Jagged Quotes

For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith. ~ John Skelton

It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths. ~ Thomas Cole

In his stupor, the forest had begun to change. The sounds were confusing, his eyes blurring in his exhaustion. He tugged another branch out of the way, gasping as a jagged twig poked through the palm of his hand, momentarily catching there. The pain was almost an afterthought, his fingers no longer working effectively. ~ Danika Stone

Ordinary psyches often react to bad news with a momentary thrill, seeing the world, for once, in jagged clarity, as if lightning has just struck. But then darkness and dysfunction rush in. A mind such as Beethoven's remains illumined, or sees in the darkness shapes it never saw before, which inspire rather than terrify. This altered shape (raptus, he would say) makes art of the shapes, while holding in counterpoise such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, complexity and simplicity. ~ Edmund Morris

He knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candies fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself as the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees' jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, half-revealed. ~ Italo Calvino

I can't wait for him to visit me again. He's just so handsome, don't you think?" she asked.
I paused. "Yeah, he's cute."
"Come on, America! You have to have noticed those eyes and his voice..."
"Except when he laughs!" Just remembering Maxon's laugh had me grinning. It was cute but awkward. He pushed his breaths out, and then made a jagged noise when he inhaled, almost like another laugh in itself.
"Yes, okay, he does have a funny laugh, but it's cute."
"Sure, if you like the lovable sound of an asthma attack in your ear every time you tell a joke."
Marlee lost it and doubled over in laughter.
"All right, all right," she said, coming up for air. "You have to think there's something attractive about him."
I opened my mouth and shut it two or three times. I was tempted to take another jab at Maxon, but I didn't want Marlee to see him in a negative light. So I thought about it.
What was attractive about Maxon?
"Well, when he lets his guard down, he's okay. Like when he just talks without checking his words or you catch him just looking at something like...like he's really looking for the beauty in it."
Marlee smiled, and I knew she'd seen that in him, too.
"And I like that he seems genuinely involved when he's there, you know? Like even though he's got a country to run and a thousand things to do, it's like he forgets it all when he's with you. He just dedicates himself to what's right in front of him. I like that.
Kiera Cass

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice.
God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Harper: That's how people change. ~ Tony Kushner

I felt in that moment as if it were all a dream - the training, my former life, the world I had left behind. None of that mattered anymore. Only this place mattered, only this moment, and not because the psychologist had hypnotized me. In the grip of that powerful emotion, I stared out toward the coast, through the jagged narrow spaces between the trees. There, a greater darkness gathered, the confluence of the night, the clouds, and the sea. Somewhere beyond, another border. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned. ~ John Green

We're broken. It's like we have all these jagged edges that scare other people off, but when we're with each other, our jagged edges fit together and we're almost whole. ~ Sarra Manning

Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument
that our future is being shaped far away 'at the ends of the earth'
makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading. ~ Michael Ignatieff

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. ~ E. M. Forster

A HOW-TO ON DISAPPEARING

No one understands the way we break.
Not jagged. Not knife sliding between ribs.
Not the spine, cracking.

That would be too easy.

That would be being able to know that
you're broken. That would be X-rays
showing the gaps, the fissures.
Clean breaks are easier to heal.
We do not break cleanly.

We break without breaking.
Not a crack, but a fog.
We dissipate.
Body here one moment and
not here the next.

Hands working one moment and
a dead weight the next.

We watch ourselves turn
colourless. Watch ourselves
become invisible / invincible.

This way, at least the pain is our own.
That's what I wanted all along, I guess. ~ Darshana Suresh

The vertical lines that run down his forearms are the most disturbing, thick and jagged as if someone took a razor to his skin. I wish I could run my fingers along them and remove the pain and memories that are attached to them. ~ Jessica Sorensen

His mouth was on mine then, and I couldn't fight him. Not because he was so many thousand times stronger than me, but because my will crumbled into dust the second our lips met. This kiss was not quite as careful as others I remembered, which suited me just fine. If I was going to rip myself up further, I might as well get as much in trade as possible.
So I kissed him back, my heart pounding out a jagged, disjointed rhythm while my breathing turned to panting and my fingers moved greedily to his face. I could feel his marble body against every line of mine, and I was so glad he hadn't listened to me―there was no pain in the world that would have justified missing this. His hand memorized my face, the same way mine were tracing his, and, in the brief seconds when his lips were free, he whispered my name. ~ Stephenie Meyer

