Scratch Quotes

When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy. ~ Philippa Perry

People have often asked if I'm gay because I don't go out of my way to spit and scratch and give people attitude. ~ Jason Bateman

Of course, my pops put chili oil in it immediately, but I wanted to taste the broth: intense, deep, and mind-numbing. It was one of those bites that make you think maybe, just maybe, your taste buds carry a cognitive key that can open something in your mind. Like the first time I heard Lauryn Hill's voice scratch over "Killing Me Softly," I felt that I just had a mental breakthrough via sound; there has to be something like that with taste. It was then and there that I realized, you can tell a story without words, just soup. ~ Eddie Huang

If they'd been dogs, they would have all been in the yard eating grass and trying to yak up whatever was making them feel so lousy. Not a bone gnawed, not a ball chased-all tails went unwagged. Oh, life is a fast cat, a short leash, a flea in that place where you just can't scratch. ~ Christopher Moore

If I did have a tumor, I would name it Marla. Marla, the little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you would stop tonguing it, but you can't. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Accounts of eating Christmas sweet potatoes baked in ashes and jackrabbit stewed with white flour dumplings are testaments to pioneer resilience and pleasure - and they help inspire my own best scratch cooking. ~ Isabel Gillies

Against all the odds, we built a better navy than theirs - from scratch - in two months! We now rule the waves in the Mediterranean Sea - Our Sea! The day will come - it begins today - when Rome will master the world! Alexander will roll in his grave, Atlantis will decay in her decadence, and these demons of Harappa will entertain Hades with their theatrics this very night. But Rome will live on in fame and glory. It starts with our victory today! ~ Jennifer McKeithen

You don't go to other books and take little pieces because although say a romantic scene may have been many times before all the details of who it is, where it is, are so intertwined in that text that it's easier to write it from scratch. ~ Bill Gates

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch. ~ Will Self

I feel like a lot of people in the hip hop world don't take me seriously as a rapper, and I feel that first-and-foremost I came up as a rapper before I started singing. All a lot of people know from me is 'Cupid's Chokehold,' and they don't scratch the surface and see beyond that dude who sings the song about his girlfriend. ~ Travie McCoy

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people's hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.

During the Age of Silence, people communicated more, not less. Basic survival demanded that the hands were almost never still, and so it was only during sleep (and sometimes not even then) that people were not saying something or other. No distinction was made between the gestures of language and the gestures of life. The labor of building a house, say, or preparing a meal was no less an expression than making the sign for I love you or I feel serious. When a hand was used to shield one's face when frightened by a loud noise something was being said, and when fingers were used to pick up what someone else had dropped something was being said; and even when the hands were at rest, that, too, was saying something. Naturally, there were misunderstandings. There were times when a finger might have been lifted to scratch a nose, and if casual eye contact was made with one's lover just then, the lover might accidentally take it to be the gesture, not at all dissimilar, for Now I realize I was wrong to love you. These mistakes were heartbreaking. And yet, because people knew how easily they could happen, because th ~ Nicole Krauss

The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka acquired through tourism consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach. ~ Martin Jacques

Seem that if baby get left in manger he would scratch up, bite up and dead by the third day. But white people think this be the greatest thing. The baby grow up and they kill him, and white people think this be even greater. It make plenty sense that white people would get so much mirth and joy out of this 'cause nobody kill for fun like backra. ~ Marlon James

When you wake up, instead of checking emails on your phone, or counting your retweets, pick up a pen and scratch a few sentences into a notebook. ~ Kevin Barry

Whatever you want," he said. "Will you please come here now?"
I slipped a piece of protective tissue over my drawing and flipped the book closed. A piece of blue scratch paper slid out, the line I'd copied from Edward;s poetry book. "Hey. Translate for me, Monsieur Bainbridge."
I set the sketchbook on my stool and joined him on the chaise. He tugged me onto his lap and read over his head. "'Qu'ieu sui avinen, leu lo sai.' 'That I am handsome, I know."
"Verry funny."
"Very true." He grinned. "The translation. That's what it says. Old-fashionedly."
I thought of Edward's notation on the page, the reminder to read the poem to Diana in bed, and rolled my eyes. You're so vain.I bet you think this song is about you..."Boy and their egos."
Alex cupped my face in his hands. "Que tu est belle, tu le sais."
"Oh,I am not-"
"Shh," he shushed me, and leaned in.
The first bell came way too soon. I reluctantly loosened my grip on his shirt and ran my hands over my hair. He prompty thrust both hands in and messed it up again. "Stop," I scolded, but without much force.
"I have physics," he told me. "We're studying weak interaction."
I sandwiched his open hand between mine. "You know absolutely nothing about that."
"Don't be so quick to accept the obvious," he mock-scolded me. "Weak interaction can actually change the flavor of quarks."
The flavor of quirks, I thought, and vaguely remembered something about being charmed. I'd sat ~ Melissa Jensen

