Gestures Quotes

They speak to each other through the magistrate, like warring children communicating through a parent, their words are extravagantly emotive illustrated with flamboyant gestures that are wasted on the empty court room ~ Clare Mackintosh

Dating is about grand romantic gestures that mean little over the long term. Marriage is about small acts of kindness that bond you over a lifetime. ~ Lori Gottlieb

I like stories of adventure. Especially if there's some kind of disaster involved."
The eyebrow remains arched.
I laugh. "I read the ones with happy endings, too."
Josh gestures towards my shelves. "You read a lot."
"Safer than going on a real adventure."
Now he's the one who laughs. "Maybe. ~ Stephanie Perkins

Great cataclysmic things can go by and neither the orchestra nor the conductor are under the delusion that whether they make this or that gesture is going to be the deciding factor in how it comes out. ~ James Levine

The light was crude. It made Artaud's eyes shrink into darkness, as they are deep-set. This brought into relief the intensity of his gestures. He looked tormented. His hair, rather long, fell at times over his forehead. He has the actor's nimbleness and quickness of gestures. His face is lean, as if ravaged by fevers. His eyes do not seem to see the people. They are the eyes of a visionary. His hands are long, long-fingered.
Beside him Allendy looks earthy, heavy, gray. He sits at the desk, massive, brooding. Artaud steps out on the platform, and begins to talk about " The Theatre and the Plague."
He asked me to sit in the front row. It seems to me that all he is asking for is intensity, a more heightened form of feeling and living. Is he trying to remind us that it was during the Plague that so many marvelous works of art and theater came to be, because, whipped by the fear of death, man seeks immortality, or to escape, or to surpass himself? But then, imperceptibly almost, he let go of the thread we were following and began to act out dying by plague. No one quite knew when it began. To illustrate his conference, he was acting out an agony. "La Peste" in French is so much more terrible than "The Plague" in English. But no word could describe what Artaud acted out on the platform of the Sorbonne. He forgot about his conference, the theatre, his ideas, Dr. Allendy sitting there, the public, the young students, his wife, professors, and directors.
His face was ~ Anais Nin

Without intention, all these postures, these breathing practices, meditations, and the like can become little more than ineffectual gestures. When animated by intention, however, the simplest movement, the briefest meditation, and the contents of one breath cycle are made potent. ~ Donna Farhi

Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent. I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them. ~ Milan Kundera

If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song. ~ Jean Giraudoux

What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures ... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth
an ordinary life. ~ Irena Klepfisz

I led her into the newsroom, removed the sheet, and pointed to the statue of the Bombinating Beast. She gestured to me that I should be the one to take it. I gestured back that she was the chaperone and the leader of this caper. She gestured to me that I shouldn't argue with her. I gestured to her that I was the one who had gotten us into the house in the first place. She gestured to me that my predecessor knew that the apprentice should never argue with the chaperone or complain and that I might model my own behavior after his. I gestured to her asking what the 'S' stood for in her name, and she replied with a very rude gesture, and I grabbed the statue and tucked it into my vest. ~ Lemony Snicket

Sometimes, one gesture comprises an entire drama, the accent of one word ruins an entire existence, and the indifference of one glance kills the happiest passion. ~ Honore De Balzac

It must be part of the inescapable human condition--each person ultimately deaf, impervious to other people's emotions, incapable of deciphering gestures, looks, or silences, all condemned to give painful explanations with words that are never the right ones. ~ Christine Féret-Fleury

What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals. ~ Temple Grandin

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one's face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one's lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because th ~ Nicole Krauss

Something changed in part of reality - my knees and my hands.
What science has knowledge for this?
The blind man goes on his way and I don't make any more gestures.
It's already not the same time, or the same people, or anything the same.
This is being real. ~ Alberto Caeiro

No exclusive," I said aloud, watching Al for his opinion and seeing him shake his head and hold his hands out in a "bigger" gesture. He didn't even know how large the offer was, and he thought I could get one bigger. ~ Kim Harrison

