Hardness Quotes

I reach forward for him, expecting to feel the hardness of his chest or at the very least one of his arms coming to halt my progress, but there is nothing. I expand my reach a little and then, feeling slightly spooked, I listen ... Nothing. No breathing, no footsteps; nothing. ~ Felicity Brandon

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Plenty and peace breed cowards; hardness ever of hardiness is mother. ~ William Shakespeare

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.

Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she'd known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She'd just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.

Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.

Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own ha ~ Steven Erikson

He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a hot trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other ~ Ray Bradbury

Rachel arched, deliberately parting herself more widely over him, inviting him deeper into her body. She heard his intake of air, felt the raw tremor that shook him. Sweat sprang out on his skin, making him glow copper in the half-light. His lips drew back, baring his teeth as he fought for the control she was intent on denying him; then, with a rough sound somewhere between a groan and a purr, his hips jackhammered, and he thrust himself all the way in.
Time stopped. Rachel registered the wild dilation in Cullen's eyes, her own sense of unreality. She was backed up against a wall, her arms and legs wrapped around Cullen, and he was so deep inside her that her muscles quivered in reaction to his alien heat and hardness. ~ Fiona Brand

Words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, Vector-Force, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity. ~ Clark Coolidge

So let this disappointment do its work
My truest hopes have never failed
They have merely been buried
beneath the shoveled muck of disillusion
or encased in the carapace of self-serving desire.
It is only false hopes that are brittle, shattering like shells of thin glass to reveal the diamond hardness of the unshakeable eternal hopes within.
So shake and shatter all that would hinder my growth, O God. ~ Douglas Kaine McKelvey

What stopped you? Why didn't you help her?" [Naji]
"Cause you're my friend," I said. [Ananna]
All the hardness in his features melted away. "Oh. ~ Cassandra Rose Clarke

A few seconds more and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen; it will stop by itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fulness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born. And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet it can break it.
The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that there is, that SOMETHING HAS HAPPENED.
Silence.
SOME OF THESE DAYS
YOU'LL MISS ME HONEY ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Someday I want to go back to San Felipe de Jesus and find the Jesus in that place. Someday I want to trap myself in those washboard towns, Aconchi, Magdalena; I want to meet their saints someday. I would ask them if they have ever been in love.

I don't mean the syrup they lay on you in the media. I mean the meat of love, the hardness of it, the ice water that wakes you up into the heat of day. The Mexico of love, with rocks, pickup trucks, fat men and sugary children. Cock-sure, moonlit tequila, sweet lime, metallic bed for secret touching. Did they ever reach that side of life? Those mealy saints with their crosses on their backs, did they have enough stomach for the midnight lunch of love? ~ Laurie Perez

Our manly ways and stern simplicity wreak much confusion to the enemy's councils. For they are men yet garb themselves as women, wearing wigs and finery and lace. And for this offense if it be God's will we will come upon them in the night, from the rear, and penetrate their degenerate bodies with our holy truth. For we are manly saints and possess the full swelling hardness of our faith, which gushes forevermore from Christ's unyielding root. ~ Oliver Cromwell

America could carry on a two years' war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge, call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event. Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice. ~ Thomas Paine

As he wrapped her in white terrycloth, Kyle eyed his lingering hardness. "Again?"
Cole turned his bride to hug her from behind, nuzzling her neck. "I'll have you in my bed next," he said. "I'm going to make love to you so thoroughly that, tomorrow? You'll walk like John Wayne."
Her laughter sounded so free. ~ Debra Anastasia

The free spirit again draws near to life - slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It again grows warmer about him, yellower as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kind blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. he is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seem! what bloom and magic they have acquired!

He looks back gratefully - grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and self-alienation, to his viewing of far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights. What a good thing he had not always stayed "at home," stayed "under his own roof" like a delicate apathetic loafer! He had been -beside himself-: no doubt about that.

Only now does he see himself - and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What unprecedented shudders! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the joy that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall!

