Fractured Folktale Quotes

He spoke!" Ivan said, eyes wide. "The dog talked! Oh my god."
"An ancient witch you can believe in, but not a talking dragon that looks like a dog?" Chudo-Yudo said, sounding slightly piqued. "Hmph. Young people today have such limited imaginations. ~ Deborah Blake

I was watching while you're dancing away,
our love got fractured in the echo and sway.
How come everybody wants to be your friend?
You know that it still hurts me just to say it. ~ Elvis Costello

Even though my fear was detonating over and over like bombs dropping, the fragile and fractured wings of my heart dared to beat as well, and alongside all that fear and all that gratitude, I felt the first precious rush of hope. ~ Shauna Niequist

I won the parental lottery. Most of the kids I grew up with either came from really fractured homes, or really violent ones. I went home to a very traditional, good Irish Catholic family. ~ Dennis Lehane

At the heart of the fractured soul of America is the frightening chasm of race. ~ Manning Marable

A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, "What is the earliest sign of civilization?" The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.

Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, "A healed femur."

A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.

Mead explained that where the law of the jungle - the survival of the fittest - rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur. ~ Ira Byock

My lip healed. So did my head. My pride stayed bruised, though, and my confidence was fractured. Those injuries, the ones that didn't show, I would have to live with. ~ Robert McCammon

And still

Your heart is fractured but it's still valuable. ~ R.H. Sin

Romney had tried to explain his reasoning to this chorus of confidants, but they were still urging him not to shut the door. They contended that even if he didn't want to launch a formal campaign right now, it would be a mistake to take himself entirely out of the running. They laid out a vivid, detailed scenario in which a fractured Republican Party - divided by a wide field of niche presidential candidates - fails to unite behind a single nominee in 2016, and ends up with a chaotic, historic floor fight at the national convention. Facing a televised descent into disarray, the GOP delegates would naturally turn to Romney - the fully vetted, steady-handed Republican statesman - for salvation. Your party might still need you, Mitt's loyalists insisted. The country might still need you! ~ McKay Coppins

Diagnosed incidentally with stage IV, grade 4 metastatic renal cell carcinoma, I had bone metastases in my femur (which eventually fractured), ulna, and cranium; five metastases in my lungs; and muscle metastases in my thigh and tongue. Yet six months after diagnosis, my treatment ended: I've not had a drop of anything since. ~ Dave DeBronkart

Jack felt arousal spiking through him, clouding his mind with the wanting, wanting this man, all of him, black and tarry, rotted with disuse, glorious and fractured and spilling out of the cracks. ~ Jane Seville

When I was 7, an old lady was driving too fast in my neighborhood and hit me with her car. I was running out of the house, and when I got halfway into the street, my mom saw the car and yelled for me to run back. As I turned around the car hit me, dragged me five houses down the road, and I fractured my collarbone. ~ Rutina Wesley

So when his tractor came to a smash-halt, the potato-digger rising up behind and then crashing back down, Bob was flung forward over the engine block and directly into the Dome. His iPod exploded in the wide front pocket of his bib overalls, but he never felt it. He broke his neck and fractured his skull on the nothing he collided with and died in the dirt shortly thereafter, by one tall wheel of his tractor, which was still idling. Nothing, you know, runs like a Deere. ~ Stephen King

Pickover's lively, provocative travel guide takes readers into the fascinating realm of mystic math, from perfectly strange numbers to fractured geometries and other curious nooks and crannies of ancient worlds and modern times. ~ Ivars Peterson

I stamped my foot and pointed more forcefully. "Off with you. Courtyard's that way. Be sure to clean those awful boots before coming back in."

"Someone told me I'd find a princess of great worth here.

