Hollows Quotes

The stillness of the calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the bass drum. ~ Herman Melville

Some of the streets are, however, genuinely narrow. These same streets may not be filled with machine-gun fire and the dramatic screech of violins, but they overflow with the invisible and innumerable longings of the human heart. Love continues to minister here, but betrayal still wears its perfidious face, hatred hollows out the weak man's breast, revenge pursues its self-defeating course; and the unfulfilled dreams of the multitude haunt the island like so many hungry ghosts. ~ John Dolan

Knowledge is Power. Ignorance is Bliss. But curiosity - even if it had killed the cat - is king. ~ Kim Harrison

Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the ~ W.G. Sebald

Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules. ~ Laura Vanderkam

Good luck and Good work for the happy mountain raindrops, each one of them a high waterfall in itself, descending from the cliffs and hollows of the clouds to the cliffs and hollows of the rocks, out of the sky-thunder into the thunder of the falling rivers. ~ John Muir

The thing is not to write what no one else has written but to write what only you could have written.'
I found this fragment in my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how a voice hollows how words you once loved can wither on a page. ~ Nam Le

It makes me feel shitty and alone. I don't want to be alone." He sagged. "But I think maybe I have to be. Even in a crowd of people, my heart will always ache." The statement resonated in the furthest hollows of Baz's soul. "Then we'll be lonely hearts together. ~ Heidi Cullinan

Al was standing a bare three feet away, his mood almost jovial as he took the paper and it vanished in a wash of black sparkles.
"Thank you, Rachel," he said, carefully reaching for my hand as Trent stiffened.
"Welcome back, my itchy witch. ~ Kim Harrison

You try getting through the Hollows traffic with a stoned redhead hanging out the window shouting, 'I'm king of the world!' ~Lee ~ Kim Harrison

In the center of a garden reared a tree, glinting golden in the darkness, peppered with flowers that smelled of blood. The great yawning hollows of the trunk invited her in, promising a snug sanctuary. "They will suffocate you like a pillow of sand and you will never emerge alive," a chittering voice cried out. The patterns engraved on the tree's bark dizzied her eyes. "If your finger brushes against them, you'll know true madness." She glanced away from the bark, her eyes caught by a movement in the branches. A squirrel scurried down the trunk towards her. It didn't seem to be bothered that its tail was swathed in flames, or that something had eaten away at half of its rot-black face and torso. Death's pet project bared its teeth at her. "Do you really want to be here? ~ Angela Panayotopulos

Winter descended on Erl and gripped the forest, holding the small twigs stiff and still: in the valley it silenced the stream; and in the fields of the oxen the grass was brittle as earthenware, and the breath of the beasts went up like the smoke of encampments. And Orion still went to the woods whenever Oth would take him, and sometimes he went with Threl. When he went with Oth the wood was full of the glamour of the beasts that Oth hunted, and the splendour of the great stags seemed to haunt the gloom of far hollows; but when he went with Threl a mystery haunted the wood, so that one could not say what creature might not appear, nor what haunted and hid by every enormous bole. What beasts there were in the wood even Threl did not know: many kinds fell to his subtlety, but who knew if these were all? ~ Lord Dunsany

Oh, hear Him within you speaking this infinite love,moving like some divine and audible leaven,lifting the sky of the soul with expansions of light, shaping new heights and new depths,and, at your stir of assent,spreading the mountains with flame, filling the hollows with Heaven. ~ Jessica Powers

The woman in the film drinks in a bar. She's in hair curlers, a chiffon headscarf tied over them like a tarp over a log pile. The hollows of the curlers, spaces for hope: something good might happen.

There was no sign of Sandro. I watched the film to keep myself awake while I waited.