And suddenly the miracle happens. I look across at the woman who has just made some coffee and is now reading the newspaper, whose eyes look tired and desperate, who is her usual silent self, who does not always show her affection in gestures, the woman who made me say yes when i wanted to say no, who forced me to fight for what she, quiet rightly, believed was my reason for living, who let me set off alone because her love for me was greater even than her love for herself, who made me go in serch of my dream,; and suddenly, seeing that small, quiet woman, whose eyes said more than words, who was often terrified inside, but always courageous in her actions, who could love someone without humbling herself and who never ever apologized for fighting for her man - suddenly. my fingers press down on the keys. ~ Paulo Coelho

We are going to have to stop penalising people for making that most human of gestures- mistake ~ Jeremy Clarkson

But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. ~ Ayn Rand

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures. ~ Milan Kundera

Adam leans into my ear. I feel the soft whispers of his breath just before he begins to speak.
"You guys are disgusting, you know that, right?"
I look up, startled, and find Kenji frozen midmovement, his spoon halfway to his mouth, his head cocking in our direction. He gestures with his spoon at our faces. "What the hell is this? You guys playing footsie under the table or someshit? ~ Tahereh Mafi

Using a dog as a narrator has limitations and it has advantages. The limitations are that a dog cannot speak. A dog has no thumbs. A dog can't communicate his thoughts except with gestures. ~ Garth Stein

I can't do the same thing every night, the same gestures ... it's like putting on dirty panties every day. ~ Brigitte Bardot

...a relationship is one of those things that builds upon itself, incident upon incident. Words and gestures and phrases pile up, and in the end, they either make something that's strong and pleasing, or they're a sort of ramshackle mess and you know it's time to walk away. ~ Kylie Logan

Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it. ~ Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Later, when Ged thought back upon that night, he knew that had none had touched him when he lay thus spirit-lost, had none called him back in some way, he might have been lost for good. It was only the dumb instinctive wisdom of the beast who licks his hurt companion to comfort him, and yet in that wisdom Ged saw something akin to his own power, something that went as deep as wizardry. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the greet slow gestures of trees. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All human action is expressive; a gesture is an intentionally expressive action. All art is expressive - of its author and of the situation in which he works - but some art is intended to move us through visual gestures that transmit, and perhaps give release to, emotions and emotionally charged messages. Such art is expressionist. ~ Norbert Lynton

How magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity? ~ Laura Lippman

…She wanders with her sad mouth
And the grand mystery of amber eyes,
Across the night, toward forgetfulness
Like a star, fugitive and white.
Like a dethroned exotic queen
With comely gestures and rare utterings.

Her undereyes are violated horizons
And her irises–two stars of amber–
Open wet and weary and sad
Like ulcers of light that weep.

She is a grief which thrives and does not hope,
She is a gray aurora rising
From the shadowy bed of night,
Exhausted, without splendor, without anxiousness.
And her songs are like dolorous fairies
Jeweled in teardrops… ~ Delmira Agustini

According to Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild, if you're feeling an intense emotion like anxiety or anger, there are two ways to manage it: surface acting or deep acting. Surface acting involves putting on a mask--modifying your speech, gestures, and expressions to present yourself as unfazed...In deep acting, known as method acting in the theater world, you actually become the character you wish to portray. Deep acting involves changing your inner feelings, not just your outer expressions of them...Deep acting turns out to be a more sustainable strategy for managing emotions than surface acting. Research shows that surface acting burns us out: Faking emotions that we don't really feel is both stressful and exhausting. If we want to express a set of emotions, we need to actually experience them. ~ Adam Grant

To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs. ~ Andre Gide

We know about your presence that fills the world, that occupies our life, that makes our life in the world true and good. We notice your powerful transformative presence in word and in sacrament, in food and in water, in gestures of mercy and practices of justice, in gentle neighbors and daring gratitude. We count so on your presence and then plunge - without intending - into your absence. We find ourselves alone, abandoned, without resources remembering your goodness, hoping your future, but mired in anxiety and threat and risk beyond our coping. In your absence we bid your presence, come again, come soon, come here: Come to every garden become a jungle Come to every community become joyless sad and numb. We acknowledge your dreadful absence and insist on your presence. Come again, come soon. Come here. ~ Walter Brueggemann