One with the strength to be the hero this realm needs." He stared at me with those unsettling blue eyes. They were cold, like ice water - made me shiver from head to toe. Then his gaze seemed to search even deeper. Finally, he looked through me, like I was nothing. "It seems she was mistaken. ~ Betsy Schow

In the chaos of this world, where we carom and collide in the everyday turbulence, there's something about the specific gravity of the helpless individual, the lost and the fractured, that draws kindness from us, like venom from a wound. ~ David Stuart MacLean

You know, I once had a little boy in Hiddleston come up to me and ask if I conjured up the hartsstone."
"What did you tell him?" he asked.
She spoke in her scratchy, witchy voice, "Why of course I do. Every full moon, my boy. And the wolves howl. And the fairies rise from their bowers, then we dance in a round, breathing in the powerful magic of the hartstone. ~ Juliette Cross

Many of us fear women. WE are afraid of woman as woman, longing for her as virgin or as madonna or as whore. It is not by becoming a woman that we will address this fear. It is by becoming the things she touches, the spaces she moves through, the fractured gestures that are not signs in themselves but are nonetheless hers and thus a part of her. If we discover the weight of these small things, then she will appear not as an idea but as a life and a totality. ~ Eleanor Catton

I imagine you not telling me to whisper. I imagine you not saying oh don't say this literally. You want me to evoke as opposed to mere describing. You want me to be an invisible scribe that an octoepoose was hiding. I'm not sure if my facial features are an autograph that your Picasso smile is signing. Infamous for the mirror I shook when my sock puppets were pining? I am not just a fish that you gave wings to! I don't simply flop in the air whenever you brush some mannequinn's hair. There is a reason for the bad timing. Exquisite imbalances. A child enjoying the pink sky. I won't say that is my clue! Playing The Beatles on a kazoo is beautiful oooh ooooh
Your laughter is a woman with alot of eyeballs on her stomach that pretends that she doesn't see the colors of all them songs. In the pre dawn hours we dance with delusions and illusions. The eternal seamstress does not care for Frakenstein's dress(she still loves our unique caress ) She loves and laughs despite some so-called scientist. Where is that emperor and his nakedness! Darling, our atoms need never split. We compliment in so many ways that all our night's and days have become one swirling sunrise/sunset that only true lovers can scoff at(those who shhhhh) The flower is not passive or apologetic. It blooms through the fractured net. Floating magnetic(eep eeep)
You are not just some seductress. You are the leader of an elite group of intergalactic seductress impersonators who reveal corruption but then ch ~ Junipurr- Sometimes Trudy

Verte was the kingdom's head sorceress, oracle, palace grump, and the only reason I hadn't died of sheer boredom.... One time, I blew up her caudron trying to make soup. In retaliation, she sent me a billy goat that ate my entire closet's contents. ~ Betsy Schow

I am not afraid of death threats, but I am appalled that so many people are capable of so much wrong spelling and fractured grammar! ~ Miriam

Season late, day late, sun just down, and the sky
Cold gunmetal but with a wash of live rose, and she,
From water the color of sky except where
Her motion has fractured it to shivering splinters of silver,
Rises. Stands on the raw grass. Against
The new-curdling night of spruces, nakedness
Glimmers and, at bosom and flank, drips
With fluent silver. The man,

Some ten strokes out, but now hanging
Motionless in the gunmetal water, feet
Cold with the coldness of depth, all
History dissolving from him, is
Nothing but an eye. Is an eye only. Sees

The body that is marked by his use, and Time's,
Rise, and in the abrupt and unsustaining element of air,
Sway, lean, grapple the pond-bank. Sees
How, with that posture of female awkwardness that is,
And is the stab of, suddenly perceived grace, breasts bulge down in
The pure curve of their weight and buttocks
Moon up and, in swelling unity,
Are silver and glimmer. Then

The body is erect, she is herself, whatever
Self she may be, and with an end of the towel grasped in each hand,
Slowly draws it back and forth across back and buttocks, but
With face lifted toward the high sky, where
The over-wash of rose color now fails. Fails, though no star
Yet throbs there. The towel, forgotten,
Does not move now. The gaze
Remains fixed on the sky. The body,

Profiled against the darkn ~ Robert Penn Warren

I've got the perfect dress. It's going to knock your socks off."
Marcus wasn't sure if that was good or bad, but he couldn't wait to find out. ~ Deborah Blake