A man bought the woman a beer. She took dainty sips in her hair curlers, in preparation for no specific occasion. Curler time seemed almost religious, a waiting that was more important than what the waiting was for. Curler time was about living the now with a belief that a future, an occasion for set hair, existed. ~ Rachel Kushner

The red Sahara in an angry glow, / With amber fogs, across its hollows trailed / Long strings of camels, gloomy-eyed and slow ... ~ Jean Ingelow

It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his hand on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The Ohlones seem to have lived at a time and in a spiritual place before the imagination was cast away and isolated from "mainstream" consciousness. Since dreams were real, when an animal-god appeared in the hollows of the dream mind, it was not mere illusion: it was divine revelation. ~ Malcolm Margolin

First I need to do something.' He pulled me closer towards him until our lips were almost touching.
'What might that be?' I managed to stutter, closing my eyes, anticipating the warmth of his lips against mine. But the kiss didn't come. I opened my eyes. Alex had jumped to his feet.
'Swim,' he said, grinning at me. 'Come on.'
'Swim?' I pouted, unable to hide my disappointment that he wanted to swim rather than make out with me.
Alex pulled his T-shirt off in one swift move. My eyes fell straightaway to his chest – which was tanned, smooth and ripped with muscle, and which, when you studied it as I had done, in detail, you discovered wasn't a six-pack but actually a twelve-pack.
My eyes flitted to the shadowed hollows where his hips disappeared into his shorts, causing a flutter in parts of my body that up until three weeks ago had been flutter-dormant. Alex's hands dropped to his shorts and he started undoing his belt.
I reassessed the swimming option. I could definitely do swimming.
He shrugged off his shorts, but before I could catch an eyeful of anything, he was off, jogging towards the water. I paused for a nanosecond, weighing up my embarrassment at stripping naked over my desire to follow him. With a deep breath, I tore off my dress then kicked off my underwear and started running towards the sea, praying Nate wasn't doing a fly-by.
The water was warm and flat as a bath. I could see Alex in the distance, his skin gleaming in the n ~ Sarah Alderson

She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I would not willingly peel back the scar tissue protecting the deepest chambers of my heart and reveal the bruised hollows pooled with the blood of old wounds – the terror comes just thinking about it – but now, facing darkness I am left with no choice.
I love you, and because of that am going to try and raise the dead. – Louise Bell Closson, How It Ends ~ Laura Wiess

The demon's eyes flicked to mine, his smile widening. "This is Nicholas Gregory Sparagmos's room," he said, and my breath caught. "Delightful, just delightful! What are you doing in Nicky's room, Rachel? Ooooh, he summoned you to the West Coast, didn't he? Did you kill him? Good for you for taking care of that little problem! I should give you a bunny. Where is he? Stuffed in a closet?" ~ Algaliarept, Black Magic Sanction, Kim Harrison ~ Kim Harrison

Eyyia?" said her husband, and Eliane bet Danel heard the mangling of her name as music.
"You sound like a marsh frog," she said, moving to stand before his chair.
By the flickering light she saw him smile.
"Where have you been," she asked. "My dear. I've needed you so much."
"Eyyia," he tried again, and stood up. His eyes were black hollows. They would always be hollows.
He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief. ~ Guy Gavriel Kay

Yet I can read. Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, majesties, Sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once pour into the wide hollows of my brain. And deify me, as if some blithe wine or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, and so become immortal. ~ John Keats

He wanted that again, that feeling of standing with her against all odds and succeeding. He wanted it so bad, he was going to risk destroying everything he and his father had worked for. ~ Kim Harrison

I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountain across the valley were iron. The deeper moonshadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost. ~ Robert Macfarlane

May with its light behaving
Stirs vessel, eye and limb,
The singular and sad
Are willing to recover,
And to each swan-delighting river
The careless picnics come
In living white and red.

Our dead, remote and hooded,
In hollows rest, but we
From their vague woods have broken,
Forests where children meet
And the white angel-vampires flit,
Stand now with shaded eye,
The dangerous apple taken.

The real world lies before us,
Brave motions of the young,
Abundant wish for death,
The pleasing, pleasured, haunted:
A dying Master sinks tormented
In his admirers' ring,
The unjust walk the earth.

And love that makes impatient
Tortoise and roe, that lays
The blonde beside the dark,
Urges upon our blood,
Before the evil and the good
How insufficient is
Touch, endearment, look. ~ W. H. Auden

Sometimes she wondered if grief could break someone, for all of them bore fractures, new hollows. ~ Roshani Chokshi

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds― cooled ―and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. ~ Toni Morrison

Good God, the man is dumber than Tink's dildo... ~ Kim Harrison

His smile banished my loneliness and limbed the hollows of my anema with starlight, pure and bright...his touch hummed in my bones like an aria -- a song to my dance, a beginning of a promise. ~ Roshani Chokshi

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to w ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What is there about me that makes me the least bit desirable?" She wasn't fishing, she truly wanted to know. Right now she didn't feel very attractive
There was no joy in the laugh that seemed to catch in his throat. He closed the scant distance between them, taking her face between the warm hollows of his palms.
"Foolish girl. You are everything that is good in life. Don't you know that?"
She would have shaken her head were she not afraid that he would release her. "No. I'm manipulative and spoiled. And I think only of my own happiness."
"You are good and sweet and true." His thumbs brushed the apples of her cheeks. "Everything I am not. Everything. I want you so badly I may go mad before the Season ends. ~ Kathryn Smith

The undulent landscape looks serene in every direction. Honey-colored farmhouses, gently placed in hollows, rise like thick loaves of bread set out to cool. ~ Frances Mayes

It throbbed and pulsed, channeled by elemental forces of fear, love, hope, and sadness. The bow stabbed and flitted across the strings in a violent whorl of creation; its hairs tore and split until it seemed the last strands would sever in a scrape of dissonance. Those who saw the last fragile remnants held their breath against the breaking. The music rippled across the ship like a spirit, like a thing alive and eldritch and pregnant with mystery. The song held. More than held, it deepened. It groaned. It resounded in the hollows of those who heard. Then it softened into tones long, slow, and patient and reminded men of the faintest stars trembling dimly in defiance of a ravening dark. At the last, when the golden hairs of the bow had given all the sound they knew, the music fled in a whisper. Fin was both emptied and filled, and the song sighed away on the wind. ~ A.S. Peterson

Just let me sleep," she grumbled. "Let me sleep, and I'll sign a paper that you're a fucking angel. ~ Kim Harrison

The 'Desert' sweeps up to the walls of Baghdad, but it is a misnomer to call the vast level of rich, stoneless, alluvial soil a desert. It is a dead flat of uninhabited earth; orange colocynth balls, a little wormwood, and some alkaline plants which camels eat, being its chief products. After the inundations, reedy grass grows in the hollows. ~ Isabella Bird

The neglect this implied, the suffering and wasted quality of human life were appalling. ~ Fred Hollows

I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave. - from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing. ~ Breece D'J Pancake

Meanwhile, the great ash would rest where she lay, and mosses would creep over her trunk, and tiny creatures make their homes her dim hollows. Even in death she was a link in the great chain of the forest's being. ~ Juliet Marillier

That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan- sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the tool-shed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.
At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river's sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself "Titanic Beggar."
"Titanic City" was born.

It's the song, they said.
No, the sea. The luxury. The ship.
It's the sex, they whispered.
Leo, said Aziza sheepishly. It's all about Leo.
"Everybody wants Jack," Laila said to Mariam. "That's what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead. ~ Khaled Hosseini

In friendship you are free, you don't hurt much. But love when comes to hurt hollows your identity, peace, mind and body so intensely making blank mind. ~ Sadashivan Nair

Seemed like you could stretch out your arms on either side and touch the mountains. Straight up they went, dark and feathered with treetops, and left a thin slice of stars above us.

Way off, a mourning dove called, long and throaty, and the mountains picked it up and echoed the sound over and over, carrying it farther and farther away until you wondered how many mountains and hollows that call would travel--and it died away, so far, it was more like a memory than a sound. ~ Forrest Carter

Few knew that she was broken. Whatever power had blessed her, divine or otherwise, was gone-or at least out of reach. Her followers were kept at a distance so they could not see that her eyes were dark hollows, that her breath came in frightened gasps. She walked slowly, tentatively, her driftwood bones fragile in her body, this sickly girl upon whom all their hopes rested. ~ Leigh Bardugo

I had been walking through the Chakara Forest. Fat moths the size of palms wreathed my hair like pearls and moonstones. And then, as I had done since before language burgeoned in the velvet clefts of the mind--I danced.
Not a slow dance, but sharp, punctual movements. My dance organized the shadows of trees, canceled the cloying plumes of wind-fallen fruit, aligned the moonbeams themselves. My back arced gracefully as I moved, neck extended like an oryx, fingers conjuring sharp kathas of rhythm, when a sound crunched not far from me.
I spun around. "Who's there?"
From beneath the heart-shaped leaves of a peepal tree, something rustled. And a voice, so lush it made ambrosia acrid, answered me.
"Only the lowly painter who tries each night, in vain, to capture evening herself."
"What do you want? Show yourself."
The stranger stepped out of the peepal tree. He was broad-shouldered, his features as severely beautiful as a strike of lightning. He wore a crown of blackbuck horns that arced in graceful whorls of onyx, catching the light. But it was his gaze that robbed the clamoring rhythm in my chest.
His stare slipped beneath my skin. And when he saw my eyes widen, he smiled. And in that moment, his smile banished my loneliness and limned the hollows of my anima with starlight, pure and bright. He moved toward me, grasping my hand, and his touch hummed in my bones like an aria. A song to my dance. The beginning of a promise. ~ Roshani Chokshi

I was distracted by the secrets of a new world. In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated oosh shoo of my own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black-and-white fish, that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces, and gently swaying anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant landscapes twice as brightly colored and varied as they were above land. I saw caves and hollows where unknown creatures lurked, distant shapes that shimmered in the rays of the sun. ~ Jojo Moyes

It was a murky confusion - here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel - of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. ~ Charles Dickens

But what was there to say?
Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much. ~ Arundhati Roy

A smile is just such an amazing thing. And to think that some of those people can now smile because they can see you, that gives me that sort of charge, energy ... that's what powers up my batteries. That's the joy that I have and that keeps me going. That's my rocket fuel, I suppose. ~ Gabi Hollows

Horrible things don't happen in crowded places; they happen in the hollows of the world, where it's just a victim and an attacker and no one to hear any screams. "Hang ~ Sara Raasch

And worst of all, I did not feel held safe. Girls who have the lingering whispers of rejection still echoing in the hollows of their soul rarely feel completely held safe. So they look at gaps of the unknown and hesitate at best. Run away at worst. They crave for life to make sense. They cringe when it doesn't. It ~ Lysa TerKeurst

What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out. ~ J.M. Coetzee

We pass each other notes in the hollows of our collarbones. ~ Tina May Hall

Eccolo!" he exclaimed.

At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.

"Courage!" cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. "Courage and love."

She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

Standing at its brink, like a swimmer who prepares, was the good man. But he was not the good man that she had expected, and he was alone.

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her… ~ E.M. Forster

A pain was gnawing in my chest. I pressed my hands to it, the hollows and hard bones. I sat before my loom and felt at last like the creature Medea had named me: old and abandoned and alone, spiritless and gray as the rocks themselves. ~ Madeline Miller

The drop hollows out the stone not by strength, but by constant falling. ~ Plutarch

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood; all this was thrilling. ~ Ishmael

Evidence of this [transformation of animals into fossils] is that parts of aquatic animals and perhaps of naval gear are found in rock in hollows on mountains, which water no doubt deposited there enveloped in sticky mud, and which were prevented by coldness and dryness of the stone from petrifying completely. Very striking evidence of this kind is found in the stones of Paris, in which one very often meets round shells the shape of the moon. ~ Albertus Magnus

Here's a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing. ~ Jaron Lanier

At night, when he is sure his father is sleeping, he sticks the phonograph needle in a rubber eraser and holds the eraser in his front teeth. Carefully, with his nose inches from the record, he sets the needle down. With a hiss and crackle, the music reverberates through the hollows of his mouth and throat without making a sound in the room. Ignoring the cramp in his neck, this is how he listens to his favorite records night after night. ~ Lydia Peelle

Rusted ringer washers. Gas stoves. Dry rotted tires and busted television sets decorated the flat rock hollows. The country yards of rusted trailers and broken-down farmhouses with abandoned red clay tractors. Vehicles on cinder blocks. It was the poor man's fairy tale of rural survival. ~ Frank Bill

... it had become agreed that Jane would be excused household duties. It sounds like a tiny thing – and indeed it was – but a tiny trickle of water gradually hollows out a stone. Jane's ducking out of the housework in order to write would lead inexorably onwards, upwards, towards women working, to women winning power in a world of men. This is the significance of trying to reconstruct the detail of Jane Austen's daily life. ~ Lucy Worsley