You know about a person who deeply interests you more than you can be told. A look, a gesture, an act, which to everybody else is insignificant tells you more about that one than words can. ~ Henry David Thoreau

All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone. ~ Alberto Manguel

Knowledge is the reward of action. For it is by doing things that one becomes transformed. Executing a symbolical gesture, actually living through, to the very limit, a particular role, one comes to realize the truth inherent in the role. Suffering its consequences, one fathoms and exhausts its contents. ~ Heinrich Zimmer

Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak to each other from a safe distance, pretending all the years we soaped each other's backs and pissed in front of each other never happened. We don't use any of the baby talk, code words, or short hand gestures that had been our language of intimacy, the proof that we belonged to each other. ~ Amy Tan

We are hungry for tenderness,
in a world where everything abounds
we are poor of this feeling
which is like a caress
for our heart
we need these small gestures
that make us feel good
Tenderness
is a disinterested and generous love,
that does not ask anything else
to be understood and appreciated. ~ Alda Merini

A controlling relationship can start with over-the-top romantic gestures and gifts, and great protestations of you 'being the only one' and their love being a special kind of 'you and me against the world', often disconcertingly early in a relationship. There may be a charm campaign aimed at you and even friends and family, your other potential allies and 'protectors'. Suddenly or gradually there are rules, or flashes of mystifying rage or sulking designed to modify your behaviour to what they want you to do. Then the 'nice' person reappears, and all is well, he's romantic and doting again, before the next flashpoints of anger or rage or sullen tension. This is not a 'return to the good times'. It's the classic cycle of abuse, recognised ~ Kaz Cooke

Being close to someone meant more than being next to them after all, it meant more than simply having spent a lot of time with them. Being close to someone meant the entire rhythm of that person's life was synchronized with yours, it meant that each body had to learn how to respond to the other instinctually, to its gestures and mannerisms, to the subtle changes in the cadence of its speech and gait, so that all the movements of one person had gradually come to be in subconscious harmony with those of the other. ~ Anuk Arudpragasam

He grabs my arm and pulls me into his embrace. I close my eyes and it's perfection. The kiss is needy and desperate even if it's closed mouth. It's the things we don't say. Words like, I needed you more than anything in the entire world and here you are. It's the sentences neither of us can say. Because neither of us likes grand gestures or big words. But the kiss says it all, the desperate tremble of his fearful lips against mine, speak volumes compared to the words we may or may not be able to say. ~ Tara Brown

I think I've become more relaxed throughout my career. I don't feel the need to jump up and down and make a big noise to get people to pay attention to me. I don't need to do punk rock gestures or eat a cockroach or do something weird to say I exist. ~ Nicolas Cage

When I get out of here, if I'm ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. But ~ Margaret Atwood

Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend. ~ James Joyce

Magic is a combination of art and science. It's an art because of the traditional parts of things, the graceful gestures, the sonorous invocations, the use of colour, sight, sound, all of these things make it very much an art form. Yet it is also a science as well because we expect something to come of what we do. Using and creating these almost dreamlike inner landscapes in which we can live, move, and have our being. ~ Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki

Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. ~ Ayn Rand

Louis-Cesare and Ray were in trouble.
I could tell because I could see them, not clearly, but in fits and starts, little glimmers like a couple of ghosts, if ghosts made "oh shit" faces on the one hand agitated French gestures on the other. And that sort of shit wasn't going to go unnoticed for long.
Aaaaand it didn't. ~ Karen Chance

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle's estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual's gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. ~ Guy Debord

The endless procession of people and things that forms the world is for me an interminable gallery of pictures whose content bores me. It doesn't interest me because the soul is a monotonous thing and is always the same in everyone; it differs only in its personal manifestations and the best part of it is that which overflows into dreams, into mannerisms and gestures, and thus becomes part of the image that so captures my interest [ ... ] This is how I experience the animate exteriors of things and beings, in pure vision, indifferent as a god from another world to their content, to their spirit. I only go deep into the surface of other people, if I want profundity I look for it in myself and in my concept of things. ~ Fernando Pessoa

First love, with its frantic haughty imagination, swings its object clear of the everyday, over the rut of living, making him all looks, silences, gestures, attitudes, a burning phrase with no context. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them - you have to be like this or like that. ~ Raf Simons

