Sopko Grinding Quotes

Obeying her silent demand, he fused their hips together in a tight, deeply satisfying grinding motion that shot through her like a bolt of lightning. She folded herself around him and purred as sweet release streaked and spread through her, until every inch of her glowed with delight. ~ Lisa Kleypas

He never beat her, but his pure, inarticulate fury would fill the house for days, weeks, at a time, making the air humid, hard to breathe, my father stalking around with his lower jaw jutting out, giving him the look of a wounded, vengeful boxer, grinding his teeth so loud you could hear it across the room. ~ Gillian Flynn

...grief looks like nothing from the outside, it looks like surrender, but in fact it is the most terrible
struggle. It is friction. It is a spiritual grinding, and who's to say it cannot produce a spark and heat that, given fuel could burn a good man to the ground. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking. ~ Ken Kesey

Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception. ~ Alan Bennett

As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home."
"I prefer normal music."
"Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse. ~ Beth Fantaskey

Anxiety in human life is what squeaking and grinding are in machinery that is not oiled. In life, trust is the oil. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

As far as she could tell, basketball involved a herd of impossibly tall men racing up and down a polished wooden floor, passing a ball back and forth until one of them forged ahead to the basket to try to score. It seemed that whenever the contest became interesting, the referees would blow their whistles and everything would come to a grinding halt. She couldn't understand why the referees chose to wear zebra-striped shirts, either, since it wasn't likely anyone would confuse the short, balding men with the players. ~ Debbie Macomber

He ate a pear. It was a hard one. It fought back against his grinding teeth. It snapped in juicy protest. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The park is high. And as out of a house
I step out of its glimmering half-light
into openness and evening. Into the wind,
the same wind that the clouds feel,
the bright rivers and the turning mills
that stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge.
Now I too am a thing held in its hand,
the smallest thing under the sky. --Look:

Is that one sky?:
Blissfully lucid blue,
into which ever purer clouds throng,
and under it all white in endless changes,
and over it that huge, thin-spun gray,
pulsing warmly as on red underpaint,
and over everything this silent radiance
of a setting sun.

Miraculous structure,
moved within itself and upheld by itself,
shaping figures, giant wings, faults
and high mountain ridges before the first star
and suddenly, there: a gate into such
distances as perhaps only birds know... ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

When we struggle, as so many do, in grinding poverty, or when our enemies prevail against us, or when sickness is not healed, the enemy of our souls can send his evil message that there is no God or that if He exists He does not care about us. ~ Henry B. Eyring

Debt, grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the orphan, and the sons of genius fear and hate;
debt, which consumes so much time, which so cripples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be forgone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see?

Transparent images moving through light, "an infinite storm of beauty."
The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth's face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back.

A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.

Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cit ~ Annie Dillard

Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience. ~ Roger Scruton

Avery latched on to his neck and stayed on him. All Kane could do was lean his head back feeling the bottles shift behind him, giving Avery full access to his jaw and ear. Kane heard himself groan when Avery's teeth nipped the soft skin under his ear. Avery ground his hips forward and Kane involuntarily met him thrust for grinding thrust. "Come home with me. No, fuck home. I want you right here." Kane couldn't think with the sexy low voice whispering across his ear. Avery's hands were on him, seeking, and he pulled Kane's shirt from his slacks and unbuckled his belt. He was surprised to find his own hands working himself free, not Avery's. Loud beeps stopped Kane in his tracks as the security code to the wine cellar was entered. ~ Kindle Alexander

I don't believe in life after death. But I do believe in some grinding destiny that watches over us on earth. If I didn't, the safety valve would give and the boiler would explode. ~ Hedy Lamarr

Primarily, I am a prose writer with axes to grind, and the theatre is a good place to do the grinding in. I prefer comedy to 'serious' drama because I believe one can get the ax sharper on the comedic stone. ~ Gore Vidal

I was close and when he spread my legs wider and firmly pressed me down to the mattress, I was nearly gone. My hips were now grinding against his mouth.

"That's it, fuck my mouth. My tongue is loving it." His thumbs spread my lips apart as he sucked hard and then moved down to tunnel inside me. ~ Christina Lee

A soldier's life is all grinding routine. Who sold you the rosy notion of honour, trumped up in bright flags and glory? We're here to burn barley. Tossing a torch takes a damned sight less practice than trenching hard ground with a spade. ~ Janny Wurts

Right,' he said uncertainty. His mind was grinding through the problem. She was a witch. Just lately there'd been a lot of gossip about witches being bad for your health. He'd been told not to let witches pass, but no one had said anything about apple sellers. Apple sellers were not a problem. It was witches that were the problem. She'd said she was an apple seller and he wasn't about to doubt a witch's word. ~ Terry Pratchett

Oh, how one wishes sometimes to escape from the meaningless dullness of human eloquence, from all those sublime phrases, to take refuge in nature, apparently so inarticulate, or in the wordlessness of long, grinding labor, of sound sleep, of true music, or of a human understanding rendered speechless by emotion! ~ Boris Pasternak

Ali gasped and could only pray the rumbling of the earth masked the sound as the dune beneath him shook and the sands flowed away to each side like a curtain. He waited for the outcry that would spell his doom, certain all eyes would spy him, but all he heard was a hiss, as of steam escaping, followed by rock grinding as it shifted. Slowly, the world around him settled. Ali heard the men below dismount, then walk the camelids forward into what he had no doubt was his grandfather's secret place, now den to what were clearly thieves and murderers. ~ Danielle Ackley-McPhail

It becomes pretty crystal clear once you watch that first assembly [movie cut] the things that are just grinding it to a halt, so to speak, or slowing it down, or getting in the way, yeah. ~ Todd Phillips

Desperation is a millstone. It wears away at the very soul, grinding away pity, kindness, humanity and courage. But sometimes it whets the mind to a sharpened point and creates moments of true brilliance. And standing there, nose tickled by the dusty hide of the stuffed deer head, such a moment visited Mosca Mye. ~ Frances Hardinge

Musically, there's probably nothing better than, after spending weeks or months of grinding on a lyric or a song, when you play a good song from beginning to end for the first time - there's a moment there where all the pain and suffering is worth it. ~ Five For Fighting

His frown was less dark and more confused."What's new for you? Dancing?"
And so much more, but all I said was, "Yes."
"And you let some strange college boy grind all over you for your first time? That's stupid, Ali."
NOT GOING TO BE EMBARRASSED, NOT GOING TO BE EMBARRASSED."First, he wasn't grinding on me, and second, you're no better than him."
A solid minute of silence, then "You are terrible for my ego, you know that?"
I could say the same to him. ~ Gena Showalter

The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Fortunately I never came to enjoy the effect of heroin for its own sake, but floating away on a silk pillow was infinitely nicer than grinding my teeth in a drunken, paranoid stupor at the end of a coke binge. ~ Duff McKagan

The ability to talk well is to a man what cutting and polishing are to the rough diamond. The grinding does not add anything to the diamond. It merely reveals its wealth. ~ Orison S. Marden

She was fifty-three years old and lonely and oppressed; why couldn't he let her have her illusions? That was what her wounded, half-drunken eyes had seemed to be saying throughout his interrogation: Why can't I have my illusions?
Because they're lies, he told her silently in his mind as he champed his jaws and swallowed the cheap food. Everything you say is a lie.(...) Everything you live by is a lie, and you want to know what the truth is?
He watched her with murderous distaste as she fumbled with her spoon. They had ordered ice cream, and some of it clung to her lips as she rolled a cold mouthful on her tongue.
Do you want to know what the truth is? The truth is that your fingernails are all broken and black because you're working as a laborer and God knows how we're ever going to get you out of that lens-grinding shop. The truth is that I'm a private in the infantry and I'm probably going to get my head blown off. The truth is, I don't really want to be sitting here at all, eating this goddam ice cream and letting you talk yourself drunk while all my time runs out. The truth is, I wish I'd taken my pass to Lynchburg today and gone to a whorehouse. That's the truth. ~ Richard Yates

Life is a merciless bully for children born into circumstances of grinding poverty, to unhappy families broken apart by crime, drugs, alcohol. It brutalises the affections, cramps the intellect, destroys aspiration. ~ Victoria Clayton

Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or gritty dust, but in what may be briefly defined in its own special phraseology as "Seven years' hard". Chief Inspector Heat was, of course, not insensible to the gravity of moral differences. But neither were the thieves he had been looking after. They submitted to the severe sanction of a morality familiar to Chief Inspector Heat with a certain resignation. They were his fellow citizens gone wrong because of imperfect education, Chief Inspector Heat believed; but allowing for that difference, he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer. Both recognize the same conventions, and have a working knowledge of each other's methods and of the routine of their respective trades. They understand each other, which is advantageous to both, and establishes a sort of amenity in their relations. Products of the same machine, one classed as useful and the other as noxious, they take the machine for granted in different w ~ Joseph Conrad

Then a sound came. It was like the grinding of gears on a colossal ship engine. The sound was like mountains of iron scraping and rubbing against each other, forced together by some godlike impulse. Uselessly, I covered my ears. It went on and on, and I felt as though I would never again know peace. My senses were consumed by the light and heat and sound, their power interrupted only by the tactile sensation of my heart pounding against my chest. It will be very difficult for you to really grasp what happened next. I warn you that my description will inevitably fall far from conveying the astonishing sight I witnessed. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to convey some sense of what happened. ~ Alec Merta

Leo stood behind him, his suit coat and tie off, rolling up his sleeves.
"Oh, crap," I said, my voice full of gravel and bigger rocks, grinding over one another. I cleared my throat and tried again. "I'm too old for a spanking and not quite up to defending myself from a butt whupping. Can we do this another time? ~ Faith Hunter

California and Italy are about the same size. Roughly speaking, California contains about 150,000 square miles, Italy about 120,000 square miles. They are not dissimilar in physical characteristics. They extend over a long distance from north to south, and each has an extensive coastline. Each is destitute of coal mines. Each produces large quantities of wheat. Each produces citrus and other fruits, olives, wine, and raisins. The climate is about the same, although California's is superior. They are in about the same zone. Rome lies in about the same latitude as San Francisco. Our state is one of the richest and most fertile of all the United States. Yet suppose that California were as populous as Italy - someday it will be. Suppose it had a population of millions. Could California, even with its vast resources, support an army of a quarter of a million men as Italy does? She could do it only as Italy does, by grinding the people into the dust with oppressive taxation. ~ Jerome Hart

When we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose. This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. ~ Steven Pressfield

Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events. ~ Robert Harris

The dark has a eased a little. There has been a street-lamp burning, that has lit the threads of the bleached net scarf hung at the window, now it is put out. The light turns filthy pink. The pink gives way to sickly yellow. It creeps, and with it creeps sound - softly at first, then rising in a staggering crescendo: crowning cocks, whistles and bells, dogs, shrieking babies, violent calling, coughing, spitting, the tramp of feet, the endless hollow of beating hooves and the grinding of wheels. Up, up it comes, out of the throat of London. It is six or seven o'clock. ~ Sarah Waters

There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful. ~ Dalai Lama

Sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence - nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds ~ Charles Dickens

Grinding her teeth together, she hoped the bastards weren't cheering yet, because it was going to take more than one bullet to kill Jenny Jones. ~ Maggie Osborne

Her words depressed him. They were like spilt sugar; however much you swept it up some grains would keep grinding under your feet. ~ Muriel Spark

I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: 'English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache...The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.' And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless,inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I'd ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy. ~ John Green

Ordinary eternal machinery, like the grinding of the stars ~ Leonard Cohen

One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime ... he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's ... what a top PBer really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty. ~ David Foster Wallace

It's not as if he's had much of a chance until now, but somehow he has internalized the ur-cultural narrative: you grow up, go to university, get a job, meet Ms. Right, get married, settle down, have kids, grow old together . . . it's like some sort of checklist. Or maybe a list of epic quests you've got to complete while level-grinding in a game you're not allowed to quit, with no respawns and no cheat codes. ~ Charles Stross