Grubby Quotes

I read, go for walks and I love to garden. My hands are such a mess. People think I should have movie star hands, but they're just gardening ones. Always slightly grubby and with a bit of dirt under the fingernails. ~ Amanda Donohoe

Dena seemed about to respond, but instead, she belched again, a smaller belch that seemed unequal as a harbinger to the monstrous chunky gush that erupted from inside her. I held her hair back and looked away as she finished retching. Working with children had made me less squeamish
they were constantly presenting their grubby hands to your, having accidents
but at some point, disgusting was still disgusting, Especially with an adult woman. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

I have never understood, for example, how come a child can climb up on the roof, scale the TV antenna, and rescue the cat ... yet cannot walk down the hallway without grabbing both walls with his grubby hands for balance. ~ Erma Bombeck

He hates chain stores and fast-food restaurants, mass-produced items and fashionable clothes - any instance of something that is repeated across the world regardless of local context. These things deny the uniqueness of each moment and each person. They function as if we were all printed out of plastic like egg boxes, and they try to make us function the same way. They are the intrusion of perfection into our grubby, smelly, sweaty living place. ~ Nick Harkaway

It's the what if? The what then? And we know that if we go for it, if we risk it, we immediately stand to lose it. But weirdly, some part of us believes the feeling is two-way, because it must be; it's too special not to be. We believe that something's been shared, even if the evidence we have is ... what? A look that lasted a breath longer then we're used to? A second glance, when the glance could easily have been to check whether there are any cabs coming, or whether the jacket we're wearing that's caught their eyes would look good on their boyfriend, or why it is we seem to be staring at them.
I saw you. You don't use overhead handles on the train. Hoped it would jolt and you would fall to me. But no.
I smiled. These small moments, never said out loud, as formed and perfect as sweet little haikus, romance and longing carved out in the dust of a grubby city. ~ Danny Wallace

I want you to keep this. I want you to keep this in your trunk in your awful grubby room in the nunnery, and to take it out every night when I'm gone and look at it and say, Harry loves me, Harry's coming back in June to take me away to Europe, Harry's going to make up for all this work and misery and make me as happy as a man ever made a woman. ~ Beatriz Williams

I want to listen to Beethoven and Mozart. I want to read the best minds. I want to live with uplifting art. I don't want to live a grubby life. ~ Alexandra Stoddard

Another bottle was brought out and poured into the reservoir. Once more I climbed inside the car and pressed the spurter button. Once more nothing happened--and once more, when we looked inside the reservoir, we found it empty.
"Two litres!" I said. "Where has it all gone?"
They'd vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don't ask me why: it just did. It was as though I'd just witnessed a miracle: matter--these two litres of liquid--becoming un-matter--not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. I looked up at the sky: it was blue and endless. I looked back at the boy. His overalls and face were covered in smears. He'd taken on these smears so that the miracle could happen, like a Christian martyr being flagellated, crucified, scrawled over with stigmata. I felt elated--elated and inspired.
"If only..." I started, but paused.
"What?" he asked.
"If only everything could..."
I trailed off. I knew what I meant. I stood there looking at his grubby face and told him:
"Thank you."
Then I got into the car and turned the ignition key in its slot. The engine caught--and as it did, a torrent of blue liquid burst out of the dashboard and cascaded down. It gushed from the radio, the heating panel, the hazard-lights switch and the speedometer and mileage counter. It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin. ~ Tom McCarthy

The last guest lecturer to honor the students with her presence had been Isabelle Lightwood. And the 'lecture' had consisted of a stern and humiliating warning that every female in a ten-mile radius should keep her grubby littler hands off Simon's hot bod.
Fortunately, the tall, dark-haired man who strode to the front of the classroom looked unlikely to have any interest in Simon or his bod. ~ Cassandra Clare

He loved me, but I also think he was infatuated with somebody in me I wasn't so crazy about. If Nate was the one who saw Kate Pierson underneath my grubby disaffect when we met, David tried to strip away all of Kate's lovely lashes and wigs and iridescent outfits to reveal what he was confident was the mousy, wide-eyed ragamuffin little girl that he wanted to love me as, and who he wanted me to be. ~ Julie Klausner

The man who could not be discourteous to a ground-squirrel had sat in the courthouse abetting the cause of grubby-minded little men. ~ Harper Lee

Dagmar faced the Iron, quickly bowed her head. "King Gaius, I'm sorry about the confusion. I'm Dagmar Reinholdt, Vassal of
Garbhán Isle and Battle Lord - "
"And my piece of ass!" Gwenvael announced from the other end of the table while he dropped into one of the chairs. "So keep
your grubby Sovereign claws off her. ~ G.A. Aiken

It is perhaps too much to ask of hero worshippers that they peer back of the hero and consider the principal factor that shaped him for glory--that is, whoever it was that had charge of his grubby little boyhood. ~ Nancy Byrd Turner

If any of you haven't tried going to the movies alone, I suggest you do. It's not like I do it because I'm single; I've gone to the movies alone when I'm in a relationship, too. It's just a nice escape, time to zone out. Plus, nobody talks to you during the film, nobody puts their grubby hands in your popcorn, and nobody judges you for bringing in airplane bottles of vodka to spike your lemonade with. ~ Sarah Colonna

Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated the most massive, cynical fraud in human history. ~ Harold Covington

As far as I was concerned children had bipolar disorder. They were angry, unpredictable, emotional ambulance-sirens with pigtails, grubby hands and food-crusted mouths that twisted from smiles to frowns and back again as quick as a breath. No, thank you very much. If I wanted a three-foot warlord as my master, I'd hire a rabid monkey to do the job. ~ Tarryn Fisher

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism. ~ Daniel Bell

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. ~ Nadine Gordimer

It is that flavor exuded by women who have fashioned an earthy and simplified sexual adjustment to their environment, borne their young, achieved an unthinking physical confidence. They are often placidly unkempt, even grubby, taking no interest in the niceties of posture. They have a slow relish for the physical spectrum of food, sun, deep sleep, the needs of children, the caressess of affection. There is a tiny magnificance about them, like the sultry dignity of she-lions. ~ John D. MacDonald

Jealousy? Is this, too, part of Onigumo's grubby heart?"- Naraku ~ Rumiko Takahashi

I see you go bare-shod. This is most likely extremely sensible. Shoes are no end of trouble for girls ... How many have danced to death in slippers of silk and glass and fur and wood? Too many to count - the graveyards, they are so full these days. You are very wise to let your soles become grubby with mud, to let them grow their own slippers of moss and clay and calluses. This is far preferable to shoes which may become wicked at any moment. ~ Catherynne M Valente

When I was small, I never wanted to step in puddles. Not because of any fear of drowned worms or wet stockings; I was by and large a grubby child, with a blissful disregard for filth of any kind.
It was because I couldn't bring myself believe that that perfect smooth expanse was no more than I thin film of water over solid earth. I believed it was an opening into some fathomless space. Sometimes, seeing the tiny ripples caused by my approach, I thought the puddle impossibly deep, a bottomless sea in which the lazy coil of a tentacle and gleam of scale lay hidden, with the threat of huge bodies and sharp teeth adrift and silent in the far-down depths.
And then, looking down into reflection, I would see my own round face and frizzled hair against a featureless blue sweep, and think instead that the puddle was the entrance to another sky. If I stepped in there, I would drop at once, and keep on falling, on and on, into blue space.
The only time I would dare walk though a puddle was at twilight, when the evening stars came out. If I looked in the water and saw one lighted pinprick there, I could slash through unafraid--for if I should fall into the puddle and on into space, I could grab hold of the star as I passed, and be safe.
Even now, when I see a puddle in my path, my mind half-halts--though my feet do not--then hurries on, with only the echo of the though left behind.
What if, this time, you fall? ~ Diana Gabaldon

Reborn here in this grubby old hospital, surrounded by the sick and the dying, people who deserve a second chance far more than he does. But it isn't the pink-and-white cooing kind of rebirth. It's more like being wrenched from a warm, dark, comfortable place and forced out into a bright, frightening world where nothing is certain. ~ Peter Blauner

Linc didn't know if it was his imagination, but the streets seemed to have gotten older and dirtier - more so, surely, then was possible in the time that had gone by. What he remembered as the center of where the action was, and where all of life happened had turned into tired and shabby remnants of an age that was running down.