Always fight for love-walk barefoot across the jagged shards of a broken heart but never become its victim. ~ Michael Faudet

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy. ~ Jon Ronson

But I'm sick of this bloody jagged graph. You know, two steps up, one step down. It's so painful. It's so slow. It's like this endless game of snakes and ladders." And Mum just looked at me as if she wanted to laugh or maybe cry, and said, "But Audrey, that's what life is. We're all on a jagged graph. I know I am. Up a bit, down a bit. That's life. ~ Sophie Kinsella

He nodded slowly. "We'll do it your way for now, but my time will come."
Why that statement sent a jagged pulse of heat racing through her; she wasn't certain.
"You've changed," she finally said. "You're harder, Cam. Colder."
"I'm still the man who would kill for you," he stated matter-of-factly.
Jaci swallowed tightly. He was completely serious.
"Fine. I'll make a list for you." She finally shrugged, opting not to believe that declaration. "Give me a few days. It may take awhile to remember every son of a bitch who ever pissed me off. But what will you do when you find your name on the list? ~ Lora Leigh

He couldn't fit the two things together. It gave him a jagged, unfinished feeling, like the first pinprick of heartbreak, a tiny pointed lance of light beaming on something you can't bear to see, can't bring yourself to look at, can't look away from. ~ Roxana Robinson

My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out. ~ Charles Bukowski

She walked down the basement steps. She saw an imaginary framed photo seep into the wall - a quiet-smiled secret. No more than a few meters, it was a long walk to the drop sheets and the assortment of paint cans that shielded Max Vandenburg. She removed the sheets closest to the wall until there was a small corridor to look through. The first part of him she saw was his shoulder, and through the slender gap, she slowly, painfully, inched her hand in until it rested there. His clothing was cool. He did not wake.
She could feel his breathing and his shoulder moving up and down ever so slightly. For a while, she watched him. Then she sat and leaned back.
Sleepy air seemed to have followed her.
The scrawled words of practice stood magnificently on the wall by the stairs, jagged and childlike and sweet. They looked on as both the hidden Jew and the girl slept, hand to shoulder.
They breathed.
German and Jewish lungs. ~ Markus Zusak

Don't worry about me. I'll heal. Come on-"
"Where are we going?" Luce asked.
"The sun's about to rise," Daniel said, taking a small leather satchel from Phil. "And I figure you must be starving."
Luce hadn't realized it, but she was.
"I thought we could steal a moment before anyone else shows up."
There was a sheer, narrow path from the plateau that led to a small ledge down from where they'd landed. They picked their way down the jagged mountain, hand in hand, and when it was too steep for walking, Daniel coasted, always flying very low to the ground, his wings tucked close to his sides.
"Don't want to alarm the hikers," he explained. "Most places on Earth, people aren't willing to let themselves see miracles, angels. If they catch a glimpse of us flying by, they convince themselves their eyes were playing tricks on them. But in a place like this-"
"People can see miracles," Luce finished for him. "They want to."
"Right. And seeing leads to wonder."
"And wonder leads to-"
"Trouble." Daniel laughed a little.
Luce couldn't help grinning, enjoying that at least for a little while, Daniel was her miracle alone. ~ Lauren Kate

When your whole foundation fractured well past the point of repair, all you could do was glue the pathetic, jagged shards of your life back together and try not to bleed on them. ~ Nenia Campbell

The skull sat on top of an old Stop sign. Someone had painted the surface of the octagon white and written KEEP OUT across it in large jagged letters. A reddish-brown splatter stained the bottom edge, looking suspiciously like dried blood. I leaned closer. Yep, blood. Some hair, too. Human hair.
Curran frowned at the sign. "Do you think he's trying to tell us something?"
"I don't know. He's being so subtle about it. ~ Ilona Andrews

In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground's frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June
Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers
they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night. ~ Jack Kerouac

But just then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared behind the jagged crest of a beetling, pine-clad rock, and by its light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were ~ Bram Stoker

Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man's upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart. ~ Laird Barron