So they drove again, Vivien sitting up and looking now, but as navigator only, letting the desert scratch its own thorny poetry on the enormous moon. ~ Douglas Woolf

I had turned down other head chef jobs. I didn't want to take over someone else's cuisine. I wanted to start from scratch. ~ Rene Redzepi

Don't sweat it if you are stuck in the corporate job right now. But begin to plan ahead. I know from much personal experience that it takes 1-3 years to transition from total scratch to making a living from home in any career you want. ~ James Altucher

Nothing is forgotten, all is permitted. In a stinking cave, muttering babies scream and scratch, furs undulate in copulation. In one corner, bright-eyed first marks are daubed on a wall. They are marks to function, marks of place, of time. They are marks to draw results and persist beyond one human lifetime. Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling itself into intuition and suggesting the very power of suggestion. No one noted down from a book this process, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-sources, death-forces that modern persons are divorced from. On this damp stone there is a curve, it is land, horizon, ejaculation, movement. ~ Genesis P-Orridge

Happiness is having a scratch for every itch. ~ Ogden Nash

He needed to man up. Step one. Take a deep breath. Step two. Scratch his balls to remind himself he wasn't a prissy fucking princess. Step three - "What the hell are you doing?" Constantine said, snapping him back to the here and now. Doing? Why having a panic attack, of course, but that wasn't something he was about to admit. "Just taking in all the changes to the place. ~ Eve Langlais

I can understand why a single parent, working two jobs, would find it easier to stop at McDonald's with the kids rather than cook something from scratch at home. ~ Eric Schlosser

Hot as hell isn't he?' Exie questioned from over my shoulder.
'Yeah, I guess he is'
'You guess? Are you blind? Girl, he is so fine it's scary. I nearly had an orgasm the other day when he asked me a cup of tea. But don't stare too hard, Meagan will scratch your eyes out if she catches you staring at her man.' Exie said with a high eyebrow warning. ~ Jennifer Loren

Ideas are like the flint stone of wondrous works. You scratch at them until a spark flies ... then the world catches fire. ~ Gerard De Marigny

Stunt performing is a highly structured career path - you have to gain qualifications in six different sports to a high standard. It takes four or five years and costs at least £20,000; a black belt in a martial art from scratch costs a fortune. ~ Steve Truglia

The hardest studio music to play is Tom & Jerry - cartoons. The music makes absolutely no sense, as music. You can't get into hearing it. There's nothing to hear-'bleep!, blop! scratch!' and it comes fast; everything's first take. That'll change the way you look at life. ~ Howard Roberts

Although I'm a scratch Ping-Pong player, there is no possibility of me beating a top professional. ~ Matt Kuchar

Who do you want to turn into?" I mean the question to be mocking, but that's not how it comes out. I sound interested. I reach down and scratch my leg, trying to hid my embarrassment.
Bishop looks at me. "Someone honest. Someone who tries to do the right thing. Someone who follows his own heart, even if it disappoints people." He pauses. "Someone brave enough to be all those things."
A boy who doesn't want to lie, married to a girl who can't tell the truth. If there is a God, he has a sick sense of humor. ~ Amy Engel

You're never too old, never too bad, never too late and never too sick to start from the scratch once again. ~ Bikram Choudhury

It is hope in this wider sense which enabled my father to build, from scratch, one of India's largest modern enterprises. His was an undertaking powered by hard work, initiative, self-belief but, above all else, the capacity, as he would often say, "to dream with your eyes wide open". ~ Anil Ambani

I tried to live cautiously - or eventually learned to try to live - in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, lightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun. ~ Lorrie Moore

(Nothing is) really as good as a meal made 'from scratch' or a picture created with your own hands. ~ Mitsumasa Anno

