Fixed Quotes

He surveyed me, his eyes half closed, as if wondering if I were a delicious snack. I had an image of a massive dragon circling me slowly, eyes full of magic fixed on me as he moved, considering if he should bite me in half.
"Dragons." Rogan snapped his fingers.
Oh crap.
"I wondered why I kept getting dragons around you." He leaned forward. His eyes lit up, turning back to their clear sky blue. "You think I'm a dragon."
"Don't be ridiculous." My face felt hot. I was probably blushing. Damn it.
His smile went from amused to sexual, so charged with promise that carnal was the only way to describe it. I almost bolted out of my chair.
"Big powerful scary dragon."
"You have delusions of grandeur."
"Do I have a lair? Did I kidnap you to it from your castle?"
I stared straight at him, trying to frost my voice. "You have some strange fantasies, Rogan. You may need professional help."
"Would you like to volunteer?"
"No. Besides, dragons kidnap virgins, so I'm out." And why had I just told him I was not a virgin? Why did I even go there?
"It doesn't matter if I'm the first. It only matters that I'll be the last."
"You won't be the first, the last, or anything in between. Not in a million years."
He laughed.
"Rogan," I ground out through my teeth. "I'm on the clock. My client is in the next room mourning his wife. Stop flirting with me."
"Stop? I haven't even started. ~ Ilona Andrews

People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is. ~ John Cage

The reality, as I have come to understand it, is that the future is not fixed, and that therefore it cannot be reliably predicted. Consciousness interacts with vast archetypal fields of possibility and probability. What actually happens is the result of the collision of both forces. ~ Steven Forrest

He made eye contact but he kept it like casual observation, not a fixed stare. He held his arms at his sides, not only because it was less threatening, but they'd be able to fend off a blow. He cleared the doorway so he'd have an escape route. ~ Lisa Scottoline

Some old traits never die, isn't that right Kurt?"
"And some are easily fixed with death. It was you who always taught me that," Kurt said ruthlessly. ~ Kia Carrington-Russell

To meditate is to labour; to think is to act. Folded arms work, closed hands perform, a gaze fixed on heaven is a toil. ~ Victor Hugo

I liked slicing through the beige brain when it had been fixed; the texture reminded me of cooked cauliflower. It was wonderful to hold this shrunken organ in your hands, the formaldehyde running down over your wrists, and picture the billion firing synapse that for many years had made the cauliflower believe that it was Fred. ~ Sebastian Faulks

we don't realize how many of our fixed views of the world are based on limited samples of reality. ~ Bernard Roth

Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of his brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. The sun shone goldly upon them. Something in Isabel's immobility attracted my attention, and I glanced at her. She was so still that you might have thought her hypnotized. Her breath was hurried. Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate, but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence as I saw then on hers. It was a mask of lust. I would never have believed that her beautiful features could assume an expression of such unbridled sensuality. It was animal rather than human. The beauty was stripped from her face; the look upon it made her hideous and frightening. It horribly suggested the bitch in heat and I felt rather sick. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Unlike plumbing, carpentry, auto repair, etc., we cannot outsource all the work over to someone else. If we wish to see our relationships fixed, at some point we are going to have to get our hands dirty. ~ Darrell Roberts

Orthodoxy is a fixed habit of mind. The average man and woman hug their orthodoxies and spit their venom on those that outrage them. ~ Gertrude Atherton

And you have fixed my life - however short. You did not light me: I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, but I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze. ~ Wilfred Owen

Our ability to adapt and therefore to accept everything is one of our greatest dangers. Creatures that are completely flexible, changeable, can have no fixed morality. ~ Stanislaw Lem

And I felt comfort. Finally. All I'd wanted for so long was for someone to explain everything that had happened to me in this same way. To label it neatly on a page: this leads to this leads to this. I knew, deep down, it was more complicated than that, but watching Jason, I was hopeful. He took the mess that was Macbeth and fixed it, and I had to wonder if he might, in some small way, be able to do the same for me. So I moved myself closer to him, and I'd been there ever since. ~ Sarah Dessen

So quietly flows the Seine that
one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great
artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me
itseemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be
able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear
negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they
need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through meits past, its ancient soil, the
changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed. ~ Henry Miller

