Delicately Quotes

His account books reflect a concern with fashion, as shown by periodic visits to a French tailor, and his sartorial elegance is confirmed in portraits. In one painting, he wears a double-breasted coat with brass buttons and gilt-edged lapels, his neck swathed delicately in a ruffled lace jabot. ~ Ron Chernow

Ghana was a particularly relevant example for us subjects in the remaining colonies and dominions of the British Empire. There was a growing confidence, not just a feeling, that we would do just as well parting ways with Her Majesty's empire. If Ghana seemed more effective, as some of our people like to say, perhaps it was because she was smaller in size and neat, as if it was tied together more delicately by well-groomed, expert hands. ~ Chinua Achebe

Linneaus imagined his clock of flowers. Ours is a calendar of delicately shifting endocrine levels. ~ Sarah Robinson

He had always had a passion for life and the idealism he had come across seemed to him for the most part a cowardly shrinking from it. The idealist withdrew himself because he could not suffer the jostling of the human crowd; he had not the strength to fight and so called the battle vulgar; he was vain and since his fellows would not take him at his own estimate, consoled himself with despising his fellows. For Phillip, this type was Hayward, fair, languid, too fat now and rather bald, still cherishing the remains of his good looks and still delicately proposing to do exquisite things in the uncertain future; and at the back of this were whiskey and vulgar amours of the street. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Only to be sent tealess to bed seemed infinite mercy to him. Officially tealess, that is; for, as was usual after such escapades, a sympathetic housemaid, coming delicately by backstairs, stayed him with chunks of cold pudding and condolence, till his small skin was tight as any drum. ~ Kenneth Grahame

This twinned twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying; or rather it only sharpened my appetite for other tidbits of light and shade, and I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket.

Through peacocked lashes I saw the dazzling diamond reflection of the low sun on the round back of a parked automobile. To all kinds of things a vivid pictorial sense had been restored by the sponge of the thaw. Water in overlapping festoons flowed down one sloping street and turned gracefully into another. With ever so slight a note of meretricious appeal, narrow passages between buildings revealed treasures of brick and purple. I remarked for the first time the humble fluting - last echoes of grooves on the shafts of columns - ornamenting a garbage can, and I also saw the rippling upon its lid - circles diverging from a fantastically ancient center. Erect, dark-headed shapes of dead snow (left by the blades of a bulldozer last Friday) were lined up like rudimentary penguins along the curbs, above the brilliant vibration of live gutters.

I walked up, and I walked down, and I walked straight into a delicately dying sky, and finally the sequence of observed and observant things brought me, at my usual eating time, to a street so distant from my usual eating place that I decided to try a restaurant which stood on the fringe of the town. Night had fallen without sound or ce ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The superficial and the slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. ~ Peter De Vries

He was very fond of flying fish as they were his principal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, and he thought, the birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Well, to put it delicately, she has the power to suck out people's brains. ~ Derek Landy

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. ~ E. M. Forster

A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another. ~ Anne Rice

I remember the day when my seventh-grade teacher called my parents to tell them I'd been crying in the bathrooms at lunchtime after Sukey died - how disappointed Dad was that I was using Sukey's death as an excuse to get attention from my teachers; how delicately Mom suggested that Sukey would have wanted me to be happy; my humiliation at letting them down. ~ Hilary T. Smith

Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith of what use they made of half-hours and months and years ... I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere. ~ James Branch Cabell

Curiously, among the few survivors from this culinary onslaught is one that is most difficult to understand: the fish knife. Though it remains the standard instrument for dealing with fish of all kinds, no one has ever identified a single advantage conferred by its odd scalloped shape or worked out the original thinking behind it. There isn't a single kind of fish that it cuts better or bones more delicately than a conventional knife does. ~ Bill Bryson

You are different." She lifted a hand to delicately trace his hairline.
He closed his eyes, feeling her fingers tremble against his skin.
"For whatever reason," she said softly, "when you are with me, you are
simply Isaac and I am Coral. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

If you really want space on public transport you should carry some pornography from the 1970s and a pair of children's safety scissors, then delicately cut out all the eyes of the glamour models whilst whistling. Every now and again mutter, 'Why are women more beautiful when they are eyeless?' You will be able to stretch out, though this can have ramifications such as ending up on a police list or being run out of town. ~ Robin Ince