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off - it's more like a recipe. So for any new checklist created from scratch, you have to pick the type that makes the most sense for the situation. ~ Atul Gawande

Eagleton has spent his life inside two mental boxes, Catholicism and Marxism, of both of which he is a severe internal critic - that is, he frequently kicks and scratches at the inside of the boxes, but does not leave them. Neither are ideologies that loosen their grip easily, and people who need the security of adherence to a big dominating ideology, however much they kick and scratch but without daring to leave go, hold on to it every bit as tightly as it holds onto them. The result is of course strangulation, but alas not mutual strangulation: the ideology always wins. ~ A.C. Grayling

Don't merely scratch at a problem. Flag it, and then show up at the meeting with ideas on how you can fix whatever is going wrong. Be a problem solver: ~ Karen Dillon

I'm so busy I dont know whether to scratch my watch or wind my butt ~ Irelynd Brown

All four gospel writers were no doubt enthusiastic members of their local churches. They went there every Sunday; sometimes they preached themselves; sometimes they listened to the sermon and nodded when the tradition was repeated accurately. And eventually they were prevailed on to write down their own or their sources' recollections of the facts that had generated the tradition. This is why it is silly for X to say: "Mark wasn't written until the 50s at the earliest. That's a good twenty years after Jesus died. Mark couldn't be expected to remember things clearly after all that time." Mark didn't hibernate between the death of Jesus and the time he wrote his gospel, then take out his pen, scratch his head, and say: "It was a long time ago, and I'm trying to remember this for the first time, but so far as I remember it went something like this."31 ~ Charles Foster

Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take none of her rights. ~ Alice Walker

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge. ~ Jim Highsmith

But something about having Ali there made him feel...lighter. Dare he admit it? Maybe even a teensy bit happy?

"Nate?"

Scratch that. He didn't just want to take on the world when she said his name like that, he wanted to take on the whole friggin' galaxy. ""Yeah?"

"I'm toughing you."

No doubt about that. The baseball bat he was trying to conceal behind his zipper was testimony enough. "I noticed. ~ Julie Ann Walker

I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

What would you have me do?
Seek for the patronage of some great man,
And like a creeping vine on a tall tree
Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?
No thank you! Dedicate, as others do,
Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon
In the vile hope of teasing out a smile
On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad
For breakfast every morning? Make my knees
Callous, and cultivate a supple spine,-
Wear out my belly grovelling in the dust?
No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine
That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns
Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right
Too proud to know his partner's business,
Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire
God gave me to burn incense all day long
Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you!
Shall I go leaping into ladies' laps
And licking fingers?-or-to change the form-
Navigating with madrigals for oars,
My sails full of the sighs of dowagers?
No thank you! Publish verses at my own
Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint
Of a small group of literary souls
Who dine together every Tuesday? No
I thank you! Shall I labor night and day
To build a reputation on one song,
And never write another? Shall I find
True genius only among Geniuses,
Palpitate over little paragraphs,
And struggle to insinuate my name
In the columns of the Mercury?
No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be a ~ Edmond Rostand

I make really good chicken soup, sort of from scratch. I don't make my own stock. I just use a base like a chicken stock, but everything else, all the ingredients, I do on my own. ~ Eric Dane

There is a distinct evolutionary advantage to being fuzzy, as much of the mammal kingdom had discovered, particularly when you wanted a human to scratch your back. The dwarven evolutionary tree had embraced this concept wholeheartedly only to discover that once you started talking and expressing opinions a human's desire to scratch your back became directly inverse to how fuzzy it was. ~ Jeffery Russell

Why, you may ask, take on this unpleasant, frightening subject? Why stare into the sun? Why not follow the advice of the venerable dean of American psychiatry, Adolph Meyer, who, a century ago, cautioned psychiatrists, 'Don't scratch where it doesn't itch'? Why grapple with the most terrible, the darkest and most unchangeable aspect of life? ... Death, however, DOES itch. It itches all the time; it is always with us, scratching at some inner door, whirring softly, barely audibly, just under the membrane of consciousness. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Of course the dust is building up unseen, but you learn to repress this for as long as it goes unnoticed by guests. And then one day someone moves a piece of furniture without your say-so, and everything comes into plain view. Dirt and scratch marks. Permanent damage to the parquet floor. By then it's too late. ~ Fredrik Backman