What happened, man? Gerry and Ginsberg are cold, and dead, in the ground. Kesey's stoned, and out of town. We've come to the end of the brotherhood song. The children brandish knives upon each other's throats, and their loaded 45's sit snug in lunch boxes nestled safely between Oreo cookies and a ham sandwich. Where are you now, oh ancient hipsters? Raggedy Beats beat down and broken wheel raggedy wheelchairs down ghostly geriatric wards. Where are you now, oh day-glow dreamers? Have you gotten off the bus and into your Mercedes? Did you get that second mortgage, and bear your fattened little babies? Where is that girl with flowers in her hair? Where is the man with revolution in his veins? We ask ourselves "where did we go wrong?" But there is no we. There is you, and then there is I. You do what you need to survive, And I do what I must to stay alive. We stand here Bleeding, slicing each other's wrists With the icy ridges of hardened jagged hearts, Cassandra's ~ Bearl Brooks

Why would anybody want a jagged piece to fit into the puzzle we call existance? A jagged piece, broken as it may be, will always stand out. There is no place for the broken pieces. ~ Nicole DSettemi

Jagged Peak was buried alive. ~ Erin Hunter

Despina can be reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.

When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another's heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.

In the coastline's haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel's withers, an embroidered saddle with glittering fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wine-skins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees' jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by thei ~ Italo Calvino

A jagged stone existed where her heart had been. ~ Meljean Brook

I couldn't imagine what Fox thought they were doing, contemplating such a jagged protagonist for a prime-time drama. I only knew that I wanted the role very much. ~ Hugh Laurie

I was a man of jagged risings ~ Gillian Flynn

But hope was a malicious, jagged thing, all spikes and razors that churned and cut deep in his guts. Hope was a great deal like fear. Jess ~ Rachel Caine

Disgust rose in Samantha like vomit. She wanted to seize the over-warm cluttered room and mash it between her hands, until the royal china, and the gas fire, and the gilt-framed pictures of Miles broke into jagged pieces; then, with wizened and painted Maureen trapped and squalling inside the wreckage, she wanted to heave it, like a celestial shot-putter, away into the sunset. The crushed lounge and doomed crone inside it, soared in her imagination through the heavens, plunging into the limitless ocean, leaving Samantha alone in the endless stillness of the universe. ~ J.K. Rowling

surviving the pieces. It's about the strength found within the damaged. It's above love. Love found despite the jagged, tainted edges… ~ Nashoda Rose

None of them were easy or soft or simple. They were like me, nursing hurts and hidden wounds, all broken in different ways. We didn't quite fit together. We had edges so jagged we cut each other sometimes, but as I curled up on my side, the warmth of the fire at my back, I felt a rush of gratitude so sweet it made my throat ache. Fear came with it. Keeping them close was a luxury I would pay for. Now I had more to lose. ~ Leigh Bardugo

Life. Unfair and painful at times. But always moving forward, always shifting,changing, with times relentless passage smoothing down jagged parts until it no longer hurts quite so much to breathe. ~ Suzanne Brockmann

Away acrost his valley he sees Black Mountain rising jagged to the sky ... and if he looks to the left on past it, he sees all the furtherest ranges, line on line. Purple and blue and blue again and smoky until you can't tell the mountains apart from the sky. Lord, it'll make a man think something, seeing that. It'll make a man think deep. ~ Lee Smith

Do you think there are bears?" whispered Linda, glancing at the black shore and jagged trees.
"Perhaps," said Philip. If it frightened her, he thought fiercely, so much the better. ~ Ruth Nichols

At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune teller.
"Now," said Wednesday, "at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns."
He dropped a coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot.
Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up and put it in his pocket.
"Aren't you going to show it to me? I'll show you mine," said Shadow.
"A man's fortune is his own affair," said Wednesday, stiffly. "I would not ask to see yours."
Shadow put his own coin into the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it.
EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING.
YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE.
YOUR LUCKY COLOUR IS DEAD.
Motto:
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.
Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it inside his pocket. ~ Neil Gaiman

There was something severed and rough about her, something tainted and, yet, at the same time those jagged pieces were the makings of something fearsome. She'd wanted to become someone the Senate would fear, why not shatter the sky? ~ Elise Kova

We didn't quite fit together. We had edges so jagged we cut each other sometimes, ~ Leigh Bardugo

I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone. ~ Chris Howard

Interesting fact from the front lines: raw grief smells like ripped leaves and splintered branches, a jagged green shriek. ~ Tana French

The one I'm looking at now is Sylvia Plath. The colors are a translucent sort of jade, pale gold, and, in a few places, milky white. Running jagged and clear, horizontally, through the middle of the canvas, is a line I recognize immediately and, after a long second, place as a line from the poem, "Daddy. ~ Ella James

The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won't function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless scream.s. We have no flesh, no muscle now ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Yes, God?" "I'm sorry about this, Buddy." The voice carried, deep and resounding, like the roar of a tornado. "I know it was all so abrupt, but some things cannot be avoided. Do you have a minute?" Buddy's hand involuntarily squeezed shut against a jagged guitar pick embedded in his bloody palm. This is a joke, right? "No, no, Buddy. ~ Byron Suggs

Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. ~ Charles Dickens

Let her alone,' said the enkanto, 'or I will curse you blind, lame, and worse.'
The old man laughed. 'I'm a curse breaker, fool.'
The elf grabbed one of the Jim Beam bottles from the table and slammed it down, so that he was holding a jagged glass neck. The elf smiled a very thin smile. 'Then I won't bother with magic. ~ Holly Black

Poor families are living above their means, in apartments they cannot afford. The thing is, those apartments are already at the bottom of the market. 24 Our cities have become unaffordable to our poorest families, and this problem is leaving a deep and jagged scar on the next generation. ~ Matthew Desmond

Fenella Doorn watched the unfamiliar wreck of a ship ghosting into her bay. Crippled by cannon fire, she thought. What else could do such damage? The foremast was blown away, as well as half the mainmast where a jury rig clung to the jagged stump, and shot holes tattered the sails on the mizzen. And yet, to Fenella's experienced eye the vessel had an air of defiance. Demi-cannons hulked in the shadowed gun ports. This ship was a fighter, battered but not beaten. With fight still in her, was she friend or foe? ~ Barbara Kyle

Can't you see? It's incredibly interesting. Aren't you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man's brain? It's as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter's brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere." The ~ Jon Ronson

Isn't it always unfair - death always a kind of outrage? A life ended too soon with jagged and torn edges, a sentence incomplete. ~ Rebecca Stott

If my body was cold in the night mist, I didn't feel it. If the sea roared in my ears, I didn't hear it. If the rock I sat on was sharp and jagged, I hardly noticed. Everything outside the two of us was a distraction. ~ Ransom Riggs

I'd spent my entire life as a teacup with a jagged crack running down the side, an imperfect vessel threatening to spill my contents onto the table at any random moment. Tolerated but not adored. It didn't seem like it would be even possible to love me. Probabilistically unlikely at best. But for Abelard, the jagged crack was the interesting thing about me. ~ Laura Creedle

He rubbed the ugly, jagged scar that ran from the corner of his eye to his hairline just above his ear. He was glad he had it. A lifelong reminder of that awful day ~ Mary Connealy

look at her. She froze, staring at the slitted silver eyes. Jagged ridges lined the top of the dragon's eyes, sweeping back into a crest on its head. The crest grew into a bony mane down the back of its neck. They ended in front of the wings and picked up again behind the wing joint to the tip of the dragon's tail. ~ Carol M. Vaughn

The driver bumped his way through the door and plopped down Caitlyn's "luggage." Caitlyn watched Madame Snowe's eyes go to it, widening as
she took it in. Caitlyn's cheeks heated.
Her "luggage" was a Vietnam War-era army green duffel bag, bought for a dollar at a garage sale. Cloud-shaped moisture stains mottled its
faded surface, and jagged stitches of black carpet thread sealed a rip on one end, Caitlyn's clumsy needlework giving the mended hole the look of
one of Frankenstein's scars.
"Is that all you brought?" Greta asked.
Caitlyn nodded, wishing the floor would swallow her.
"Very good. You will have no trouble unpacking, and then you can burn your bag, heh?"
"Reduce, reuse, recycle!" Caitlyn said with false cheer. "We're very big on living green in Oregon. Why buy a new suitcase when someone else's
old duffel bag will do?"
"We'll see that it gets … disposed of properly, ~ Lisa Cach

Woolf thought hard and continuously about the gravity, the scale, and the impact of these changes, and about the need for new literary forms to confront and interpret them. She was in the vanguard of a new generation of novelists for whom the traditional conventions of the novel no longer served to represent modern realities: the crumbling of established social and political orders, the sexual disquiet and jagged nerves, the moral revolt and cultural revolutions, the agitation for rights long denied, freedom unreasonably curbed or stupidly repressed. ~ Virginia Woolf

I smile back at her. "I must be stronger than I look." "All women are," my doctor adds while scrutinizing the womaniest part of me, improvising a pattern upon which to seam the torn pieces and hem the jagged edges. Clint ~ Hope Jahren

I now had two handy shafts of wood with jagged, pointy ends. I stepped between Inari and the nearest vampire and passed her one broken half of the rod. "Here," I said. "If you get the chance, make like Buffy. ~ Jim Butcher

Ana was a tornado. A jagged, hundred-sided peg in a community where everyone was supposed to fit into round holes. ~ Fredrik Backman

It was almost as if we'd passed our gaze from the healthy skin of a supermodel to the ragged infections of a burn-victim's corpse. Any industry buildings that had once stood proudly in the city were now hollowed-out skeletons with tents decorating their innards. The tall apartment buildings were burned and then rebuilt into towering layers of jagged, cut metal, brightly colored canvas roofs, solar panels, and graffiti. ~ Michael-Scott Earle

The thing I hear about a lot is when people over-sharpen their pencil with a single-blade pocket-sharpener and then when they put the pencil to the page, their tip breaks and pencil points always break irregularly. It always gets all jagged and you have to refresh the point. That's a common complaint. ~ David Rees

Once ye made up yer mind to do somethin', 'tis better t'stumble o'er the small hillock of jump-ahead than t'bash yer head on the jagged rocks of did-nothing.
Old Woman Nora of Loch Lomand to her three wee granddaughtersone cold evening ~ Karen Hawkins

They'd lied to me and betrayed me, leaving jagged edges where all my trust had been, and I didn't like or respect or admire them any more, but still I loved them. I had no choice. I understood that, perfectly, standing in the white wilderness of snow. You can't kill love. You can't even kill it with hate. You can kill in-love, and loving, and even loveliness. You can kill them all, or numb them into dense, leaden regret, but you can't kill love itself. Love is the passionate search for a truth other than your own; and once you feel it, honestly and completely, love is forever. Every act of love, every moment of the heart reaching out, is a part of the universal good: it's a part of God, or what we call God, and it can never die. ~ Gregory David Roberts

Most people would say that being in love was the best feeling in the world, and to some degree, I would agree with them, but not when all you could think about was losing it or watching something awful happen so that your heart shatters into a thousand tiny, jagged little pieces. No, being in love was more frightening than gratifying. ~ Kirsty Moseley

Poor Tony had once had the hubris to fancy he'd had occasion really to shiver, ever, before. But he had never truly really shivered until time's cadences - jagged and cold and smelling oddly of deodorant - entered his body via several openings, cold the way only damp cold is cold (the phrase he'd once had the gall to imagine he understood was the phrase "chilled to the bone"), shard-studded columns of chill entering to fill his bones with ground glass, and he could hear his joints' glassy crunch with every slightest shift of his hunched position, time ambient and in the air and entering and exiting at will, very cold and slow; and the pain of his breath against his teeth. ~ David Foster Wallace

No question that 'Birdman' is a breathtaking technical achievement, not a stunt. Shot in 30 days after a long rehearsal period, with the actors' and the camera's movements calibrated to the inch and the millisecond so the action flows smoothly, the picture has the jagged energy of a long guerrilla raid choreographed by Bob Fosse. ~ Richard Corliss

People are like their own ecosystems, little planets made up of islands and climates and forecasts. Some of us carry jagged mountain peaks, and some of us carry lakes. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

The water was not God. The water undulating slightly with the waves unformed was not spiritual. It was jagged cold water and it felt perfect when we put our hands into it, and it kissed out palms again and again, would never stop kissing our palms - and why wasn't that enough? ~ Dave Eggers

Calf-deep in the soothing water I indulge myself in the wishful vision. I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish. Without exception they are dreams of ends: dreams not of how to live but of how to die. And everyone, I know, in that walled town sinking now into darkness (I hear the two thin trumpet calls that announce the closing of the gates) is similarly preoccupied. What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in the water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one: I, wading in the ooze, am no less infected with it than the faithful ~ J.M. Coetzee