Had the store fronts always been so grubby with their cloudy windows, half hearted displays, the paint around the doors dulled and peeling like the once-high hopes of some forgotten opening day long ago? Had trash always stunk like this, piled in alleys and strewn along the gutters?

Above it all, high-rental buildings that had once thrust proudly toward the sky crumbled silently amid the winds, the rain, and the corrosive fames eating into them. They had degenerated into cheap hotels and apartments while business fled the cities for manicured office parks by the interstates.

But the people no longer stopped to gaze at these buildings, in any case. The figures on the sidewalks hurried on, avoiding each other's eyes, enwrapped in their own isolation.

Even those who stood or walked together aimed words at each other from behind facades that had become so second nature that even they themselves now mistook them for the persons atrophying within.

A city of brooding shells, inhabited by beings who hid inside shells. ~ James P. Hogan

There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And ~ Terry Pratchett

Hey ... yeah. Okay. Percy rubbed his eyes. Just his luck he was related to this grubby old dude. He hoped all sons of Neptune didn't share the same fate. First, you start carrying a man satchel. Next thing you know, you're running around in a bathrobe and pink bunny slippers, chasing chickens with a weed whacker. ~ Rick Riordan

They looked down on the landscapes of West 1, and then with that last step it was as if somebody had exploded a daisycutter bomb, scything away the greenery for miles around and replacing it with concrete, tarmac and steel, staining the shining river a turbid grey and penning it in with reinforced banks and bridges, all under a grubby, colourless sky. Joshua thought you couldn't have had a better demonstration of what humanity could do to a world, given a few centuries and a lot of oil to burn. ~ Terry Pratchett

Yes," he said. "But I wonder ... I've a peculiar feeling that I may never see you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a melodrama who gets shuffled offstage without ever learning how things turn out."
"I can appreciate the feeling," I said. "My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author. But look at it this way: inside stories seldom live up to one's expectations. Usually they are grubby little things, reducing down to the basest of motives when all is known. Conjectures and illusions are often the better possessions. ~ Roger Zelazny

Time passes, and as the hot midday sun and cool mountain nights alternately bake and freeze the blackened landscape of Vesuvius, something remarkable happens.
Gradually, the streams of cold lava are colonized by a lichen, stereocaulon vesuvianim. This lichen is so tiny that it is almost invisible to the naked eye, but as it grows, it turns the lava from black to silvery gray. Where the lichen has gone, other plants can follow- first mugwort, valerian, and Mediterranean scrub, but later ilex and birch trees, along with dozens of species of apricot.
Meanwhile, the clinkers and ash that covered the landscape like so much grubby gray snow are slowly, inexorably, working their way into the fields and the vineyards, crumbling as they do so, adding their richness to the thick black soil, and an incomparable flavor to tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, fruit and all the other produce which grows there. ~ Anthony Capella

One didn't understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one's hands and face and clothes clean. The world's surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort. ~ Chris Cleave

Billy Bob, as though he were in pain, doubled up on the bed like a jackknife; but his face was suddenly clear, his grubby boy-eyes twitching like candles. She's so cute, he whispered, she's the cutest dickens I ever saw, gee, to hell with it, I don't care, I'd pick all the roses in China.
Preacher would have picked all the roses in China, too. He was as crazy about her as Billy Bob. But Miss Bobbit did not notice them. ~ Truman Capote

The Poet Ridiculed by Hysterical Academics"

Is it, then, your opinion
Women are putty in your hands?
Is this the face to launch upon
A thousand one night stands?

First, please, would you be so kind
As to define your contribution
To modern verse, the Western mind
And human institutions?

Where, where is the long, flowing hair,
The velvet suit, the broad bow tie;
Where is the other-worldly air,
Where the abstracted eye?

Describe the influence on your verse
Of Oscar Mudwarp's mighty line,
The theories of Susan Schmersch
Or the spondee's decline.

You've labored to present us with
This mouse-sized volume; shall this equal
The epic glories of Joe Smith?
He's just brought out a sequel.

Where are the beard, the bongo drums,
Tattered T-shirt and grubby sandals,
As who, released from Iowa, comes
To tell of wondrous scandals?

Have you subversive, out of date,
Or controversial ideas?
And can you really pull your weight
Among such minds as these?

Ah, what avails the tenure race,
Ah, what the Ph.D.,
When all departments have a place
For nincompoops like thee? ~ W.D. Snodgrass

Above the sink in the scratched mirror he looked grubby and bloated, his beard a grizzled mess. He knew what these men could never know: A man is who he is. That doesn't change. A thief is a thief. A bad man stays a bad man underneath. He'd been set at seventeen. "You want to end ~ Rae Meadows

Actually, I wear the nail polish to hide how grubby my nails are. ~ Caroline Corr

Art is for the elite because it has a very high price-point of entry. And when one is in that social strata, they look down at illustrators because they just draw things directly for a few hundred dollars, and that's seen as being a bit grubby. Galleries allow artists to stay relatively divorced from the financial aspects of their trade. ~ Molly Crabapple

All books are in safe hands with me. They're my children, my inky children, and I look after them well. I keep the sunlight away from their pages, I dust and protect them from hungry hookworms and grubby human fingers. ~ Cornelia Funke

I remembered the taste of good Italian coffee in my London flat, brewed at the expense of time and a good deal of mess, compared to the sort that came out of machines in the office at the press of a button. I remembered walking to art school, through the windy winter, over hills and heaths: how much gladder I was to reach the rich warmth and to toast my hands on a radiator, than if I had gone by car. I remembered the nickels my father gave me as a child for being good: how much more I valued them than I would a dollar bill given all at once for no reason. Of course God as the ultimate parent could give happiness for the asking, just as my father could have given a handful of dollar bills, but at the age of five would I have known its value, or would it have looked to me just like a wad of grubby green paper? ~ Sumangali Morhall

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics - in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations - is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. ~ Charles Krauthammer

Will picked a single blossom from a gorse bush beside him; it shone bright yellow on his grubby hand. "People are very complicated," he said sadly.
"So they are," John Rowlands said. His voice deepened a little, louder and clearer than it had been. "But when the battles between you and your adversaries are done, Will Stanton, in the end the fate of all the world will depend on just those people, and on how many of them are good or bad, stupid or wise. And indeed it is all so complicated that I would not dare foretell what they will do with their world. Our world. ~ Susan Cooper

Get your grubby hands off my luxurious designer handbag! ~ Kirkland Ciccone

My thoughts about pornography tend to revolve around the fact that while very few of us are zombies, detectives, cowboys, or spacemen, there are an infinite number of books that are recounting the stories of those lifestyles. However, all of us have some sort of feelings or opinions about sex. And yet the only art form which in any way is able to discuss sex, or depict sex, is this grubby despised under the counter art form, which has absolutely no standards. This was what Lost Girls was intended as a remedy for, that there is no reason why a horny piece of literature, that is purely about sex, could not be as beautiful, as meaningful, and have as absorbing characters as any other piece of fiction. ~ Alan Moore

Drudgery is one of the finest touchstones of character there is. Drudgery is work that is very far removed from anything to do with the ideal - the utterly mean grubby things; and when we come in contact with them we know instantly whether or not we are spiritually real. ~ Oswald Chambers

The last 100 years of research into the human brain ... sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body ... our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine ... ~ Steven Pinker

This used to be a day in honor of the dead of World War One, but the living couldn't keep their grubby hands off of it, wanted the glory of the dead for themselves. So typical, so typical. Any time anything of real dignity appears in this country, it's torn to shreds and thrown to the mob. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor. ~ David Mitchell

I'm so sorry. I don't think the etiquette manuals cover this sort of situation." He leaned in close, his lips all but grazing her neck, and inhaled. "Mmm. You smell good, too."
She nearly choked. Took a step backwards, until her back met cold stone. "Th-thank you."
"That's better. May I kiss you?" His finger dipped into her shirt collar, stroking the tender nape of her neck.
"I d-don't th-think that's a good idea."
"Why not? We're alone." His hands were at her waist.
Her lungs felt tight and much too small. "Wh-what if somebody comes in?"
He considered for a moment. "Well, I suppose they'll think I fancy grubby little boys. ~ Y.S. Lee

What must strike any intelligent witch or wizard on studying the so-called history of the Elder Wand is that every man who claims to have owned it has insisted that it is "unbeatable," when the known facts of its passage through many owners' hands demonstrate that has it not only been beaten hundreds of times, but that it also attracts trouble as Grumble the Grubby Goat attracted flies. ~ J.K. Rowling

There are so mane shades of gray."
"Nope."
"Pardon?"
"Thers's no grays, only white that's got grubby ... ~ Terry Pratchett

Nor did the Antarctic represent to Shackleton merely the grubby means to a financial end. In a very real sense he needed it - something so enormous, so demanding, that it provided a touchstone for his monstrous ego and implacable drive. In ordinary situations, Shackleton's tremendous capacity for boldness and daring found almost nothing worthy of its pulling power; he was a Percheron draft horse harnessed to a child's wagon cart. But in the Antarctic - here was a burden which challenged every atom of his strength.

Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations, he had a talent - a genius, even - that he shared with only a handful of men throughout history - genuine leadership. He was, as one of his men put it, "the greatest leader that ever came on God's earth, bar none. ~ Alfred Lansing

We left the nursery in silence, Ma smoking a roll-up, looking like she hadn't slept in a week or maybe like she had slept for a whole week. When the nursery was just a grubby finger smudge behind us Ma looked down at me and said in her poshed-up telephone voice: "Will you speak to Janie about swearing? Fuckin' busybody!"

I laughed and swung our linked hands.

"Aye, fuckin' busybody."

Pleas of laughter escaped us and spiraled up into the hot, blue Scottish sky. We laughed all the way home ~ Kerry Hudson

But the other half of my motivation came from farther back in my brain, in the curious part that I inherited. It came from the spot in my skull that feels the burning need to unravel puzzles, finish crosswords, indulge in Internet games, and read all the mystery books I can get my grubby little paws on. Like it or not, need it or not, and want it or not, I can't leave a good mystery alone. ~ Cherie Priest

How you are in this place that has been sealed since the time of Caesar Augustus?" one of the archaeologists demanded in amazement.
"I was looking for my sister," Dan quipped.
"Your sister?"
"Oh - here she is." Dan reached through the opening and hauled out an equally grubby Amy. ~ Gordon Korman

My fingers are callused from gripping tree limbs, and my nails are short and grubby with bark. They are like the talons of a bird that lives only in trees. ~ Ned Hayes

Fact is, famous people say fame stinks because they love it so - like a secret restaurant or holiday island they don't want the hoi polloi to get their grubby paws on. ~ Julie Burchill

And that's what your holy men discuss, is it?" "Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example." "And what do they think? Against it, are they?" "It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray." "Nope." "Pardon?" "There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." "It's a lot more complicated than that - " "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts. ~ Terry Pratchett

The cactus of the high desert is a small grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it the wrong way. Yet from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born once each year a splendid flower. It is unpluckable and except to an insect almost unapproachable, yet soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites ~ Edward Abbey

In some organizations, they can succeed if they are simply good at making presentations to the board of directors or writing strategies or plans. The tragedy is that these talents mask real deficiencies in overall management capabilities. These talented performers run for cover when grubby operating decisions must be made and often fail miserably when they are charged with earning a profit, getting things done and moving an organization forward. ~ Tom Peters

Consequently, the town remained the same size for over 150 years. Its primary reason for existence was government. What saved it from becoming another grubby little Alabama community was that Maycomb's proportion of professional people ran high: one went to Maycomb to have his teeth pulled, his wagon fixed, his heart listened to, his money deposited, his mules vetted, his soul saved, his mortgage extended. ~ Harper Lee

I'm trying to be inspiring! I'm trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you! ~ David Nicholls

To the person who has anything to conceal - to the person who wants to lose his identity as one leaf among the leaves of a forest - to the person who asks no more than to pass by and be forgotten, there is one name above others which promises a haven of safety and oblivion. London. Where no one knows his neighbour. Where shops do not know their customers. Where physicians are suddenly called to unknown patients whom they never see again. Where you may lie dead in your house for months together unmissed and unnoticed till the gas-inspector comes to look at the meter. Where strangers are friendly and friends are casual. London, whose rather untidy and grubby bosom is the repository of so many odd secrets. Discreet, incurious and all-enfolding London. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I'm a secret nonmember of the establishment. This isn't a grubby kind of revolution I'm talking about. This isn't Che Guevara stuff. I don't want to live on berries in the woods - I don't think anybody does. ~ Louis O. Kelso

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan ... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self. ~ Jonathan Lethem

He stopped in a seedy alley in Holborn where he jumped down from the carriage, held a muttered conference with a dirty, one-eyed old woman, and climbed back in, his arms full of grubby cloth.
She wrinkled her nose. "Phew. What the devil is all that?"
"It's a dress."
"Oh, no. I'm not putting that on. It stinks of last week's washing up."
"It smells of the people. ~ Y.S. Lee

We look jealously around at others, noting their lack of grubby visible bra straps or crusty under-eye mascara sprinkles, and it's hard not to be resentful. Why you and not me? you think, squinting angrily at this person who probably has a beautiful apartment and an actual career and a boyfriend who never uses a skateboard to go from place to place.

But perhaps he has $12.37 in his checking account, or she has no idea how to cook anything, or he slowly lets his car rot from inside rather than pony up the thirty bucks to get the oil changed. Chances are good that person is looking at you the same way. ~ Kelly Williams Brown

She was too compelling to look at directly. Bright like the sun, bright and terrible. Only one other being could look upon her, and that was Death. And so…they became lovers."
He said the word like a caress, like velvet again, and my face began to heat.
"Together they forged great and hellish things," Jesse murmured. "Lightning and waterfalls that churned into clouds off the tip of the world. Chasms so winding deep that daylight never traced their endings. They dreamed through golden days and silvered nights. All the other creatures envied or adored them, because Death and the Elemental were destruction and creation joined as One. In the natural order of things, they should not have been stronger joined. And yet they were."
He shifted, coming closer to me. A hand settled lightly atop my chest, directly over my heart. At our feet the seawater splashed a little, as if disturbed by something rolling over in the dark, distant deep.
"Centuries passed, and mankind began to devour the earth, even the wildest places. They had tools to invent and wars to fight and grubby, short lives. Nothing about them dwelled in the magic of the ancient spirits. So although Death, the Great Hunter, prospered as he sieved through their villages, the Elemental, strong as she once was, thinned into a web of gossamer. Human lives simply tore her apart."
His hand was so warm. Warmer than I, warmer than the air, and still just barely touching me. The light behind my lids never lif ~ Shana Abe

One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most. ~ Meghan O'Rourke

Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys. ~ Theodore Roethke

To those of us who believe that all of life is sacred every crumb of bread and sip of wine is a Eucharist, a remembrance, a call to awareness of holiness right where we are.
I want all of the holiness of the Eucharist to spill out beyond church walls, out of the hands of priests and into the regular streets and sidewalks, into the hands of regular, grubby people like you and me, onto our tables, in our kitchens and dining rooms and backyards. ~ Shauna Niequist