APPLES SCENT,
You arrive in the basement. Immediatly it catches you. Apples are here, lying on fruit trays, turned crates. You didn't think about it. You had no wish to be flooded by this melancholic wave. But you can't resist. Apple scent is a breaker. How could you manage without this childhood, bitter and sweet ?
Shrivelled fruits surely are delicious, from this feak dryness where candied taste seems to have wormed in each wrinkle. But you don't wish to eat them. Particularly don't turn into an identifiable taste this floating power of smell. Say that it smells good, strong? But not ..... It's beyond .... An inner scent, scent of a better oneself. Here is shut up school autumn, with purple ink we scratch paper with down strokes and thin strokes. Rain bangs against glasses, evening will be long ....
But apple perfume is more than past. You think about formerly because of fullness and intensity from a remembrance of salpetered cellar, dark attic. But it's to live here, stay here, stand up.
You have behind you high herbs and damp orchards. Ahead it's like a warm blow given in the shade. Scent got all browns, all reds with a bit of green acid. Scent distilled skin softness, its tiny roughness. Lips dried, we alreadyt know that this thirst is not to be slaked.
Nothing would happen if you bite the white flesh. You would need to become october, mud floor, moss of cellar, rain, expectation.
Apple scent is painful. It's from a stronger life, a slowness ~ Philippe Delerm

I will never be able to create a budget from scratch with the amount of time that I have, but my instructions remain the same: Give me a budget that has no new revenue. ~ Christine Gregoire

Freedom is not being for or against an ideal, but creating your own existence from scratch. ~ Glennon Doyle

Andie was a physical girl, and that's not code for 'It's all about the sex'. She was a hugger, a toucher, she was prone to running her fingers through my hair or down my back in a friendly scratch. She got reassurance and comfort from touching. And yes, fine, she also liked sex. ~ Gillian Flynn

What about an amnesiac, who awakes having lost his memories and must learn of his past from scratch? Has he died? How can we be just memories? How does that leave us with enough? ~ Bernard Beckett

I'm pretty much a cat that way. Scratch my stomach, and I'll purr at you, but I'll want to gut you with my claws even more than if you'd ignored me. ~ Tad Williams

I don't care if it's Bruno Mars or Aerosmith or ZZ Top ... it's about songs. 'Paperback Writer,' 'Satisfaction,' 'Cat Scratch Fever,' 'Walk This Way,' all the killer songs in the world start with an identifiable guitar pattern that is basically a bastardization of either honky-tonk or boogie-woogie. And that's in every cool piece of music in the world that you and I love. ~ Ted Nugent

Where my heart lies is in the real-life, but at the same time part of it lies in this creative realm where I need to go in and put out that fire, scratch that itch, in order to be all rounded. ~ Frank Iero

He loves me so he hurts me
To try and make me good.
It doesn't work. I'm just too bad
And don't do what I should.

My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell - and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed - and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together - so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years. ~ Laurie Matthew

Every cat knows how to keep his owner feeding them: You may scratch and bite ninety-nine times, but the hundredth time, you must leap into a lap and press your nose to their nose. Rules are for dogs. ~ Catherynne M Valente

It's incredibly hard to program a network from scratch for 24 hours. ~ Carson Kressley

If someone saw a movie of your life so far, when the credits rolled, would they say, "Wow, that was awesome?" Or would they scratch their heads and say, "I wonder what that was all about? ~ Dan Miller

When hunting a Maltese Falcon, catch it, but don't scratch it! ~ Anthony Marais

It was Simone who used to say, on her better days, "Don't worry, little one, none of this will leave a scratch. ~ Stephanie Danler

That is the normal succession of things in this part of the world; you can see the various stages all over Scratch Flat. There is, for example, a small red maple swamp above my house on the northwest side of the drumlin. The swamp was probably a pond sixty years ago, but now in summer, unless you know your trees, you cannot distinguish it from the surrounding woodlands. It is only in spring, when the groundwater levels are high, that the remnant of the ice sheet makes itself apparent. Then the waters rise around the trunks of the red maple trees and, after reaching a critical level, run down across the small meadow to the north of my house. ~ John Hanson Mitchell

In the textbook of revelation, the Bible, God has spoken verbally; and this spoken word has survived every scratch of the human pen. ~ Billy Graham

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do. ~ Charles Dudley Warner

He looked down at the street, and the unbroken whiteness, and watched his foot touch the snow and listened to the slight crunching sound as he stepped forward. He looked back at his footprints. They were fascinating. He had been the only one to walk along this street today. There wasn't even the mark of a dog or squirrel, or the scratch of a bird. He continued through the soft, silent snow, a feeling of peace starting to flow through him, helping make his step lighter and easier. ~ Hubert Selby, Jr.

Last night I had the dream again. Except it's not a dream I know because when it comes for me, I'm still awake.
There's my desk. The map on the wall. The Stuffed animals I don't play with anymore but don't want to hurt Dad's feelings by sticking in the closet I might be in bed. I might be just standing there, looking foe a missing sock. Then i'm gone.
it doesn't just show me somthing this time, it takes me from here to THERE> standing on the bank of a river of fire. A thousand wasps in my head. Fighting and dying inside my skull, their bodies piling up against the backs of me eyes. Stinging and stinging.
Dad's voice. Somewhere across the river. Calling my name. I've never heard him sound like that before. He's so frightened he can't hide it, even though he tries (he ALWAYS tries).
The dead boy floats by.
Facedown. So I wait for his head to pop up, show the holes where his eye used to be, say somthing with his blue lips. One of the terrible things it might make him do. But he just passes like a chunk of wood. I've never been here before, but I know it's real. The river is the line between this place and the Other Place. And I'm on the wrong side. There's a dark forest behind me but that's not what it is. I try to get to where Dad is. My toes touch the river and it sings with pain. Then there's arms pulling me back. Dragging me into the trees. They feel like a man's arms but it's not a man that sticks its fingers into my mouth. Nails that scratch the ~ Andrew Pyper

We can't start over and develop a Saturn 5-type vehicle from scratch. ~ Buzz Aldrin

The gap between most people's capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean. ~ Lionel Shriver

You don't have to start from scratch to do something interesting. You don't have to start from scratch to have a massive impact on the world. You have to have a good idea. You have to convince other people of those good ideas. And you have to push as quickly as possible. ~ Jack Dorsey

We'll take what the other team gives us. We'll scratch where it itches. ~ Hayden Fry

Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses," roared Aslan in a voice that shook the ground. "Your name is Fledge."
The horse shied, just as it might have shied in the old, miserable days when it pulled a hansom. Then it roared. It strained its neck back as if there were a fly biting its shoulders and it wanted to scratch them. And then, just as the beasts had burst out of the earth, there burst out from the shoulders of Fledge wings that spread and grew, larger than eagles', larger than swans', larger than angels' wings in church windows. The feathers shone chestnut color and copper color. He gave a great sweep with them and leapt into the air. Twenty feet above Aslan and Digory he snorted, neighed, and curvetted. Then, after circling once round them, he dropped to the earth, all four hoofs together, looking awkward and surprised, but extremely pleased.
"Is it good, Fledge?" said Aslan.
"It is very good, Aslan," said Fledge. ~ C.S. Lewis

I don't like comfort zones. Having never had any drama training, I don't really have a technique, so I'm continually learning new things. I like being frightened, and always having to start from scratch. ~ Lea Seydoux

Although these examples only scratch the surface, they illustrate the fundamental proposition that freedom is one whole, that anything that reduces freedom in one part of our lives is likely to affect freedom in the other parts. ~ Milton Friedman

I'm trusting you not to break my heart. If it gets even a scratch, I'll break your face. -Shaye ~ Gena Showalter

I'm the living dead. I feel no connection to any other human. I have no friends and I don't really care much about my family any longer. I feel no love for them.

I can feel no joy. I'm incapable of feeling physical pleasure. There's nothing to ever look forward to as a result. I don't miss anyone or anything. I eat because I feel hunger pangs, but no food tastes like anything I like.

I wear a mask when I'm with other people but it's been slipping lately. I can't find the energy to hide the heavy weight of survival and its effect on me. I'm exhausted all the time from the effort of just making it through the day.

This depression has made a mockery of my memory. It's in tatters. I have no good memories to sustain me. My past is gone. My present is horrid. My future looks like more of the same. In a way, I'm a man without time. Certainly, there's no meaning in my life. What meaning can there be without even a millisecond of joy? Ah, scratch that. Let's even put aside joy and shoot for lower. How about a moment of being content? Nope. Not a chance.

I see other people, normal people, who can enjoy themselves. I hear people laughing at something on TV. It makes me cock my head and wonder what that's like. I'm sure at sometime in my past, I had to have had a wonderful belly laugh. I must have laughed so hard once or twice that my face hurt. Those memories are gone though. Now, the whole concept of "funny" is dead. I stopped going to movies ~ Ahmed Abdelazeem

What's the woman doing there?" he asked.
"Covering a scratch on the hood. She was cheaper than a new paint job."
He flipped through a few more pages of barely dressed women and classic cars. "Nick used to have magazines like this when we were kids. But without the cars." He rotated a photo sideways. "Or the bathing suits. ~ Kelley Armstrong

Raining. Oh, brother, a scratch on the fender. Damn rabbi on his unicycle.
Wait a minute, where are my car keys? Could have sworn I left them in this pocket. No, just some loose change and ticket stubs from the all-black version of Elaine Stritch' s one-woman show.
Did I check my desk? Better go back inside. What's in the top drawer here? Hmm. Envelopes, my paper clips, a loaded revolver in case the tenant in 2A begins yodelling again. ~ Woody Allen

She glanced again at Caliban as she said, "You and Daffodil were very brave." "And the best part, Mama," Indio said, tugging her hand to get her attention, "the best part is Caliban spoke. Did you hear him? He shouted my name!" "What?" Lily stared at Indio's filthy little face and then back up at Caliban. She absently noted that he had a bleeding scratch on his cheek. That shout right before the accident - had that been him? ~ Elizabeth Hoyt

I sheathe my spear on my back and I plow through bushes dotted with prickly balls, feeling them scratch and scrape my skin, but do not stop. ~ Jennifer Martucci

The basement smelled damp, like mold and minerals, as she started down the creaking, wooden stairs. Her mother had stopped screaming the moment the door opened. Everything was very quiet as Tana descended, the scratch of her shoes on the wood loud in her ears. Her foot hesitated on the last step. Then something knocked her down. ~ Holly Black

What good is it to be rich if we canna scrape up the scratch to buy a political prisoner on a whim? ~ Kresley Cole

If you wanted to watch me work, it would be totally boring. It would look like a Warhol film where nothing happens. I sit for 24 hours, then I scratch myself. ~ Robert Irwin

What it does, that other resources do not, is gather under one cover a body of broadly applicable design principles, coupled with practical ideas and suggestions for making specific instruments. If you are interested in exploring instrumental sound, building something musical from scratch, or composing and performing with anything other than the usual commercially made instruments, then you will be glad to have the information provided here. So will anyone, for that matter, who simply wants to better understand musical sound. Acoustical ~ Bart Hopkin

This vocation of yours.
She knew that a hunger dwelled in her, in that place where happier emotions should reside, a hunger she could neither sate nor deny. While her compulsion to scratch that itch never faded, she knew that she performed a service to the world in these coll west London rooms. While it was work for which she would receive not a single word of thanks, its value, Etienne believed, could not be denied. ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

I've been fortunate to come on places where the question isn't why did I do it? The question to me is always, why didn't anybody else do it before me? Those are the ones that I scratch my head about. ~ Todd McFarlane

My mom used to make everything. She had a great garden and composted and made everything from scratch - peanut butter, bread, jelly, everything. I don't know how she did it because all those things take time and love and labour. I only do half the stuff she does - but there's still time. ~ Julia Roberts

Sometimes you receive a knock in action: it may be your death-wound or just a scratch ~ Patrick O'Brian

Some people are serial entrepreneurs and want to just move on to the next thing. They just want to clean the slate and start from scratch. I feel that sometimes, too, and the way that we do that here is we build things inside Shutterstock: we launch new products all the time. ~ Jon Oringer

The birds scratch the seed out of the feeder, then fly down to the deck to eat the seed. They know there's a cat, but still they go down to pick at the seed. When you think about it, people are often like this, too. ~ Robert Crais

Everything I had learned or assimilated from my parents I now regarded as unreliable, and needing to be rethought from scratch. In fact, I probably went further-I felt that everything my parents believed was by definition wrong, and that if I ever felt myself in agreement with my parents I should immediately recant. Everything ... needed to be jettisoned. But in a way what they said wasn't the problem: what I was more worried about was the attitudes, prejudices, beliefs I might have picked up from them subconsciously or before I was old enough to even know what I was learning. Effectively, I had to question everything I believed, and never accept my own instincts. It required constant vigilance; it was intellectually exhausting. ~ Lynn Barber