The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric - but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her "life" boundaries. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures ~ Joseph Conrad

Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well. ~ Virginia Postrel

They were coarse and crude. They made rude finger gestures to one another and they were their scars like badges. They were a family, unbreakable, loyal and absolutely powerful when they stood together. ~ Christine Feehan

Sometimes I thought it was a good thing that he had gone blind, because that way he would never see me, never see my face, never see the look on my face when I was with him, which wasn't the look of a prostitute or a thief or a spy, but an expectant look, the look of someone hoping for anything and everything, from a kind word to a life-changing declaration.
There weren't many kind words, because Maciste didn't talk much, but there were kind gestures. And there were no life-changing declarations, or at least none I recognized at the time, though since then I've come to remember each of Maciste's words as a key or a dark bridge that surely could have led me elsewhere, as if he were a fortune-telling machine designed exclusively for me, which I know isn't true, though sometimes I like to think so, not often, because I don't lie to myself the way I used to, but every once in a while. ~ Roberto Bolano

If an alien lands on your front lawn and extends an appendage as a gesture of greeting, before you get friendly, toss it an eightball. If the appendage explodes, then the alien was probably made of antimatter. If not, then you can proceed to take it to your leader. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

He thinks of Elienad, lying beneath tables, listening to the inflections of lies. Watching the hesitations, the gestures, the tensed muscles. Learning a language the king was unaware he even spoke. ~ Holly Black

Cyclical time already dominates the experience of nomadic populations because they find the same conditions repeated at every moment of their journey: Hegel notes that "the wandering of nomads is only formal because it is limited to uniform spaces." The society which, by fixing itself in place locally, gives space a content by arranging individualized places, thus finds itself enclosed inside this localization. The temporal return to similar places now becomes the pure return of time in the same place, the repetition of a series of gestures. The transition from pastoral nomadism to sedentary agriculture is the end of the lazy liberty without content, the beg inning of labor. The agrarian mode of production in general, dominated by the rhythm of the seasons, is the basis for fully constituted cyclical time. Eternity is internal to it; it is the return of the same here on earth. Myth is the unitary construction of the thought which guarantees the entire cosmic order surrounding the order which this society has in fact already realized within its frontiers. ~ Guy Debord

I quickly realized that friendships without tomorrows, and the little anguishes of parting, were part of the pleasures of traveling. I resolutely avoided bores, saw only those who amused me. We spent afternoons taking long walks, nights drinking and talking, and then we would leave each other, never to meet again, and there were no regrets. How simple life was. No regrets, no obligations, my acts and gestures counted for nothing, no one asked my advice, and I knew no other rule but my whims. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Bond, especially Connery's Bond, was an existential hired gun with an aristocrat's tastes - just right for a time when class was a matter of brand names and insouciant gestures. ~ Richard Corliss

Turning your nose up at a genuine and sincere gesture of hospitality is no way to travel or to make friends around the world. ~ Anthony Bourdain

So, I begin each day with a gesture of cynicism, and close it with a gesture of faith; or, if you prefer, begin it by reminding myself that, for me at least, goals and objectives are without value, and close it by demonstrating that the fact is irrelevant. A gesture of temporality, a gesture of eternity. It is in the tension between these two gestures that I have lived my adult life. ~ John Barth

I do not spoil women ... I don't send them flowers and gifts ... I'm saving those gestures until I am an unpleasant old man who must resort to bribery to win a woman's synthetic affections. ~ George Sanders

Art is just a series of natural gestures. For God's sake, don't try to be artistic - all wild animals walk the same way. ~ John Marin

But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence of his head; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood, commanding then to attend to him); but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. But, no. Nothing would make Mr. Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding sympathy. ~ Virginia Woolf

Sometimes those silent gestures mean the most. They're the glue that holds our fragile lives together. ~ H.M. Ward

If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet that when B.B. King is playing the blues and when he is feeling the blues, the neural signatures are very similar. (Of course there will be differences, too, and part of the scientific hurdle will be subtracting out the processes involved in issuing motor commands and listening to music, versus just sitting on a chair, head in hands, and feeling down.) And as listeners, there is every reason to believe that some of our brain states will match those of the musicians we are listening to. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

The secret of attraction is to love yourself. Attractive people judge neither themselves nor others. They are open to gestures of love. They think about love, and express their love in every action. They know that love is not a mere sentiment, but the ultimate truth at the heart of the universe. ~ Deepak Chopra

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith. ~ Franz Kafka

My parents had a pub and each Sunday there was an accordionist. They have told me that when I was in my cradle, I already was imitating the gestures of the musician. ~ Toots Thielemans

I have reached far beyond my competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble with science and write. ~ Ernest Becker

Eventually I saw that the path of the heart requires a full gesture, a degree of abandon that can be terrifying. Only then is it possible to achieve a sparkling metamorphosis. ~ Carlos Castaneda

He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward. ~ Tanith Lee

Why do I love you? Because you looked into my eyes and saw me. Behind the painted beauty, the forced expressions, the practiced gestures and habitual politeness, you saw me - the pure, vulnerable core that is my true essence. Somehow, in a kind but knowing glimpse you stripped away the façade, and I will never forget the relief it was to finally be seen. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The apparatus of corrective penality acts in a quite different way. The point of application of the penality is not the representation, but the body, time, everyday gestures and activities; the soul, too, but in so far as it is the seat of habits. The body and the soul, as principles of behaviour, from the element that is now proposed for punitive intervention. Rather than on an art of representations, this punitive intervention must rest on studied manipulation of the individual:'I have no more doubt of every crime having its cure in moral and physical influence...'; so, in order to decide on punishments, one 'will require some knowledge of the principles of sensations, and of the sympathies which occur in the nervous system'. As for the instruments used, these are no longer complexes of representation, reinforced and circulated, but forms of coercion, schemata of constraint, applied and repeated. Exercises, not signs: time-tables, compulsory movements, regular activities, solitary meditation, work in common, silence, application, respect, good habits. And, ultimately, what one is trying to restore in this technique of correction is not so much the juridical subject, who is caught up in the fundamental interests of the social pact, but the obedient subject, the individual subjected to habits, rules, orders, an authority that is exercised continually around him and upon him, and which he must allow to function automatically in him. There are two quite distinct ways, therefore ~ Michel Foucalut

evening, they began to think that although he could never hope to be an Englishman, still it would be hard to visit that affliction on his head. They began to accommodate themselves to his level, calling him 'Mr Baptist,' but treating him like a baby, and laughing immoderately at his lively gestures and his childish English - more, ~ Charles Dickens

Every small, kind gesture we make affects the lives of others positively ~ Margo Vader

Light gesture and color of the key compliments of any photograph. Light and color are obvious, but it is just her that is the most important. There is gesture in everything. It's up to you to find a gesture that is most telling. ~ Jay Maisel

The paintings are more about physicality and gesture than meditation. I'd compare it to playing scales on the Cello - each sound (pitch and intensity) depends on the manner in which you hold and apply the bow. The same goes for the gesture of applying paint to a surface. ~ Stephen Beal

Gestures, in love, are incomparably more attractive, effective and valuable than words. ~ Francois Rabelais

Even small gestures of kindness have the potential to reap enormous rewards. Only the shortsighted man believes otherwise. ~ Erika Johansen

When you have truly come to know a person, Nella -- when you see beneath the sweeter gestures, the smiles -- when you see the rage and the pitiful fear which each of us hide -- then forgiveness is everything. We are all in desperate need of it. ~ Jessie Burton

There was a very small crowd - minuscule compared to the crowd that he gathered later - at a private home in Los Angeles. And we were standing on the back patio, waiting for him. And he came through the house, saw me and immediately put his hand up in the Vulcan gesture. He said, 'They told me you were here.' We had a wonderful, brief conversation and I said, 'It would be logical if you would become president.' ~ Leonard Nimoy

Ali and the woman whose baby crawled out on the roof


A woman comes to Ali. My baby has crawled out on the roof near

the water drain, where I cannot go. He won't listen to me. I talk, but he doesn't understand

language. I make gestures. I show him my breast, but he turns away. What can I do?