Hoyt's view of hell is tactile; it is the pain which moves in him like jagged wires pulled through his veins and guts. ~ Dan Simmons

I howl at the roof like a hotted-up bomb doing donuts, full of screeches. I howl like an air-raid siren, my arms stretched out wide. Howls are like songs. They can't be summoned; they just happen. They come from a place that I barely understand. And then something else climbs to the surface, something black and jagged, something from the deep. Imagine all your worse feelings surfacing. Imagine coughing up razor blades. Imagine not being able to stop the pain from coming out, and not knowing when it's going to end. ~ Leanne Hall

There are times when it's easier to fool yourself than swallow some jagged piece of reality. ~ John Searles

THE STORIES WE TELL fearlessly explores the textures of the human heart, finding a path toward hope through a Savannah that is jagged with class issues, faith misused, and broken trust. Henry loses you in a landscape peopled with secret keepers, storytellers and liars, and proves that in the end, love is the only reliable compass. This is everything you expect from Patti Callahan Henry - lyrical writing, characters worth rooting for, a sure-footed belief in the power of goodness - plus a twisty plot that will keep the pages turning long into the night. ~ Joshilyn Jackson

It was strange learning the contours of another's loneliness. You could never know it all at once; like stepping inside a dark cave, you felt along the walls, bumped into jagged edges. ~ Brit Bennett

Time goes on, and your life is still there, and you have to live it. After a while you remember the good things more often than the bad. Then, gradually, the empty silent parts of you fill up with sounds of talking and laughter again, and the jagged edges of sadness are softened by memories. ~ Lois Lowry

Gregori stepped away from the huddled mass of tourists, putting distance between himself and the guide. He walked completely erect,his head high, his long hair flowing around him. His hands were loose at his sides, and his body was relaxed, rippling with power.
"Hear me now, ancient one." His voice was soft and musical, filling the silence with beauty and purity. "You have lived long in this world, and you weary of the emptiness. I have come in anwer to your call."
"Gregori.The Dark One." The evil voice hissed and growled the words in answer. The ugliness tore at sensitive nerve endings like nails on a chalkboard. Some of the tourists actually covered their ears. "How dare you enter my city and interfere where you have no right?"
"I am justice,evil one. I have come to set your free from the bounaries holding you to this place." Gregori's voice was so soft and hypnotic that those listening edged out from their sanctuaries.It beckoned and pulled, so that none could resist his every desire.
The black shape above their head roiled like a witch's cauldron. A jagged bolt of lightning slammed to earth straight toward the huddled group. Gregori raised a hand and redirected the force of energy away from the tourists and Savannah. A smile edged the cruel set of his mouth. "You think to mock me with display,ancient one? Do not attempt to anger what you do not understand.You came to me.I did not hunt you.You seek to threaten my lifemate and those I count as my friends ~ Christine Feehan

...somewhere in that intersection of broken hearts and shattered souls... broken is not the end of things, but the beginning. Maybe broken is what happens before you become unbroken. What's more, maybe our broken pieces don't fit us... maybe my pieces are the very pieces needed to mend you and your pieces are the very pieces needed to mend me, but until we've been broken we don't have the pieces to mend each other. Maybe in the offering we discover the meaning, and value of being broken. Maybe...somewhere on the planet is another somebody standing around holding a bag of all the jagged, painful pieces of themselves and they can't get whole without you... Maybe love, the real kind, the kind only wished for in whispers and the kind our hearts are hardwired to want, is opening up the bag of you... And what's more, they don't cost you anything. They're free. I paid for them in the breaking... And because you're desperate, and you've tried most everything else, you empty my bag across the floor... and...find the one piece you've been missing... And when you insert that piece into the puzzle that had become you, it stops the hemorrhage, and for the first time in maybe your whole life, the wound starts to heal. ~ Charles Martin

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

People say we're weak where we've been broken, but I say we're stronger." Boone traced the long jagged line running right down the center of her. "We're stronger because we know our weak spots and can protect them more carefully the next time. ~ Nicole Williams