I feed Volnay, who eats in her unusual way, delicately removing one piece of kibble at a time from her bowl, placing it on the little rug that serves as her dining room, and then eating it before going back in for a second piece of kibble. It takes her the better part of thirty minutes to finish her bowl. I'm sure if she had thumbs, she'd be patting her chin with a linen napkin after every morsel. When she finishes, she hits the water bowl. Silently. No one can figure out how she drinks, she sort of purses her lips and sucks, none of that slurping and splashing that accompany most dogs' drinking. She is a stealth drinker. When she finishes, she heads to her little bed in the corner of the kitchen to groom her fur a bit. Lovely girl. ~ Stacey Ballis

His mind was completely occupied with the image of Aline by the river, the rich mass of her pinned-up hair, the exquisite lines of her body and throat.
Time had only made Aline's beauty more eloquent. Her body was ripe and fully developed, the form of a woman in her prime. With maturity, her face had become more delicately sculpted, the nose thinner, the lips faded from deep rose to the pale shade of pink that tinted the inside of a seashell. And there was that damned, never-forgotten beauty mark, the festive dark fleck that lured his attention to the tender corner of her mouth. ~ Lisa Kleypas

my mother
smiled
as she offered
a cube of
sugar
in her
upturned palm.

greedily,
i accepted.

i reached inside
my mouth,
delicately placing one
(just one)
on the center
of my tongue,
& i clamped
down.

salt.

this is what abuse is:
knowing you are
going to get salt
but still hoping for sugar
for nineteen years.

- you may be gone, but i still have a stomachache. ~ Amanda Lovelace

How fares the thumb, boy? well? Aye, merry, 'tis the sign of the penis. With the women, look you, observe the ear. The parts appear and come together. So obesity and malice. So grumbling and nagging. So gossip, envy, spite, and avarice. Slowly settling into. So feminine weakness. Heartless piety. Savage morals. They come together. No more goody geedge. Ruthless, lifelong revenge. Zrrr. Grease in a cold pan. Stay off from gingerly lobed and delicately whorled ones. Thus appear the parts. Mind your uncle, boy, who knows. And the men then. Lewd speech and slovenly habits. And the peasant's suspicion, his cruelty and rancor, his anger, drunkenness, pig-headed ignorance and bestiality. Inevitable they should be parts. Hoolyhoohoo. All in the normal course of nature. And they were saying we had evolved. What did it mean? But, he said in a voice that was clearly audible, I protest this world of unilluminated cocks. He caught the sense of his own words - so absurd - and his body began to shake - half in laughter, half in despair. ~ William H. Gass

Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake. ~ Raymond Chandler

Julietta's dark hair is glossy and straight and smells like apples. Armand kneels beside her and holds his head close. Her eyelashes are long and delicately curved in a way people a hundred years ago would have described as buggy whips, a phrase no one uses any¬more because no one understands. In this way knowledge is lost. ~ John Lauricella

Nobody ever," said the Dowager sorrowfully, "credits me with normal thought processes. When a mysterious man creates a royal scandal on the banks of the Lake of Menteith with the keenest ears in Scotland strolling utterly oblivious - by her own account - in the locality, I begin to wonder. I also wonder when a delicately reared child sends a court into fits with a riddle which I invented myself. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

I can't put this delicately - everyone goes to their high school reunion wanting to see who they 'beat.' ~ Megyn Price

Some people hate the very name of statistics, but I find them full of beauty and interest. Whenever they are not brutalized, but delicately handled by the higher methods, and are warily interpreted, their power of dealing with complicated phenomena is extraordinary. They are the only tools by which an opening can be cut through the formidable thicket of difficulties that bars the path of those who pursue the Science of Man. ~ Francis Galton

This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun. But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind. ~ Madeline Miller

For my grandfather

Quote from "INCUBUS"

The genealogical table is an important branch of life, and whether life's hand is bitter or sweet, it must be treated delicately.
- C.L. Cropper ~ Cheryl L. Cropper

Then there were her childhood book: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, What Katy did next, Pollyanna - stories about girls who were good. All Pollyanna had ever done wrong was ruin her parasol. Beth in Little Women was so perfect she was only fit for heaven. Why were girls in novels exemplary, almost saintly? Grace preferred adventure stories, histories and romances about what to do if you were damned and female, tales about women who were kind, likeable and believable, who escaped unpunished. No thin Quakers with lace caps. No beatific consumptives coughing delicately. No unloved, eternally jolly orphans. Grace craved books about girls like herself: good women, normal women in a world bigger and more powerful than themselves. ~ Wendy Jones

But now it is Norris's privilege and pleasure to see her as no one else does, for he has been struck by love for Vida. And in his eyes, under the transforming inspection of his gaze―well, who can tell? Vida may become something more than she appears at the very moment, waiting quietly on her bench, the world breathing delicately around her. ~ Carrie Brown

There is no end in creativity. Hence, to strive towards an end result is a fool's errand. Set goals, make music and paint pictures, but know that the crux of your happiness balances delicately on the wings of the act of creativity itself. Not at the finish line. ~ Brandon Boyd

Pornography is writing that seeks primarily, even exclusively, to bring about sexual stimulation. This can be done crudely or delicately. In the former case it would be bad literature; in the latter good. ~ Kenneth Tynan

Every once in a while, in newspapers, magazines, and biographical dictionaries, I run upon sketches of my life, wherein, delicately phrased, I learn that it was in order to study sociology that I became a tramp. This is very nice and thoughtful of the biographers, but it is inaccurate. I became a tramp - well, because of the life that was in me, of the wanderlust in my blood that would not let me rest. Sociology was merely incidental; it came afterward, in the same manner that a wet skin follows a ducking. I went on "The Road" because I couldn't keep away from it; because I hadn't the price of the railroad fare in my jeans; because I was so made that I couldn't work all my life on "one same shift"; because - well, just because it was easier to than not to. ~ Jack London

And while he waited in the castle court,
The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang
Clear through the open casement of the hall,
Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,
Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,
Moves him to think what kind of bird it is
That sings so delicately clear, and make
Conjecture of the plumage and the form;
So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint;
And made him like a man abroad at morn
When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave
To Britain, and in April suddenly
Breaks from a coppice gemmed with green and red,
And he suspends his converse with a friend,
Or it may be the labour of his hands,
To think or say, 'There is the nightingale;'
So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said,
'Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me. ~ Alfred Tennyson

In summer a young rooster's fancy turns to ... how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I've ever had to watch. (And yes, I'm including high school.) ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The Lady Ishil gestured. "Oh, we asked. It wasn't difficult. Everyone in this pigsty of a town seems to know where you sleep." A delicately curled lip. She let him go. "And with who."
Ringil ignored that one. "I'm a hero, Mother. What do you expect? ~ Richard K. Morgan

Dev tucks my hair behind my ear. "Yeah - whoa." I clear my throat and sit up straighter. Somehow I managed to lean in rather close as he was talking. "The weird thing was," he continues, "where we found you, under this tree, is where I'd go anytime I wanted to be alone. I would come here to think and get out of the city. And that's where you landed. Sometimes, I think…"
"What do you think?" I nudge him to finish.
He delicately plays with the top of my hand. "Sometimes I think that you were sent to me, that someone knew I would find you. ~ E.J. Mellow

Why did they all have to tread so very delicately around Celeste's money? It was like wealth was an embarrassing medical condition. It was the same with Celeste's beauty. Strangers gave Celeste the same furtive looks they gave to people with missing limbs, and if Madeline ever mentioned Celeste's looks, Celeste responded with something like shame. "Shhh," she'd say, looking around fearfully in case someone overheard. Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else. Oh, it was a funny old world. ~ Liane Moriarty

Under the trimmed willows, where brown children
are playing
And leaves tumbling, the trumpets blow. A quaking
of cemeteries.
Banners of scarlet rattle through a sadness of maple
trees,
Riders along rye-fields, empty mills.
Or shepherds sing during the night, and stags step
delicately
Into the circle of their fire, the grove's sorrow
immensely old,
Dancing, they loom up from one black wall;
Banners of scarlet, laughter, insanity, trumpets ~ Georg Trakl

A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy. As is customary in this kind of operation, the patient was wide awake, under
only local anesthesia, while the surgeon delicately explored his exposed cortex, makingsure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating
them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced. Some stimulations provoked visual flashes or hand-raisings, others a sort of buzzing sensation, but one spot
produced a delighted response from the patient: "It's 'Outta Get Me' by Guns N' Roses.
my favorite heavy metal band!"

I asked the neurosurgeon If he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how "high fidelity" the provoked memory
was, would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record?
Such a song (unliken"Silent Night") has one canonical version. so we could simply have superimposed a recording of the patients humming with the standard record and compared the results.
Unfortunately, even though a tape recorder had been running during the operation, thesurgeon hadn't asked the patient to sing along. 'Why not?" I asked, and he replied: "I hate rock music!'

Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man. and I expressed the hope that he would
just check to see if he could r ~ Wilder Penfield

The whole genius of an author consists in describing well, and delineating character well. Homer, Plato, Virgil, Horace only excel other writers by their expressions and images; we must indicate what is true if we mean to write naturally, forcibly and delicately. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

Were I a man," she struck a fencing pose and swept her hand before her as if it held a razor-sharp rapier, "I'd fix him thus!" She stabbed once, twice, thrice, then whipped the imaginary tip across her victim's throat. Delicately she wiped the phantom blade and restored it to an equally airy scabbard. "Were I a man," she straightened to stare pensively through the window, "I'd assure myself that braggart knew the error of his ways and henceforth would bend to seek his fortune in some other corner of the world." She caught her reflection in the crystal panes and folding her hands, struck a demure pose. "Alas, a brawling lad I am not, but a mere woman." She turned her head from side to side to inspect the carefully arranged raven tresses, then smiled wisely at her image. "Thus my weapons must be my wit and tongue."
-Erienne ~ Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

The oxygen at the summit of Mount Everest is the same oxygen that has been delicately knit within your lungs; the elements at the bottom of the ocean are dotted like wildflowers along the surface of your skin. Let this reassure you – at the highest and lowest points of life, you were made to endure. You were made to survive. ~ Bianca Sparacino

I want to marry you, Malda - because I love you - because you are young and strong and beautiful - because you are wild and sweet and - fragrant, and - elusive, like the wild flowers you love. Because you are so truly an artist in your special way, seeing beauty and giving it to others. I love you because of all of this, because you are rational and highminded and capable of friendship - and in spite of your cooking!"
"But - how do you want to live?"
"As we did here - at first," he said. "There was peace, exquisite silence. There was beauty - nothing but beauty. There were the clean wood odors and flowers and fragrances and sweet wild wind. And there was you - your fair self, always delicately dressed, with white firm fingers sure of touch in delicate true work. I loved you then. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I'm sure you know by now, Jesse Jackson was overheard saying, and I'll put this more delicately, that he wanted to cut Barack Obama's testicles off. And Jesse has been on several news programs the last couple of days, explaining what he meant by those comments. Do you need to explain that? ~ Jay Leno

You can grow softly, lovely and delicately amidst the hard surfaces. Not all who passed tougher times in life have a hard heart, kindness and tenderness do breathe despite of worse times. ~ Angelica Hopes

Hegel understood the Heisenbergian reality of knowing: yes, it would be nice if we could somehow delicately capture the truth and bring it closer to ourselves without altering it, "like a bird caught with a limestick." But the reality is, every truth we manage to know is altered, deformed by our very "encheiresis naturae," by the act of our taking-in-hand of nature (to borrow the alchemists' phrase from Goethe's Faust). ~ Kenny Smith

To see Sow Flower's mother eat that meat was something I'll never forget. She had been raised to be a fine lady and, as hungry as she was, she did not tear into the food as someone in my family might. She used her chopsticks to pull apart slivers of the pork and lift them delicately to her lips. Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less that a cultivated woman. ~ Lisa See

It's Simon, he's missing."
Ahh." said Magnus delicately "Missing what exactly?"
Missing!" Jace repeated "As in gone, absent, notable for his lack of presence, disappeared ~ Cassandra Clare

I don't know what it is that comes over me, but suddenly I'm crossing to his side of the table and sitting down in his lap, arms wrapping around his neck. His lips are soft against mine, and when I part them he tenderly obliges, tasting me delicately. His fingers prod at my back, never going further than the small indent at the base of the spine, and it's all very lovely and nice.
"I think I could get used to you," I say, looking down into his beautiful brown eyes, deep like the color of autumn.
(From "Undone, The Romance of Nick and Layla [Part 5"]). ~ Crystal Cierlak

In the dim, wavering light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with fiery steel. ~ Ray Bradbury

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue! -
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly ~ Anne Sexton

Her fine high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining, the colour of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood
she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinaman wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible. ~ Bertrand Russell

And the roses - the roses! Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades - they came alive day by day, hour by hour. Fair fresh leaves, and buds - and buds - tiny at first but swelling and working Magic until they burst and uncurled into cups of scent delicately spilling themselves over their brims and filling the garden air. Colin ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

There is not one single invention of (Nature's), however subtle or impressive it may be thought to be, that the human spirit cannot create; no forest of Fontainebleu or moonlit scene that cannot be produced with a floodlit stage set; no waterfall that hydraulics cannot imitate so perfectly as to be indistinguishable from the original; no rock that papier-mâché cannot copy; no flower that specious taffetas and delicately painted papers cannot rival! There is no doubt whatever that this eternally self-replicating old fool has now exhausted the good-natured admiration of all true artists, and the moment has come to replace her, as far as that can be achieved, with artiface. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

Twisting and wiring and stringing starching and curling, delicately painting spots and shadings on scraps of silk until what had been nothing more than a pile of brightly colored fragments had been transformed into the silk irises, forget-me-not, violets and roses that would adorn the hats of women and girls more fortunate than themselves. ~ Melanie McGrath

If that's all you've got, I'm not too worried," he taunted me. I dipped my hand in the wet sand, grabbing a handful. I slowly raised it above his head threatening to release it. Before I even noticed, he caught my wrist and pulled it back down. Holding my eyes, he delicately threaded his fingers through mine, while the wet sand squished out. The gesture was somehow very intimate and a shiver ran down my spine. The wet sand ran down my arm but I didn't even notice. We stayed like that, hand in hand, facing the ocean for what seemed like hours. ~ Kristen Day

A soul mate was the person who wielded the greatest power imaginable over you, the person who cupped your happiness in their hands. If the worst happened and the relationship crumbled, they used the power you so foolishly lent them to crush your dreams under their heels as they walked out of your life. Those same hands that had so delicately held your joy were plunged in your chest as they ripped your heart out by its roots. ~ Hailey Edwards

I can't pinpoint what exactly it is until Silas steps behind my sister and delicately runs his fingers through her hair, his handle gentle as if he's touching a priceless jewel. Rosie blushes as he leans into her and whispers something in her ear that makes her lips curve up in an elegant smile. I recognize the look in Silas's eyes - adoration. ~ Jackson Pearce

His warm tickling fingers stroked against her like the idle sway of river reeds... cunning fingertips that quickly discovered where she most wanted them. He toyed with her, parting her, slowly investigating the cambered softness and the sensitive places within. Blindly she reached down to grip his stronger wrist, feeling the intricate movements of bone and tendon. He slid two fingers inside her, his thumb gliding over her sex in tender circles.
The water sloshed in the tub as she began to push up rhythmically, urging herself into his hand. A third finger worked inside, and she tightened and gasped out a protest- it was too much, she couldn't- but he whispered that she could, she must, and he stretched her carefully and took her groans into his mouth.
Splayed and floating, Win felt herself loosening, opening to the sensuality of the fingers reaching inside her. She felt greedy and wild, undulating to capture more of the obliterating pleasure. She actually clawed him a little, her hands scrabbling against his hard, bare skin, and he growled as if it pleased him. An abbreviated cry left her lips at the first shock of release. She tried to stifle it, but another was torn from her, and another, and the bathwater rippled as she shuddered, the climax lengthened by the delicately emphatic thrusting that continued until she was limp and panting. ~ Lisa Kleypas

All right then, I will," she said, delicately dabbing at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. "Safe sex, Nicholas." "Yes, dear," Viola agreed. She circle the table, collecting the plates, "We want you to practice safe sex…shall we have dessert? ~ Julie Garwood

The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else. ~ Philip Pullman

Running? Jumping?" Anthony turned an anxious face to William. "He'll hurt himself. You can handle the Computer. Override. Make him stop."

And William said sharply, "No. I won't. I'll take the chance of his hurting himself. Don't you understand? He's happy. He was on Earth, a world he was never equipped to handle. Now he's on Mercury with a body perfectly adapted to its environment, as perfectly adapted as a hundred specialized scientists could make it be. It's paradise for him; let him enjoy it."

"Enjoy? He's a robot."

"I'm not talking about the robot. I'm talking about the brain-the brain-that's living here."

The Mercury Computer, enclosed in glass, carefully and delicately wired, its integrity most subtly preserved, breathed and lived.

"It's Randall who's in paradise," said William. "He's found the world for whose sake he autistically fled this one. He has a world his new body fits perfectly in exchange for the world his old body did not fit at all. ~ Isaac Asimov

Maybe for this story," Professor Piper said delicately, "you could start with something real. With one day from your life. Something that confused or intrigued you, something you want to explore. Start there and see what happens. You can keep it true, or you can let it turn into something else - you can add magic - but give yourself a starting point. ~ Rainbow Rowell

I remember when I was in high school I didn't have a new dress for each special occasion. The girls would bring the fact to my attention, not always too delicately. The boys, however, never bothered with the subject. They were my friends, not because of the size of my wardrobe but because they liked me. ~ Marilyn Monroe

Wine so delicately
pulls from us
all the stories
we hadn't planned to tell. ~ Atticus Poetry

But when oxidation nibbles more slowly - more delicately, like a tortoise - at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations. ~ Alan Bradley

Why do we all say we prefer honesty but rarely give that courtesy to others? Maybe in our hearts we all want to give others honesty, but in practice it's just too damn hard. Honesty is confrontational. Crafting the 'honest' message takes a lot of time and thought. And no matter how delicately you do it, it feels cold and mean to reject someone. It's just easier on many levels to say nothing or pretend to be busy until people get the picture. ~ Aziz Ansari

Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown? That our souls need the mysteries of night and the clarity of day? ~ Dave Eggers

Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well. Teleology tells us that they do so because they were expressly constructed for so doing - that they are perfect mousing apparatuses, so perfect and so delicately adjusted that no one of their organs could be altered, without the change involving the alteration of all the rest. Darwinism affirms on the contrary, that there was no express construction concerned in the matter; but that among the multitudinous variations of the Feline stock, many of which died out from want of power to resist opposing influences, some, the cats, were better fitted to catch mice than others, whence they throve and persisted, in proportion to the advantage over their fellows thus offered to them.

Far from imagining that cats exist 'in order' to catch mice well, Darwinism supposes that cats exist 'because' they catch mice well - mousing being not the end, but the condition, of their existence. And if the cat type has long persisted as we know it, the interpretation of the fact upon Darwinian principles would be, not that the cats have remained invariable, but that such varieties as have incessantly occurred have been, on the whole, less fitted to get on in the world than the existing stock. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Spirituality is like a thin-thin thread, that if delicately followed guides us from darkness to light; from poverty to abundance and from destruction to safety. ~ Bryant McGill

Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal - the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth - is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition. ~ Daniel Dennett

I beg your pardon, Mrs. Graham - but you get on too fast. I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life, - or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it; - I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe; - and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hothouse, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered from the shock of the tempest.'

'Granted; - but would you use the same argument with regard to a girl?'

'Certainly not.'

'No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant - taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?'

'Assuredly not.'

'Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; - and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith. It must be either that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded, that she cannot withstand temptation, - and though she may ~ Anne Bronte

Anyway, I'm doing my rave and this spittle comes out of my mouth and it winds its way very delicately through the wire fence that separates us and lands clear and bright on Denzel's lip. And we're at the beginning of the scene and I've got to do the rest of the scene, and the camera isn't on him, it's on me - and I'm fully aware that I've just spat on Denzel Washington! ~ Russell Crowe

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman: subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert. Delicately made up, not highly rouged. Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts. ~ Graham Kerr

Kate, the mother of thirteen, is forty-nine; delicately made; her skin creamlike where the weather has not got at it. She is smaller than several of her children. Her legs and feet, like those of most women in this country, are beautifully shaped by shoelessness on the earth. Her eyes, which are watchful not at all for herself but for her family, are those of a small animal which expects another kick as a matter of course and which is too numbed to dodge it or even much care. She calls her children "my babies." They call her mama, treat her protectively as they might a deformed child, and love her carelessly and gaily. An old photograph shows her fiber and bearing as a young woman, and perhaps it is the relinquishment of that unusual spirit, under the beating and breakage of the past two decades, that has made her now the most abandoned of these people: more than any of them, she is lost in some solitary region of her own. She is only half sane. ~ James Agee

You could have any girl in the world."
He laid his forehead to my right temple, his hands still held to the sides of my face delicately, and whispered right into the shell of my hear, "But I don't want just any girl, Hazel." He leaned in even closer until his lips were a breath away from mine. "I want you. ~ Amie Knight

Evie…" His whisper stirred the tiny wisps at her hairline. "I want to make love to you."
Her blood turned to boiling honey. Eventually she managed a stammering reply. "I-I thought y-you never called it that."
His hands lifted to her face, his fingertips exploring delicately. She remained docile beneath his caress while the scent of his skin, fresh and clove-like, drugged her like some narcotic incense.
Reaching to his own throat, Sebastian fumbled beneath his shirt and extracted the wedding band on the fine chain. He tugged it, breaking the fragile links, and let the chain drop to the floor. Evie's breathing hastened as he reached for her left hand and slid the gold band onto her fourth finger. Their hands matched together, palm to palm, wrist to wrist, just as they had been bound during their wedding ceremony. His forehead lowered to hers, and he whispered, "I want to fill every part of you…breathe the air from your lungs…leave my handprints on your soul. I want to give you more pleasure than you can bear. I want to make love to you, Evie, as I have never done with anyone before."
She was now trembling so violently that she could hardly stand. "Your w-wound - we have to be careful - "
"You let me worry about that." His mouth took hers in a soft, smoldering kiss. Releasing her hand, he gathered her body closer, applying explicit pressure against her shoulders, back, hips, until she was molded completely against him. Evie wanted him with a despera ~ Lisa Kleypas

Tall, broad-shouldered, every inch of him seemingly corded with muscle, he was a male blooded with power. He paused in a dusty shaft of sunlight, his silver hair gleaming. As if his delicately pointed ears and slightly elongated canines weren't enough to scare the living shit out of everyone in that alley, including the now-whimpering madwoman behind Celaena, a wicked-looking tattoo was etched down the left side of his harsh face, the whorls of black ink stark against his sun-kissed skin. ~ Sarah J. Maas

A man with delicately-strung nerves often says and does things which often lead us to think more meanly of him than he deserves. It is his great misfortune constantly to present himself at his worst. On the other hand, a man provided with nerves vigorously constituted, is provided also with a constitutional health and a hardihood wich express themselves brightly in his manners, and which lead to a mistaken impression that his nature is what it appears to be on the surface. Having good health, he has good spirits. Having good spirits, he wins as an agreeable companion on the persons with whom he comes in contact - although he may be hiding all the while, under an outer covering which is physically wholesome, an inner nature which is morally diseased. ~ Wilkie Collins

Mindy runs to the DVD player and delicately places the disk in the holder and presses play. "Will you sit in this chair, please, Princess Mindy?" I ask, bowing deeply at the waist.
Mindy giggles as she replies, "I guess so."
After Mindy sits down, I take a wide-tooth comb and start gently combing out her tangles.
Mindy starts vibrating with excitement as she blurts, "Mr. Jeff, you're gonna fix my hair fancy, ain't you?"
"We'll see if a certain Princess can hold still long enough for me to finish," I tease. Immediately, Mindy becomes as still as a stone statue. After a couple of minutes, I have to say, "Mindy, sweetheart, it's okay to breathe. I just can't have you bouncing, because I'm afraid it will cause me to pull your hair."
Mindy slumps down in her chair just slightly. "Okay Mr. Jeff, I was ascared you was gonna stop," she whispers, her chin quivering.
I adopt a very fake, very over-the-top French accent and say, "Oh no, Monsieur Jeff must complete Princess Mindy's look to make the Kingdom happy.
Mindy erupts with the first belly laugh I've heard all day as she responds, "Okay, I'll try to be still, but it's hard 'cause I have the wiggles real bad."
I pat her on the shoulder and chuckle as I say, "Just try your best, sweetheart. That's all anyone can ask."
Kiera comes screeching around the corner in a blur, plunks her purse on the table, and says breathlessly, "Geez-O-Pete, I can't believe I'm late for the makeover. I ~ Mary Crawford

You've been talking to George about me."
It was Alessandra's turn to look away, shrugging delicately. "There's not much else to do around here besides talk. So, yes, I did ask him some questions - "
"Out of the four hundred and sixty-eight trillion possible topics of discussion," he mused, "I'm number one on the list. I'm flattered."
She took a sip of her tea, completely nonchalant - except for the slight pink tinge that colored her cheeks, and the fact that she refused to meet his gaze. "Don't be. I was just trying to break this endless boredom."
She was lying. He knew it. And she knew that he knew it. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

Moira's made contact." He grimaced. "She wants a pair of strap-on wings for some strange reason."

Robin shuddered delicately.

"She also has a plan." Jaden gave Robin a mock sympathetic look. "Be afraid."

Robin sighed and followed the vampire. Perhaps assigning the Blackthorns to watch Michaela hadn't been his best idea. The thought of Michaela and Moira conspiring together had his gut clenching in terror. ~ Dana Marie Bell

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Besides the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

- The Thought Fox ~ Ted Hughes

The serenity and the transcendence of self that you found are to me exemplary. You showed that it is not necessary to be unhappy, even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is. Somewhere you said that a writer - delicately you added: all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. (You were speaking of your blindness.) ~ Susan Sontag

You're a miracle," he breathed.
"You're a miracle," the mermaid echoed, before it leaned up and carefully, almost delicately, ripped away his throat. ~ Mira Grant

Life breathed spring (haiku)
spring awakening
dance of lovers
delicately wrapped in cherry blossoms ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

When they left, I saw four or five black-and-white photographs I had taken of you, peeping from the file. They'd faded a little over time and were stuck to each other. Delicately, i separated them. ~ Sachin Kundalkar

She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, I hope you are a savage. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that. ~ Jenny Colgan

Weston is everything
And all at once.
Weston is gentle
And harsh.
Weston can be blindingly bright
But then he can also be
Delicately soft.
Weston is a paradox. ~ Abbie Emmons

Since Betty was on the pill or took precautions of her own which Graham did not choose to enquire into, the marital bed was untrammelled by tedious prophylaxis so that what Graham had been expecting to find an onerous and even distasteful duty unexpectedly partook of a freedom and absence of restraint that he found exhilerating. ~ Alan Bennett

Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want. ~ Thornton Wilder

Over the past few decades we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying "ghetto", a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as "the inner city", yet everyone knows what we mean. When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as "inner city families". Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analysts of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used "ghetto" to describe low-income African American neighborhoods created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. ~ Richard Rothstein

I remember her body so miraculously
Fumbling with me so delicately
Fighting with me so passionately
Exhausting us both so mercilessly
Before sleeping beside me so languidly. ~ Roman Payne

Dear Fran
I'm watching you sleep. You are sucking your thumb. (We're going to need to talk about this.)
I can't pretend you look like a delicately slumbering princess, because you don't. Apart from the thumb business you are twitching around like a ferret and about ten minutes ago you pulled the entire duvet over yourself and left me with nothing. But I've never loved you more than I do right now.
I love you so much. I hope we can have a life together. There's so much I want to say to you. Please wake up soon.
Freddy x ~ Lucy Robinson

In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it. ~ Robert M. Gates

How these humans dispose themselves! Unlike anything else in creation. Or rather like everything else in creation all at once. Legs of one beast. Arms of another. Proportions all awry to a tortoise's eye. Torso too squat. Too little neck. Vastly too much leg. Hands like creatures unto themselves. Senses delicately balanced. And yet each sense dulled by mental acuity. Reason in place of a good nose. Logic instead of a tail. Faith instead of the certain knowledge of instinct. Superstition instead of a shell. ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

As the company headed for the table, I drew her over to the window and passionately kissed her face, which had delicately recovered from its past suffering. I was wrong to say that I have never recaptured the sweetness of that kiss at Les Oublis. The kiss on this evening was as sweet as no other. Or rather, it was the kiss of Les Oublis, which, evoked by the allure of a similar minute, slipped gently from the depths of the past and settled between my mother's still vaguely pale cheeks and my lips. ~ Marcel Proust

Louisa raised an eyebrow. Is he - how shall I put it delicately - a simple man? ~ Heidi Cullinan