Riddled Quotes

I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp
brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure. ~ Anne Carson

The Healing spells on his chest were certainly earning their keep tonight. Sullivan got to his feet. The lack of noise from the courtyard indicated that his team had gotten all the mechanical men. "Thanks."

Toru just grunted a noncommittal response as he lifted the feed tray to check the condition of his borrowed machine gun. They didn't see the final robot inside until it turned on its eye and illuminated the Iron Guard in blue light.

Sullivan's Spike reversed gravity, and the gigantic machine fell upward to hit the steel beams in the ceiling. Sullivan cut his Power and the robot dropped. It crashed hard into the floor where it lay twitching and kicking. The two of them riddled the mechanical man with bullets until the light died and it lay still in a spreading puddle of oil.

"Normally, this would be the part where you thank me for returning the favor and saving your life."

"Yes. Normally… If we were court ladies instead of warriors," Toru answered. "Shall we continue onward or do you wish to stop and discuss your feelings over tea?"

Sullivan looked forward to the day that the two of them would be able to finish their fight. "Let's go. ~ Larry Correia

She was afraid of us moving in together. With Mark, domestic intimacy had become domestic claustrophobia; and had riddled romance (though she never quite said this) like woodworm. It wasn't that she was resistant to the glamourlessness of stray toenails and washing up and underpants and mug-rings and hoovering and boredom; on the contrary: it was that she was horrified by her own willingness to sink so deeply into the comfort of such details. A no nonsense streak in her identified the ordinary with truth, the exotic with delusion. She and Mark had delighted in dehumbugging their own romance, had (she confessed) Larkinized themselves into mundanity addicts. In Mark's case (she suspected) because he knew deep down he had no magic in him; in her own because she knew deep down that she had too much (no nonsense streak or not), and that to release it would be to lose him - and perhaps herself. Therefore they had wallowed together in cosiness, both suffering, Mark for fear of her leaving him, her for fear (certainty, actually) that the romantic inside her would rise up and smash their deadening familiarity to pieces. ~ Glen Duncan

The glass is riddled with bullets on either side of The Stranger, but the glass before him is unbroken, as though the bullets didn't dare approach.
That's when I work out what he is: a bullet catcher. ~ Joaquin Lowe

We don't grow unless we take risks. Any successful company is riddled with failures. ~ James E. Burke

Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore? ~ Roberto Bolano

The more you open up, the more you get hurt. So basically, I'm just riddled with scars and I just don't want any more. ~ Freddie Mercury

Everything is a matter of interpretation. And that is how you will rule," he said, before handing the sword's hilt to me. "Think on what you've seen today. But do not let me influence you. Your will is yours alone."
I stared at the sword in my hand, still gleaming despite the dark. "I can promise you I won't forget."
Amar paused, his voice soft. "Memory is a riddled thing. I would caution you from making promises you cannot keep."
I moved toward the door, but Amar stopped me with a shake of his head. "Gupta will arrive in a moment to escort you." He straightened the cuffs of his sherwani jacket. "I myself have a number of duties to attend to, so I must leave."
Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, "Why?"
He paused and took a step to me. Darkness, soft-edged and heavy, clung to the room. In the shadows, his smile held all the lazy grace of a cat.
"Would you miss me?"
"Curiosity inspired my question. Nothing more," I said, but even my voice was unconvinced.
"Even so, there's no greater temptation than to stay by your side."
The door swung open and a chorus of voices trickled into the room--silvery and indistinct, like whispers released through clenched teeth. Amar lingered for a moment, his lips tight as though he wanted to say something.
Then, he cupped his palms together and blew into them. When he opened his hands, a bloom of light shaped like an unopened flower bud lifted off his palm and floated into the room. Brightne ~ Roshani Chokshi

The difference between a self-induced orgasm and an orgasm given by a man is like comparing a rainy day and a rainstorm. Rain was a sure thing, you knew exactly what you were going to get: a clean and crisp, both sweet and refreshing experience. But rainstorms were unpredictable, they were riddled with surprises, messy and wet; they were something you had no control over.
Rainstorms brought you to your knees, soaking you in uncontrollable need, lightning flashing before your eyes while you dug your fingers deep into the earth, trying to hold on; unable to tell which was louder ... the thunder roaring in your ears or the pounding of your heart. ~ Madeline Sheehan

The only perfect love to be found on earth is not sexual love, which is riddled with hostility and insecurity, but the wordless commitment of families, which takes as its model mother-love. This is not to say that fathers have no place, for father-love, with its driving for self-improvement and discipline, is also essential to survival, but that uncorrected father-love, father-love as it were practiced by both parents, is a way to annihilation. ~ Germaine Greer

Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull

this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face ~ Natalie Diaz

The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage. ~ Geoff Dyer

She's one of those soppy girls, riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds the view that the stars are God's daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She's a drooper. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Books. More books than I had ever seen in my life. I gasped and crawled to my knees. I couldn't breathe. Books galore. Music books, philosophy books. Math books. Geometry. Opera scores, logic. I sobbed and cradled the books. I hugged them to my naked chest and I cried. I smelled them and touched their spines. I remember how violently my fingers shook. I buried my nose in their pages and wept. Never had I ever held so many books in my life. And they were mine. All my very own. The orgasm still riddled my body. It had barely begun to fade. One orgasm ended, but the euphoria was just beginning. ~ Angela B. Chrysler

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt, or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. And yet I continue to live in a world the way a religious person lives in the world; I keep living in a world that I know to be enchanted, and not left alone. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze. ~ Lauren F. Winner

But if you judge safety to be the paramount consideration in life you should never, under any circumstances, go on long hikes alone. Don't take short hikes alone, either – or, for that matter, go anywhere alone. And avoid at all costs such foolhardy activities as driving, falling in love, or inhaling air that is almost certainly riddled with deadly germs. Wear wool next to the skin. Insure every good and chattel you possess against every conceivable contingency the future might bring, even if the premiums half-cripple the present. Never cross an intersection against a red light, even when you can see all roads are clear for miles. And never, of course, explore the guts of an idea that seems as if it might threaten one of your more cherished beliefs. In your wisdom you will probably live to be a ripe old age. But you may discover, just before you die, that you have been dead for a long, long time. ~ Colin Fletcher

In today's climate in our country, which is sickened with the pollution of pollution, threatened with the prominence of AIDS, riddled with burgeoning racism, rife with growing huddles of the homeless, we need art and we need art in all forms. We need all methods of art to be present, everywhere present, and all the time present. ~ Maya Angelou

If I shake your hand, will I get my fingerprints all over your fingertips? I hope not. Otherwise the crime scene, and the shaft of my penis, is riddled with my fingerprints. ~ Jarod Kintz

Like Marxism, Thatcherism is, in fact, riddled with contradictions. Mrs. Thatcher, on the other hand, is free of doubt; she is the label on the can of worms. ~ Julian Critchley

All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it. ~ Dave Barry

In fourth grade, I had a talk with the school psychologist about all the things that actively terrified me . . . After our session, he handed my mom a list of all my fears . . . Highest (and most memorable) on the list was the specific fear that I'd accidentally churn myself into butter. This was inspired by a creepy antique children's book called Little Black Sambo, which is one of those stories from the simpler, more racist times of yore when people wrote frightening, insulting tales to help children fall asleep at night. It was highly popular back in the day and has since been rightly banned or taken out of circulation. But my mom had a copy lying around. It's about a boy who goes on an adventure and ends up getting chased by tigers, who circle and circle around a tree so fast that they churn themselves into a pool of butter, which the boy then takes home for his mother to use to make pancakes. Like ya do. Anyway, I was always riddled with fear that I'd somehow be transformed into melted butter, which now doesn't really sound like that much of a bummer. It sounds more like how I'd like to spend my last twenty-four hours on this earth. ~ Amy Schumer

TIDES Every day the sea blue gray green lavender pulls away leaving the harbor's dark-cobbled undercoat slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls walk there among old whalebones, the white spines of fish blink from the strandy stew as the hours tick over; and then far out the faint, sheer line turns, rustling over the slack, the outer bars, over the green-furred flats, over the clam beds, slippery logs, barnacle-studded stones, dragging the shining sheets forward, deepening, pushing, wreathing together wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures spilling over themselves, lapping blue gray green lavender, never resting, not ever but fashioning shore, continent, everything. And here you may find me on almost any morning walking along the shore so light-footed so casual. ~ Mary Oliver

Edouard, I have spent so many hours wrestling with my faith - my lack of faith - but now, in this fearful corner of an all but forgotten world, riddled as I am with this loathsome parasite, I have somehow rediscovered a strength of belief the likes of which I have not known since you and I were boys. I now understand the need for faith - pure, blind, fly-in-the-face-of-reason faith - as a small life preserver in the wild and endless sea of a universe ruled by unfeeling laws and totally indifferent to the small, reasoning beings that inhabit it. Day ~ Dan Simmons

If there was a day of the week I could skip it would be Monday. Clients had too much time to think and worry over a long weekend and by Monday they were often riddled with fear and anxiety. ~ Stan Turner

The machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies riddled through and through with incompetence. ~ Laurence J. Peter

In the middle of Little Italy little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily ~ Big Pun

But Lao Tzu's teaching suffers from the major problem endemic to such visionaries. In the intervening two and a half millennia, his words have been misinterpreted and distorted by generations of adherents until his message is riddled with meaningless ritual and dogma. Taoism contracted the conceptual plague: it became a religion. ~ Thomas Daniel Nehrer

Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition. ~ Aldous Huxley

We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (interoffice memos, supermarket receipts, etc.), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The church today is riddled with fad doctrines and new sounds that distract from the clear message of the Great commission in the New Testament. Any message that attracts you which does not bring glory to Christ is the message of a seducing spirit and the man giving it is in deception. ~ John Hagee

People were growing resentful of bureaucrats whose first mission in life seemed to be protecting their own jobs by keeping expensive programs alive long after their usefulness had expired. They were losing respect for politicians who kept voting for open-ended welfare programs riddled with fraud and inefficiency that kept generation after generation of families dependent on the dole. And they were growing mistrustful of the self-appointed intellectual elite back in Washington who claimed to know better than the people of America did how to run their lives, their businesses, and their communities. ~ Ronald Reagan

Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I am bundle of nerves riddled with irrational fears. ~ Tori Spelling

SUNLIGHT SEEPED THROUGH the thickly-bunched leaves of the towering kirstal trees, the clearing beneath them riddled with chaotic patches of brilliant light and gray shadow. ~ Mickey Zucker Reichert

Telling someone to "follow their passion" is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst. ~ Cal Newport

I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturised by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them. ~ Don DeLillo

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence. ~ Adrienne Rich

Cable boxes are, almost without exception, awful. They're under-powered computers running very badly designed software. Their channel guides are slow, poorly laid out, and usually riddled with ads. ~ Alex Pareene

On the levels of politics and theology, beauty is perfectly compatible with nonsense and tyranny. Which is very fortunate; for if beauty were incompatible with non­sense and tyranny, there would be precious little art in the world. The masterpieces of painting, sculpture and architecture were produced as religious or political propaganda, for the greater glory of a god, a govern­ment or a priesthood. But most kings and priests have been despotic and all religions have been riddled with superstition. Genius has been the servant of tyranny and art has advertised the merits of the local cult. Time, as it passes, separates the good art from the bad meta­physics. Can we learn to make this separation, not after the event, but while it is actually taking place? That is the question. ~ Aldous Huxley

People who disagree with His Excellency, the President for Life and 'Chief of Chiefs,' are frequently found to be the victims of car crashes (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or dead in their beds of heart attacks (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or the recipients of some not-quite-fresh seafood (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets). ~ Alexandra Fuller

Our triumphant age of plenty is riddled with darker feelings of doubt, cynicism, distrust, boredom and a strange kind of emptiness ~ Samuel Johnson

Untrained warriors are soon killed on the battlefield; so also persons untrained in the art of preserving their inner peace are quickly riddled by the bullets of worry and restlessness in active life. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

What I've come to realize I that I don't like action for action's sake. Mindless explosions, super close ups of combat and gore, and unnecessary effects make me zone out incredibly fast.
What I do love is a fight that is well choreographed and in which I actually care about the outcome. And hopefully not riddled with cliches.
Even more so, I have had a long, deep-seated appreciation for watching chicks kick ass. Watching some lone-wolf-type hero beat the crap out of the bad guys is okay, but watching a BAMF femme do it is 10000% times better. ~ J.M. Richards

The key to staying unintimidated is to convince yourself that the person you're facing is a mere mortal, no different from you-- which is in fact the truth. See the person, not the myth. Imagine him or her as a child, as someone riddled with insecurities. Cutting the other person down to size will help your keep your mental balance. ~ Robert Greene

Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts. ~ David Mitchell

My career has been riddled with controversy, which I never fully understand. ~ Liz Phair

We do not have a paradise on earth; it is riddled with so much sin and disease. ~ Billy Graham

Remember, Angels are both God's messengers and God's message, witness to eternity in time, to the presence of the divine amidst the ordinary. Every moment of every day is riddled by their traces. ~ Forrest Church

The logical flaws and inconsistencies that riddled the tale, far from making him doubt its veracity finally convinced him that it might indeed be true; for life is like that. ~ Tom Holt

The busy 20th and 21st centuries have made Garfield's era seem remote and irrelevant, its leaders ridiculed for their very obscurity... to the generation of Americans then alive, though, their dramas, humanities, and dignity were a compelling part of daily life. For twenty years after the Civil War, America was led by a group of larger-than-life figures with clay feet who fought and raged and plied their craft with nerve and ambition while following a code of honor riddled with blind spots and inconsistencies; during that time, public involvement in politics reached levels far higher than today. Garfield held a special place: one of the most promising of his generation, shot down in his prime, martyred for taking a principled stand. ~ Kenneth D. Ackerman

Many different kinds of sprouts lay torn. Green, purple and orange leaves lay scattered across the dark soil, and the thorn fence surrounding the bed had a fist-sized hole in it. Teacher eased himself into a squat, poked at the inside of the hole. Whatever made the hole had left blood on the thorns. The sprouts looked like wispy ghosts, pale and broken. Their delicate leaves and stems were riddled with bites. Life drained out of them like water dripping from a hanging cloth, and a breeze made them dance sadly. It felt like a funeral.
Teacher picked up a gnawed berry and gently squeezed it until purple juice dripped down his thumb. He placed the berry by the plant's roots.
Chandi's small face bunched up. "Are they dead?"
"They're dying, yes." Yuvali took her hand. "But their bodies will help other plants grow. ~ B.T. Lowry

My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless ... I'm not going to have a happy ending. ~ Marya Hornbacher

To die whole,
riddled with nothing
but desire for it,
is like breakfast
after love. ~ Anne Sexton

Love has two affirmations. First of all, when the lover encounters the other, there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself). There follows a long tunnel: my first yes is riddled by doubts, love's value is ceaselessly threatened by depreciation: this is the moment of melancholy passion, the rising of resentment and oblation. Yet I can emerge from this tunnel; I can 'surmount,' without liquidating; what I have affirmed a first time, I can once again affirm, without repeating it, for then what I affirm is the affirmation, not its contingency. I affirm the first encounter in its difference, I desire its return, not its repetition. I say to the other (old or new): Let us begin again. ~ Roland Barthes

[The USA in the '70s] The country's cinematic output was appropriately bleak, reflecting the moroseness and self-hatred that riddled the national psyche. Anti-heroes such as Bonnie and Clyde, Travis Bickle, Popeye Doyle and the Corleones dominated the box office and the public wallowed in a morass of guilty introspection. There was never a country in more desperate need of a blow job than the United States of America: enter George Lucas. ~ Simon Pegg

One day, he saw her through the window of a café. She was sitting with two women, and her face, long riddled with wrinkles from her unbridled gift for grimaces, was in a state of animation. ~ Milan Kundera

Unfortunately, the American justice system is just riddled with lies and inconsistencies. ~ Tommy Chong

It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise. Moon recognized the man as the new missionary. His head was cropped too close, so that his white skull gleamed, and the red skin of his neck and jaw was riddled with old acne; his face was bald with anxiety and tiresome small agonies. ~ Peter Matthiessen

The round silence of night,
one note on the stave
of the infinite.

Ripe with lost poems,
I step naked into the street.
The blackness riddled
by the singing of crickets:
sound,
that dead
will-o'-the-wisp,
that musical light
perceived
by the spirit.

A thousand butterfly skeletons
sleep within my walls.

A wild crowd of young breezes
over the river.