For every planned situation, my head contains every single consequence, outcome, alternative and possibility. In an unplanned situation none of these thoughts exist, so they have to be constructed, from scratch. This takes up energy. My existence runs on a very complicated thought- process. It is no wonder I am exhausted all the time. "Simple" decisions have big emotional consequences. ~ Alis Rowe

The tabby rogue bounded alongside the river until he reached the fallen tree that Sky had used to cross a few days before. Leading Firestar over to the far bank, Scratch started to climb another trail that led up the cliff face on the opposite side. Firestar panted after him, wishing he had the rogue's powerful haunches. Scratch was a true SkyClan cat! ~ Erin Hunter

Greta's cedar hope chest
Is full of pamphlets
Glass shelves of romantic vignettes
A journal laced with sedimentary prose
Norma gathers and collects vintage photoplays
Hair combs valentines
Lillian allows the animals to scratch
And the leather crack
And the mail collect in the box as coatings peel
Agnes veiled cathedral dweller
Smiles with benevolent pain

But it's Katrina's fair
Tuesday morning
As she with caution unlatches the flat door
She alone cascades to the basement
Careful not to spoil her
Calico printed pinafore
Composite traits and mannerists
All others dissipate

Marguerite vigilant
She dwells upon frigid casements
Sarah's thoughts in high velocity
Accusations always pierce and pass
Clara abandons her passions for distastes
A Miss Lenora P. Sinclair
Early for coffee in the pool
"I'm resituating all your words"
Capital Space Colon Paragraph

Sylvia keeps beasts in jars labeled by
Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family
Genus
Species

But it's Katrina's fair
Tuesday morning
As she with caution unlatches the flat door
She alone cascades to the basement
Careful not to spoil her
Calico printed pinafore
Composite traits and mannerists
All others dissipate

Down the way a silk design
This face is mine
Tis I, Ka ~ Natalie Merchant

Sad as it is, we cannot conceal the fact that in spite of our companionship with flowers we have not risen very far above the brute. Scratch the sheepskin and the wolf within us will soon show his teeth. It has been said that a man at ten is an animal, at twenty a lunatic, at thirty a failure, at forty a fraud, and at fifty a criminal. Perhaps he becomes a criminal because he has never ceased to be an animal. Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires. Shrine after shrine has crumbled before our eyes; but one altar if forever preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol,-ourselves. Our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him. We boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is Matter that has enslaved us. What atrocities do we not perpetrate in the name of culture and refinement! ~ Kakuzo Okakura

So someday in the near future hopefully rather than having a foot or a leg amputated we'll just give you an injection of the cells and restore the blood flow. We've also created entire tubes of red blood cells from scratch in the laboratory. So there are a lot of exciting things in the pipeline. ~ Robert Lanza

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. ~ F.K. Preston

This book is about the questions you must ask and answer to succeed in the business of doing new things: what follows is not a manual or a record of knowledge but an exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch. ~ Peter Thiel

Lowe has broken from the Christianity of his parents, a faith that now seems hopelessly out of date. The meek shall no longer inherit the earth; the go-getters will get it and everything that goes with it. The Christ who went among the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, among lepers and prostitutes, really had no marketing savvy. He has been transfigured into a latter-day entrepreneur, the greatest superstar sales person of all time, who built a multinational outfit from scratch. ~ Eric Schlosser

Jeanne's sisters thought nothing of themselves ... Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers ...
Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch. ~ Allegra Goodman

The true goal of all spiritual practices is to keep yourself fooled, to maintain the self-deception, to see what's not and not see what is. That's why the stated goals are always unverifiable and ill-defined: its not about attaining them, its about pursuing them. Who wants to wake up? When we have a little itch that threatens to awaken us in the night, we want to scratch the itch and make it go away. not let it evict us from our slumbers. Same thing here. In this sense. spiritual practice - meditation. for instance - is one hundred percent effective. If a spiritual practice satisfies your urge to do something spiritual. if it makes you think you're making progress. if it scratches your itch without disturbing your slumber, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. ~ Jed McKenna

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English. ~ Steven Pinker