They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half-turned towards life: - there are some among them who allow no day to pass without hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe. And to speak seriously: to become sic ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In order to live a life of nonviolence one must be willing to soften -- to open one's heart to others, to forgive, to be compassionate, to be graceful, to be loving toward others and oneself, to be kind. We must be willing, in other words, to reject hardness as the measure of power and justice, and to embrace, instead, so much of what is commonly associated with the feminine. Indeed, it is no longer tenable – if it ever were – to assess and critique nonviolence in terms of whether or not it conforms to some masculine idea of the justice-seeking self. ~ Alycee J. Lane

He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best. ~ Willa Cather

I feel his hardness between us and when I look down, sure enough, there it is. It's big and yummy and pressed inside his pants like an encased sausage threatening to break free. ~ Ella Dominguez

The men were famous once. Some of them still are. They were the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and Brooks had brought them together, 24 summers before. He had picked them and provoked them and pushed them, sometimes irritating them and often infuriating them by his hardness and his aloofness, his scathing rebukes and his unrelenting mind games. ~ Wayne Coffey

In the beginning, when Twaslitri (the Divine Artificer) came to the creation of woman he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man and that no solid elements were left. In this dilemma, after pro-found meditation, he did as follows: he took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of the creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sun-beams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldnesss of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakravaka; and compounding all these together, he made woman and gave her to man.
(Written by scholars of the Vedic Age) ~ F.W. Bain

No, really Patrick. What do you want me to call you?"

King, I'm thinking. King, Evelyn. I want you to call me King. But I don't say this. "Evelyn. I don't want you to call me anything. I don't think we should see each other anymore."

"But your friends are my friends. My friends are your friends. I don't think it would work," she says, and then, staring at a spot above my mouth, "You have a tiny fleck on the top of your lip. Use your napkin."

Exasperated, I brush the fleck away. "Listen, I, know that your friends are my friends and vice versa. I've thought about that." After a pause I say, breathing in, "You can have them."

Finally she looks at me, confused, and murmurs, "You're really serious, aren't you?"

"Yes", I say, "I am."

"But... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly.

"The past isn't real. It's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past."

She narrows her eyes with suspicion. "Do you have something against me, Patrick?" And then the hardness in her face changes instantaneously to expectation, maybe hope.

"Evelyn," I sigh. "I'm sorry. You're just... not terribly important... to me. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

I continue to wonder,' he said, glancing down at Min, 'why you all assume that I am too dense to see what you find so obvious. Yes, Nynaeve. Yes, this hardness will destroy me. I know.' ...
You all claim that I have grown too hard, that I will inevitably shatter and break if I continue on. But you assume that there needs to be something left of me to continue on ...
That's the key, Nynaeve. I see it now. I will not live through this, and so I don't need to worry about what might happen to me after the Last Battle. I don't need to hold back, don't need to salvage anything of this beaten up soul of mine. ~ Brandon Sanderson

We can't," he said gently, ignoring the hardness and the pain in his groin. "You deserve better than something hot and fast up against a tree."
She swallowed. "I'm not so sure about that. ~ Susan Mallery

Now, my friend, I beg you to consider that this blindness and unyielding hardness is the very core of your iniquity, and to be convinced that you are thus blind and stupid is true conviction of sin. ~ Archibald Alexander

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England. ~ E. M. Forster

Reaching too deep into something not meant for you is full of pain. Figure out what you can have and work on that ~ Lalita Tademy

Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her. She will be June plus all that I contain. ~ Anais Nin

Here's some advice. Stay alive, says Haymitch, and then bursts out laughing. I exchange a look with Peeta before I remember that I'm having nothing more to do with him. I'm surprised to see the hardness in his eyes. He generally seems so mild.
'That's very funny,' says Peeta. Suddenly, he lashes out at the glass in Haymitch's hand. It shatters on the floor, sending the bloodred liquid running toward the back of the train. 'Only not to us.'
Haymitch considers this a moment, then punches Peeta in the jaw, knocking him from his chair. When he turns back to reach for the spirits, I drive my knife into the table between his hand and the bottle, barely missing his fingers. I brace myself to deflect his hit, but it doesn't come. Instead, he sits back and squints at us.
'Well, what's this?' says Haymitch. 'Did I actually get a pair of fighters this year? ~ Suzanne Collins

Lying flat, the small mound of their child nearly disappeared,with only a palm-sized hardness palpable below her navel. Darcy murmured nonsense over this evidence of their love, tickling Lizzy's skin so that she giggled and squirmed.
"What are you saying to him, love?"
"I am informing him that he has been gifted to the very best mother in the entire world. Also, I am reintroducing myself and thanking him for finally allowing me to feel him. If need be, I shall squeeze him several times a day. He can kick me whenever the whim takes him!" He glanced up into her mirth-filled face. ~ Sharon Lathan

The days which bracketed hurricanes were painful in their clarity, sharp edge clouds, blue sky hard as a cop's eyes. ~ N.K. Jemisin

I'd never once considered Tracy anything other than beautiful, but the hardness of the apocalypse had sculpted her into something almost otherworldly. Any chance I had to grab onto that, I was going to take it. ~ Mark Tufo

Nothing has saddened me so much in life as the hardness of heart of educated people. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life - this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial. ~ Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Allow the hammer of pain to split open the stone armor of your hardness; exposing the tenderness and beauty of your sweet spirit and sacred heart. ~ Bryant McGill

I feel so many things growing - my individuality, my confidence; I feel lines of my character growing stronger. I'm really sprouting, springing up, with mixed feelings of tenderness and bitterness, faith and disillusion, hardness and softness. I have never felt so clearly that my Self is - obscurely and stubbornly self-made. ~ Anais Nin

The older I grow the more sharply I mistrust words. So few of them have any meaning left. It is impossible to write one sentence in which every word has the bareness and hardness of bones, the reality of the skeleton. ~ Storm Jameson

I felt his hardness and I suddenly understood-an older girl would have understood long before-that this was the currency of desire. He was my betrothed. he desired me. I desired him. All I had to do was tell him the truth. ~ Philippa Gregory

The thing which grieves and oppresses my heart with respect to poor Scotland, is the hardness of heart manifest in the levity and cruelty with which they speak of others. ~ Edward Irving

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity. ~ Matthew Arnold

Because it is the hardness of the floor, and the abrupt halt in momentum, and the unyielding nature of the surface, that causes a thing to crack. Even if it is not that thing's fault. And then we talk about this thing being broken, or it needing to be fixed, and not what part of the floor has played in the matter. Never the part about the floor being a constant threat. Even if it is a nice floor. Even if everybody wants one just like it. ~ Tracey Baptiste

All kids want such glamorous knowledge. The darkness of it. The hardness of it. The realness of it. The cold fact that life really is fucked. And Sarah, with her Morrissey T-shirts and her unfiltered Camels and her sleep deprivation and her willful compliance with sexual hungers, she's been asking for this awful dispossession, with one mind she's been hot on its trail, and now that she's got it she longs to go back. If she could only go back, and eat the sandwich her mother packed her, with its thoughtful tomato. ~ Susan Choi

The sounds of the thwacks seem very loud to my ears and I am grateful for the privacy of the royal box. I keep count in my mind until we're beyond sixty strikes and then find myself becoming consumed with the burning warmth of my behind. I imagine the colour it must be already and know that Sir is far from done. I hear his exertion as he lays into my
sore ass again and feel his hardness straining against the confines of his suit. I want to rub myself against it, but I don't dare. Now is the time to take my punishment like a good girl.It's what he wants and what I need. ~ Felicity Brandon

I'd been reborn since Marlboro Man had entered my life; his wild abandon and unabashed passion had freed me from the shackles of cynicism, from thinking that love had to be something to labor over or agonize about. He'd ridden into my life on a speckled gray horse and had saved my heart from hardness. He'd taught me that when you love someone, you say it--and that when it comes to matters of the heart, games are for pimply sixteen-year-olds.
Up until then that's all I'd been: a child masquerading as a disillusioned adult, looking at love much as I'd looked at a round of Marco Polo in the pool at the country club: when they swam after me, I'd swim away. And there are accusations of peeking and cheating, and you always wind up sunburned and pruney and pooped. And no one ever wins.
It was Marlboro Man who'd helped me out of the pool, wrapped a towel around my blistering shoulders, and carried me to a world where love has nothing to do with competition or sport or strategy. He told me he loved me when he felt like it, when he thought of it. He never saw any reason not to. ~ Ree Drummond

Are you going to try it with me? Or do
you only take pleasure in attacking those
who cannot defend themselves?" Damen
heard the hardness in his own voice. He
held his ground. Around them, the tower
room was empty. He had sent everyone
else out. "I remember the last time you
were like this. You blundered so badly
you gave your uncle the excuse he
needed to have you stripped of your
lands. ~ C.S. Pacat

I don't think of myself as a hard man, but other people may think otherwise. You know you have obligations to do the best you can for people, for your job, for your shareholders ... it all has to be balanced between the hardness and the softness. ~ Frank Lowy