- Hour of Stars (1920) ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Memories die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they burst, lose color, lose suppleness, stiffen like corpses. All that remains are shells with translucent edges. Half-erased brain platelets are a slippery terrain, deceptive. One's mental archive is locked, it languishes in the dark. The past is riddled with holes, souvenirs can't help here. Everything must be thrown away. Everything. And perhaps everyone as well. ~ Daša Drndić

Inside its crumbling walls the house is riddled with bullet holes, and in its garden only the crimson dahlias still hold their heads high. Jing is lying on a chaise longue [sic] playing with his bird.
'I thought you were in prison.'
He looks up, his eyes filled with hate and desire.
'You are my prison. ~ Shan Sa

Hamlet' dwarfs 'Hamilton' - it dwarfs pretty much everything - but there's a revealing similarity between them. Shakespeare's longest play leaves its audience in the dark about some basic and seemingly crucial facts. It's not as if the Bard forgot, in the course of all those words, to tell us whether Hamlet was crazy or only pretending: He wanted us to wonder. He forces us to work on a puzzle that has no definite answer. And this mysteriousness is one reason why we find the play irresistible.

'Hamilton' is riddled with question marks. The first act begins with a question, and so does the second. The entire relationship between Hamilton and Burr is based on a mutual and explicit lack of comprehension: 'I will never understand you,' says Hamilton, and Burr wonders, 'What it is like in his shoes?'

Again and again, Lin distinguishes characters by what they wish they knew. 'What'd I miss?' asks Jefferson in the song that introduces him. 'Would that be enough?' asks Eliza in the song that defines her. 'Why do you write like you're running out of time?' asks everybody in a song that marvels at Hamilton's drive, and all but declares that there's no way to explain it. 'Hamilton', like 'Hamlet', gives an audience the chance to watch a bunch of conspicuously intelligent and well-spoken characters fill the stage with 'words, words, words,' only to discover, again and again, the limits to what they can comprehend. ~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

In the fall he picked up his phone one afternoon to hear Grandma Lynn.
'Jack,' my grandmother announced, 'I am thinking of coming to stay.'
My father was silent, but the line was riddled with his hesitation.
'I would like to make myself available to you and the children. I've been knocking around in this mausoleum long enough.'
'Lynn, we're just beginning to start over again,' he stammered. Still, he couldn't depend on Nate's mother to watch Buckley forever. Four months after my mother left, her temporary absence was beginning to take on the feel of permanence.
My grandmother insisted. I watched her resist the remaining slug of vodka in her glass. 'I will contain my drinking until'- she thought hard here- 'after five o'clock, and,' she said,' what the hell, I'll stop altogether if you should find it necessary.'
'Do you know what you're saying?'
My grandmother felt a clarity from her phone hand down to her pump-encased feet. 'Yes, I do. I think'
It was only after he got off the phone that he let himself wonder, Where will we PUT her?
It was obvious to everyone.

~pgs 213-214; Grandma Lynn and Jack; ~ Alice Sebold

If you were madly in love, you'd want me to win,' said Katherine.

"'I'm not sure that's true,' said Sam. 'I think love is about equality: both of us equally happy with either result. One-sided self-sacrifice is only enabling someone else's egoism. Altruists always end up riddled with resentment, or if they make that last superhuman effort, with spiritual pride.'

"'Oh,' said Katherine, 'you mean you're not going to enable my egoism.'

"'Okay, okay,' said Sam 'you're right – love is doing everything you want all the time. ~ Edward St. Aubyn

The Love of a lonely wolf,
full of secrets and strange midnights-
drawn out of the darkness
from hills thick with black oaks
valleys riddled with riddles-
that love is sharper than a bed of thistles;
each kiss pares away flesh.

The love of a wolf
can eat you up all the better. ~ Sandra Kasturi

I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellow pus.[ ... ] A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain. In my right armpit there is a chameleon which is perpetually chasing them, to avoid starving to death: everyone must live.[ ... ] My anus has been penetrated by a crab; encouraged by my sluggishness, he guards the entrance with his pincers, and causes me a lot of pain. ~ Comte De Lautreamont

She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate ~ Isabel Allende

Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs. ~ Yann Martel

Shannon: Only the living suffered. Only they were riddled with guilt and regret and unanswered questions. ~ Nora Roberts

Hundreds of bodies, riddled with German bullets, were washed out to sea by the gentle swell of the waves. ~ Alex Von Tunzelmann

I began writing this story by subverting the dominant discourse, but that did not last long. My story decided to assert its independence. I tried to rupture all vestiges of received form, but my story fought back. It wanted to go live with its Aristotelian parents. "I'm sick of being experimented on," it said. "What's so lame about catharsis?" Then it stormed out of the barber shop, mid trim, and fumbled down the sidewalk, weak from surgery, thin in description, gaping with holes, and absolutely riddled with bruised sentences. I watched it with binoculars, but decided not to chase after it. I never liked that story anyway. ~ Christopher Higgs

Like Christians, Soccerians argue that you should not judge the essence of their faith by the loopy activities of its followers. But the Beautiful Game is in fact quite the opposite. It is badly designed and riddled with flaws. ~ Craig Brown

A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. ~ China Mieville

I was grateful for cereal
the only food that my tummy, riddled by pangs of infatuation, could handle. ~ Craig Thompson

When everything that is called art was well and truly riddled with rheumatism, the photographer lit the thousands of candles whose power is contained in his flame, and the sensitive paper absorbed by degrees the blackness cut out of some ordinary object. He had invented a fresh and tender flash of lightning. ~ Tristan Tzara

Pakistan is riddled with problems that are rooted in the disproportionate power of the state. Aid has only boosted that power. ~ Iqbal Quadir

Those who in the name of Faith embrace illusion,
kill and are killed.
Even the atheist gets God's blessings-
Does not boast of his religion;

With reverence he lights the lamp of Reason
And pays his homage not to scriptures,
But to the good in man.

The bigot insults his own religion
When he slays a man of another faith.
Conduct he judges not in the light of Reason;
In the temple he raises the blood-stained banner
And worships the devil in the name of God.

All that is shameful and barbarous through the Ages,
Has found a shelter in their temples-
Those they turn into prisons;
O, I hear the trumpet call of Destruction!
Time comes with her great broom
Sweeping all refuse away.

That which should make man free,
They turn into fetters;
That which should unite,
They turn into sword;
That which should bring love
From the fountain of the Eternal,
They turn into prison

And with its waves they flood the world.
They try to cross the river
In a bark riddled with holes;
And yet, in their anguish, whom do they blame?

O Lord, breaking false religion,
Save the blind!
Break! O break
The alter that is drowned in blood.

Let your thunder strike
Into the prison of false religion,

And bring to this unhappy land
The light of Knowledge. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

What tortures have men to endure, comparable to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex? ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

I carry a small spiral notebook with me at all times and have been doing this for many years. There's a shoe box in my closet filled with these notebooks, each riddled with notes and impressions, ideas, schemes, and soup recipes. ~ Patrick DeWitt

In the early 1970s, phone phreaks manipulated the long-distance system using blue boxes that they built from sketchy photocopied schematics that were often riddled with errors. Not many had the skill to do this. Phreaking was restricted to a select few. ~ Charles Platt

Our destinies are riddled with challenges that have a tendency to ruin well laid plans. Many have attempted to take fate into their own hands and have been unsuccessful in changing it.
Others find that their paths differ from what they have dreamed for themselves. We must be aware that our choices may come back to haunt us later in life, but to trust that is is all part of fate's desing. ~ Peter Koevari

Guy suddenly wanted to scald his face, gain fifty pounds, shear his hair. He was sick of his beauty, his "eternal" beauty. People thought he was purer, more intelligent, kinder, nobler than he was because they ascribed all these virtues to him. What if he were stripped of his looks, if he stabbed the grotesque painting in the attic? If they saw him for what he really was – empty-headed, vicieux (how did you translate that? "Riddled with vices?"), narcisse? Used to being indulged and pursued, terrified he'd outlive his fatal appeal and yet longing to be free of it? ~ Edmund White

A poster of the massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my wall as a daily reminder of the brutality in the world. ~ Assata Shakur

Disease is a manifestation of human thought because it is ideas, worldviews, and beliefs that create the conditions in which a society can be riddled with disease, strife, and poverty, or can continue in health and harmony. ~ F. David Peat

I was running on the earth,
Slashing primeval winds.
I was running in the world,
Riddled with darkness. ~ Keishi Ando

Destriers began to perish of exhaustion and exposure. "What is a knight without a horse?" men riddled. "A snowman with a sword. ~ George R R Martin

Be careful," Aunt Blythe said. "The floor's riddled with dry rot."
Forgetting her own warning, she plunged ahead, opening trunks and boxes, poking and pawing through things, reminiscing. ~ Mary Downing Hahn

The passage that he had found in the book had been riddled with ambiguities and contradictions only reserved for those most valiant in overriding their legalistic forbearance into a necessary frenzy that would allow them to suitably work up a case for one side or the other on how the Law, without the possibility of misinterpretation, states If ABC, then DEF - or for the sake of acknowledging the counterargument first as a courtroom tactic, the case might also be made that the Law states the antithesis of the aforementioned If ABC, then DEF, but gives allowance within reasonable parameters for a provisional XYZ to be granted in exceptional cases. And thus, it was a matter not so much of making one's case in a clear and logical sense, but one for the lawyers to battle out in the arena of pathos, as it was clearly the emotional pleas that could evoke a sense of sympathy in the courtroom and overturn otherwise painstaking endeavors at using the tools at hand to make pleas based upon incontrovertible facts. ~ Ashim Shanker

Yet this is not a novel. It is a faithful transcription of my memories, some of them hazy, others riddled with holes left by the passage of the years, others patched up by time and the filters of experience and distance, and still others, no doubt, completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were. ~ Alma Guillermoprieto

I think 'Comic Book: The Movie' is the apex of my career in terms of making a personal statement that has significance to me and resonates with biographical detail about not only my career, but all the people that I've worked with in my career. All of it's riddled, on- and off-camera, with people I've known and worked with for decades. ~ Mark Hamill

The road to riches is never straight and narrow. It can be riddled with financial land mines. ~ Kevin O'Leary

A jolt of rage now forced him into her face, their noses almost touching. At once she was the one pulling back.
"Is this yours and Fricker's little game, Geline? To what purpose? Why not keep to the truth? It's disgusting enough." His voice was ragged with fury. "Why make up lies when it's so unnecessary? I was a gambler, a prodigious drinker. I whored my way through most of London's lower echelons. I am profoundly fortunate not to be riddled with disease."
Her mouth crimped with distaste.
"Yes, indeed. Don't want to mention that, do we? There's a price to be paid for treating this vessel," he tapped his chest, "without respect. As to that, we've both been fortunate. ~ Cynthia Wicklund

The area between the nose and the chin, the subject of kissing and the vehicle for speech, is perhaps even more known and set upon than the eyes. The mouth is also riddled with a complex interweaving of folds, curves, flats and lost-and-found edges. These nuances are needed by a perceptive person who might try to understand human nature. ~ Robert Genn

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. ~ Carl Sagan

U.S. Speedskating has been riddled with problems since when I started my career, and we were always able to look past that. When it came down to performing on the ice, regardless of funding issues, we were always able to make it happen. And that's what it's all about. ~ Apolo Ohno

The past is an annoying critic whose loud tirade of accusatory declamations detracts me from experiencing happiness. Loitering within the craggy shadows of my lithograph identification apparatus is the splayed viscera from the blood-soaked entrails of an egotistical self's riddled history. The unbidden past tugs at my sleeves similar to a persistent tramp demanding an attentive accounting. A disgraced personal self refuses to release its despotic hold upon my guilt-ridden psyche without exacting a sacrificial tithing. Strewn wreckage from my history of scandalous debacles cast a pall of shame over the present. The shambles of my disreputable past stifles my present desire to celebrate in the rudimentary grandeur of living robustly. With the past snarling its reproach, my mind is preoccupied with ugly thoughts, and every day reduced to a tiresome and worrisome filled existence that halts my progress towards achieving an envisaged life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I expect I knew better than to try to recapture the experience now, in my mid-fifties, when time went so fast that I wouldn't have time, wouldn't , or couldn't, allow myself the time, to savor it. I counted that inability as another of the losses of getting older, which goes too slow at first, leaving you aching to speed things up, and then goes too fast when it's way too late to slow things down. And all the time, young or old, you're looking at people on the other side of the equation, riddled with envy. ~ Frederick Barthelme

In Zen, there is an old saying: The obstacle is the path. Know that a whole and happy life is not free of obstacles. Quite the contrary, a whole and happy life is riddled with obstacles-they simply become the very stepping-stones that help lift us to a new perspective. It is not what happens to us in this life that shapes us, it is how we choose to respond to what happens to us. ~ Dennis Merritt Jones

Reality is an AIDS-riddled whore. ~ Roberto Bolano