of increasing in numbers, we should have to give it some advantage ~ Charles Darwin

Rommel could smell the sea. At Torbruk the heat and the dust and flies were as bad as they had been in the desert, but it was all made bearable by that occasional whiff of salty dampness in the faint breeze. ~ Ken Follett