Quaked Glass Quotes

The thing that's hard about it - the thing that makes it so hard when the person you love has been taken from you, not by something evil you could have seen coming but by random, pure chance - is that you find yourself suddenly living through a history other than the one you expected to live, through no fault of your own. I feel . . . it's hard to describe, but I feel weirdly outside of time. Ever since the accident I've had these moments when I felt like a visiting guest in this world, not a permanent resident. Like sometimes I look in a mirror and I feel like I can almost see through the version of me on the other side of the glass. And sometimes I feel like I can see the history I used to be in more clearly than the history I'm in now - the real history is one where Philip and Sean and I are all together, being a family and doing whatever family things people do, and this one's like . . . like a fake version of events that I've been yanked into, where everything's gone wrong. ~ Dexter Palmer

The ship's surgeon was a spotty unshaven little man whose clothes, arrayed with smudges, drippings, and cigarette burns, were held about him by an extensive network of knotted string, The buttons down the front of those duck trousers had originally been made, with all of false economy's ingenious drear deception, of coated cardboard. After many launderings they persisted as a row of gray stumps posted along the gaping portals of his fly. Though a boutoniere sometimes appeared through some vacancy in his shirt-front, its petals, too, proved to be of paper, and he looked like the kind of man who scrapes foam from the top of a glass of beer with the spine of a dirty pocket comb, and cleans his nails at table with the tines of his salad fork, which things, indeed, he did. He diagnosed Camilla's difficulty as indigestion, and locked himself in his cabin. that was the morning. ~ William Gaddis

Big

When I was little,
I killed ants with a magnifying glass.
And now I'm big.
And I worry I'm doing the same thing with you. ~ Bo Burnham

Some realizations can only come from truly looking into the mirror. However, the only thing that the mirror can show one of a false face is the moment before death. Who truly looks into the mirror and sees the painting within it? Who looks into the reflection beyond the looking-glass and see the truth hidden within it? All it takes is one look into the mirror, to come to a realization of truth. But those that do not see the truth, simply falls into another illusion - within an endless refrain. ~ Lionel Suggs

You see what you want to see. The truth is that the glass is both half empty and half full. What you can control is how you choose to see it. ~ Nicholas Lamar Soutter

Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal people of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast. Picture floor-to-ceiling drapes blown out and flaming to shreds in the hot wind. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Being part of his entourage was like the sun coming through a plate-glass window: golden, something to lift your face toward. ~ Jodi Picoult

The American spirit is stronger than stone and mortar, tougher than steel and glass, and more enduring than any pain or suffering that can be inflicted on our national conscience. ~ Olympia Snowe

When I came out of the Charity Ward of the L.A. County General Hospital in 1955 after drinking ten years without missing a night or day (except while in jail) they told me that if I ever took another drink I would be dead. I went back to my shack job and I asked her, "What the hell am I going to do now?" "We'll play the horses," she said. "Horses?" "Yeah, they run and you bet on them." She had found some money on the boulevard so we went out. I had 3 winners, one of them paid over 50 bucks. It seemed very easy. We went out a second time and I won again. That night I decided that if I mixed some wine with milk it might not hurt me. I tried a glass, half wine, half milk. I didn't die. The next glass I tried a little less milk and a little more wine. By the time the night was over I had been drinking straight wine. In the morning I got up without hemorrhaging. After that I drank and played the horses. 27 years later I am still doing both. Time is made to be wasted... ~ Charles Bukowski

My mind is curiously alert; it's as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I've never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It's as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations. How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place. After what seems like an eternity there follows an interval of semiconsciousness balanced by such a calm that I feel a great lake inside me, a lake of iridescent sheen, cool as jelly; and over this lake, rising in great swooping spirals, there emerge flocks of birds of passage with long slim legs and brilliant plumage. Flock after flock surge up from the cool, still surface of the lake and, passing under my clavicles, lose themselves in the white sea of space. And then slowly, very slowly, as if an old woman in a white cap were going the rounds of my body, slowly the windows are closed and my organs drop back into place. ~ Henry Miller

I want him when you're done with him," Rach pipes up, sending me a teasing grin.
"You'll be waiting a while," I reply, accepting a glass of champagne from Ky. "Like eternity. ~ Siobhan Davis

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass. ~ Gene Tierney

Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom's voice came to me, repeating things she'd said for months. Like, "My skin is melting off my face, isn't it?" And, "My whole body feels dead from the crap they're pouring into me. Do I look green to you?" And, "When I'm naked, I can see my heart beating. ~ Laura Anderson Kurk

Demons feed on death and pain madness," Valentine said. "When I kill, it is because I must. You grew up in a falsely beautiful paradise surrounded by fragile glass walls, my daughter. Your mother created the world she wanted to live in and she brought you up in it, but she never told you it was an illusion. And all the time the demons waited with their weapons of blood and terror to smash the glass and pull you free of the lie. ~ Cassandra Clare

She still took my breath away with how beautiful she was. "Hei, Poppymin," I said and sat on the edge of her bed.

"Hey, baby," she replied, her voice now barely above a whisper. I brought my hand to hers and pressed a kiss to her mouth.

Poppy smiled and melted my heart. A loud gust of wind blew past the window, whistling against the glass. Poppy inhaled sharply. I turned to see what she was seeing.

A mass of blossom petals went sailing in the wind.

"They're leaving…," she said.

I closed my eyes briefly. It was apt that Poppy left the same day that the cherry blossoms lost their petals too.

They were guiding her soul home. ~ Tillie Cole

This was a pain that did not touch the body, a pain that did not race along the nerve paths, a pain that filled the mind so completely and so shatteringly that not even the smallest part of you was free to think or plan or meditate. The pain was you, and you were the pain. There was nothing to dissociate from, no cool sanctum of thought where you might retreat. (from The Glass Flower) ~ George R R Martin

I know life all too well. But I turned from that path. I'm not a rat anymore. I'm the lightning girl, and now I have too many ideas to count. Freedom, revenge, liberty, everything that fuels the sparks within me, and the resolve that keeps me going. ~ Victoria Aveyard

With his immaculately coiffured blond locks and his impeccable cut-glass accent, he looks, and sounds, like a dab hand. 'People are as nice as you make them,' he enunciates. 'Which gives you a heck of a lot of power over them, of course. ~ Kevin Dutton

If you find an Australian indoors, it's a fair bet that he will have a glass in his hand. ~ Jonathan Aitken

Paint should not be applied thick. It should be like a breath on the surface of a pane of glass. ~ James Whistler

You'll always meet someone new, encounter something odd. That's the peculiar thing about life. Everything will make sense after it happens in the end. Everything will be clear, fresh, as if looking through glass. Crazy, isn't it? ~ Serena Winter

And then I see my mother sitting by the open window, her dark silhouette against the night sky. She turns around in her chair, but I can't see her face. "Fallen down," she says simply. She doesn't apologize. "It doesn't matter," I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen." "Then why you don't stop it?" asks my mother. And it's such a simple question. ~ Amy Tan

Would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take a terrible vengeance. So he sweated and fired up and watched the glass fearfully (with an impromptu charm, made of rags, tied to his arm, and a piece of polished bone, as big as a watch, stuck flatways through his lower lip), while the wooded banks slipped past us slowly, the short noise was left behind, the interminable miles of silence - and we crept on, towards Kurtz. ~ Joseph Conrad

Yet I have reflected on the fact that for most of use, there is a hard, impassable barrier between the most imaginatively detailed depravity and its real-life execution. It's the same solid steel wall that inserts itself between a kinife and my wrist even when I'm at my most disconsolate. So how was Kevin able to raise that crossbow, point it at Laura's breastbone, and then really, actually, in time and space, squeeze the release? I can only assume that he discovered what I never wish to. That there is no barrier. That like my trips abroad or this ludicrous scheme of bike locks and invitations on school stationaery, the very squeezing of that release can be broken down into a series of simple constituent parts. It may be no more miraculous to pull the trigger of a bow or a gun than it is to reach for a glass of water. I fear that crossing into the "unthinkable" turns out to be no more athletic than stepping across the threshold of an ordinary room; and that, if you will, is the trick. The secret. As ever, the secret is that there is no secret. He must almost have wanted to giggle, though that is not his style; those Columbine kids did giggle. And once you have found out that there is nothing to stop you - that the barrier, so seemingly uncrossable, is all in your head - it must be possible to step back and forth across that threshold again and again, shot after shot, as if an unintimidating pipsqueak has drawn a line across the carpet that you must not pass and you launch tau ~ Lionel Shriver

What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages. ~ Philip Glass

He said that it always struck him with surprise that while men in buying an earthen or glass vase would sound it first to learn if it were good, yet in choosing a wife they were content with only looking at her. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight
will abide forever.
Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that will make that happen,
as you yourself are the mirror and image
of those who did not live as long as you
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

The Great Gatsby' [ ... ] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [ ... ] ~ J.D. Salinger

He smiled at his glass. It seemed to be in on the joke. It fed daring and plausibility to the tiny flame of rebellion growing in his heart. Rahid ~ Karen Lord

The Garden trapped me like an animal. The Governess sold me like livestock at an auction. And the mayor and his family would have made me their whore. I am shaking with rage. ~ Kristen Simmons

The Crown Prince tipped his head back to the sky and roared, and it was the battle cry of a god. Then the glass castle shattered. ~ Sarah J. Maas