Until we begin to question our basic assumptions about ourselves and view them as fluid, not fixed, it's easy to repeat established patterns and, out of habit, reenact old stories that limit our ability to live and love ourselves with an open heart. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Yet nature cannot be contravened, but preserves a fixed and immutable order. ~ Baruch Spinoza

[I]f the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting, the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their Government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows - only hard with luminous edges - and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe:" but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things. In such a country, you will perceive at once that it is impossible that there should be anything of what you call a "solid" kind; but I dare say you will suppose that we could at least distinguish by sight the Triangles, Squares, and other figures, moving about as I have described them. On the contrary, we could see nothing of the kind, not at least so as to distinguish one figure from another. Nothing was visible, nor could be visible, to us, except Straight Lines; and the necessity of this I will speedily demonstrate. ~ Edwin A. Abbott

Midnighter: I told you this wasn't going to end well...
Bendix: ...but...I did what you...what the Authority...never could...fixed earth... Midnighter: No. You just gave them peace through corporate control and ignorance... through mindless consumerism.
Bendix: Bulls*%t! The air is clean...no wars...people are happier...you can't deny...it's a finer world. ~ Ed Brubaker

I'm not saying I'm perfect, or fixed, but I am learning to love and accept myself. My outlook is more positive and I am happy. ~ Demi Lovato

You Can Fly But Your Body Can't

My first seat was in first class between Penny and Belinda. Before I poured Rémy Martin down my throat and had to come see what the folks back here think of things.

316

'Cool out, you know, I didn't mean it, I don't really hate you,' I hear someone say.
While, over the intercom, the pilot jabbers. He's explaining that some dysfunction, once we're on the ground, can be easily fixed with a pin. I don't know, at that point, how much any of us will care. Maybe I'm drunk, but seems like they could give the plane to the Arabs once we've all made our connecting flights.

317

The beer nuts just served to me in a cello packet are the most delicious food I've ever tasted in my life.
Back at Dallas-Fort Worth I put an Otis Redding CD into my player and I doubt I'll ever have a reason to take it out.
Through the window, trigonometry, under a silky pink sky. ~ Mary Robison

Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed. ~ Anna Freud

She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness - not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference. ~ Kate Chopin

She slipped both hands into the water. Her skin looked pale and creamy below its surface. Not its usual warm bronze color. She fixed her gaze on the place where the water met the air, on the strange bend that made it seem as though her hands were in a different world beneath the water -
A world that moved more slowly and told stories.
The water lies. ~ Renee Ahdieh

The eye fixed on Christ sees clearly, succumbing to neither pride nor inferiority, because it is not concerned with the self at all. ~ Andree Seu World Magazine

Today i solved a problem my mother knew nothing about," Estrella said. Her words twisted, each one sounding harder, like a knot tightening. "She still doesn't. I fixed it, and she had no idea. My mother, all our mothers, they think they're holding everything up, but we have it too. It's ours too. So forget what my nother thinks i should or shouldn't be doing because we're going and getting some damn cotton candy, okay? ~ Anna-Marie McLemore

If there's a problem, you fix it. You don't set up fences around it and make rules about how it should be fixed. You fix it. ~ Orson Scott Card

You can, if you wish, think of it like the universe: Each case is a sun, and all the judges, lawyers and administrative personnel represent planets revolving around the case in fixed orbit, never getting closer. ~ Sol Wachtler

You're bleeding," he said. "A thorn prick, no more," she stated. "I didn't know fairy creatures could bleed. I always fancied them spun of mist and moonlight, not flesh and blood." "Let go." "No, my love - " "I'm not a fairy creature, and I am surely not your love." "It's just an expression." "It's a lie. But 'tis no high wonder to me. I'd be expecting falsehoods from a Sassenach." "Poor Caitlin. Does it hurt?" Very slowly, with his eyes fixed on hers, he put her finger to his lips and gently slipped it inside his mouth. Too shocked to stop him, she felt the warmth of his mouth, the moist velvet brush of his tongue over the pad of her finger. Then with an excess of gentleness he drew it out and placed her hand in her lap. "I think the bleeding's stopped," he said. ~ Susan Wiggs