Take another baby his age up to the roof. The woman does, and the child sees his friend and

crawls away from the edge. The prophets are human for this reason, that we may see them

and delight in their friendly presence, and crawl away from the downspout. Muhammad calls himself

a man like you. Likeness is a great drawing force. Those of mean dispositions learn hatred

from each other, and they try to draw others in. Anyone whose haystack has burned

does not enjoy seeing someone else's candle lit. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Soon the two men were chattering away sounding excited, they could only be discussing trivialities yet their voices, their gestures might lead the observer to suppose they were arguing about life and death. Such was the Greek manner of conversation. ~ Margaret Yorke

I love her, and I love Mom, and I would do just about anything for them. But when you think stuff like that ... you think of grand, heroic gestures. Pushing someone out of the way of a moving vehicle. Standing between them and danger. Sacrificing something important. But it's not like that. Not at all. It's not one big moment, it's a thousand. It's every day. And you don't sacrifice just one important thing, you sacrifice a little more and a little more until you start to feel hollowed out. It's not the sacrifice that hurts so much as the thought that it will never end. That you're stuck in your fate, and nothing and no one can change it. You'll just keep giving and giving until you don't even know who you are. ~ Cora Carmack

Much has happened since last we met, Bartimaeus," he went on. "Do you remember how we parted?"
"No." I did.
"You set light to me, old friend. Struck a match and left me burning in a copse."
The crow shifted uneasily beneath the cleaver."That's a gesture of endearment in some cultures. Some hug, some kiss, some set each other on fire in small patches of woodland ... ~ Jonathan Stroud

The Constitution requires that Congress treat similarly situated persons similarly, not that it engages in gestures of superficial equality. ~ William Rehnquist

Well the you should sue Mc Donald's because the really fucked you up" *gestures at fat man* ~ Hancock

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. ~ Margaret Atwood

It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions. ~ Roland Barthes

COBB: Our dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake we realize things were strange.

Ariadne gestures around them-

ARIADNE: But all the textures of real life-the stone, the fabric... cars... people... your mind can't create all this.

COBB: It does. Every time you dream. Let me ask you a question: You never remember the beginning of your dreams, do you? You just turn up in the middle of what's going on.

ARIADNE: I guess.

COBB: So... how did we end up at this restaurant? ~ Christopher J. Nolan

The gesture is the thing truly expressive of the individual - as we think so will we act. ~ Martha Graham

We must open our eyes to admire God who hides and at the same time reveals himself in things and introduces us into the realms of mystery ... we must be pure and simple like children, capable of admiring, being astonished, of marveling, and being enchanted by the divine gestures of love and closeness we witness. ~ Pope John Paul II

In the spring, during the Festival of Flora, when Rome was crowded with visitors from all over Italy, Clodius's mob found itself for once outnumbered by ordinary citizens who despised their bullying tactics. Clodius himself was actually jeered at the theatre. Unused to anything other than adulation from the people, according to Atticus he looked around him in astonishment at the slow handclapping, taunts, whistles and obscene gestures, and realised - almost too late - that he was in danger of being lynched. He retreated hastily, and that was the beginning of the end of his domination, for the Senate now recognised how he could be beaten: by appealing over the heads of the ~ Robert Harris

Is a gesture of charity genuine or is it a kind of deep moral tax write-off? ~ Padgett Powell

I actually started to think a lot about the difference between a creative gesture and a noncreative gesture. I decided that all gestures were creative. Because you always have to make a decision at some point. ~ Andrea Zittel

Let us dig our gardens and not be elsewhere;
Let us take long walks in the open air ...
Let us bathe in the rivers and lakes ...
Let us indulge in games ...
Let us be more simple: simple and true in our gestures, in our words,
and simple and true in our minds above all. Let us be ourselves. ~ Robert Linssen

I tended to be hard on the egos of a certain kind of men. The ones who normally swept women off their feet had never moved me much, because I'd always felt that if they swept me off my feet they'd practiced on a lot of women before me, and would practice more with women after me. I'd rarely been wrong on that. ~Anita Blake ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Fanatics are picturesque, mankind would rather see gestures than listen to reasons. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche