Rattling Quotes

Childermass knew what games the children on street-corners are playing - games that all other grown-ups have long since forgotten. Childermass knew what old people by firesides are thinking of, though no one has asked them in years. Childermass knew what young men hear in the rattling of the drums and the tooting of the pipes that makes them leave their homes and go to be soldiers - and he knew the half-eggcupful of glory and the barrelful of misery that await them. And all that Childermass knew made him smile; and some of what he knew made him laugh out loud; and none of what he knew wrung from him so much as ha'pennyworth of pity. ~ Susanna Clarke

Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite. ~ Anne Roiphe

The way Magnus' breath had sounded, rattling in his chest, before he'd said his father's name. ~ Cassandra Clare

She's always sniffing the bottles in the spice cabinet."
I didn't know she'd even noticed. At first it was just curiosity; why did fennel and cumin, identical twins, have such opposing personalities? I had crushed the seeds beneath my fingertips, where the scents lingered for hours. Another day I'd opened a bottle of nutmeg, startled when the little spheres came rattling out in a mothball-scented cloud. How could something so delicate have such a ferocious smell? And I watched, fascinated, as the supple, plump, purple vanilla beans withered into brittle pods and surrendered their perfume to the air. The spices were all so interesting; it was impossible to walk through the kitchen without opening the cupboard to find out what was going on in there. ~ Ruth Reichl

Beneath our feet a fairy pathway flows, The grass still glitters in the summer breeze, The dusky wood, and distant copse appear, And that lone stream, upon whose chequer'd face We mused, when noon-rays made the pebbles gleam, Is mirror'd to the mind: though all around Be rattling hoofs and roaring wheels, the eye Is wand'ring where the heart delights to dwell. ~ Robert Montgomery

The beating of drums, which delights young writers who serve a party, sounds to him who does not belong to the party line like a rattling of chains, and excites sympathy rather than admiration. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I am always surprised when I see several cameras, a gaggle on lenses, filters, meters, et cetera, rattling around in a soft bag with a complement of refuse and dust. Sometimes the professional is the worst offender! ~ Ansel Adams

It's funny, because even though they're rattling on about the Games, it's all about where they were or what they were doing or how they felt when a specific event occurred ... Everything is about them, not the dying boys and girls in the arena ~ Suzanne Collins

November arrives in Northern Maine on a cold wind from Canada that knives unfiltered through the thinnest forest, drapes snow along the river banks and over the slope of hills. It's lonely up here, not just in fall and winter but all the time; the weather is gray and hard and the spaces are long and hard, and that north wind blows through every space unmercifully, rattling the syllables out of your sentences sometimes. ~ Gerard Donovan

It was very quiet here on the mountainside,
but, quiet in the of hills and forests. A quiet that wasn't silent at all, but composed of constant tiny sounds. It was small buzzing in the gorse bush nearby, of bees working the yellow flowers -dusty with pollen, far below was the rushing of the burn, a low note echoing the wind above stirring leaves and rattling twigs sighing past the jutting boulders. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. Get to San Francisco. Get to San Francisco in defiance of your geography, your ancestry and the lonely change rattling sad excuses in your pocket. Fuel up on pie and diner coffee and mystic visions and the freedom of not knowing what's coming next except that you're burning the road to outrun it. ~ Jack Kerouac

He regarded us with dark, evaluating eyes. "This can't be good."
"I'll go first," Dabria began, sucking in a rattling breath.
"Not even close," I shot back. I faced Patch directly, cutting Dabria out of the conversation. "She kissed you! And Dante, who's been tailing you, by the way, caught it on camera. Imagine my surprise when that's what I got an eyeful of earlier tonight. Did you even think to tell me?"
"I told her I kissed you, and that you pushed me away," Dabria protested shrilly.
"What are you still doing here?" I exploded at Dabria. "This is between me and Patch. Leave already!"
"What are you doing here?" Patch echoed to Dabria, his tone sharpening.
"I - broke in," she sputtered. "I was scared. I couldn't sleep. I can't stop thinking about Hanoth and the other Nephilim."
"You have got to be kidding me," I said. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

Farrell had seen pure white drunkenness before, but not often enough to recognize it at sight. He knew the thing itself, however
the freight train rattling and lurching comically from hilarity to slobbering sorrow, picking up speed as it passed through wild, aimless anger straight on into wild sickness; and then, running smoothly and almost silently now, into a dark place of shaking and sweating and crying, and out again with no warning to where a dazzling snowy light made everything very still. ~ Peter S. Beagle

And then he experienced an inexplicable confusion of thoughts, like a rosary of ideas comprised of diverse and ingenious beads that had unraveled and was now rattling around in his brain with no thread linking them, no coherence. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

She was talking too loud now, shouting almost, and a long silence followed. Why was she being like this? He was only trying to help. In what way did he benefit from this friendship? He should get up and walk away, that's what he should do. They turned to look at each other at the same time.
"Sorry," he said.
"No, I'm sorry."
"What are you sorry for?"
"Rattling on like a ... .mad cow. I'm sorry, I'm tired, bad day, and I'm sorry for being ... so boring."
"You're not that boring."
"I am, Dex. God, I swear, I bore myself."
"Well you don't bore me." He took her hand in his. "You couldd never bore me. You're one in a million, Em."
"I'm not even one in three."
He kicked her foot with his. "Em?"
"What?"
"Just take it, will you? Just shut up and take it. ~ David Nicholls

A politician is a hog grateful to whoever is rattling the stick inside the swill bucket. It is time to take the swill bucket away. p 270 ~ Mike Lofgren

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! ~ Milan Kundera

how from time to time some young and beautiful nun had suddenly disappeared, to the surprise and alarm of her companions; how piercing shrieks had been heard to issue from the interior of the building, by those who passed near it at night, - and how the inmates themselves were often aroused from their slumbers by strange noises resembling the rattling of chains, the working of ponderous machinery, and the revolution of huge wheels. ~ George W.M. Reynolds

In Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality
the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds
the rattling teacups would ~ Lewis Carroll

The ambition which he felt astir at times in the darkness of his soul sought no outlet. A dusk like that of the outer world obscured his mind as he heard the mare's hoofs clattering along the tramtrack on the Rock Road and the great can swaying and rattling behind him. ~ James Joyce

It is not real," he whispered. "This place is only a thought that has grabbed hold of you. It cannot harm you. You are not of this place, and it has no power over you. You do not need it, nor do you owe it your allegiance." I nodded, listening only to his words and not to the rattling of the windows, which had begun as soon as we stepped inside. ~ Rita Murphy

Gentlemen, a pleasure talking to you. Hope I've been of some help. It's coming upon closing time, and I don't stay around here one minute more than I need to. We walked to the van. It was no longer in the shade, and hot enough inside to melt belt buckles. We talked it over and decided that the motel at Robstown had been comfortable enough and only about sixty miles away, so we decided to call it a day, but halfway there we came upon a motel in Alice that looked just about as good, and they had plenty of room, so we took a pair of singles out in the back wing of the place. The shower was a rusty trickle. The window air conditioners made a thumping roaring rattling sound, and the meat across the street was fried, but otherwise it was adequate. Good ~ John D. MacDonald

Old buildings whisper to us in the creaking of floorboards and rattling of windowpanes. ~ Fennel Hudson

Television cannot film corruption. Television cannot spend five days on a rattling railway train, talking endlessly. Television needs excitement, it needs an angle, it needs a 'sound bite. ~ Paul Theroux

We have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes "a family unit" to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of those big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. What you've got are two, possibly three, or maybe sometimes four people rattling around together in a giant space, each person with her own private physical and psychological domain, each person spending large amounts of the day completely separated from the others. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

The sky is changed,-and such a change! O night And storm and darkness! ye are wondrous strong, Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light Of a dark eye in woman! Far along, From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, Leaps the live thunder. ~ Lord Byron