It's impossible to imagine my mother like that. I cannot imagine her softened, thawed, decayed, becoming sweeter as she spoils. I imagine her trapped in a mirror instead. A permanent image of her locked into a rectangle of hard brightness, open-eyed. ~ Laura Kasischke

God reared back and slammed into Day again. He was about to come but he wanted them to come to together. "Jerk that pretty cock for me, sweetheart." God released Day's hands so he could do what he'd asked. God kept their foreheads together as they watched their union. God pumping in and out of that tight hole, his dick glistening and pulsing. Day's hand working his cock back to full-on hardness. God was about to come. Fuck. God ~ A.E. Via

Elain had always been gentle and sweet - and I had considered it a different sort of strength. A better strength. To look at the hardness of the world and choose, over and over, to love, to be kind. She had been always so full of light. Perhaps ~ Sarah J. Maas

This must have been the side that Sam slept on when he snuck in here, because I recognized his scent. How ballsy he had been to come here night after night, just to be with Grace. I imagined him lying right here, Grace next to him. I had seen them kiss before - the way that Sam's hands pressed on Grace's back when he thought no one would see and the way that the hardness of Grace's face disappeared entirely when he did. It was easy to picture them lying together here, kissing, tangled. Sharing breath, lips pressed urgently against necks and shoulders and fingertips. I felt hungry suddenly, for something that I didn't have and couldn't name. It made me think of Cole's hand on my collarbone and how his breath had been so hot in my mouth, and suddenly I was sure that I was going to call him or find him tomorrow if such a thing was possible. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

May your character not be a writing upon the sand, but an inscription upon the rock! ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place. ~ Mark Twain

When people complain, for instance, that they find it hard to believe, it is a sign of deliberate or unconscious disobedience... The outcome is usually that self-imparted absolution confirms the man in his disobedience, and makes him plead ignorance of the kindness as well as the commandment of God. He complains that Godís commandment is uncertain, and susceptible of different interpretations. At first he was aware enough of his disobedience, but with his increasing hardness of heart that awareness grows ever fainter, and in the end he becomes so enmeshed that he loses all capacity for hearing the Word, and faith is quite impossible... It is time to take the bull by the horns, and say: 'Only those who obey believe.'... 'You are disobedient, you are trying to keep some part of your life under your own control. That is what is preventing you from listening to Christ and believing in His Grace. You cannot hear Christ because you are willfully disobedient. Somewhere in your heart you are refusing to listen to his call. Your difficulty is your sins.' Christ now enters the lists again and comes to grips with the devil, who until now has been hiding. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

All the sands of the world even when they unite together cannot create the hardness of a single rock! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. "About life, about death; about Mrs. Ramsay" - no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. TO want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have - to want and want - how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! She called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. It seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room ste ~ Virginia Woolf

The holiness of the gospel softens the hardness of the heart. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Man at his birth is supple and tender, but in death, he is rigid and hard. Thus, suppleness and tenderness accompany life, but rigidity and hardness accompany death. ~ Laozi

To the average man, life presents itself, not as material malleable to his hand, but as a series of problems ... which he has to solve ... And he is distressed to find that the more means he can dispose of - such as machine-power, rapid transport, and general civilized amenities, the more his problems grow in hardness and complexity ... .Perhaps the first thing he can learn form the artists is that the only way of 'mastering' one's material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be a lord of life, let him be its servant. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

In the modern era, many thinkers began to mistrust faith, viewing it as 'blind' and an enemy of reason. Their watchword was 'reason alone.' One of the difficulties of this stance is that reason cannot test its own reliability, any more than soapstone can test its own hardness. Any argument, accomplished by reasoning, that what reasoning accomplishes can be trusted, would be circular, because it would take for granted the very thing that it was trying to prove.
Suppose I am at the window of a burning building. Although I can hear the firemen calling to me from far below, I cannot see them because of all the smoke. They are telling me to jump. Though I may have every reason to believe that they will catch me in their net, I may not trust them enough to overcome my fear, and so, hesitating, I burn to death. Obviously, my reasons are not the same as trust; faith surpasses reason. Even so they are reasons for trust; though faith surpasses reason, it is not irrational. ~ J. Budziszewski

Sergeant Hicks seemed to be laid out in squares as though he were constructed out of cinder blocks. There was a hardness to his body that made his uniform appear to be little more than a paint job. He walked as if each step he took was driving a hated enemy toward a precipice. ~ Pat Conroy

High expectations I have. In hardness I labor that, fuller joy at the top I may partake. Nevertheless, in vain I toil. And then, friends'and people's reproach I become, because of my drowning hopes that keeps me out of the circle of richies and honor. I'm the distance they keep like plague, because I have no physical wealth and glamour like them. But in all my stony falls and griefs, the word of restoration in the blood given to me upon the altar of salvation, I cling. For in the end, mercy will attend my situation and see to my hard labor with crown of great success. ~ Darmie Orem

Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current ... ~ Henry Giroux

Hardness of heart is a dreadful quality, but it is doubtful whether in the long run it works more damage than softness of head. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

bad biblical interpretation proceeds not just from ignorance but from sin.36 Therefore, part of the hermeneutical challenge to contemporary Christians is to repent of our millennia-long hardness of heart. ~ Ellen F. Davis

The willow is full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers.
Rendevous, it says. Terraces;
the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire ...
Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I'm a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness. ~ Margaret Atwood

I tried to get my hands beneath his shirt, but because of the way we were sitting, I couldn't find the hem. Instead, the back of my hand brushed across the undeniable hardness between his legs. The accidental contact made his entire body jerk and go rigid as a groan ripped from his mouth.
"Fuck, Katie."
"I-I'm sorry," I said, my voice low and shaky.
He pulled back, staring down at me with passion in his eyes. "Do it again. ~ Cambria Hebert

We are the new "barbarians", forged in iron hardness in the fires of their hate and persecution. All over the world, we wait to pounce ... ~ George Lincoln Rockwell

We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean ... one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold ... d'you see what I mean? ~ John Le Carre

Nope," she managed. "No other questions."
Eleven centuries of captivity. Hung on his hated enemy's study wall. Eleven centuries of not touching. Not eating. Not loving. Had he had anyone to talk
to?
Her face must have betrayed her thoughts, for he startled her by saying softly, " 'Tis no longer of
consequence, lass, but thank you for the compassion. 'Tis nigh over. Seventeen more days, Jessica. That's all."
For some reason his words brought a sudden hot burn of tears to the backs of her eyes. Not only hadn't eleven centuries turned him into a monster, he was trying to soothe her, to make her feel better about his imprisonment.
"You weep for me, woman?"
She turned away. "It's been a long day. Hell, it's been a long week."
"Jessica." Her name was a soft command.
She disobeyed it, staring out the window at the rolling hills.
"Jessica, look at me."
Eyes bright with unshed tears, she whipped her head around and glared at him. "I weep for you, okay?" she snapped. "For eleven centuries stuck in there. Can I start driving again or do you need something else?"
He smiled faintly, raised his hand, and splayed his palm against the inside of the silvery glass. Without an ounce of conscious thought, her hand rose to
meet his, aligning on the cool silver,
palm to palm, finger to finger, thumb to thumb. And though she felt only a cold hardness beneath her palm, the gesture made something go all warm and soft in her heart.< ~ Karen Marie Moning

This is the time for a young man to stop saying, "Why is life so hard?" He takes the hardness as the call to fight, to rise up, take it on. ~ John Eldredge

Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people. ~ Jane Addams

Great cutting edge,
indifferent to tissue
Great stamping mass,
indifferent to the cry of crushed bones,
Grant us your hardness:
We would be as prompt to suffer
As you to inflict our suffering!

Light flashes out
from your whirling blades
Heads bow to the earth
before your harvesting:
Heads of grain, heads of men and women.
Grant us your hardness and bright surface.

Be with us in the hour of our processing.

- Hymn to Steel: for 5 million human voices ~ John Wain

Imaginings and resonances and pain and small longings and prejudices. They mean nothing against the resolute hardness of the sea. They meant less than the marl and the mud and the dry clay of the cliff that were eaten away by the weather, washed away by the sea. It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the water shone in the early light and shocked her with its sullen beauty. It might have been better, she felt, if there had never been people, if this turning of the world, and the glistening sea, and the morning breeze happened without witnesses, without anyone feeling, or remembering, or dying, or trying to love. She stood at the edge of the cliff until the sun came out from behind the black rainclouds, ~ Colm Toibin