I like you, Mallory. And God knows you deserve a hell of a lot better than me." He dipped his chin, laughing as he thrust his hand through his hair. "God. I suck at this. Can we just forget - "
I snapped out of it. "You like me?"
His gaze flew to mine. "Yeah, I do. And I know I've been with Paige and I'm not going to pretend that meant nothing, but it's not how I feel for you. Not remotely like how I feel for you. And it's not because of our past - because of you and I knowing each other for so long," he said, and the words kept coming out in a rush. "At first, I thought that was why - this attraction I have to you. I thought it was because of everything we'd shared. And then the night I came to your place and you fixed me up, I thought it was just this physical thing." Pink raced across his cheeks. "And it is most definitely a physical thing, but it wasn't just that. I think part of me knew that from the very first time you said my name."
Now my pulse was pounding. He liked-liked me. Oh my God, this was unexpected. This was totally unplanned. It was an infinite, vast sea of unknown.
"I know you deserve better, but I want to be better. I want to be that for you. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Class is not a fixed designation in this country. We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups. ~ Paul Ryan

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.
Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party - all these may also impose a simple structure on life. ~ Alvin Toffler

why the rating agencies weren't more critical of bonds underpinned by floating-rate subprime mortgages. Subprime borrowers tended to be one broken refrigerator away from default. Few, if any, should be running the risk of their interest payment spiking up. As most of these loans were structured, however, the homeowner would pay a fixed teaser rate of, say, 8 percent for the first two years, and then, at the start of the third year, the interest rate would skyrocket to, say, 12 percent, and thereafter it would float at permanently high levels. ~ Michael Lewis

If you do not help me," Tessa said to Jem, "I swear, I will change into you, and I will lift him myself. And then everyone here will see what you look like in a dress." She fixed him with a look. "Do you understand? ~ Cassandra Clare

I also become the local computer nerd. The administration brings me in to fix all the computers, I create viruses to invade at a specific day and time. They call me in, and I eradicate my own virus, only to plant another one to go into effect a couple months later. They ask me why I can't just fix the computers once and for all. I tell them to quit going to porn sites and it will stay fixed. That shuts them up every time. ~ Darynda Jones

The fixed idea may also be perceived as 'maxim', 'principle', 'standpoint', and the like. Archimedes,86 to move the earth, asked for a standpoint outside it. Men sought continually for this standpoint, and every one seized upon it as well as he was able. This foreign standpoint is the world oj mind, of ideas, thoughts, concepts, essences; it is heaven. Heaven is the 'standpoint' from which the earth is moved, earthly doings surveyed and - despised. To assure to themselves heaven, to occupy the heavenly standpoint firmly and for ever - how painfully and tirelessly humanity struggled for this! ~ Max Stirner

One day, you're in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she's female but alien because you're a fool in love and there's nothing not alien about that. And then when she's gone, you're alone and all the strangeness and wonder have gone out of the landscape and you're still a fool but now nobody notices how many days in a row you wear the same socks and cleaning the shower doesn't make the girl smile anymore so everything smells a little worse and doesn't get fixed when it breaks. I missed the feminine touch - not just hers, but mine. I missed being half-boy, half-girl, part of a whole. Now that I was male in a male environment, it was harder to manifest her physical chick presence, no matter how many of her MAC lipsticks I set out on the coffee table in a basket like so many M&Ms. ~ Rob Sheffield

You know what I think? I think you've picked up the Nazi idea that Jews can't create. That they can only imitate and sell. Middlemen.' He fixed his merciless scrutiny on Frink.

'Maybe so,' Frink said. ~ Philip K. Dick

It is difficult to disturb the common usage of Korean that is bent to the perspective of a male-oriented society. Korean society is based on both a politics and history that have been disguised as a solid society of solid male poems, a solid written language, fixed rules of how to write literature, and a narrative language. ~ Kim Hyesoon

Beauty is an intangible thing; can not be fixed on the surface, and the wear and tear of old age on the body cannot defeat it. Nor will a "pretty" face make it, for "pretty" faces are often dull and empty, and beauty is never dull and it fills all spaces. ~ Robert Henri

The power of giving life and taking by death belong to God alone. He won't allow what He hasn't already ordained. And since He fixed the number of days your mother would walk on this earth, neither you nor anyone could do anything to prolong it, not even if you helped in a dozen ways. ~ Jody Hedlund