Every step of the road was just as she'd dreamt it all the time she'd been away. Every step took her further away from the smoke and the noise and the loneliness and fear of the city she'd left behind. Every step drew her deeper into the hollows of the landscape, the green hills and shining rivers and mist-tangled treetops. ~ Jon McGregor

Each year in Africa about two and a half million people go blind ... and they just go blind ... they sit around in their huts. ~ Fred Hollows

Cath wanted to go back and rewrite every scene she'd ever written about Baz or Simon's chests. She'd written them flat and sharp and hard. Levi was all soft motion and breath, curves and warm hollows. Levi's chest was a living thing. ~ Rainbow Rowell

In the countryside by nights without the moon, there sometimes roamed an indigent, a recycled reject with eyes sifting the darkness and sorting the scattered scents, walking beside deep hollows and ditches of stinking water. The hours he kept were usually reserved for the drunk and the sleeping. With his sloe-lidded eyes that in the daytime tried to hide from the sun, he spied treasures all over the land. No thing unlocked was safe from his grasp, he who could squat in the road and talk to the dogs and still their dying growls, all save one ~ Larry Brown

The Universe is made of hands;
Hands that twist fabric and sizzle in the air.

Hands that grasp curls and flick words away

Small, smooth fingers pouring gold over gaping wounds

Before slicing into soft tissue,

Blood mixing with gold.

Hands that make it beautiful.

The Universe is made of bones;

Bones that cut against yards of skin,

Warm and yielding and moulded around the wings that splay across his back.

Bones that cage the heart and dig into the hollows.

Bones that break,

Tear the warm, yielding skin.

Bones that shred and brush his chin.

The Universe is made of lips;

Lips that breathe and stutter warm sighs,

Caressing the cracks in his broken body, the body that he broke.

Lips that carve paths into stone,

That leave trails upon gooseflesh,

Lips that make incisions,

Too delicate to mend.

The Universe is made of blood;

Blood that runs warm and hot and steady and crimson,

Pumping beneath the stone and the gold.

Blood that burns with every jerk of limbs.

Blood that spills on open palms,

Staining the fabric,

Filling up his throat.

The Universe is made of eyes;

Eyes that breach and eyes that splice and eyes that never leave.

Eyes that ripple oceans.

Eye ~ Velvetoscar

My kids know you can make it if you take risks and work hard. That we can work in the system you lunkers set up. That's all a parent really needs to give his child. That, and how to love someone with all your soul. ~ Kim Harrison

Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life. ~ Sean O'Casey

Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

Who me? I play scales. The scales of
dead fish of oil-slicked seas. My sister
blows wind through the hollows of fallen
trees. And we are the echoes of eternity.
Maybe you've heard of us.
We do rebirths, revolts, and resurrections. ~ Saul Williams

Don't pursue something with a vengeful heart, or it will destroy you. Hate wraps a cold hand around your heart and hollows you out.
- Justus ~ Dannika Dark

It was unconscious, immobilized, totally vulnerable. It would've been easy to climb onto the ice and drive the point of an icicle into the hollow's skull - and if anyone else had known it was here, I'm sure they would've done just that. But something stopped me. It was no threat to anyone now, this creature. ~ Ransom Riggs

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, widely fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult it's teeth. They seem to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds - cooled - and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. They danced a macabre ballet around the victim, whom, for their own sake, they were prepared to sacrifice to the flaming pit. ~ Toni Morrison

But these are small troubles, people will say. Yes, but they are drops which wear hollows in the rock. ~ Hans Christian Andersen

Outside the snow was falling. In the lamplight icy leaf-patterns could be seen glittering on the blue-black windows, and hoar-frost sparkled like melted sugar in the hollows of the bottle-glass panes, all splattered with gold.
The little house, lying snug and sleepy in the darkness, was wrapped in a deep silence. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

To my mind, having a care and concern for others is the highest of the human qualities. ~ Fred Hollows

It makes it seem as though there's no door between us at all. The sound of water gathering, cascading, trailing along the planes, ridges, and hollows of his naked body feels more intimate than if he were standing in front of me wearing nothing at all. ~ Carrie Ryan

Joy and anger,
sorrow and happiness,
caution and remorse
Come upon us by turns,
with ever changing mood.

They come like music from hollows,
like wood when played by the wind,
or how mushrooms grow from the damp.

