Petrified Quotes

I met an agent through my modeling agency who encouraged me to go out and audition for sitcoms, and I was absolutely petrified because I had no desire to do it. ~ Robin Wright

I was looking through half-open eyes at the sky, like the first man, and thinking about how - there you are - my uncle had died, about how they would now be burying him, about how I would never meet him. I stood petrified, thinking that one day I too would die. At the same time I was horror-stricken to realize that my mother would also die. All of this came rushing upon me in a flash of a peculiar violet color, in a twinkling, and the sudden activity in my intestines and in my heart told me that what had seemed at first just a foreboding was indeed the truth. This experience made me realize, without any circumlocution, that I would die one day, and so would my mother, and my sister Anna. I couldn't imagine how one day my hand would die, how my eyes would die. Looking over my hand, I caught this thought on my palm, connected to my body, indivisible from it. ~ Danilo Kis

I actually got really petrified by the thought of people seeing me. ~ Andy Partridge

A mathematical idea should not be petrified in a formalised axiomatic setting, but should be considered instead as flowing as a river. ~ James Joseph Sylvester

Warner drops his hand. His glassy green eyes are so delighted I'm petrified.
"God, I've missed you," he says to me.
"You didn't actually think I'd let you go so easily? ~ Tahereh Mafi

Most men are petrified of standing out in any way or being thought superficial. ~ Russell Smith

Despite its enormous power and wealth, China's ruling elite remains absolutely petrified that the free flow of information will undermine its political legitimacy, particularly among China's younger generation. ~ Tom Lantos

And then I met a woman,
now comes the funny part;
with eyes that petrified my brain
and sunk into my heart. ~ Hugh Antoine D'Arcy

Sometimes you don't have enough money to hire a real science teacher. Sometimes you have an old real science teacher who retires or quits and leaves you without a replacement. And if you don't have a real science teacher, then you pick one of the other teachers and make him the science teacher.
And that's why small-town kids sometimes don't know the truth about petrified wood. ~ Sherman Alexie

I'll tell you now before you can speak: strength is a myth. It's not what it is, when it looks like what it is. It's usually what it is when it looks like something else. It takes bravery to admit that you're petrified and keep soldiering on despite it. Oh,and, "easy"? Also a hoax! If it existed it would be sold for the same as you got it for- nothing! Ha! ~ Mary-Louise Parker

I can't believe I said it out loud. The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don't feel free. I feel like shit. ~ Melina Marchetta

I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and - But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic. ~ Mark Twain

I'm petrified of bees because I have an anaphylactic reaction to bees. ~ Joyce Giraud

Whatever noblest things the mind received,
More and more foreign matter spoils the theme;
And when the good of this world is achieved,
What's better seems an idle dream.
That gave us our life, the noblest urges
Are petrified in the earth's vulgar surges ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

GGRRROOCCCCK...
Ian's knees buckled. The rock outcropping shook the ground, sending a spew of grayish dust that quickly billowed around them.
Shielding his eyes, he spotted Amy standing by the figurine, which was now moving toward her. She was in shock, her backpack on the ground by her feet.
"Get back!" he shouted.
Ian pulled Amy away and threw her to the ground, landing on top of her. Gravel showered over his back, embedding into his hair and landing on the ground like a burst of applause.
His second though was that the shirt would be ruined. And this was the shock of it-that his first thought had not been about the shirt. Or the coin. Or himself.
It had been about her.
But that was not part of the plan. She existed for a purpose. She was a tactic, a stepping stone. She was...
"Lovely," he said.
Amy was staring up at him, petrified, her eyelashes flecked with dust. Ian took her hand, which was knotted into a fist. "Y-y-you don't have to do that," she whispered.
"Do what?" Ian asked.
"Be sarcastic. Say things like 'lovely.' You saved my life. Th-thank you."
"My duty," he replied. He lowered his head and allowed his lips to brush hers. Just a bit. ~ Peter Lerangis

My first date was with a girl named Cessi. We'd had a beautiful relationship over the phone all summer long. Then she came home and we met to go out for the first time to the movies. When I saw her I was petrified. I couldn't even look her in the eye to talk to her. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio

How many thorns of human nature - hard, sharp, lifeless protuberances that tear and wound us, narrow prejudices, bristling conceits that repel and disgust us - are arrested developments, calcified tendencies, buds of promise that should have lifted a branch up into the sunny day with fruit; and flowers to delight the heart of men, but now all grown hard, petrified, for want of culture and a congenial soil and climate. ~ John Burroughs

Four hours of prosthetics every morning, the jowls and the nose, and it was very hot so they're having to attend to it all day, and you're still petrified of so many things, such as, can I speak properly? Hitchcock never quite lost those East End vowels, even though he had the softened California consonants. ~ Toby Jones

It was as if, before she`d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now ir was all oxygenated and red. She was petrified of becoming the half-alive person she`d been before. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Extreme torture is mute, and so we sat silent, petrified, like columns of marble buried under the sand of an earthquake. Neither wished to listen to the other because our heart-threads had become weak and even breathing would have broken them. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Door's not locked," Zerbrowski said. "You're a cop. How can you leave your car unlocked?" I opened the door and stopped. The passenger seat and floorboard were full. McDonald's take-out sacks and newspapers filled the seat and flowed onto the floorboards. A piece of petrified pizza and a herd of pop cans filled the rest of the floorboard. "Jesus, Zerbrowski, does the EPA know you're driving a toxic waste dump through populated areas?" "See why I leave it unlocked. Who would steal it?" He knelt in the seat and began shoveling armfuls of garbage into the backseat. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that. ~ Lennie James

I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot. ~ Eugene Ionesco

You used to give yourself over to endless sessions of doubt. You would claim to be an expert on the subject. But doubting would tire you so much that you would end up doubting doubt itself. I saw you one day at the end of an afternoon of solitary speculation. You were unmoving and petrified. Running several kilometers in a deep forest full of ravines and pitfalls would have exhausted you less. ~ Edouard Leve

Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; ~ Mark Twain

But when the 'Glee' audition came around, my manager literally had to talk me into it. I was petrified to sing in front of anyone. ~ Cory Monteith

Why are you so petrified of silence, here can you handle this? Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines or when you think you're gonna die? Or did you long for the next distraction ... ~ Alanis Morissette

A film is a petrified fountain of thought. ~ Jean Cocteau

I had always told my father that before working with him in the same frame as an actor, which I was petrified to do, I wanted to learn from him, so I had pleaded with him for two years before he agreed to write and direct 'Mausam.' It was our dream project and a wonderful opportunity for us to work as a family. ~ Shahid Kapoor

Unfortunately, we cannot live our lives according to the moral and religious convictions or petrified dogmas of our forebears. We have an obligation to live by our own faith, forever renewing the traditions of the past and adapting them to the demands of own time and place. ~ Farquhar McHarg

Second Tale"

You who knew always where your love
was going,
today you stay on your rock
as petrified as it is
and I in my skiff
frozen with love
up to my neck
wanting nothing more to do with love,
I close my eyes on you
entirely you
standing
motionless among the gulls,
you whom I loved so much
that my heart at every joint
cracked open. ~ Rachida Madani

I didn't have boyfriends until my late teens. I was at a girls' boarding school, and my stepfather disapproved of me going out with anybody. I never really came across any boys. When I did, one of them asked me out, and I was petrified. I felt like a fish out of water, and it was excruciating. ~ Pattie Boyd

Why are you still smiling? You're supposed to fear my mighty wrath." His shoulders shook with silent laughter. "In case you can't tell, I'm petrified." "You will be if my mighty wrath is ever unleashed. Stop laughing! ~ Suzanne Wright

If this was love, it felt different than she'd imagined it would, walking a thin line between passion and terror. It was Romeo and Juliet. It was Wuthering Heights. And Val was left petrified from the boiling intensity of it. ~ Nenia Campbell

I'm petrified of spiders. I hate them. I sleep with a glass of water beside my bed every night. I woke up once to take a sip of water and almost swallowed a dead one floating in the glass. ~ Kyle Schmid

She wondered how trees became petrified, if the same process worked with a human heart. ~ Jodi Picoult

While I believe in marriage as an institution, I am also petrified of it. ~ Shahid Kapoor

What would our enemies say if they knew we'd all been petrified of a girl? ~ Sarah J. Maas

Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched men fall to the ground like leaves. They were swept up as memories, and burned. History owns them. These men were petrified in both senses of the word: paralyzed and turned to stone. Their refusal to express feeling killed them. Anachronistic men. Those poor, poor boys. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

But he was incapable of shame.He had no conscience or soul.No heart, either.That has broken and died years ago.The leftover pieces had petrified in his chest, leaving stone shrapnel in a black, empty place that felt nothing.Just a yawning void of nothing.And he liked it that way ... ~ Charlotte Featherstone

The ice inside me melts. Suddenly, I'm burning up and terrified, scared I'll be too weak to resist.

Scratch that - I'm petrified I've already given in. ~ Amanda Bouchet

You'll find people who rib you about their age are petrified about getting old. It doesn't bother me. ~ Noel Gallagher

You think if you sit there, looking petrified and tense, I'll offer a blowjob to distract you from it all."
My humiliation comes to a screeching halt upon hearing the word blowjob. "What?"
"Well, it's not going to happen."
Ignore the cock. Ignore him. He's an idiot. Focus on the problem at hand. "You are deranged. Completely deranged. ~ Kristen Callihan

Shale's answers were, for the most part, sarcastic. When asked what kind of rock it consisted of, Shale answered "petrified nug droppings." When asked how it was created, Shale responded with a long explanation of mother golems and father golems which Pharamond believed for five whole minutes. When asked how it could see through those points of lights in its eye sockets, Shale commented that it actually preferred tearing the eyeballs out of flesh creatures and using them instead - elven ones in particular. ~ David Gaider

If I don't clean off the bug corpses that are petrified on my bumper for looks, then what do I do it for? Safety. I feel safer not knowing how many things I've killed with my car, possibly including many missing children. ~ Jarod Kintz

An interesting example is that the worst woman in the book, who is so cruel and violent, is the sorceress in "The Prince of the Black Islands." She's a beautiful young woman, and she has turned her husband into stone from the waist down. A traveling sultan finds him, in his dreadful state, and the man petrified from the waist down tells his sad story ... how his wife comes every afternoon and beats him until the blood runs down. She's just unwontedly, arbitrarily cruel. ~ Marina Warner

I'm the kind of guy who would say, "Yeah, I'll do that!," and then, when it came down to it, I would be absolutely petrified. Those days have passed me by, but I would do it. If it meant that I was in a scene naked with a woman, or anybody romantic, I'd be into it. ~ Chris Bauer

And I laugh and I spin and dance and frolic in ecstasy and I ... I hurt no more, while you ... you petrified little man, are left to wonder if it's you I speak of. ~ Kellie Elmore

I will not pretend I wasn't petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn't be exciting if they didn't. ~ Roald Dahl

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion. ~ Joseph Campbell

But like all beautiful faces Emily's made you believe that its possessor was a better person than she was. It allowed her to pass for stoical when she was petrified, and mysterious and aloof when she was so filled with self-doubt that she bought presents for other people when it was her birthday, framed most of her conversation in terms of apology and regret, and for all her talent could no longer manage to string twenty-five paragraphs fo prose together to make a short story. ~ Michael Chabon

Phillip look into Ray's eyes. He saw compassion and hope. And he saw himself mirrored back, bleeding in a dirty gutter on a street where life was worth less than a dime bag.
Sick, tired, petrified, Phillip dropped his head into his hands.
"What's the point?"
"You're the point, son." Ray ran his hand over Phillip's hair. "You're the point. ~ Nora Roberts

I will say that when I first came out to the States to work on 'Jericho,' that was the only time that I've ever been frightened about a job, because in America they tell stories over such a long time, and I was petrified that I'd get bored. ~ Lennie James

As the boys screamed and hauled off handfuls of mulch, Olivier had slowly, deliberately, gently taken Gabri's hand and held it before gracefully lifting it to his lips. The boys had watched, momentarily stunned, as Olivier had kissed Gabri's manure-stained hand with his manure-stained lips. The boys had seemed petrified by this act of love and defiance. But just for a moment. Their hatred triumphed and soon their attack had re-doubled. ~ Louise Penny

I went to a Karaoke Bar last night that didn't play any 70s music, at first I was afriad, oh I was petrified ~ Stewart Francis

If you steal other people's characters, it doesn't work with the context of the scripts and what is written, so I wanted to make her my own. I was petrified, in the beginning, because it's such an iconic character, especially being a young lady myself. ~ Tamsin Egerton

Nightmares are a strange thing. Your worst fear is sometimes something you enjoy thinking about, for some strange reason. I don't know why that is, but it's some kind of fantasy that people play out. "What would I do to protect my children? I'd do anything." And then, you watch it play out. I'm petrified of such a thing. ~ Ethan Hawke

My heart was in my mouth. I realised that I had no desire to know any more about her past. What was behind her made me feel sick, petrified. Only the future mattered now. ~ Ruth Ahmed

The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I was petrified because all my friends would be going to Washington, DC, to protest. I was sixteen, and I was like, "I don't think I'll be going with you guys," just because I was scared. Then you saw the news, and cops - not students in schools with guns - cops are killing sixteen year old protesters on the news. To me that was more horrifying, to have the authority figures actually killing people on the evening news, than to have another student firing a gun. ~ Gus Van Sant

As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Y'all got your heads tucked so far up your rears, she's petrified the kid's gonna need a shrink before he can shit in a dish. ~ Addison Moore

Mountains have been formed by one [or other] of the causes of the formation of stone, most probably from agglutinative clay which slowly dried and petrified during ages of which we have no record. It seems likely that this habitable world was in former days uninhabitable and, indeed, submerged beneath the ocean. Then, becoming exposed little by little, it petrified in the course of ages. ~ Avicenna

Petite and with a rounded figure exaggerated by her tight dress, she was a beautiful mermaid swimming through the crowded street, and Gil felt like a petrified little fish in front of a shark. Maybe ~ Mala Spina

It had to be the most surreal, embarrassing, awkward moment of his life, standing petrified in his mother's backyard in front of a broken lawn mower, sporting a woody and discussing sex for sale with the landlady. ~ Linda Kage

Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl. At ~ Tana French

It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face, - one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude Frollo except his eyes. ~ Victor Hugo

She was petrified now but I simply slung her over my shoulder and made for my bunk. My 2IC who had caught the whole show approached.
'Sir do you think it's fair, you have banned all the men from having sex yet here you are about to indulge your base nature.'
I swung up an arm, 'tell them to help themselves, there are plenty to go round.'
He paled when he realised that I meant the females, 'I will tell them sir.'
'Be sure to Peter, I don't want to have to repopulate the whole human race by myself now do I.'
'It doesn't bear thinking about sir. ~ J.W. Murison

Hey Nash! You scared?'
'Terrified,mortified,petrified...stupefied by you! ~ Sylvia Nasar

As a child, I was a brat, and my parents didn't know how to control me. So they told me ghost stories, which stayed with me. I am still petrified of darkness and being alone. ~ Bipasha Basu

An academical system without the personal influence of teachers on pupils, is an arctic winter; it will create an icebound, petrified, cast-iron University, and nothing else. ~ John Henry Newman

Ever feel like you're always winding up and never throwing it out? You might blame it on perfectionism or procrastination or preparation. You may even call it prudent. But whatever it is...IT'S NOT WORKING. I call this phenomenon "petrified performance." Where you're busy, busy, busy (on the wrong activities or the right activities for too long), and never accomplishing the idea or task you set out to do. You're stuck. Like a tree that once was lively is now dead and immovable like a stone. What once was a fluid idea is now frozen in time. How do you overcome petrified performance? With practice, silly. Everything you do should be considered a "project" because projects have a beginning and an end with a timeline. No more dreaming. Wake up and put those dreams to work by putting the steps necessary to make them happen on the calendar. Are you willing to practice? That's my prescription. ~ Richie Norton

I am petrified of where my mind can go, because I know where it has already been. ~ Matt Haig

When white people envision their perfect home, it always has hardwood floors. In fact, most white people would prefer a dirt floor over wall-to-wall carpeting, because to them it would have the same level of cleanliness and probably fewer germs.
White people are petrified of germs, and when they look at a carpet all they can see is everything that has ever been spilled, tracked in, or shaken loose into the carpet fibers. But more disgusting to white people is that wall-to-wall carpeting reminds them of suburban homes, motel rooms, and the horrible apartments that they have visited or lived in over the years. It has no soul. Only germs.
Hardwood floors, on the other hand, are easily cleaned and give a sense of character to a place, since they are often the original flooring in older buildings. It is a well-known white fantasy to purchase a home or apartment that has disgusting carpet and then to pull it up to reveal a beautiful hardwood floor underneath. ~ Christian Lander

Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago. ~ Graham Moore

A few minutes ago he'd been petrified, and now all he could think was that he refused, absolutely refused, to embarrass himself any more. The man was a historian. Once Arthur got over his appearance, he was going to remember that most historians were full of themselves and often boring, and he was going to feel very foolish. ~ R. Cooper

Emily climbed onto a large boulder, watching the heavens while listening to the waves that were melodically splashing to the granite rocks.

Then, she petrified and curdled: two stars in the sky were moving quickly, changing the angles of the trajectory radically and sharply… disappearing and appearing again. In a few seconds, the third one joined them, doing the same.

- But it can't be real! - Emma exclaimed, finding herself reaching her arm upwards. - No… can't be real… just can't…

The girl dropped her glance down, unconsciously hoping that if she didn't see the UFOs, they would stop existing.
She took a long breath, and, making as huge leaps as she could do with her little feet, ran back to the streets of the village. ~ Sahara Sanders

I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because ... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since ... I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment. ~ Clyde Tombaugh

The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error ~ Thornton Wilder

He'd seen that the young ones died quickly. He'd heard the staff talk about it. When they were ready they let go. Not like adults. Adults took a long time. It was as if adults had built such a thick, petrified husk around them that this alone gave them the strength, the form to hold on. And by the transient revival that so often came to the dying, adults seemed to find a last little puff of life before the end. They had a term for it here at the hospital -- hui guang fan zhao, the reflected rays of the setting sun. Children were lacking in this. They went quickly. He watched as the DOWN light came on and the elevator door slid open.

He had a fear that his life now was just an interlude of hui guang fan zhao, a brief moment before it all came back, worse. And for so long now he had been in this state by himself. He stared up at the digital floor numbers flashing, descending. ~ Nicole Mones

Of course the people in the metro didn't see a thing! ... what a joke! petrified ratlets! but they'll still come out to refute me! make claims! ... that nothing got bombed! ... squished! powdered! that the firmament was calm, and me, I imagined the whole thing! chrysanthemums, sprays, roses! why, there's no more any such thing as sky-hooking shrapnel than there is anal ice cream! it's all in my mind! hallucinations and bullshit! what a crook! but I repeat and reassert! shrapnel and fiery lace stretched from one end of the horizon to the other! with lots of glow-worms mixed in ... and dancing purple fireflies ... ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Fascinated by the glitter of gain, man gazes at the Medusa-like face of greed and stands petrified. ~ Manly P. Hall

The witch's weapon is fear. She aims to put as much into your heart as she can before she takes it. Either that or she'll simply turn you to stone. If that sounds preferable to death, it is not. The skin hardens to rock. The blood stops flowing. The living flesh is petrified, but the mind is not." The dull patter of rain was the only sound in the cavernous Armory. None of the girls moved. Most stared at the discarded weapons strewn across the floor. "The witch uses fear, but so do we. And there's nothing she fears more than love." She continued her slow patrol, locking eyes with whichever cadet was in front of her. "She has no answer for it. That is the magic of a Princess of the Shield. That is how you defeat a witch. Whoever scares the other in the core of her heart first, wins. That's the game. ~ M.A. Larson

Snow pouted. "I hate roses! They hurt!"
Her mother smiled, her image softening along with the sound of her voice. She seemed so far away. "They can, yes, when you get nicked by a thorn." She plucked a single red rose off the bush. It was petrified from the snow and frozen, but still perfectly preserved and almost crimson in color. Snow peered at it closely. "But you shouldn't be afraid to hold on to something beautiful, even if there are thorns in your path. If you want something, sometimes you have to take risks. And when you do"- she handed Snow the rose- "you reap wonderful rewards. ~ Jen Calonita

I have found a paper of mine among some others in which I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations. ~ George Eliot

While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time. ~ Lynne Truss

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing
that was me. ~ Louise Erdrich

Sombre thoughts and fancies often require a little real soil or substance to flourish in; they are the dark pine-trees which take root in, and frown over the rifts of the scathed and petrified heart, and are chiefly nourished by the rain of unavailing tears, and the vapors of fancy. ~ John Frederick Boyes

I suffer from CLAUSTROPHOBIA, a fear of closed spaces.For example, I'm petrified that the WINE store will be closed before I have time to get there!!! ~ Tanya Masse

Did that really happen?" said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn't had even one baby yet. She used birth control. "Of course it happened," Trout told her. "If I wrote something that hadn't really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That's fraud."
Maggie believed him. "I'd never thought about that before."
"Think about it now."
"It's like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble."
"Exactly. The same body of law applies."
"Do you think you might put us in a book sometime?"
"I put everything that happens to me in books."
"I guess I better be careful what I say."
"That's right. And I'm not the only one who's listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he's going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they're bad things instead of good things, that's too bad for you, because you'll burn forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting."
Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that, too, and was petrified.
Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie's cleavage. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation. ~ Roland Barthes

And Chaol was afraid, but not for himself. He was afraid of what would come when Aedion and Aelin were reunited. For he'd seen in her that same glittering ember that made people look and listen. Had seen her stalk into the council with Councilor Mullison's head and smile at the King of Adarlan, every man in that room enthralled and petrified by the dark whirlwind of her spirit. The two of them together, both of them lethal, working to build an army, ignite their people ... He was afraid of what they would do to his kingdom. ~ Sarah J. Maas

My father ran a saloon in Kenosha, Wis., which is just about as rough a living as I can think of. It was brutal; it scared the hell out of me. I was so petrified all the while I was a child, I didn't know what I was doing half the time. ~ Don Ameche

For some reason we feel we should be perfect, and forget that we learn through our mistakes. Our need to be perfect and our need to control the outcome of events work together to keep us petrified when we think about making a change or attempting a new challenge. ~ Susan Jeffers

As the bartender struck a match to light her cigarette, she put her hand on his wrist to steady it. Travis saw him jump, draw back. He held his wrist, blew on it, looked at her reproachfully. Travis said: 'Why, you scratched him, Sarah.'

'Did I?' And as she turned and looked at him, he saw her hand twitch a little, and drew still further away from her. 'What - what's got into you?' he faltered.

There was some kind of tension spreading all around the horseshoe-shaped bar, emanating from her. All the cordiality, the sociability, was leaving it. Cheery conversations even at the far ends of it faltered and died, and the speakers looked around them as though wondering what was putting them so on edge. A heavy leaden pall of restless silence descended, as when a cloud goes over the sun. One or two people even turned and moved away reluctantly, as though they hadn't intended to but didn't like it at the bar any more. The gaunt-faced woman in red and black was the center of all eyes, but the looks sent her were not the admiring looks of men for a well-dressed woman; they were the blinking petrified looks a blacksnake would get in a poultry yard. Even the barman felt it. He dropped and smashed a glass, a thing he hadn't done since he'd been working on the ship. Even the canary felt it, and stood shivering pitifully on its perch, emitting an occasional cheep as though for help. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight") ~ Cornell Woolrich

His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a moment, the turn of the head, the enormous and aimless impulsion of accident, had thrust into the blazing heat of him. His mind picked out in white living brightness these pinpoints of experience and the ghostliness of all things else became more awful because of them. So many of the sensations that returned to open haunting vistas of fantasy and imagining had been caught from a whirling landscape through the windows of the train.

And it was this that awed him - the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time. There was one moment of timeless suspension when the land did not move, the train did not move, the slattern in the doorway did not move, he did not move. It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute. Or like those motion-pictures that describe the movements of a swimmer making a dive, or a horse taking a hedge - movement is petrified suddenly in mid-air, the inexorable completion of an act is arrested. Then, completing its parabola, the suspended body plops down into the pool. Only, ~ Thomas Wolfe

Vincent knew he was dying. A horrendous fever overwhelmed him with intolerable pain throughout many sleepless hours. It came as a result of a malaria epidemic that erupted in his hometown during early nineteenth century Europe. The disease spread so fast, physicians had to ration their stocks of quinine only to use it on patients who weren't declared "hopeless". Vincent was one of the unlucky ones. Speculating his time on Earth may be short, he requested spiritual guidance, even if he wasn't a faithful man, nor did he believe in forgiveness. He appealed to the Church as a "just in case" like many other petrified atheists. ~ Don Luis Zavala

Anyone who's had a casual conversation with his neighbors or is cognizant of reality TV should already be petrified of democracy. ~ David Harsanyi

Let me just acknowlege that the function of grammar is to make language as efficent and clear and transparent as possible. But if we're all constantly correcting each other's grammar and being really snotty about it, then people stop talking because they start to be petrified that they're going to make some sort of terrible grammatical error and that's precisely the opposite of what grammar is supposed to do, which is to facilitate clear communication. ~ John Green