Make no mistake, no one has ever become great by mistake. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

When all moves equally (says Pascal), nothing seems to move as in a vessel under sail; and when all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so. He that stops first, views as from a fixed point the horrible extravagance that transports the rest. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

The most important and most difficult thing that you can change is your fixed false beliefs. ~ Debasish Mridha

We are by the river bank. The river is very, very low. Almost dry. But mostly is wet stones. Grey on the outside. We walk on the stones for awhile. You pick up a stone and crash it onto the others. As it breaks, it is quite wet inside and is very colorful, very pretty. I pick up a stone and break it and run toward the pieces to see the colors. They are beautiful. I laugh and bring the pieces back to you and you are doing the same with your pieces. We keep on crashing stones for hours, anxious to see the beautiful new colors. We are playing. The playfulness of our activity does not presuppose that it is a particular form of play with its own rules. Rather the attitude that carries us through the activity, a playful attitude, turns the activity into play. Our activity has no rules, though it is certainly intentional activity and we both understand what we are doing. The playfulness that gives meaning to our activity includes uncertainty, but in this case the uncertainty is an openness to surprise. This is a particular metaphysical attitude that does not expect the world to be neatly packaged, ruly. Rules may fail to explain what we are doing. We are not self-important, we are not fixed in particular constructions of ourselves, which is part of saying that we are open to self-construction. We are not worried about competence. We are not wedded to a particular way of doing things. While playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in, any particular 'world.' We ar ~ María Lugones

What is there in places empty of matter? and Whence is it that the sun and planets gravitate toward one another without dense matter between them? Whence is it that Nature doth nothing in vain? and Whence arises all that order and beauty which we see in the world? To what end are comets? and Whence is it that planets move all one and the same way in orbs concentrick, while comets move all manner of ways in orbs very excentrick? and What hinders the fixed stars from falling upon one another? ~ Isaac Newton

Do you know what investing for the long run but listening to market news everyday is like? It's like a man walking up a big hill with a yo-yo and keeping his eyes fixed on the yo-yo instead of the hill. ~ Alan Abelson

Most things can be fixed with duct tape and extension cords. ~ Jase Robertson

We do not seek the unanimity that comes to those who water down all issues to the lowest common denominator - or to those who conceal their differences behind fixed smiles - or to those who measure unity by standards of popularity and affection, instead of trust and respect. We are allies. This is a partnership, not an empire. We are bound to have differences and disappointments - and we are equally bound to bring them out into the open, to settle them where they can be settled, and to respect each other's views when they cannot be settled. ~ John F. Kennedy

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I just did an arc with Warren Ellis - and no one else on the planet could get away with this, because I think this is like harassment? - But Warren felt like there was a depiction of Spider-Woman where it looked like her waist perhaps didn't contain any internal organs. And he suggested very quietly ... 'You should fix that, or else I will come to your house and nail your feet to the floor and set your house on fire.' ... And it totally got fixed! ~ Kelly Sue DeConnick

In my considered opinion, salary is payment for goods delivered and it must conform to the law of supply and demand. If, therefore, the fixed salary is a violation of this law - as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together and both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other only earns two thousand , or when lawyers and hussars, possessing no special qualifications, are appointed directors of banks with huge salaries - I can only conclude that their salaries are not fixed according to the law of supply and demand but simply by personal influence. And this is an abuse important in itself and having a deleterious effect on government service. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I've always hated dating," I said instead. "In fact, if I could bypass all that might I bestow upon you a kiss business, I would. Why can't we all just skip to the comfortable part of relationships? Go straight to the bit where you can walk around in your undies, let farts go and blame them on the dog, and leave the door open when you're taking a piss?"
"First of all, there is no part of a relationship that should involve that last bit, and second of all, dating is the best part. All those butterflies and excitement, the sexual tension. Wanting to skip to the comfortable bit is laziness. It means you don't have to put in any effort to woo someone. Also, if memory serves, you've never had a relationship that lasted more than six months."
"Thanks for the reminder, oh Sarah of Ye Old Wet Blanket," I groused, but she was right. I hadn't dated anyone for longer than six months; and even then it hadn't really been a relationship with any meaningful or lasting impact.
"Ye Old Wet Blanket was my grandmother's name, I'll have you know...You're thirty years old, practically a baby. You've just burned yourself out. You need to find the excitement in life again, the thrill to be had from simple things."
"I do get a thrill from simple things," I countered. "Didn't I mention I fixed my tap this weekend? And I had Earl Grey tea with breakfast."
"Oh. Stop. Too much excitement. I can't handle it. ~ L.H. Cosway

