Loomed Rugs Quotes

Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses. ~ Toni Morrison

I don't need to think that I'm being loomed over my shoulder in order to behave in a way that's moral. ~ John Amaechi

I could hear the chaotic laughter trailing behind me. It turned the ageless trees into a menace. They loomed around me, while hiding him. The branches tore at my skin in an effort to bind me, while weeds sought to shackle my ankles, so that I could go no further. The pain they caused was minor, when I compared it to the searing inferno at my core. ~ J.D. Stroube

The tower loomed above them, growing, casting its cold shadow over them all as they drew closer. Tangled ropes of green ivy blanketed one side of the tower, blackened in places - carved deep into the mottled stone like scars. ~ Shona Moyce

It's about time you saw how fortunate you are. You have ... the most virile man in the world." He grinned, and in his eyes, black as sin, she saw the devil inside him laughing. But he was her devil, and she loved him madly.
"The most conceited, you mean," she said.
He bent his head until his great Usignuolo nose loomed as inch from hers, "The most virile, " he repeated firmly. "You are pathetically slow if you haven't learned that by now. Fortunately for you, I am the most patient of tutors. I shall prove it to you."
"You patience?" she asked.
"My virility. Both. Repeatedly." His black eyes glinted. "I will teach you a lesson you'll never forget. "
She tangled her fingers in his hair and brought his mouth to hers. "My wicked darling," she whispered. "I should like to see you try. ~ Loretta Chase

St. Paul's
Loomed like a bubble o'er the town. ~ Oscar Wilde

Without his shirt she could see just how bony he was, probably twenty or thirty pounds under his fighting weight from his years in captivity. He loomed over her, and she finally understood her ambivalence. He had protected her, killed for her, led her to safety. He was safety.
But he was also big and raw and so elementally male that it made her teeth sweat. She'd spent most of her life blissfully above the calls of the flesh and the dark, desperate couplings that subsumed others. She didn't like sex, didn't want sex. Body parts were simply that. She looked at MacGowan and thought about sex. ~ Anne Stuart

I hope it's that she simply doesn't figure large enough in his life to be worth mentioning, Vita thought.
And then she thought, if that was the case. It was therefore rather pathetic that Suzie loomed larger for her than for Tim, that Suzie was in some ways a more real presence in her life than in his. What she thought it boiled down to was that she really didn't want the woman he left her for to be the true, profound love of his life.
I auditioned for that role. I put so much effort into it, I loved it. I'm not ready to let it go to someone else.
But you keep forgetting he didn't leave you, Vita - you left him.
And then she thought, is this a slewed version of Aesop's dog in the manger? I don't want him - but I don't want him wanting anyone else?
And then she thought, For God's sake, shut up! This is doing me no good at all. All this thinking and wondering that I do isn't going to change him or the past. What a waste of quarter of an hour - sifting through all that emotional JUNK. She knew there was nothing of value in it- she'd been through it with a fine toothcomb over and again. ~ Freya North

No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources. ~ Margaret Sanger

The downtown local pulled in, its four yellow lights suggesting the feelers of some great dashing worm. Jane stood at the very rear of the train, and absently watched the tunnel lights. With a spurt, yellow meteors jumped up and arranged themselves in a row behind, one end of it growing, the other fading away in the tunnel. Sometimes a blue one flew into the row. Once the red eyes of an express train behind loomed up, a monster roaring past out of the dark. It was sinister but impersonal. It didn't care in the least whether or not Jane liked civilization. It was civilization. ~ Barbara Newhall Follett

The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church tower when I looked around me for the last time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Personal hatreds and rivalry loomed larger in most senator's minds than the good of the Republic. [A big problem then and now] ~ Adrian Goldsworthy

Flanked as they are by busts of the governors before them and loomed over by all those names along the walls, I feel generations of men who have kept women from their schools staring me down. Men like this never die - they're chiseled in marble and erected in these halls. ~ Mackenzi Lee

Part of her wanted simply to sit and stare out of the window, at the lawn, flaky with sodden leaves, and the branches with yellow leaves, or few, or none, she thought, taking pleasure at least in Shakespeare's rhythm, but also feeling old. She took pleasure, too, in the inert solidity of glass panes and polished furniture and rows of ordered books around her, and the magic trees of life woven in glowing colours on the rugs at her feet. ~ A.S. Byatt

When your young life offered its first disaster, naturally it loomed large. After you'd survived dozens, you basically just told the next one to take a number and get in line. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

We receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity, of our passive impressionism, of our helplessness before suggestion. In no period has the role of the parents loomed as immense, because we have recognized the determinism, but at the same time an exaggeration in the size of the Enormous Parent does not need to be permanent and irretrievable. The time has come when, having completed the scientific study of the importance of parents, we now must re-establish our power to revoke their imprint, to reverse our patterns, to kill our fatal downward tendencies. We do not remain smaller in suture than our parents. Nature had intended them to shrink progressively in our eyes to human proportions while we reach for our own maturity. Their fallibilities, their errors, their weaknesses were intended to develop our own capacity for parenthood. We were to discover their human weakness not to overwhelm or humiliate them, but to realize the difficulty of their task and awaken our own human protectiveness toward their failures or a respect for their partial achievement. But to place all responsibilities upon them is wrong too. If they gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength. We cannot forever await from them the sanction to mature, to impose on them our own truths, to resist or perhaps defeat them in our necessity to gain strength.

We cannot always place responsibility outside of ~ Anais Nin

Eviction day at the orphanage loomed large over Giti--and I worried deeply for her. 'Allah will provide,' I whispered. But Giti rolled her eyes, unconvinced. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Above him loomed a grotesque fat man [ ... ] His bedrobe was large enough to serve as a tourney pavilion, but its loosely knotted belt had come undone, exposing a huge white belly and a pair of heavy breasts that sagged like sacks of suet covered with coarse yellow hair. ~ George R R Martin

I'm the kind of person who would have liked to have lived at the Plaza. I love crystal chandeliers and gold leaf, velvets and mirrors, Oriental rugs and marble. ~ Candace Bushnell

The manor looked smaller than Ash remembered, the stone of its facade honey-gold, not bleak and imposing. It had shrunk from the unassailable fortress that had loomed in Ash's head all these years. Now it was just a house. A big house, yes, but not the dark, menacing edifice he'd brooded over in his memory. ~ Courtney Milan

In reality it was just what is usually
seen in the houses of people of moderate
means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others
like themselves: there are damasks,
dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and
polished bronzes
all the things people of
a certain class have in order to
resemble other people of that class. His
house was so like the others that it
would never have been noticed, but to him it
all seemed to be quite exceptional. ~ Leo Tolstoy

He walked from one end of the basement to the other, the lamplight magnifying his shadow. It turned him into a giant on the wall, walking back and forth. When he stopped pacing, his shadow loomed behind him, watching. Someone was always watching. ~ Markus Zusak

I've never been to a festival. I'm a creature of habit, mashed-potato comfort, I like rugs. Our sofa's squishy. Maybe too squishy - it's hard to get up sometimes. ~ Martin Freeman

As I worked I continued to be a bit terrified in the back of my mind that it would be awful in the end, a big mishmash of nothing in particular, and there I would be, having wasted a whole week of my life destroying things I wanted to keep.

But I should have trusted the long history of women who've come before me making rag rugs from everything that wasn't nailed down because it wasn't like that at all. Instead it was like a big, incredible tapestry that just happened to--if you could decipher it--tell a million little stories from my life. I could look at it and see my old lace slip and the girls' party dresses and my high school rainbow tie-dyes, the Irish kilt and the Halloween clown pants and so many, many other things. It was all in there somewhere.

I felt like the miller's daughter in the fairy tale, the one who stays up all night spinning straw into gold. But who needs yellow metal, anyway? The was way better. ~ Eve O. Schaub

But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming-everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class. And his arrangements looked so much like everyone else's that they were unremarkable, though he saw them as something truly distinctive. ~ Leo Tolstoy

All the nightmares that had ever plagued a woman alone in the dark loomed in her mind. ~ Nora Roberts

She was haunted by the possibility that she had missed her chance for happiness. But she had not missed her chance, she told herself, for her chance would not let her get away so easily. Each morning she was fortified by hope: the future loomed. ~ Amanda Coplin

The orphanage taught their girls religious ritual to the Nth degree, and how to make their own clothes. Giti mended uniforms for the soldiers and even sold a few prayer rugs in the marketplace. Self-sufficiency they called it. Ha! ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

Those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks ~ Umberto Eco

Then she told him to look in the bedroom and Aureliano Segundo saw the mule. Its skin was clinging to its bones like that of its mistress, but it was just as alive and resolute as she. Petra Cotes had fed it with her wrath, and when there was no more hay or corn or roots, she had given it shelter in her own bedroom and fed it on the percale sheets, the Persian rugs, the plush bedspreads, the velvet drapes, and the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In a dog's life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open, some rugs would shred. Like any relationship, this one had its costs. They were costs we came to accept and balance against the joy and amusement and protection and companionship he gave us. ~ John Grogan

Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions. One of my patients told me, 'It is like hating your home, your kitchen and pots and pans, your bed, your chairs, your table, your rugs.' Nothing feels safe – least of all your own body. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Emptiness was an index. It recorded the incomprehensible chronicle of the metropolis, the demographic realities, how money worked, the cobbled-together lifestyles and roosting habits. The population remained at a miraculous density, it seemed to him, for the empty rooms brimmed with evidence, in the stragglers they did or did not contain, in the busted barricades, in the expired relatives on the futon beds, arms crossed over their chests in ad hoc rites. The rooms stored anthropological clues re: kinship rituals and taboos. How they treated their dead.

The rich tended to escape. Entire white-glove buildings were devoid, as Omega discovered after they worried the seams of and then shattered the glass doors to the lobby (no choice, despite the No-No Cards). The rich fled during the convulsions of the great evacuation, dragging their distilled possessions in wheeled luggage of European manufacture, leaving their thousand-dollar floor lamps to attract dust to their silver surfaces and recount luxury to later visitors, bowing like weeping willows over imported pile rugs. A larger percentage of the poor tended to stay, shoving layaway bureaus and media consoles up against the doors. There were those who decided to stay, willfully uncomprehending or stupid or incapacitated by the scope of the disaster, and those who could not leave for a hundred other reasons - because they were waiting for their girlfriend or mother or soul mate to make it home first, because their mobil ~ Colson Whitehead

Upon the scent of dying jasmine she loomed out that solemn brook, spinning herself a crown of silver, witches bones and citadels. For her longing was the sky dripping with dark fever ... And she will lick the face of oblivion, till the stars scream her name. ~ Arthur Crow

Somehow, all the talk about tenure and anthropology had given her visions of a thick-walled, libraried adobe, the kind of place that was covered with kilim rugs and fertility sculptures. The white stucco in front of her looked only slightly more substantial than a roadside weigh station. ~ Mira Jacob

Every muscle in his body went rigid. Then he rolled toward her, not stopping until she was on her back and he loomed over her. He shoved a muscled thigh between hers, parting them and making room for himself. Then, his eyes as bright as the damned sun, he ducked his head and claimed her lips, devouring her and stoking the flames until she moaned and arched up against him.

YES. This was what she wanted, what she needed. It had been soooooo long since any man had touched her. And Nick wasn't just any man. He was the one who frequented all of her illicit sexual fantasies.

She moaned a protest when his lips left hers and trailed kisses across her cheek to her ear. His warm breath sent more sensual shivers through her before he raised his head and stared down at her. ~ Dianne Duvall

Part of you liked him," Jack said, giving her an intent stare. "I could see it in your writing."
She smiled uncomfortably. "Well, in the realm of fantasy, I suppose I did. But certainly not in reality."
The hand behind her neck closed in a gentle but secure grip. "Then here is your birthday present, Amanda. A night of fantasy." He loomed over her, his head and broad shoulders obliterating the firelight as he bent to kiss her.
"Wait," Amanda said in a flash of panic, turning her head as Jack's mouth approached hers. His lips pressed on her cheek, a brush of intimate heat that astonished her. "Wait," she said again, her voice wobbling. Her face was turned full toward the fire, its yellow glow dazzling her eyes as she sought to avoid the stranger's exploring kisses. His mouth moved gently over her cheek and toward her ear, tickling the tiny wisps of hair just above it. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Hagrid's hut loomed out of the darkness. There were no lights, no sound of Fang scrabbling at the door, his bark booming in welcome. All those visits to Hagrid, and the gleam of the copper kettle on the fire, and rock cakes and giant grubs, and his great bearded face, and Ron vomiting slugs, and Hermione helping him save Norbert . . . ~ J.K. Rowling

And what kind of habitation pleases God? What must our natures be like before he can feel at home within us? He asks nothing but a pure heart and a single mind. He asks no rich paneling, no rugs from the Orient, no art treasures from afar. He desires but sincerity, transparency, humility, and love. He will see to the rest. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt. ~ China Mieville

Is there anywhere else to sleep tonight ... Anywhere?' I pleaded.
There's Mei's office, but you'll have to sleep on the floor I'm afraid.' Mei was one of the Ward 9D dietitians.
'I'll sleep on the floor any day. I'm used to it back in the Islands,' I laughed tiredly.
I settled down on the floor. The three rugs I had brought to cushion my back worked surprisingly well. It was almost more comfortable than the thin mats on the cold concrete floors of the fales in Samoa. The idea of sleeping in someone's office was the best idea I had had all year. I decided that I would keep this secret to myself. ~ Ta'afuli Andrew Fiu