Spines Quotes

The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow. ~ Alice Munro

The wooden shelves were tall and packed with worn covers of books read many times over. Pages were yellowed and paperbacks had arched spines like old sway-backed horses. It was an old folks' home for secondhand books, with that smell of old newsprint and slightly musty wood smell. ~ Nathan Fillion

In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch. ~ Jeff Greenwald

During the ice age, many animals died of cold, so the porcupines decided to band together to provide one another with warmth and protection. But their spines or quills kept sticking into their surrounding companions, precisely those who provided most warmth. And so they drifted apart again. And again many of them died of cold. They had to make a choice: either risk extinction or accept their fellow porcupines' spines. Very wisely, they decided to huddle together again. They learned to live with the minor wounds inflicted by their relatives, because the key to their survival was that shared warmth. ~ Paulo Coelho

The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself. ~ Milos Forman

She stooped to pick a wild pink rose, avoiding the tiny spines that slivered like unseen glass hairs onto one's fingers. There was little scent, but the creamy softness of the petals like the insides of a dog's ear more than made up for it. She placed one on her tongue, and imagined she could taste the hills, the bittersweet tang of life. ~ Jonis Agee

My books were my prized possessions. I had a bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud of it. I loved my books and kept them in pristine condition. I read them over and over, but I did not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured every single one. ~ Trevor Noah

Get you dead ass out of the sarcophagus and follow along," Tern muttered. "And no yelling for guards, and no continuing forward when we stop and then stomping all over us and crushing our spines and skulls under your undead feet because we didn't explicitly tell you not to do that. ~ Patrick Weekes

Many of the volumes had spines covered in numbers, symbols, or languages she didn't read. There were also a few spines with titles that she would have liked to read, had she not felt pressed for time.

Mermaids and Mermen and How to Become One

Ten Essential Rules of Time Travel

Shape-shifting for Beginners

Cakes, Cakes, and More Cakes

Turning Your Shadow into a Pet

Love, Death, and Immortality ~ Stephanie Garber

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. ~ William Gibson

After a long time, one small hand moved, slowly, tentatively, tracing the feathers falling around her, stroking the black slashes along one huge wing. She didn't ask where he'd gotten them, didn't ask why they mimicked the marks on his shoulder. She didn't ask, just kept running her soft fingers through the down, along the spines ...
"How long will they last?"
"A few hours," he said hoarsely. He should tell her, he thought, that the feathers weren't just a projection. That for the moment for however long the Irin's essence held out, they were an innate, physical part of him. And that her fingers stroking along the marks felt just like they once had, moving over his scars. He ought to tell her, ought to ask her to stop. It's what a gentleman would do, he knew that. But then he was half demon. And tonight, he thought maybe he'd just go with that.
"They're nice," she murmured, pulling one around her.
"Yes." One hand tightened in her thick soft hair. "Yes. ~ Karen Chance

As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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

And this is the library," Mrs. Simcosky said, leading Beth into a generous room with a fire flickering in a river rock fireplace. "Or, as Mason liked to call it, my love den." She drifted to one of the floor to ceiling book shelves and trailed her fingers down a bevy of colorful spines. "He used to call my books 'the other men'. ~ Trish McCallan

What was magic, after all, but something that happened at the snap of a finger? Where was the magic in that? It was mumbled words and weird drawings in old books, and in the wrong hands it was as dangerous as hell, but not one half as dangerous as it could be in the right hands. The universe was full of the stuff; it made the stars stay up and the feet stay down.

But what was happening now . . . this was magical. Ordinary men had dreamed it up and put it together, building towers on rafts in swamps and across the frozen spines of mountains. They'd cursed and, worse, used logarithms. They'd waded through rivers and dabbled in trigonometry. They hadn't dreamed, in the way people usually used the word, but they'd imagined a different world, and bent metal around it. And out of all the sweat and swearing and mathematics had come this . . . thing, dropping words across the world as softly as starlight. ~ Terry Pratchett

Maybe we're on the wrong side of some metaphorical bridge where the grass is crusty and not grass at all, but sharp little spines of glass. I dunno, Moritz.
But the one little speck of green that I get is your letters, so please never stop writing me.
You got that?
Never stop.

Because you'll never meet me and it's the closest we can get. ~ Leah Thomas

She did find that the books displayed prominently in every chamber had been dusted, but the spines were pristine and uncreased. They had the sad, untouched air of literature paraded for display purposes but never actually used. It was profoundly depressing. ~ Genevieve Cogman

I also like to escape inside their world,
tucked behind their colorful spines. It forces me to fully invest
my mind into what I'm doing, not just my ears or my eyes. ~ Katie Kacvinsky

Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It's natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily. ~ Kate Morton

The Sunflowers

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks, their dry spines

creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky

sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy

but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young--
the important weather,

the wandering crows.
Don't be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,

which follows the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds--
each one a new life!--

hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,

is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come

and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning. ~ Mary Oliver

I really like looking at other people's book collections when I'm at someone's house. I think it is an amazing cross section of a person's brain and lifestyle. I think everyone should photograph their book spines and make a website. Seriously. ~ Phil Elvrum