Simon had never noticed before, but she wore a silver ring on her right hand, with a partner of flames around the band of it, and a carved L in the center. It reminded him of the ring Clary wore around her neck, with its design of stars.
"It's the Lightwood family ring," she said, noticing where his gaze was fixed. "Every family has an emblem. Ours is fire. ~ Cassandra Clare

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever. ~ Mark Twain

I never forget my old days and I never fly too high I have my feet fixed firmly on the ground! ~ Natasha Henstridge

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself. ~ Joan Didion

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist. ~ Tim O'Brien

Are you afraid of me?
Uh ... yes.'
The smile stayed fixed in place. 'You should be. You locked me in a refrigerator truck with three dead people. Sooner or later I'm going to get you for it. ~ Janet Evanovich

The Council also commands933 that the public services of the Church shall not be celebrated in the vulgar tongue, but in a fixed language, each one according to the ancient formularies approved by the Church. ~ Francis De Sales

As strange as it sounds, broken people are fixed by other broken people. It's God's economy. ~ Charles Martin

Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. Pa? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The future is fixed.
The past ever-changing ~ Lynda Barry

Things that were never together weren't meant to be fixed. ~ Lisa De Jong

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. ~ George Santayana

I was in error when I saw him as fixed and stable and thought I would have him forever. He was never fixed, nor stable, but always just a passing, temporary energy-burst. ~ George Saunders

I haven't tried this with anyone ... signifacant in a long time. It's never worked before."
"You haven't had sex before?"
"I have. But not with anyone i cared about or ... knew. One-time things. That's all."
"That's all-ever?"
"It's not like they 've been tons of them. There were more before, in high school, than there have been the last three years."
"Lucas? I said yes, and i meant it. I want this-as long as you have protection, i mean. I want this, with you. So this is okay. Please don't ask me to say stop."
"I want it to be better than okay. You deserve better than okay."
"You 're shaking, Jacqueline. Do you want to-"
"No." "I'm just a little cold."
"Better?"
"Yes."
"You know you can say it. But i'm not asking you to, this time."
"Good."
His earlier hesitation gone, he removed the last scraps of fabric we were wearing, fixed the condom in place, kissed me fiercely and rocked into me. ~ Tammara Webber

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come. ~ Herman Melville

The history of the Bible is one of perpetual revolution. In that light, we might begin to think about the Bible not so much as a fixed thing but as a dynamic, vital tradition. In light of its history, the Bible looks less like a rock than a river, continually flowing and changing, widening and narrowing, as it moves downstream.

For some, thinking about the Bible as a river and not a rock is liberating. That rock has been a millstone around the neck and a tombstone that won't be rolled away. But for others, seeing it this way can be disorienting. That rock has promised solid foundation in a stormy world. Cling to it or be swept away. ~ Timothy Beal

Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia. ~ Henry Miller

I twirl away, then back to him, staying on my toes, my hips always lightly rotating. He reacts clumsily at first, but soon the awkwardness fades away and he begins matching my movements, reflecting them in reverse. We dance like this, wrist to wrist, twirl and turn, step for step, for several more minutes. He holds my gaze, our eyes connecting at every turn, anticipating one another's movements.
His pulse is so strong against my wrist that it echoes through me, almost like a heartbeat of my own. My skin warms; my breath catches in my throat. I know how closely I dance along the line of destruction, but I cannot pull myself away. He is intoxicating, his force of life an addiction I cannot refuse. I have not felt this alive in centuries, not since you, Habiba, when you taught me the dance of Fahradan. Ours was a dance of giddy laughter, a dance of friends, sisters, a dance of life and youth and hope.
But this dance is different.
It is not I but he who entices, reversing the ancient roles of the dance. And I resist because I must, because if I don't, because if I give in to the all-too-human desires racing through me - then it is Aladdin who will pay the terrible price.
"Stop." I drop my wrists and step away, and he does the same, still caught up in mirroring me. Except that he is breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling with exertion, his eyes filled with a strange, wondrous, curious look as he stares at me. He moves closer, his eyes fixed on mine, an ~ Jessica Khoury

I was Juliet and Quinn was Romeo, and the lines weren't dead black-and-white words on a page but somehow alive, as natural and real as the argument we'd had about the spider and the fly. The rows of empty seats were gone, and we were in a candlelit ballrooom, wrapped in our own cocoon of words. But the playful banter of our words couldn't mask what we both knew
that after this, nothing would be the same .
And then we got to the kissing part, which we'd only read through together and had never really rehearsed. But it didn't matter, because I was still Juliet and Quinn was still Romeo, his gray-green eyes fixed on mine. And when he bent to kiss me, it was Romeo's lips on Juliet's.
Even so, Juliet was just as stunned as I would've been. When I said the last line, I was speaking for both of us. You kiss by the book. ~ Jennifer Sturman

Tis a barbaric fancy," said Roxholm thoughtfully as he turned the stem of his glass, keeping his eyes fixed on it as though solving a problem for himself. "A barbaric fancy that a woman needs a master. She who is strong enough is her own conqueror
as a man should be master of himself. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

All these stupendous objects are daily around us; but because they are constantly exposed to our view, they never affect our minds, so natural is it for us to admire new, rather than grand objects. Therefore the vast multitude of stars which diversify the beauty of this immense body does not call the people together; but when any change happens therein, the eyes of all are fixed upon the heavens. ~ Saint Basil

When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it - immediately. ~ Stewart Butterfield

This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here - the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos. ~ Frank Herbert

The past is something that can not be fixed, but sets an example to fix the present to better the future. ~ John Yang Aka Private83

But millions at one time, beyond gender or race, had their attention fixed on her, and with that power, she chose to flash the word "feminist" all over our TV screens. If that don't do nothin' but make people Google the word, then that should make every feminist in the world proud. ~ Lizzo

Be an experimental person. Break up fixed routines. Expose yourself to new restaurants, new books, new theaters, new friends; take a different route to work someday, take a different vacation this year, do something new and different this weekend. ~ David J. Schwartz

It is painful to comprehend how the mind becomes fixed little by little as time goes by. The mind is the executioner of reality, the slayer of the true; the mind is the destroyer of love. ~ Samael Aun Weor

They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies. As ~ Cormac McCarthy

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning. ~ Tom Robbins

We arrived in Vermont expecting to fix up the old lake house. But in the end, it was the house that fixed us. ~ Sarah Ockler

Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel. I could make out about a dozen human figures scattered among the library's corridors and platforms. Some of them turned to greet me from afar, and I recognized the faces of various colleagues of my father's, fellows of the secondhand-booksellers' guild. To my ten-year-old eyes, they looked like a brotherhood of alchemists in furtive study. My father knelt next to me and, with his eyes fixed on mine, addressed me in the hushed voice he reserved for promises and secrets. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Tell them I'm like you," Gavriel said as they began to slow down.
Aidan laughed. "I think they can see you're not like us anymore."
"No," he said. "Tell them you know me. That I'm like you, one of you. From the party. Tell them."
"Wait," said Winter. "Wait. Is he saying he wasn't at the party? Did you meet him by the side of the road? Did you pick up a hitchhiker who coincidentally turned out to be a vampire?"
Gavriel fixed his gaze on Winter. "You know me," he said, and a chill went up Tana's spine. "You've known me since outside the rest stop, when I turned and the light hit my face."
"What does he mean?" Midnight asked.
"I don't know," Winter said in an odd voice. "Nothing. ~ Holly Black

Q: Why do you think that people are so protective of their egos? Why is it so hard to let go of one's ego? A: People are afraid of the emptiness of space, or the absence of company, the absence of a shadow. It could be a terrifying experience to have no one to relate to, nothing to relate with. The idea of it can be extremely frightening, though not the real experience. It is generally a fear of space, a fear that we will not be able to anchor ourselves to any solid ground, that we will lose our identity as a fixed and solid and definite thing. This could be very threatening. ~ Chogyam Trungpa

Quote from my future book "Beyond the Absurd":
"Psychologists have finally proven that the entire justice system's deep motives and its idea as a whole, which have existed for thousands of years, are completely false, since they rest upon empty human delusions. Namely, the delusion that people can control or change the future and win over the evil that has already taken place. According to the studies, this is impossible, since it's the evil of the moment that makes the world go round and this is a fixed constant". ~ Alexandar Tomov

She never indulged in reveries or tried to be clever in her conversation; she seemed to have drawn a line in her mind beyond which she never went. It was quite obvious that feelings, every kind of relationship, including love, entered into her life on equal terms with everything else, while in the case of other women love quite manifestly takes part, if not in deeds, then in words, in all the problems of life, and everything else is allowed in only in so far as love leaves room for it. The thing this woman esteemed most was the art of living, of being able to control oneself, of keeping a balance between thought and intention, intention and realization. You could never take her unawares, by surprise, but she was like a watchful enemy whose expectant gaze would always be fixed on you, however hard you tried to lie in wait for him. High society was her element, and therefore tact and caution prompted her every thought, word, and movement. ~ Ivan Goncharov

Ben's dead," he says not moving or breaking his stare.

"And?"

"Just thought you should know," he says, looking at me in the eyes like he's waiting for me to confess.

"Thanks for waking me up to share the information," I tell him. "Where's Venessa?"

"At home," he says. "Needed to see you first, alone."

"Quit looking at me like that, partner," I tell him. "I ain't left this floor all night." Which isn't a lie. Ben's room is on this floor, but he doesn't know I know that.

"Even if you did, you know I wouldn't - "

"Partner," I tell him straight, letting him figure it out. "I didn't shut off his life support."

After he blinks several times he gives me that smirk. He looks around me to my sleeping wife and then back at me and tells me straight, too. "Go back to sleep partner. You look like shit."

With that he gets up and walks out.

Staring at the door he walks out of, I smile. He gets it. Turns out the staff at that front desk got it, too. They didn't stop my wife from doing what she needed to do; seems like they had other shit going at that time. Heard through the grapevine one of the women taken and held by Ben happened to work on this very floor. It also turns out the coffee pot wasn't working and it was an all hands on deck kinda thing to get it fixed. I get it, the women need their coffee. They also didn't run to his aid until I had my wife safe back in her bed. Those ~ K.S. Adkins

If you can't afford the good food or if you can't afford health care or if you don't have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can't get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game-bzzzzz-thanks for playing extreme capitalism. ~ Marc Maron

What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a notion fixed, canonic, and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When something gets broken, it can be fixed. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher ~ Gregory B. Sadler

a good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving" Taoist dictum quoted by Sam Miller ~ Sam Miller

I knew his face when he came. Of course I knew it. Even a Star dreams. I have been dreaming a long time, and I watched the glittering cord of that man's life spool out until it intersected with mine, and how the sparks lit the grass at my feet! I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other. But Stars, you know, are fixed in their courses, and we can no more change the throttling paces of orbit than a rabbit can shorten its ears. I saw his cord lashing and snapping in the dark, and could do nothing. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I have had to make do. Whose eyes had he been looking into, all those years? Cristina wondered as she leaned forward. She didn't know why she did it, exactly; maybe it was the way his eyes stayed fixed on hers, as if he couldn't imagine anything more fascinating than looking at her. ~ Cassandra Clare

Japanese universities have a chair system that is a fixed hierarchy. This has its merits when trying to work as a laboratory on one theme. But if you want to do original work you must start young, and young people are limited by the chair system. Even if students cannot become assistant professors at an early age they should be encouraged to do original work.
... Industry is more likely to put its research effort into its daily business. It is very difficult for it to become involved in pure chemistry. There is a need to encourage long-range research, even if we don't know its goal and if its application is unknown. ~ Kenichi Fukui

The widest, most open, most accepting aperture, the one providing the narrowest, most demanding depth of field. She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman's monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens's diaphragm - elegantly composed of nine leaf-shutter blades - to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise. ~ David Cronenberg

It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened. ~ George Orwell