In the mountains it's cold.
Always been cold, not just this year.
Jagged scarps forever snowed in
Woods in the dark ravines spitting mist.
Grass is still sprouting at the end of June,
Leaves begin to fall in early August.
And here I am, high on mountains,
Peering and peering, but I can't even see the sky. ~ Gary Snyder

Tarver," she whispers, her eyes on my face. "There'll be cameras all the time. More questions. Everyone will want to hear your story. Your life will be different, no matter how far from Corinth we go." A flashlight flickers through the trees, broken and jagged as it shines past the trunks. The light glances off her face, illuminating her eyes for a brief, brilliant moment. I step closer.
"I don't care."
"My father will try to - " She swallows, then lifts her chin, mouth firming to a straight, determined line. "No. I'll figure out a way to handle him." I can't help but grin down at her, this steely assurance, my Lilac through and through.
"I'd pay to see that showdown. ~ Amie Kaufman

There is never going to be a good time for us. You can't force together two objects whose edges are worn in some spots and jagged in others. We're not puzzle pieces. We're two people who have a world of shit between them. But my mind is quiet when our gazes meet. ~ Rebecca Paula

Sometimes I think that no situation actually fits the technical definition of irony, and that the word just sort of hangs out in the linguistic ether singing a Siren song that's designed to crash the unsuspecting against the jagged rocks of pedantry. ~ Mike Duncan

...if you don't script your own way once and for all, your story will be written by someone else, and your actions will be guided by other people's dreams of who you should be rather than by the bright jagged thing you really are. ~ Carolina De Robertis

Gradually, without my noticing, my grief has changed shape; from a raw, jagged pain that won't be silenced to a dull, rounded ache I'm able to lock away at the back of my mind. ~ Clare Mackintosh

A narcissist society, in which each person is busy looking out for number one, can build neither brotherhood nor community. Aren't we glad in this Easter season and in all seasons that Jesus did not selfishly look out for number one? No wonder we have been told, 'Thou shalt have no other gods
before me,' and this includes self-worship! (Ex. 20:3; emphasis added). One way or another, the grossly selfish will finally be shattered, whimpering, against the jagged, concrete consequences of their selfishness. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

Jagged needle, wicked lies
From under the skin, pluck evil eyes.
Destiny change from pain and cold
Now that you pay in blood and soul. ~ Lawren Leo

But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on ~ John Green

...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in... this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged... ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Admirable, however, as the Paris of the present day appears to you, build up and put together again in imagination the Paris of the fifteenth century; look at the light through that surprising host of steeples, towers, and belfries; pour forth amid the immense city, break against the points of its islands, compress within the arches of the bridges, the current of the Seine, with its large patches of green and yellow, more changeable than a serpent's skin; define clearly the Gothic profile of this old Paris upon an horizon of azure, make its contour float in a wintry fog which clings to its innumerable chimneys; drown it in deep night, and observe the extraordinary play of darkness and light in this sombre labyrinth of buildings; throw into it a ray of moonlight, which shall show its faint outline and cause the huge heads of the towers to stand forth from amid the mist; or revert to that dark picture, touch up with shade the thousand acute angles of the spires and gables, and make them stand out, more jagged than a shark's jaw, upon the copper-coloured sky of evening. Now compare the two. ~ Victor Hugo

Daddy." I looked up towards my Heavenly Father in His garden. "Daddy, what is happening?" "Your wounds are the wounds of a great battle, beloved. "The glass that falls from your head is trauma. "The more you play, the more you rest as a little child in My presence, and the more healing of your body and your mind takes place on Earth. "Every time shards of jagged glass fall from your head it means that the trauma is falling from your mind. "Beloved, many in My Church do not yet understand how to heal those that have been wounded in battle. "That is why it is so important that every wounded warrior runs directly to Me. "For in this present Church age it is sometimes I, and I alone, who can bring the healing balm that is essential to heal the wounds of this present age. ~ Wendy Alec

A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop. ~ Ayn Rand

Rowen saw her life spread out before her, a long narrow road barely visible in the darkness, lined by dark jagged cliffs and even darker crevices. But at the end of that road blazed a light so radiant it stood in sharp contrast to the lonely black road that represented her life below. Her heart gasped at the sight. She desired the light at the end, but the path to it terrified her. ~ Morgan L. Busse

The earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken. ~ Walt Whitman