It is ever thus that the things which we do wrong - although they may seem little at the time, and though from the hardness of our hearts we pass them lightly by - come back to us with bitterness. ~ Bram Stoker

I was harder than Dante. I think I'd tried to hide that hardness from him because I'd wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn't hard. ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

Asian people have a unique way about them and a different sense of beauty. It's exotic to me. I like they way Asians project their feelings. There's a hardness to the culture, but at the same time there's a delicateness. ~ Paz Vega

Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. The writer doubles and trebles the power of writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. ~ Victor Hugo

The land, now, well I'll tell you how I feel about that. It's done a good job, as good as it was able to, anyway, and it's got a right to look tired. It'd be pretty upsetting if it looked any other way. Yes, and the hardness is all right, too. It's been through something pretty hard, and some of that hardness was bound to rub off. And sometimes a frown sets a lot better with you than a smile. Something that's taken a beating, you don't want to see it laugh. And just because it's stopped laughing doesn't mean it'll never laugh again. ~ Jim Thompson

The whole universe is contained within a single human being - you. Everything that you see around, including the things you might not be fond of and even the people you despise or abhor, is present within you in varying degrees. Therefore, do not look for Sheitan outside yourself either. The devil is not an extraordinary force that attacks from without. It is an ordinary voice within. If you get to know yourself fully, facing with honesty and hardness both your dark and bright sides, you will arrive at a
supreme form of consciousness. When a person knows himself or herself, he or she knows God. ~ Elif Shafak

In all things preserve integrity; and the consciousness of your own uprightness will alleviate the toil of business, soften the hardness of ill-success and disappointments, and give you a humble confidence before God, when the ingratitude of people, or the iniquity of the times may rob you of other rewards. ~ Babe Paley

What prayer most often changes is the wickedness and the hardness of our own hearts. That alone would be reason enough to pray, even if none of the other reasons were valid or true. ~ R.C. Sproul

Its hardness and solidity had been an odd kind of comfort. Do not wish for anything. Be and endure. The Old African had learned that enduring was power too, and just as he had been drawn to the boulder, so the slaves, after a while, were drawn to him. ~ Julius Lester

I am not sinuous or suave; I sit among you abrading your softness with my hardness, quenching the silver-grey flickering moth-wing quiver of words with the green spurt of my clear eyes. ~ Virginia Woolf

I can make you feel touched." He paused. "It would be easier if I showed you. Do I have permission?"
Yes. "No." Being touched by Mad Rogan wasn't a good idea.
We kept walking. What would it be like?"
"Does it hurt?"
"No."
How would it feel?
Would it feel . . . oh hell.
"Okay." I stopped. We were in front of a small alcove. Nobody was around. If I made an idiot out of myself, nobody would notice. "Just once."
A soft burst of heat touched the back of my neck. I'd never felt anything like it before. It was as if someone had touched me with a heated mink glove, but the touch wasn't soft, it was firm. It felt . . . it felt . . .
The heat slid down my neck, fast, over my spine, setting every single nerve on fire before melting in the small of my back, its echoes pulsing through me. My body sang. He'd strummed me like I was a guitar. I wanted him and I wanted him now.
"That was . . ." I saw his eyes. Words died.
All the hardness had vanished from his eyes. They were alive and heated from within. "You want me."
"What?"
The magic warmth slid over my shoulders, melting into pure pleasure.
"I feel the feedback." He took a step toward me, grinning. "Nevada, you're a liar."
Uh-oh. I backed up. "What feedback?"
"When I do this . . ." The heated pressure zinged from my back up my ribs. I gasped. Oh dear God. ". . . what you feel loops back to me. I'm partially emphatic."
"You didn't mention that." My heart ~ Ilona Andrews

In some mysterious way, in all his brokenness, he reveals to us our own brokenness, our difficulties in loving, our barriers and hardness of heart. If he is so broken and so hurt and yet is still such a source of life, then I, too, am allowed to look at my own brokenness and to trust that I, too, can give life to others. I do not have to pretend that I am better than others and that I have to win in all the competitions. It's okay to be myself, just as I am, in my uniqueness. That, of course, is a very healing and liberating experience. I am allowed to be myself, with all my psychological and physical wounds, with all my limitations but with all my gifts too. And I can trust that I am loved just as I am, and that I, too, can love and grow. ~ Rick Santorum

