Formal Cloth Quotes

Everyone stared in shock at the pool of white robes and the bright-red blood that began to stain them.
Behind her, holding a rock in both hands, stood Malcolm.
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"We really need to talk about this habit of yours," Raithe told Malcolm as he stared down at the pile of cloth and the frail Fhrey at his feet. ~ Michael J. Sullivan

Nuryevet wasn't a real thing--it was a story that people told one another. An idea they constructed in fantasy and then in stone and mortar, in lines of ink in labyrinthine law books, in cities and roads. It was a map, if you will, drawn on a one-to-one scale and laid out over the whole landscape like so much smothering cloth. So when I say there was nothing in Nuryevet worth saving, that's what I mean: the story wasn't worth saving, and none of its monstrous whelps were either--the government, their methods, the idea that they could feed their poor to the story like cattle to a sea monster so the wealthy could eat its leavings. ~ Alexandra Rowland

She looked like a hippie who'd been kicked to the side of the road maybe forty years ago, where she'd been collecting trash and rags ever since. She wore a dress made of tie-dyed cloth, ripped-up quilts, and plastic grocery bags. Her frizzy mop of hair was gray-brown, like root-beer foam, tied back with a peace-sign headband. Warts and moles covered her face. When she smiled, she showed exactly three teeth. ~ Rick Riordan

No one ever taught me, and I never had formal classes in pattern making, so I was like, Okay, I'll just drape, and I'll sew as I pin it. ~ Alexander Wang

He's not dead," I spoke up. "The last we heard, he still lived."

"He did?" Simus asked, then let his eyes slide over to Keir. "Losing your touch?"

A cry of outrage filled the tent. I grabbed at the blanket, as Keir stood, sword in hand. Simus had two daggers that appeared from nowhere. I looked at the privy entrance, to see Marcus standing there, waving my underthings in his fist and shaking them in the air. "Where did the likes of these come from?"

I jumped up and grabbed for them, but that scarred little man dodged me. "Those are mine!" I made another attempt, darting around the bed. Simus roared out his laughter and Keir got out of the way.

Marcus danced away again. "The Warprize accepts nothing, except at the hand of the Warlord!" His face was bright red, the scarring a dull white against it.

"Give me those!" I went after him again and this time managed to wrestle the cloth from his hand. Flushed and breathless, I shoved them behind my back and faced down Marcus, toe to toe. "You have no business - "

"Nothing, except at the hand of the Warlord!" Marcus roared out, spittle flying from his mouth.

"You bragnect! I bought them with his coin!"

Marcus blinked. Apparently it was an effective curse in their language, since it seemed to leave him speechless. His recovery was quick. "Could have asked Hisself or I."

I rolled my eyes, just imagining that conversation. ~ Elizabeth Vaughan

Little girl, who gave you permission to--Oh!" She bit off her words the moment that she noticed how well I was dressed, to say nothing of the two guards attending me. Her expression transformed from sour to sweet with stunning speed.
"Ah, noble lady, I see that you have a keen eye for quality," she cried. "You won't find better cloth anywhere in Delphi--warm in winter, light in summer, tightly woven, and proof against wind and rain. And just look at those colors!"
I did. They were all drab grays and browns. I held the first cloth up to the sunlight. If that was what she called a tight weave, so was a fishing net.
"I want a cloak," I told her, tossing the cloth aside. "Something long and heavy. It's for him." I nodded at Milo.
"Of course, just as you wish, I have exactly what you want, wait right here," she chattered. "I'll bring out the best I have, something worthy of the noble lord." She raised her hands to Milo in a gesture of reverence before ducking back into her house.
"'The noble lord'?" the tall guard repeated, incredulous. He and his companion snickered. Milo looked miserable.
"Ignore them," I told him, speaking low. "I promise you, before today is over, you'll be the one laughing at them. ~ Esther M. Friesner

Doras II was a somewhat absentminded king, It is said, when Death came to summon him, Doras granted Death the usual formal audience and then dismissed him from his presence. Death was too embarrassed to return until many years later- Ka'a Orto'o, Gnomic Utterances ~ Diana Wynne Jones

I am not romantic. I am stripped of romance as bare as the white tenters in that field are of cloth. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language. ~ John McWhorter

There is nothing we can do and nowhere we can hideas darkness as consumes our formal light , now shadowed by fear's linger. ~ Weyhey_harry

Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him. ~ John Green

I graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Communications and left formal education behind. ~ Sarah Zettel

Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d'avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next? If power is like stock shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof lately lost by B[olingbroke] has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock crashes, it never seems to turn up, but if power is conserved, then B's must have gone somewhere. Where is it? Some say 'twas scooped up by my Lord R, who hid it under a rock, lest my Lord M come from across the sea and snatch it away. My friends among the Whigs say that any power lost by a Tory is infallibly and insensibly distributed among all the people, but no matter how assiduously I search the lower rooms of the clink for B's lost power, I cannot seem to find any there, which explodes that argument, for there are assuredly very many people in those dark salons. I propose a novel theory of power, which is inspired by . . . the engine for raising water by fire. As a mill makes flour, a loom makes cloth and a forge makes steel, so we are assured this engine shall make power. If the backers of this device speak truly, and I have no reason to deprecate their honesty, it proves that power is not a conserved quantity, for of such quantities, it is never possible to make more. The amount of power in the world, it follows, is ever increasing, and the rate of increase grows ever faster as more of the ~ Neal Stephenson

I submit to you, Mr. President of Congress, my formal resignation as president of the republic. ~ Alberto Fujimori

Love is a cloth which imagination embroiders. ~ Voltaire

For some reason I have a visual intuition that allows me to design things in an interesting way, and I don't know where that came from. Because I don't have this formal training, I seem to drift in a different direction. ~ David Carson

They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I'd left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love - as who amongst us is not) ~ Karen Joy Fowler

One must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one's own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others ~ Allen Ginsberg

Agitated, he hooked a finger under his neck cloth and pulled it loose. "Care for her," he muttered. "How could that be possible? I've scarcely gone near the woman in weeks."
"I don't know how it's possible, but it seems to be true. In fact, I think you're half in love with her. More than half, perhaps."
Rising from his chair, Gray straightened to his full height. "Now wait. I'm half out of my mind with lust, I'll grant you that. More than half, perhaps. But I'm certainly not in love with that girl. Don't forget who you're talking to, Joss. I keep my conscience in my bank account, remember? I don't even know what love looks like."
Joss paused over his desk. "I know what love looks like. Using up all those Portuguese on one meal, killing a valuable goat, bringing out porcelain from the cargo hold…Crack one plate, and you'd lose half the set's price. Serving meat onto a lady's plate." He shrugged. "Love looks something like that."
Gray ran his hands through his hair, shaking off the lunatic notion before it could take root in his brain. "I'm telling you, I'm not in love. I'm just too damned bored. I've nothing to do on this voyage but plan dinner parties. And it's about to get worse. No chance of cracking a plate tonight." He jerked his chin at the lamp dangling from a hook, which on any normal night would have been swaying in time with the waves. "If you hadn't noticed, we're becalmed."
"I'd noticed." Joss grimaced and motioned for the flask. Gray tosse ~ Tessa Dare

Leo and I are kindred spirits
we're cut from the same cloth, ~ Kate Winslet

Justices look solemn in their formal black robes, but every so often they like to have a little fun by taking on a strange case, or overturning a presidential election, that sort of thing. ~ Christopher Buckley

A formal period in life where there isn't the worry of another person's dramas and insecurities can be of great advantage, especially when used for growing into the full and wholesome beings we intended to be when choosing to come to this material manifestation.
"Even after ending a long relationship or a marriage, it seems normal to have some alone-time to reflect, meditate, explore areas of interest, find meaning in one's suffering and try to placate the void felt in the heart before attempting to enter into new relationships, otherwise the same old mistakes will surely re-emerge.
"Once we're at the stage of life where we can stand our own silence, where we've made peace with our past, where we've accepted and grown from its lessons, and we would like to share our independence without becoming dependent on someone else for love and affection, then we can choose to commit to a two bodied intimate relationship. ~ Nityananda Das

The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not "harmonious" natures: they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener: but the eggs are always smaller, [Pg 64] though their books are bigger. The natural result of it all is the favourite "popularising" of science (or rather its feminising and infantising), the villainous habit of cutting the cloth of science to fit the figure of the "general public. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall.

After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers' heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn't watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank an ~ Neal Stephenson

At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head. "I'm ~ Donna Tartt

I am not a chef. I can't claim that title. The difference is a cook doesn't have a degree. A chef has formal education. It has nothing to do with talent or actual preparation - one just can't claim the title if you don't have degree. ~ Anna Pump

The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. ~ Michael Ondaatje

The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security. ~ Thomas Paine

There's a great freedom of forms and intonations in Luigi Fontanella's poetry. He doesn't take a strong formal stand; his poetry entertains moments of nearly proselike colloquial narrative along with moments of powerful lyrical tension. There is a movement of extremes, from powerful tonality to near atonality, and I like this a great deal; it's a stance that very effectively catches the spirit that makes work in poetry possible nowadays. ~ Giovanni Raboni

An amusing, if rather pathetic, case study in miracles is the Great Prayer Experiment: does praying for patients help them recover? Prayers are commonly offered for sick people, both privately and in formal places of worship. Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was the first to analyse scientifically whether praying for people is efficacious. He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?* Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. ~ Richard Dawkins