And you are a useless princess who knows absolutely nothing of the real world. You would be the very last person I'd choose to chain myself to. But apparently both our kingdoms - no. The whole realm needs this alliance, so what we want doesn't matter. I will do what I have to do, regardless of my personal feelings, and you will do the same. So sit down, grow up, and start acting like the kind of princess your people deserve." He snapped off the last syllable and abruptly let go at the same time so that I stumbled backward. ~ Betsy Schow

She ... grabbed her bra, clasping it and shoving her arms through.
"Ye harness your udders?" The man was insufferable.
"For your information, it's a bra - short for brassiere, something that wasn't invented until the twentieth century. ~ Amy Jarecki

To convulse reality from within, to demonstrate it as fractured spacing, became the collective result of all that vast range of techniques to which surrealist photographers resorted and which they understood as producing the characteristics of the sign. ~ Rosalind E. Krauss

The final entity was the beast. The steel juggernaut that raked claws made of screams along the bones of their soul.All of the pain that Jango had endured as a child had never left his mind. That pain had created a sort of primordial ooze in his fractured mind that sloshed and bled until the beast was birthed from the suffering. The beast lived in a cage forged of willpower deep in the recesses of the mad matrix of his splintered mind. It rattled the cage and roared for release, but he was loath to ever set the beast loose ... again. ~ Cedric Nye

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them.
One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives. ~ Ben Okri

I should at least have learned more about how it had come to be that Rema had abandoned her mother, before I asked her to marry - and hopefully not abandon - me. But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon and actually I'm glad love does that, I shouldn't complain about love or love's perspective - distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing. ~ Rivka Galchen

It seems like the more my body healed, the more fractured my mind became, and there aren't enough wires and screws to fix he breaks in it. ~ Katja Millay

And then he heard Mad-Eye Moody's voice, echoing in some distant chamber of his empty brain: Jump onto the desk ... jump onto the desk ...
Harry bent his knees obediently, preparing to spring.
Jump onto the desk ...
Why, though? Another voice had awoken in the back of his brain.
Stupid thing to do, really, said the voice.
Jump onto the desk ...
No, I don't think I will, thanks, said the other voice, a little more firmly ... no, I don't really want to ...
Jump! NOW!
The next thing Harry felt was considerable pain. He had both jumped and tried to prevent himself from jumping - the result was that he'd smashed headlong into the desk, knocking it over, and, by the feeling in his legs, fractured both his kneecaps. ~ J.K. Rowling

one day
you are going to fall in love
and instead of breaking
like before

you'll find you fit perfectly
into all the fractured parts
and rusted
worn-out spots

you'll realize you are more beautiful
than you ever could have dreamed
more stunning
than you ever imagined

you see
little love
the universe always knew
just how flawless you would become
when you finally took the time
to fall in love with yourself ~ Tyler Kent White

Paranormal romance gives me the opportunity to explore love outside of its traditional boundaries. Common themes are hunger and uncontrollable desires, but I like to push further into wounds that cannot be healed and the way love can still find its way into the cracks of a fractured soul. ~ Stephanie Draven

If only every member of the family could have grown as straight and strong as Ann Garrity's beech tree. But as fate and genetics would have it, both sides of Fred and Alice Springsteen's lineage came with a shadow history of fractured souls. The drinkers and the failures, the wild-eyed, the ones who crumbled inside of themselves until they vanished altogether. These were the relatives who lived in rooms you didn't enter. Their stories were the ones that mustn't be told. They inspired the silence that both secreted and concentrated the poison in the family blood. Doug could already sense the venom creeping within himself. ~ Peter Ames Carlin

Gerald Foos's explanation in his journal--he was 'only an observer and not a reporter,' and he 'really didn't exist as far as the male and female subjects were concerned'--were explanations that didn't surprise me because of his often-expressed notion that he was a fractured individual, a hybridized combination of the Voyeur and Gerald Foos ~ Gay Talese

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our humanity. ~ Bryan Stevenson

A ferocious growl drew my gaze to the back of the room, where a hairy beast wore a yellow ball gown. I tried to block out the memory of Beauty in that dress earlier this evening. ~ Betsy Schow