Daily and nightly they alternate within
but we cannot tell whence they spring.

Without these emotions I should not be.
Without me, they would have no instrument ~ Zhuangzi

As if the parents we were born to weren't always a matter of happenstance: an elbow jostled at a bar, a muscular hand smoothing the hair away from a blue-shadowed eye, a quick decision that this girl looks hot or that guy seems safe. We are never guaranteed that the people who fit together so deliciously in the heat of a moment can building a lasting love. And it is love, the breadth and force of being wholly, unabashedly loved - not just having two parents who look like the wax figures on a wedding cake - that affirms and redeems us. Poverty alone doesn't always spark violence. And a two-parent home isn't always the antidote. The urge to obliterate is as dark and unknowable as the hollows of our bones. ~ Laura Bogart

Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty. ~ Franny Billingsley

Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives. ~ Beth Kephart

It is a thought as sweet as heaven to know that in the minds of each of us the may by the fence still blooms in an eternal springtime; that the snowdrop has in our hearts a triple birth, and blooms in three separate minds, faultlessly ... So that if all the flowers and grasses and hollows and hills of the old house were razed and mutilated - as they are now, I suppose - we keep them intact in three minds, each depending on the other to supply it with the delicate minutiae of remembrance. ~ Eve Langley

That's why I want you there, he said. You're unpredictable, and that can be the difference between success and failure. Most people make decisions in anger, fear, love, or obligation. You make decisions to irritate people. ~ Kim Harrison

In bed, I steal moments of tenderness when sex has finally exhausted me to the point where I'm too bone weary to fret anymore about the enormous capacity for evil that's taken up squatter's rights inside me. I touch him, put all those things I don't say into my hands as I trace the red and black tattoos on his skin, the sharp planes and hollows of his face, bury my hands in his dark hair. He watches me in silence when I do, eyes dark, unfathomable.
I sometimes wake up to find he's pulled me close to him and is holding me, spooned into my back with his face in my hair, and those hands that don't speak like mine don't speak move over my skin and tell me I'm cherished, honored, seen. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Dear Angel Juan,
You used to guard my sleep like a panther biting back my pain with the edge of your teeth. You carried me into the dark dream jungle, loping past the hungry vines, crossing the shiny fish-scale river. We left my tears behind in a chiming silver pool. We left my sorrow in the muddy hollows. When I woke up you were next to me, damp and matted, your eyes hazy, trying to remember the way I clung to you, how far down we went.
Was the journey too far, Angel Juan? Did we go too far? ~ Francesca Lia Block

He did not look like a pirate.
He looked... familiar.
There was something there, in the handsome angles and deep, wicked shadows, the hollows of his cheeks, the straight line of his lips, the sharp line of his jaw- in need of a shave.
Yes, there was something there- a whisper of recognition.
He wore a pin-striped cap dusted with snow, the brim of which cast his eyes into darkness. They were a missing piece.
She would never know from where the instinct came- perhaps from a desire to discover the identity of the man who would end her days- but she could not stop herself from reaching up and pushing the hat back from his face to see his eyes.
Only later it would occur to her that he did not try to stop her.
His eyes were hazel, a mosaic of browns and greens and greys, framed by long, dark lashes, spiked with snow. She would have known them anywhere, even if they were far more serious now than she'd ever seen them before.
Shock coursed through her, followed by a thick current of happiness.
He was not a pirate.
"Michael?" He stiffened at the sound of his name, but she did not take the time to wonder why.
She flattened her palm against his cold cheek- an action at which she would later marvel- and laughed, the sound muffled by the snow falling around them. "It is you, isn't it?"
He reached up, pulling her hand from his face. He wasn't wearing gloves, and still, he was so warm.
And not at all clammy. ~ Sarah MacLean

Trauma ruptures and hollows. Compassion mends and fills; love heals. ~ Na'ama Yehuda

I was having coffee with my bodyguard. I didn't expect to be hunting bad guys until later. Leather before sundown is tacky. ~ Kim Harrison

Hollows are proof that something bad can become something good with enough time and care and hope" -Red ~ Katherine Applegate

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all. ~ Charles Dickens

Thrice blessed are they whose early years are spent in some countryside. The flowering and withering of the seasons, and every exquisite sound and sight - every lane, and pasture, and green corners and gnarled hollows everywhere, make them affluent with a treasure which neither change nor chance can steal away. ~ Lizette Woodworth Reese

When the storm is over, the new growth, tiny and light, timid-green, starts edging our on the buses and three limbs. Then Nature brings April rain. It whispers down soft and lonesome, making mists in the hollows and on the trails where you walk under the drippings from hanging branches of trees.

It's a good feeling, exciting--but sad too--in April rain. Granpa said he always got that kind of mixed-up feeling. He said it was exciting because something new was being born and it was sad, because you knowed you can't hold onto it. It will pass too quick.

April wind is soft and warm as a baby's crib. It breathes on the crab apple tree until white blossoms open out, smeared with pink. The smell is sweeter than honeysuckle and brings bees swarming over the blossoms. Mountain laurel with pink-white blooms and purple centers grow everywhere, from the hollows to the top of the mountain, alongside of the dogtooth violet...

Then, when April gets its warmest, all of a sudden the cold hits you. It stays cold for four or five days. This is to make the blackberries bloom and is called "blackberry winter." The blackberries will not bloom without it. That's why some years there are no blackberries. When it ends, that's when the dogwoods bloom out like snowballs over the mountainside in places you never suspicioned they grew: in a pine grove or stand of oak of a sudden there's a big burst of white. ~ Forrest Carter

When the air gets heavy so it's hard to breathe, you know what's coming. The birds come down from the ridges and hide in the hollows and in the pines. Heavy black clouds float over the mountain, and you run for the cabin.

From the cabin porch we would watch the big bars of light that stand for a full second, maybe two, on the mountaintop, running out feelers or lightning wire in all directions before they're jerked back into the sky. Cracking claps of sound, so sharp you know something has split wide open--then the thunder rolls and rumbles over the ridges and back through the hollows. I was pretty near sure, a time or two, that the mountains was falling down, but Granpa said they wasn't. Which of course, they didn't.

Then it comes again--and rolls blue fireballs of rocks on the ridge tops and splatters the blue in the air. The trees whip and bend in the sudden rushes of wind, and the sweep of heavy rain comes thunking from the clouds in big drops, letting you know there's some real frog-strangling sheets of water coming close behind. ~ Forrest Carter

Like the wide hollows of eyes marked in cathedrals of stone that left me half-perplexed as a child. A self-portrait of an innocent in this organic of ephemeral societies. Then I know I will be able to flourish viciously. That's the trouble with remembering. You begin to wish. ~ Abigail George

Teaching an adolescent pixy and teenage gargoyle how to make explosives might not be such a good idea. But hell, he'd learned when he was five. ~ Kim Harrison

Home is home, no? - whatever layabouts you live with, whatever tempers and timidities. I was glad to glimpse them, and glad to go to my own bed among them, with the right smell and the right hollows holding me ... ~ Margo Lanagan

The hollows around her eyes were darkly glamorous, her mouth sullen: she had the beauty of an insomniac. ~ Jardine Libaire

Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before. ~ James MacKaye

I love you!" he bellowed at me and his eyes turned black. "Happy now? I love you, okay? I love you
so fucking much that it hurts! It's driving me insane! I loved you from the moment I saw you doing
your Miss Marple impression in those woods back at The Ragged Cove. But I could tell you were
sweet on Luke and hey, why not? He's the good-looking one, right? I mean, I'm just the hired muscle.
I'm the one who gets everyone else out of the shit. But I couldn't help my feelings, I'd never felt like
that before. So yeah, okay I stole a kiss from you in the gatehouse – big fucking deal! But you know
what? That was the biggest mistake of my life, because that one kiss from you drove me out of my tiny
freaking mind! So, I'm sorry if I give the boy a hard time and ain't too gentle with the girl, but I'm not
going to sit back and watch you risk your life just so you can blow their noses and wipe their arses!"
I looked at Potter and he seemed almost out of breath after his rant. Once he had finished, he put out
his cigarette and lit another one. Standing, I looked at him and said, "Potter, I had no idea…"
"Ah, forget it," he said, waving me away with his hand. "I shouldn't have said anything. Besides, I'll
be moving out at first light in search of Luke. Once I've rescued him, I'll bring him to you in The
Hollows and you won't have to see me again. ~ Tim O'Rourke