So I pulled the ridiculously small, unwrapped, box from the sleeve of my yukata (as they don't have pockets) and rather overly self-consciously handed it to her. She took the pitiful little box, held it up to her ear and gave it a cautious little rattling shake. -You didn't just put a couple of dried old beans in here, as a joke, did you? She suddenly glared at me suspiciously.
I heard a stifled bark from Yumi at that, and a deep gasp from Uncle Suzuki and Aunt Anda, followed by a moment of silence. -Of course not, you silly old goose, I snapped back, -just open it and you'll see what's inside! ~ Andrew James Pritchard

His teeth were now rattling on hers: knock-knock, who's there? Bicuspids. Bicuspids who? Bicuspids McAllister. And then his tongue came flicking out, looking for an opening, any opening, even a missing tooth. But she had no missing teeth and all the teeth she did have were clenched together as in a snapped bear trap. ~ Herman Raucher

This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony.

This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They a ~ Arved Mark Ashby

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. ~ John Donne

The drawers in my mind are rattling to break open. Memories. Theories. Whispers and sensations. I shove them off a cliff. ~ Tahereh Mafi

For the first time in his life, Midhat wished he were more religious. Of course he prayed, but though that was a private mechanism it sometimes felt like a public act, and the lessons of the Quran were lessons by rote, one was steeped in them, hearing them so often. They were the texture of his world, and yet they did not occupy that central, vital part of his mind, the part that was vibrating at this moment, on this train, rattling forward while he struggled to hold all these pieces. As a child he had felt some of the same curiosity he held for the mysteries of other creeds - for Christianity with its holy fire, the Samaritans with their alphabets - but that feeling had dulled while he was still young, when traditional religion began to seem a worldly thing, a realm of morals and laws and the same old stories and holidays. They were acts, not thoughts. He faced the water now along the coast, steadying his gaze on the slow distance, beyond the blur of trees pushing past the tracks, on the desolate fishing boats hobbling over the waves. He sensed himself tracing the lip of something very large, something black and well-like, a vessel which was at the same time an emptiness, and he thought, without thinking precisely, only feeling with the tender edges of his mind, what the Revelation might have been for in its origin. Why it was so important that they could argue to the sword what it meant if God had hands, and whether He had made the universe. Underneath it all was a living u ~ Isabella Hammad

In general, her family wasn't very good at talking about important stuff. And of all of them, she was the least good at it. When she tried, it felt like all the chains on all her imagined safes and trunks started rattling ~ Holly Black

What do you think you're here to do?'
She paused a moment, gazing out the rattling side window at the distant mountains.
'To help people along the way, ' she said, 'to bring them hot coffee when they're cold and scared to death and hangin' on for dear life. ~ Stanley Gordon West

With a grunt he levered himself to his feet, causing the chair to bang against the bookcase behind him and set the various objet d'bollocks rattling. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

He swings the knocker against the door. The entire building booms like a drum. It continues booming after he lets go, banging like a clock striking the hour, rattling like a great tin drum. ~ Christopher Bram

It sloweth age, it strengtheneth youth, it helpeth digestion, it abandoneth melancholie, it relisheth the heart, it lighteneth the mind, it quickenth the spirits, it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the mouth from snaffling, the teeth from chattering and the throat from rattling; it keepeth the stomach from wambling, the heart from swelling, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, and the marrow from soaking. ~ Joseph Lyons

He looked around when he heard a window-rattling roar. "Earthquake? Volcano? Nuclear war?" "Beaver," Peter told him. "I don't care if it is Alaska, you don't have beavers big enough to sound like that. ~ Nora Roberts

There is a mirror across from me, and I check my reflection in it before heading home. Despite the bone-deep fatigue and the growing fear and frustration, I look ... fine. Da always said he'd teach me to play cards. Said I'd take the bank, the way things never reach my eyes. There should be something - a tell, a crease between my eyes, or a tightness in my jaw.
I'm too good at this.
Behind my reflection I see the painting of the sea, slanting as if the waves crashing on the rocks have hit with enough force to tip the picture. I turn and straighten it. The frame makes a faint rattling sound when I do. Everything in this place seems to be falling apart. ~ Victoria Schwab

I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips. ~ W.B. Yeats

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. ~ Thomas Hardy

People are always rattling on about what "we" should do, whether they are talking about "their" country or "their" race or all of humanity or some other abstract group of humans who don't give a damn what they think about anything.

Who is "We?" Who can you legitimately speak for? Who cares what you say?

If you don't know, you're just running our mouth. You're just some guy yelling at the TV during a football game. Your "we" can't hear you and if they could, they wouldn't care anyway. ~ Jack Donovan

There the black horse stood - his feet planted firm on the ground, afraid to move. His coat was covered in sweat and a stark white rim lined his eyes. All three of us gawked at his sudden silence. The rattling metal gate was now the only sound. ~ Brittney Joy

Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle. ~ Patti Smith

For all his apologies, the convict Esau Davis was just a low-level toilet scrubber without the sense that God gave a goat. If she could get to a pistol or a shotgun or a hammer or a screwdriver, Caddy Colson would go all redneck on his ass and tear him a new asshole. That's the way she was feeling, sitting there in the front seat of his shitty old truck, muffler rattling loose and wild, while he took Kleenex to his bleeding eye and talked about old times with Jamey Dixon like he thought they could still be friends after all this shit went down. ~ Ace Atkins

If I had questioned Harris further - "What do you mean when you say sex doesn't have to mean anything? Do people engage in it for no reason at all? Does it just happen, like a gurgle in the stomach, a can rattling down the street, or a screen door blowing shut in the breeze?" - perhaps he would have conceded that sex does have trivial meanings: a little pleasure, a little fun, a little relief from boredom and desire. This wouldn't be much of a concession. Sex would mean something, but only in the way that eating a peanut means something, chewing on an ice cube means something, scratching an itch means something. There would be no more call to rhapsodize about the touch of a man and a woman than to compose sonnets about the communion of a picnicker with his mayonnaise. ~ J. Budziszewski

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see
that's my idea of happiness. ~ Henry James

Oh! now to be alone, on some grand height, Where heaven's black curtains shadow all the sight, And watch the swollen clouds their bosom clash, While fleet and far the living lightnings flash ... And see the fiery arrows fall and rise, In dizzy chase along the rattling skies, - How stirs the spirit while the echoes roll, And God, in thunder, rocks from pole to pole! ~ Robert Montgomery

... the cylinder itself has only just begun its revolutions ... as it gathers speed the objects grouped around its fulcrum assume, collectively ... no ... as it gathers speed the whole intricate system of cords, weights, metal spikes and rods, brass plates engraved with labyrinthine patterns, bricks, scraps of fabric, paper, canvas, unmarked sheets ... the entire elaborate network of components begins to shudder into wild spasmodic motion, rattling almost farcically within the framework of the machine. ~ Martin Vaughn-James

My Father Comes Home From Work"



My father comes home from work

sweating through layers of bleached cotton t-shirts

sweating through his wool plaid shirt.


He kisses my mother

starching our school dresses

at the ironing board,


swings his metal lunchbox

onto the formica kitchen table

rattling the remnants

of the lunch she packed

that morning before daylight:


crumbs of baloney sandwiches,

empty metal thermos of coffee,

cores of hard red apples

that fueled his body through

the packing and unpacking of sides

of beef into the walk-in refrigerators

at James Allen and Sons Meat Packers.


He is twenty-six.

Duty propels him each day

through the dark to Butcher Town

where steers walk streets

from pen to slaughterhouse.


He whispers Jesus Christ

to no one in particular.

We hear him-- me,

my sister Linda, my baby brother Willy,

and Mercedes la cubana's daughter

who my mother babysits.

When he comes home

we have to be quiet.


He comes into the dark living room.

Dick Clark's American Bandstand

lights my father's face

white and unlined

like a movie star's.
Barbara Brinson Curiel

Tom got to rattling off the pranks he and his school boy buddies pulled ... and what I saw wasn't an old man gone wistful but rather an old man still resonating to the glee of a young heart. ~ Michael Perry

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion. ~ Douglas Hofstadter

War makes rattling good history. ~ Thomas Hardy

If you have had an unfortunate experience, forget it. If you have made a failure in speech, your song, your book, your article, if you have been placed in an embarrassing position, if you have fallen and hurt yourself by a false step, if you have been slandered and abused, do not dwell upon it. There is not a single redeeming feature in these memories, and the presence of their ghosts will rob you of many a happy hour. There is nothing in it. Drop them. Forget them. Wipe them out of your mind forever. If you have been indiscreet, imprudent, if you have been talked about, if your reputation has been injured so that you fear you can never outgrow it or redeem it, do not drag the hideous shadows, the rattling skeletons about with you, Rub them off from the shite of memory. Wipe them out. Forget them. Start with a clean slate and spend all your energies in keeping it clean for the future. ~ Orison Swett Marden

So," he said as we turned onto the main road, the muffler rattling, "I've been thinking."
"Yeah?"
He nodded. "You really need to go out with me."
I blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"You know. You, me. A restaurant or movie. Together." He glanced over, shifting gears. "Maybe it's a new concept for you? If so, I'll be happy to walk you through it."
"You want to take me to a movie?" I asked.
"Well, not really," he said. "What I really want is for you to be my girlfriend. But I though saying that might scare you off. ~ Sarah Dessen

He's pushing me, so I push him back.
His cross is rattling in my tongue and jaw. His pulse is beating in my throat. And his mouth is killing everything I'm trying to think.
Simon Snow. ~ Rainbow Rowell

Any man can work when every stroke of his hands brings down the fruit rattling from the tree ... but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement ... that requires a heroism which is transcendent. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

We are all so broken. Pick up a person, shake them around and you'll hear the rattling of their broken pieces. Pieces our fathers broke, or our mothers, or our friends, strangers, or our loves. ~ Tarryn Fisher

A wind picked up, rattling the windows, and the candle flames suddenly shifted, dancing along the border between turbulence and order. ~ Jeannette Walls

I don't know why dogs always go for postmen, I'm sure," continued our guide.
"It's a matter of reasoning," said Poirot. "The dog, he argues from reason. He is intelligent; he makes his deductions according to his point of view. There are people who may enter a house and there are people who may not - that a dog soon learns. Eh bien, who is the person who most persistently tries to gain admission, rattling on the door twice or three times a day - and who is never by any chance admitted? The postman. Clearly, then, an undesirable guest from the point of view of the master of the house. He is always sent about his business, but he persistently returns and tries again. Then a dog's duty is clear, to aid in driving this undesirable man away, and to bite him if possible. A most reasonable proceeding. ~ Agatha Christie

I think that people don't make the most of their lives. So, you know, for me, it seems like it's the beginning of me rattling the cage, of making some people nervous. And people are strategically trying to do things to mute my voice in some way or make me look like I'm a lunatic or pinpoint the inaccuracies in my grammar to somehow take away from the overall message of what I'm saying. ~ Kanye West

No, human. I don't know shit about this. I'm just rattling off randomness to confuse you."

Xypher ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Standing at my door, I heard the discharge of a gun, and in four or five seconds of time, after the discharge, the small shot came rattling about me, one or two of which struck the house; which plainly demonstrates that the velocity of sound is greater than that of a cannon bullet. ~ Benjamin Banneker

There was always something yet unseen. The ground itself was daily renewed, kicked up and muddled by passing travelers, such that it was impossible to repeat the same journey twice. Alif thought of all the times he had left the duplex in Baqara District bent on some mundane errand: the courtyard gate closing behind him with a rattle, rattling again when he returned the same way; to him, ordinary and frustrating, to the world, a process full of tiny variations, all existing, as Sheikh Bilal had said, simultaneously and without contradiction. He had been given eternity in modest increments, and had thought nothing of it. ~ G. Willow Wilson

Will do, to begin with.' 'A barrowful of what?' thought Alice; but she had not long to doubt, for the next moment a shower of little pebbles came rattling in at the window, and some of them hit her in the face. 'I'll put a stop to this,' she said to herself, and shouted out, 'You'd better not do that again!' which produced another dead silence. Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all turning into little cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright idea came into her head. 'If I eat one of these cakes,' she thought, 'it's ~ Lewis Carroll

The heart pumped softly in her hands, it's PUM-Pom-poom rattling gently against her skin.
A means of living. The greatest spell she had ever crafted.
She said nothing. Even Mg. Aviosky didn't offer an explanation, which made Ceony wonder how far word of Emery's near demise had reached.
Mg. Bailey stared at the beating heart in Ceony's grasp.
And smiled. ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

Meanwhile a certain amount of moaning and groaning was coming from upstairs. Sophie kept muttering to the dog and ignored it. A loud, hollow coughing followed, dying away into more moaning. Crashing sneezes followed the coughing, each one rattling the window and all the doors. Sophie found those harder to ignore, but she managed. Poot-pooooot! went a blown nose, like a bassoon in a tunnel. The coughing started again, mingled with moans. Sneezes mixed with the moans and the coughs, and the sounds rose to a crescendo in which Howl seemed to be managing to cough, groan, blow his nose, sneeze, and wail gently all at the same time. The doors rattled, the beams in the ceiling shook, and one of Calcifer's logs rolled off onto the hearth.
"All right, all right, I get the message!" Sophie said, dumping the log back into the grate. "It'll be green slime next". ~ Diana Wynne Jones

We sat within the farm-house old,
Whose windows, looking o'er the bay,
Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold,
An easy entrance, night and day.

Not far away we saw the port,
The strange, old-fashioned, silent town,
The lighthouse, the dismantled fort,
The wooden houses, quaint and brown.

We sat and talked until the night,
Descending, filled the little room;
Our faces faded from the sight,
Our voices only broke the gloom.

We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
And who was changed, and who was dead;

And all that fills the hearts of friends,
When first they feel, with secret pain,
Their lives thenceforth have separate ends,
And never can be one again;

The first slight swerving of the heart,
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.

The very tones in why we spake,
Had something strange, I could but mark;
The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rattling in the dark.

Oft died the words upon our lips,
As suddenly, from out the fire
Built of the wreck of stranded ships,
The flames would leap and then expire.

And, as their splendor flashed and failed,
We thought of wrecks upon the main,
Of ships dismasted, that were hailed
And sent no answer back again.

The w ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

So imagine a fire going
wood snapping the way it does when it's a little green - the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains
and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys
and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare. ~ Steven Millhauser

So Lily's mouth would open and nothing would come out, then Louisa would start rattling on about meeting her grandmother or whether she had eaten something and she had realized she was on her own. ~ Jojo Moyes

Downstairs, I could hear the return of a long-lost sound: Amy making breakfast. Banging wooden cupboards (rump-thump!), rattling containers of tin and glass (ding-ring!), shuffling and sorting a collection of metal pots and iron pans (ruzz-shuzz!). A culinary orchestra tuning up, clattering vigorously toward the finale, a cake pan drumrolling along the floor, hitting the wall with a cymballic crash. ~ Gillian Flynn

Curse it," Bran said the next morning, standing before the fire in shirt and trousers with his shoulder stiffy bandaged. "You think this necessary?"
He pointed at the mail coats lying on the table, their linked steel rings gleaming coldly in the light of two glowglobes. It was well before dawn. The Marquis had woken us himself, with the news that Galdran's forces were nigh. And his messengers had brought from Renselaeus the mail coats, newly made and expensive.
"Treachery--" Shevraeth paused to cough and to catch his breath. He, too, stood there in only shirt and trousers and boots, and I looked away quickly, embarrassed. "We should be prepared for treachery. It was his idea to send archers against you in the mountains. He will have them with him now." He coughed again, the rattling cough of a heavy cold.
I sighed. My own fever and aches had all settled into my throat, and my voice was gone.
Bran was the worst off. Besides the wound in his shoulder, he coughed, sneezed, and sounded hoarse. His eyes and nose watered constantly. Luckily the Renselaeus munificence extended to a besorceled handkerchief that stayed dry and clean despite its heavy use.
Groaning and wincing, Bran lifted his arm just high enough for a couple of equerries to slip the chain mail over his head. As it settled onto him, chinging softly, he winced and said, "Feels like I've got a horse lying athwart my shoulders."
I picked up the one set aside for me and retreated to my room t ~ Sherwood Smith

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?

I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you. ~ J.D. Salinger

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I ~ James Lee Burke

To the Thawing Wind"

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door. ~ Robert Frost

Sadly, the natural world is not short of people who believe that rattling off Latin names incessantly makes them appear clever, whereas most of us know instinctively that this suggests insecurity at best, but possibly social and sexual dysfunction as well. If somebody corrects you sternly by using an obtuse name for something, they probably know neither human nature nor any other kind very profoundly. ~ Tristan Gooley

I'm close to my mother's heart and know its rhythms and sudden turns. And now! It accelerates at her husband's voice, and there's an added sound, a disturbance in the chambers, like the distant rattling of maracas, or gravel shuffled softly in a tin. From down here I'd say it's a semilunar valve whose cusps are snapping to hard and sticking. Or it could be her teeth. ~ Ian McEwan

Sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in. ~ Charles Bukowski

She moved suddenly, planting her hands against the kitchen floor. Throwing back her head, she screamed, and that sound was full of sorrow and heartbreak. It started as a low tremble under my feet and then increased, shaking the kitchen table and rattling the plates and cups in the cabinets. Then it was a rumble, causing the house to groan and small clouds of dust to drop from the ceiling. The table scuttled over the floor. A chair toppled over and then another. Somewhere in the living room, a window shattered. Kat was going to bring the house down. Shit. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

The president's rattling the saber and beating the drums may have an effect. ~ Rand Paul

An airplane crossed the sky, and she imagined its interior-people packed in rows like eggs in a carton, the chemical smell of the toilets, pretzels in foil pouches, cans hiss-popping open, black oval of night sky embedded in the rattling walls. How strange that something so drab, so confined, so stifling with sour exhalations and the fumes of indifferent machinery might be mistaken for a star. ~ Maggie Shipstead

The sky darkened, the liquid singing of the blackbirds diminished and ceased, mud hens swam back to shore, climbed up the banks and huddled in the willows. The lights of a farm came on in the brown distance where patches of tule fog lay on the barren muddy fields. A wind came with the darkness, rattling the license plate, and a low, honking flight of geese passed. ~ Leonard Gardner

Nothing more likely,"said Hannasyde. "I've got to try and rattle him."
"It's him that'll do the rattling,"said the Sergeant darkly. "he's the nearest thing to a snake I've seen outside of the Zoo. ~ Georgette Heyer

Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back. ~ Bram Stoker

Sometimes I wonder how I'd tell this if I didn't have so many books rattling around inside me. The truth is both a vast wilderness and the tiniest space you can imagine. ~ Julie Buntin

So we have to make sure we stop it here," he said.
"Exactly. Well,you asked me to get you as close to the water as possible.I presume you have a plan?"
"My love,I always have a plan."
They heard footsteps rattling behind them and turned as Prometheus and Niten came hurrying up. They were both carrying fishing rods over their shoulders.The slender Japanese man grinned. "Do not ask him how much it cost to hire these," he said.
"How much?" Nicholas asked.
"Too much," Prometheus answered furiously. "I could have bought an entire fishing boat,or at least a very good fish dinner,for what it cost to rent them for a couple of hours," he grumbled. "Plus a deposit in case we don't bring them back."
"What's the plan?" Niten asked. He held out an empty bucket. "We can'nt really go fishing. We don't have bait."
"Oh,but we do." Nicholas smiled. "You are our bait. ~ Michael Scott

I write for what's left of the eight-year-old still rattling around inside my head. ~ Chris Van Allsburg

Love had bones to it. Solid, rattling things bent on cluttering you up long after the soft parts melted into the ether. You had to carry those bones around with you. Make room for them, dust them, trip over them. ~ Cara McKenna

I walk into a kids' store, and it's amazing, the types of instruments - little squeaky things, rattling things, spinning tops. ~ Evelyn Glennie

For several seconds, we stand there staring each other down. Anger radiates off the both of us in waves, crackling like electricity.
And then…he sort of staggers back. All his swagger, his bravado, crumbles away in a split second, just like that. "Why do we keep doing this? Yelling at each other like this?"
I let out my breath in a huff. "Because you always piss me off, that's why, acting all smug and superior."
"Yeah, and you always throw temper tantrums like some kind of spoiled brat. That's just who we are. We're not perfect." He takes a deep, rattling breath. "But we're good together, Jem. ~ Kristi Cook

I took a fortnight off. But I'm not a great believer in breaks. I don't want to be rattling around inside my own head. I did feel I was spiralling into a Kathy Burke character and tried going out, but I prefer it here. Filming keeps me busy. It absorbs me. ~ Nigella Lawson

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves
rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children. ~ Caitlin Moran

Spooky wild and gusty; swirling dervishes of rattling leaves race by, fleeing the windflung deadwood that cracks and thumps behind. ~ Dave Beard

The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said ("You stupid broad et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down
cries
manhood vindicated. Under "Real Fight With Girl" was written Don't hurt (except whores). I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under "Brutality" found:
Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards.
There were sub-rubrics, one (reinforcing) under "Management" and one (exceptional) under "Martyrdom." Everything in my book begins with an M. ~ Joanna Russ

Black bones are rattling in the grass. ~ Amy Cross

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim - even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon - feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep. ~ Michael Chabon

I'm a maker of ballads right pretty
I write them right here in the street
You can buy them all over the city
yours for a penny a sheet
I'm a word pecker out of the printers
out of the dens of Gin Lane
I'll write up a scene on a counter
- confessions and sins in the main, boys
confessions and sins in the main

Then you'll find me in Madame Geneva's
keeping the demons at bay
There's nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they'll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day

They come rattling over the cobbles
they sit on their coffins of black
Some are struck dumb, some gabble
top-heavy on brandy or sack
The pews are all full of fine fellows
and the hawker has set up her shop
As they're turning them off at the gallows
she'll be selling right under the drop, boys
selling right under the drop

Then you'll find me in Madame Geneva's
keeping the demons at bay
There's nothing like gin for drowning them in
but they'll always be back on a hanging day, on a hanging day ~ Mark Knopfler

I still say Kellyanne could do with some real-live mates," went on my dad, as if he was talking to someone inside his beer.
Mum had stomped off into the kitchen. "Maybe they are real!" she shouted back at him after rattling a few plates together. "Ever thought about that, ye of little bloody imagination? ~ Ben Rice

When she treads on my grave and feels as if she's trampling on that doting old man's bones, my spirit will still be alive, feeling the whole weight of her body, feeling pain, feeling the fine-grained velvety smoothness of the soles of her feet. Even after I'm dead I'll be aware of that. I can't believe I won't. In the same way, Satsuko will be aware of the presence of my spirit, joyfully enduring her weight. Perhaps she may even hear my charred bones rattling together, chuckling, moaning, creaking. And that would by no means occur only when she was actually stepping on my grave. At the very thought of those Buddha's Footprints modeled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone. Between sobs I would scream: It hurts! It hurts! ... Even though it hurts, I'm happy - I've never been more happy, I'm much, much happier than when I was alive! ... Trample harder! Harder! ~ Junichiro Tanizaki