When Tom's lips and tongue reclaimed him, Jon felt the heat and hardness of the captain's cock against his own. With a moan, he pulled away from the kiss and saw that Tom held both shafts tight in one hand; the first mate licked and sucked at their cockheads, working his lips over both with a soft moan. ~ Bey Deckard

It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man's will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterredby such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation. ~ Henry David Thoreau

In the ferment of our civil societies, from which the guardian angels seem to depart, we see many every moment sliding at the brink. What anguishes are rankling in the lees of the soul, the heart-nipping unkindness of a man's friends, his defeated endeavours ! betwixt the birth and death of the mind, what swallowing seas, and storms of mortal miseries ! And when the wildfire is in the heart and he is made mad, the incontinent hands would wreak the harm upon his own head, to blot out the abhorred illusion of the world and the desolate remembrance of himself. Succoured in the forsaken hour, when his courage swerved, with the perfume of human kindness, he might have been to-day alive. Many have looked for consolation, in the imbecility of their souls, who found perhaps hardness of face and contra-diction ; they perished untimely in default of our humanity. ~ Charles M. Doughty

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. ~ C.S. Lewis

This is a very painful and delicate subject, I know, but I dare not turn away from it. It has long been my sorrowful conviction that the standard of daily life among professing Christians in this country has been gradually falling. I am afraid that Christ-like charity, kindness, good temper, unselfishness, meekness, gentleness, good nature, self denial, zeal to do good and separation from the world are far less appreciated than they ought to be and than they used to be in the days of our fathers.

Into the causes of this state of things I cannot pretend to enter fully and can only suggest conjectures for consideration. It may be that a certain profession of religion has become so fashionable and comparatively easy in the present age that the streams which were once narrow and deep have become wide and shallow, and what we have gained in outward show we have lost in quality. It may be that our contemporary affluence and comfortable lifestyles have insensibly introduced a plague of worldliness and self indulgence and a love of ease. What were once called luxuries are now comforts and necessities, and self denial and "enduring hardness" are consequently little known. It may be that the enormous amount of controversy which marks this age has insensibly dried up our spiritual life. We have too often been content with zeal for orthodoxy and have neglected the sober realities of daily practical godliness. Be the causes what they may, I must declare my own belief that the r ~ J.C. Ryle

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising. ~ Barbara Januszkiewicz

The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread. ~ Steven Wright

mother would say, "Stop making happiness some kind of concrete goal. It's a side effect. It's a secondary happening, but not the main event. Happiness is what you feel when you've been kind, fair, or loving in the face of hardness. It is the feeling of light that comes after behaving in the way you ultimately want." But ~ Ann Wertz Garvin

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. ~ Pope Paul VI

Every Man being conscious to himself, That he thinks, and that which his Mind is employ'd about whilst thinking, being the Ideas, that are there, 'tis past doubt, that Men have in their Minds several Ideas, such as are those expressed by the words, Whiteness, Hardness, Sweetness, Thinking, Motion, Man, Elephant, Army, Drunkenness, and others: It is in the first place then to be inquired, How he comes by them? I know it is a received Doctrine, That Men have native Ideas, and original Characters stamped upon their Minds, in their very first Being. ~ John Locke

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted.

I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep.

There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces. ~ Jean Lorrain

That it is fairly improbable to get much emotional response out of this man, I am convinced. There is a long-conditioned hardness, an outer shell which has been worn and used so long, probably nothing exists beneath it. Having dealt with force, violence, and easy dispositions of the lives of others, it is questionable as to how much value he puts on life in general, including his own in particular. This was not discussed with him, though it would be interesting to get some information on that point. Getting a sincere or emotionally meaningful answer from him is like trying to bail water from a long-dry well. ~ Leon Goldensohn

One great reason why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that one part of the world does not know what the other suffers. Many of them do not know, because they do not care to know: they keep out of the way of knowing it – and then plead their voluntary ignorance as an excuse for their hardness of heart. ~ John Wesley

Around the time they were preparing Jose Arcadio for the seminary she had already made a detailed recapitulation of life in the house since the founding of Macondo and had completely changed the opinion that she had always had of its descendants. She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone... Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end. It was during that time that Ursula began to speak Rebeca's name, bringing back the memory of her with an old love that was exalted by tardy repentance and a sudden admiration, coming to understand that only she, Rebeca , the one who had never fed of her milk but only of the earth of the land and t ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez