Devours Quotes

But again the eternal question - what need is there of my humility? Can't I simply be devoured without being expected to praise what devours me? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Little Cinder

Girl, they can't understand you.
You rise from the as-heap in a blaze
and only then do they recognize you
as their one true love.

While you pray beneath your mother's
tree you carrve a phoenix into your palm
wth aa hazel twig and coal;
every night she devours more of you.

You used to believe in angels.
Now you believe in the makeover;
if you can't get the grime off your face
and your foot into a size six heel

who will ever bother to notice you?
The kettle and the broom sear in your grasp,
snap into fragments. The turtledoves sing,
"There's blood within the shoe."

You deserve the palace, you think, as you signal
the pigeons to attack, approve the barrel filled with red-hot nails.
Its great hearth beckons, and the prince's flag
rises crimson in the angry sun.

He will love you for the heat you generate,
for the flames you ignite around you,
though he encase your tiny feet in glass
to keep them from scorching the ground. ~ Jeannine Hall Gailey

And yet to possess a young soul that has barely developed is a source of very deep delight. It is like a flower whose richest perfume goes out to meet the first ray of the sun. One must pluck it at that very moment and, after inhaling its perfume to one's heart's content, discard it along the wayside on the chance that someone will pick it up. I sense in myself that insatiable avidity that devours everything in its path. And I regard the sufferings and joys of others merely in relation to myself, as food to sustain my spiritual strength. Passion is no longer capable of robbing me of my sanity. My ambition has been crushed by circumstances, but it has manifested itself in a new form, for ambition is nothing but lust for power, and my greatest pleasure I derive from subordinating everything around me to my will. Is it not both the first token of power and its supreme triumph to inspire in others the emotions of love, devotion and fear? Is it not the sweetest fare for our vanity to be the cause of pain or joy for someone without the least claim thereto? And what is happiness? Pride gratified. Could I consider myself better and more powerful than anyone else in the world, I would be happy. Were everybody to love me, I'd find in myself unending wellsprings of love. Evil begets evil; one's first suffering awakens a realization of the pleasure of tormenting another. The idea of evil cannot take root in the mind of man without his desiring to apply it in practice. Someone has said th ~ Mikhail Lermontov

In nature, creatures never ended the lives of others except to survive. To women, abortion was self-defense and preservation of the species. Abortion was not a fancy borne out of the female mind. Abortion was instinct beyond ideas. Abortion was fear (the cat that devours its litter when a predator nears). ~ Ana Castillo

No, Your Grace. At the end a dragon hatches from an egg and devours all of the lions. ~ George R R Martin

(Watch closely, folks, here it is: Science, the ugly little beast that devours itself!) ~ Orson Scott Card

I do not love men: I love what devours them. ~ Andre Gide

I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The desire for power feeds off itself, growing as it devours. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I swear love is the most powerful emotion thats ever existed. It owns people, devours them, tears them open and bleeds them out from the inside, making them defenseless to everything. Hate is the same way. Hate takes your levelheadedness and even your sanity away from you. ~ Jessica Sorensen

Le mariage doit incessamment combattre un monstre qui de v ore tout: l'habitude. Marriage should always combat the monster that devours everything: habit. ~ Honore De Balzac

Hatred is a parasite that devours all. One doesn't build upon hatred, but upon love. ~ Henri Matisse

Jealousy. It burns so hot, so bright. It devours you until you're just a smoking ruin with nothing left inside. Nothing but ashes. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples. ~ George Eliot

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity. ~ Honore De Balzac

His head is busy moving between my parted thighs. He makes low purr-like sounds between my legs and is so surprisingly ravenous I can feel his teeth. His nails bit into my thighs as he devours me like he's the one deriving pleasure from the act, and I'm so turned on by the way he laps me up, that I come. ~ Katy Evans

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists. ~ Emile Zola

Friendships fail some years,
blight twists the leaves and the crop is bitter.
Frost bites or sudden fire devours:
but the root lies sound and waits for better weather or a storm of sleet to scour the branches.
Then we shall see another spring:
a flare of green flame and flowers burning to fruit along the boughs. ~ Charlotte Gray

Always beneath or above concrete events, I remain a prisoner of this alternative: the world as a real object that dominates me and devours me (like Judith) in suffering and in fear, or else the world as a pure fantasy which dissolves in my hands, which I destroy (like Lucrece thrusting home the dagger) without ever succeeding in possessing it. Perhaps, above all, the question for me is to escape this dilemma by finding a way in which the world and myself--object and subject--confront each other on an equal footing, as the matador stands before the bull. ~ Michel Leiris

Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the
little ones: I can compare our rich misers to
nothing so fitly as to a whale; a' plays and
tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at
last devours them all at a mouthful: ~ William Shakespeare

Data gathering: She was alone in the desert with a possible murderous cult member.
Hypothesis: shit. ~ Joseph Fink, Jeffrey Cranor

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows. ~ Samuel Beckett

A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance. ~ Pat Barker

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Without standards, you end up accepting any morsel of paying work that comes your way, like a hungry mouse devours a crumb. You remain stuck in that gut-tightening, demoralizing position of doing work you despise, for clients you don't like, just because you need the money. ~ Pete Savage

If you do not receive Christ as the Lamb who saves and delivers, you will face Him as the Lion who stalks and devours. ~ Steven J. Lawson

After all, the three of us were young. It wasn't just about the pleasure of the flesh. No, it wasn't that simple. The flesh is easy to satisfy. It's the heart that is insatiable, the heart that needs to love, to despair, to burn with any kind of fire ... That was what we wanted. To burn, to be consumed, to devour our days just as fire devours the forest. ~ Irene Nemirovsky

Fear devours the soul. You don't have to let it consume yours. ~ Hannah Heath

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Anger devours almost all other good emotions. It deadens the soul. It numbs the heart to joy and gratitude and hope and tenderness and compassion and kindness. ~ John Piper

Talking, is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental constitution of the man who devours many books. ~ William Matthews

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure. ~ H.L. Mencken

Knowledge is as powerful as fire. The brighter it burns, the more it devours. ~ Jessica Cluess

What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us and hug him close to our bosoms tillhe has gnawed into our hearts? ~ Voltaire

The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past. ~ Walker Percy

I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Vengeance is like a fire. The more it devours, the hungrier it gets. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy - a process that reached its peak during the 1980s - and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. However, the demand for more prisons was represented to the public in simplistic terms. More prisons were needed because there was more crime. Yet many scholars have demonstrated that by the time the prison construction boom began, official crime statistics were already falling. ~ Angela Y. Davis

My family always comes first. My world revolves around my husband, Peter, our daughter, Victoria, and our son, William, but not necessarily in that order. Then, it's this fascinating world of publishing that devours most of my days and many nights. ~ Dorothea Benton Frank

The unfed mind devours itself. ~ Gore Vidal

The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. ~ Ted Hughes

Decide to forgive: For resentment is negative; resentment is poisoning; resentment diminishes and devours the self. ~ Robert Muller

Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light. ~ Steven Erikson

Death devours all lovely things;
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness
presently
Every bed is narrow. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Trauma is a time traveller, an ouroboros that reaches back and devours everything that came before. ~ Junot Diaz

Debt rolls a man over and over, binding him hand and foot, and letting him hang upon the fatal mesh until the long-legged interest devours him. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

Grief grinds slowly; it devours all the time it needs. ~ Long Litt Woon

This is the supreme anguish of the soul; it realizes itself as itself, as thing separate from that which is not itself, from God. In this spasm there are two ways: if fear and pride are left in the soul, it shuts itself up, like a warlock in a tower, gnashing its teeth with agony. "I am I," it cried, "I will not lose myself," and in that state damned, it is slowly torn by the claws of circumstance disintegrated bitterly, for all its struggles, throughout ages and ages, its rags to be cast piecemeal upon the dungheap without the city. But the soul that has understood the blessedness of that resignation which grasps the universe and devours it, which is without hope or fear, without faith or doubt, without hate or love, dissolves itself ineffable into the abounding bliss of God. It cries with Shelley, as the "chains of lead about its flight of fire" drop molten from its limbs: "I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire," and in that last outbreaking is made one with the primal and final breath, the Holy Spirit of God.
Such must be the climax of any retirement to the Desert on the part of any aspirant of the Mysteries who has the spark of that fire in him. ~ Aleister Crowley

That is the nature of our beasts and plagues. They are not dumb machines to be driven about. They have their own needs and hungers. Their own evolutionary demands. They must mutate and adapt, and so you will never be done with me, and when I am gone, what will you do then? We have released demons upon the world, and your walls are only as good as my intellect. Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be? ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

When you live in the dark for so long, you begin to love it. And it loves you back, and isn't that the point? You think, the face turns to the shadows, and just as well. It accepts, it heals, it allows. But it also devours. ~ Raymond Carver

From a historical point of view, restricting the availability of addictive substances must be seen as a peculiarly perverse example of Calvinist dominator thought - a system in which the sinner is to be punished in this world by being transformed into an exploitable, of his cash, by the criminal/governmental combine that provides the addicitve substances. The image is more horrifying than that of the serpent that devours itself - it is once again the Dionysian image of the mother who devours her children, the image of a house divided against itself. ~ Terence McKenna

Revolution devours its own parents as well as its own children. ~ Helen Foster Snow

O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing! ~ Thomas Carlyle

What we have – it consumes me. It devours me. And it scares me more than anything we have ever encountered, because if I ever lost you, if I ever had to live without you, I wouldn't be whole. You, Perry, have my heart. You are my heart. ~ Karina Halle

Whatever praises itself but in the deed devours the deed in the praise. ~ William Shakespeare

Marriage must fight constantly against a monster which devours everything: routine. ~ Honore De Balzac

Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison. There are thus real and often quite complicated connections between the deindustrialization of the economy - a process that reached its peak during the 1980s - and the rise of mass imprisonment, which also began to spiral during the Reagan-Bush era. ~ Angela Y. Davis

The world devours the world to make the world ~ Anne Rice

There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me ~ Gustave Flaubert

Tempus edax rerum.
Time that devours all things. ~ Ovid

I am the serpent that devours her own tail--her own tale. If you tell a tale well enough, it becomes a path to follow. I shed my skin and begin again. ~ Mary Sharratt

Some people lose all respect for the lion unless he devours them instantly. There is no pleasing some people. ~ Will Cuppy

Bookstores, invariably, are a refuge. There's one in the town where they live, and the first time Lydia ventures in, it takes her breath away. She has to steady herself against a shelf. The smell of coffee and paper and ink. It's nothing like her little shop back home. It's stocked mostly with religious books, and instead of calendars and toys, they carry rosaries, Buddha figurines, yarmulkes. Still, the upright spines of the books are bedrock. Steady. There's an international poetry section. Hafiz. Heaney. Neruda. Lydia flips past the twenty love poems and reads "The Song of Despair." She reads it desperately, hungrily, bent over the books in the aisle of the quiet shop. Her fingers ready the next page while she devours the words. The book is water in the desert. ~ Jeanine Cummins

In the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts. ~ May Sarton

COVID-19 devours you from the inside. ~ Steven Magee

You do show after show after show and get them done and on the air. Television devours material. We work a minimum of 12, 14 hours, and often 15, 18 hours a day. ~ Parker Stevenson

It wasn't an awe striking moment; I didn't lose my breath or stumble over my words. It was gradual, like going to sleep. It happens slowly, at first, you're restless, and you think it will never happen, and then the spell of seductive sleep falls upon you. And you're in that wonderful stage of ease and peacefulness where you're still awake but know your being slowly consumed by this wonderful sweet sensation. Then it devours you, and you forget everything else around you, and you just focus on what is going on in the here and now. And there is never one moment during this-this dream that you know with your entire mind that it's true. Your body knows, your heart knows but not your mind. Your mind is the only thing unaware of this action, it's helpless, and so it relies on every other part of the body to make the right decisions. The sad part? The mind doesn't even know it's helpless, but it doesn't matter, because in those moments when you're under that spell, the brain couldn't be happier. ~ Aliza Bell

There remains the mystery of how the pupil devours so much bastard beauty. Abandoned property.

This land and I are rewilding. ~ Ada Limon

Meat-eating is condemned by the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Sravakas; if one devours meat out of shamelessness he will always be devoid of sense. ~ Gautama Buddha

There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all. Yet every species has its unique way of passing on its wisdom through the ages, its way of making thoughts visible, tangible, frozen for a moment like a bulwark against the irresistible tide of time. Everyone makes books. ~ Ken Liu

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Control. It is a food that Nathan feeds on, devours with a vulgarity that clashes with his smooth exterior. He wants to control me, and he wants an audience - an audience that he controls in the process. ~ Alessandra Torre

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

What do I see? I see a man who has higher and thicker walls than I will ever have. I see a terrifying beast enveloped and hidden by a cleverly fashioned mask. I see tears that will never fall. I see blood and death. I see a heart that devours itself. I see the promise of a pain and deceit. I see a lot of things, Baltsaros. Many of them frightening," Jon said.

Baltsaros showed no surprise over Jon's words. Instead, he leaned towards him, intrigued. "And you're not afraid," he said. ~ Bey Deckard

The past devours those naive enough to forget it. ~ Roseanne A. Brown

Los Angeles is a mother that devours her children. ~ Donald O'Donovan

After carrying and collecting like the ant, Enjoy-before the grave worm devours thee. ~ Bill Vaughan

The feeling of solidarity is the leading characteristic of all animals living in society. The eagle devours the sparrow, the wolf devours the marmot. But the eagles and the wolves respectively aid each other in hunting, the sparrow and the marmot unite among themselves against the beasts and birds of prey so effectually that only the very clumsy ones are caught. In all animal societies solidarity is a natural law of far greater importance than that struggle for existence, the virtue of which is sung by the ruling classes in every strain that may best serve to stultify us. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

Lord Loss sows all the sorrows of the world
Lord Loss seeds the grief-starched trees
In the center of the web, lowly Lord Loss bows his head
Mangled hands, naked eyes
Fanged snakes his soul line
Curled inside like textured sin
Bloody, curdled sheets for skin
In the center of the web, vile Lord Loss torments the dead
Over strands of red, Lord Loss crawls
Dispensing pain, despising all
Shuns friends, nurtures foes
Ravages hope, breeds woe
Drinks moons, devours suns
Twirls his thumbs till the reaper comes
In the center of the web, lush Lord Loss is all that's left ~ Darren Shan

Finance, like time, devours its own children. ~ Honore De Balzac

Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children. ~ Jacques Mallet Du Pan

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories. ~ Jennifer Lanthier

Love is that burning fire which devours everything and shall never, never cease in all the endless ages to come. ~ Hadewijch

His persistence allowed us to play a game, and pretend that everything can stay as it is now forever. It cannot. The events of this day have shown us what happens when you try to keep things from changing. Sooner or later the sleeplessness catches up with you, the paranoia about threats devours you and your mind betrays you even if your body does not. ~ Frances Hardinge

The electricity devours my soul, fractures it open, and leaves it vulnerable and exposed. ~ Jessica Sorensen

Ambition devours gold and drinks blood and climbs so high by other men's heads, that at the length in the fall, it breaks its own neck; therefore, it is better to live in humble content than in high care and trouble. ~ Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl Of Strafford

His [Ben Okri's] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them: To what extent will we allow the indefinable dynamics of something called "destiny" to maintain grief and horror in the world? How hard are human beings willing to fight to achieve and sustain justice, equanimity, or joy? And should progress be called such when it devours what is best within the human spirit? ~ Aberjhani

For anyone who devours the web on a daily basis, the biggest problem is too much of a good thing. There's so much extraordinary content - from articles to images, videos and Tweets - that it's almost impossible to keep track of it. ~ Ryan Holmes

If only I could master that demon of procrastination that goes about like a roaring lion and devours all my good intentions, I should become the most punctual man in the world. ~ Henrik Ibsen

I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today. ~ Nick Antosca

If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind. Jefferson ~ Jon Meacham

I have so much, yet my feeling for her devours it all. I have so much, yet without her all of it is nothing. ~ Elisabeth Krimmer

… What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Wisdom devours the weak. ~ Laird Barron

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep. ~ Rene Daumal

Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape. ~ Georges Bernanos

I've seen the ocean lapping lovingly at his muscles. And now I look at the sun stroking his skin like a possessive lover.
My best friend doesn't live life, he devours it. ~ Petra F. Bagnardi

Law is a Bottomless-Pit, it is a Cormorant, a Harpy, that devours every thing. ~ John Arbuthnot

In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has" (Proverbs 21:20, NIV). ~ Gary Chapman