All the stories we've been telling about the presence of an evil power in the world, all the dark characters that have sent chills down our spines and given us restless nights - they are spoken to us as warnings.
There is evil cast around us ... there is an evil force in this world. ~ John Eldredge

The zipper opened all the way down our spines. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our
spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of
artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship
the spine and its tingle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I have a sort of tactility about music. I go into record stores and just run my fingers over it, the spines. ~ Twyla Tharp

Books. They tumbled from the bleeding sky like wounded birds. The spines snapping open and the pages fanning white. Black letters slipping off the slanted pages and falling, falling to the ground where they ... Shatter. ~ Natasha Mostert

That's my problem with new-age stuff. In common with many irrational views it harks back to a sense of something ancient while rejecting anything provably historical. It's like the miserable concept of Original Sin. There seems to be an obsession with the idea that there were ancient humans, uncorrupted by their capricious intellects, who lived in the 'right way'.
They didn't eat too much dairy or any wheat. They didn't sit down too long for their spines or walk around in posture-ruining shoes. They didn't consume too many sugars or fats for their unblemished guts to digest, or pop painkilling and antibiotic tablets to deal with the short-term symptoms of long-term problems that should be dealt with by wholesale lifestyle change. They didn't drink or smoke. They were perfect and we should sling out all our stuff and emulate them. Except they had an average life expectancy of about 18 and the planet could only support a few hundred thousand of them. Apart from that, good plan. ~ David Mitchell

There were maybe thirty or forty of them - nothing to how many were in the ruined library - but these had been cared for, protected and preserved against the years. And though they showed wear, cracked spines and corners rubbed such that the dye had faded, it was the kind of wear from use, the wear her own family's books had shown before they sold them. These books were read, many times. These books were loved. The ~ Meagan Spooner

She means," Nate said, turning away from the books, "That David has gone full weird."
"He was always that way<' Janelle said in a low voice.
"Yeah, but now he's completed his journey. Our little caterpillar has turned into a freaky butterfly."
"Tell her about the screaming," Janelle said. "Because I can't."
"The screaming? Stevie repeated.
"The other morning he started something called 'screaming meditation'," Nate said. "Guess what happens in screaming meditation? Did you guess screaming? For fifteen minutes? Because that's what happens in screaming meditation. Fifteen. Minutes. Outside. At five in the morning. Do you know what happens when someone screams outside for fifteen minutes at five in the morning at a remote location in the mountains, especially after a . . ."
The implied dot dot dot was "student dies in a terrible accident or maybe murder and another one goes missing."
"When security got to him he claimed it was his new religion and that it is something he needs to do every morning now as a way to talk to the sun."
So this is what Edward King had been referring to.
"Sometimes," Nate went on, tapping the books into place so that the spines lined up perfectly, "he sleeps on the roof. Or somewhere else. Sometimes the green."
"Naked," Janelle added. "He sleeps on the green naked."
"Or in classrooms," Nate said. "Someone said they went into differential equations and he was asleep in the corner of the room under ~ Maureen Johnson

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

Rose goblins are built like porcupines - if you rub them the right way, you don't have to worry about the spines. They're sort of like people in that regard, too.​ ~ Seanan McGuire

You are unmannerly,sharp-tounged, and show no respect for your betters,which is practically everyone given your lowly ravel birth."
"I am Edema Ruh to my bones.
That means my blood is red.
It means I breathe the free air and walk where my feet take me.
I do not cringe and fawn like a dog at a man's title.
That looks like pride to people who have spent their lives cultivating supple spines"
-Kvothe ~ Patrick Rothfuss

My application's not bought,' I am telling them, calling into the darkness of the red cave that opens out before closed eyes. 'I am not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex.
'I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it." My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk. Let's talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,' I say. 'I'm not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.'

I open my eyes. 'Please don't think I don't care. ~ David Foster Wallace

Animals don't even try to look any different from what nature intended. They humbly wear their shells, scales, spines, plumes, pelts, and down ... The conscious impulse to change one's appearance is found only among humans. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

circle back, you're nearly through.
The next one, then just one more clue.
Summer's coming, dark and drear,
Soon those tourists will appear.

In the word hoard you will find
Books with numbers on the spines.
A 2 a 9 a 2 again-
Not too easy for Athena's friend. ~ Megan Frazer Blakemore

awesome "Impaler Prince," even as a captive, had the power of sending shivers down the spines of the Turkish delegates. ~ Radu Florescu

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice. ~ William Gibson

I read," I say, "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi ad say, 'The library, and step on it. ~ David Foster Wallace

I have seen salmon swimming upstream to spawn even with their eyes pecked out. Even as they are dying, as their flesh is falling away from their spines, I have seen salmon fighting to protect their nests. I have seen them push up creeks so small that they rammed themselves across the gravel. I have seen them swim upstream with huge chunks bitten out of their bodies by bears. Salmon are incredibly driven to spawn. They will not give up. This gives me hope. ~ Kathleen Moore

Demons do tend to cluster around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second hand books. ~ Graham Joyce

The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him. ~ Thomas Hardy

To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own pwer in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was sadi to have been quite dramatic. A painteding the scned survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormaous atlases soaring around the place like condors.
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear o the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly dposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub - sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribably papery susurrus. ~ Lev Grossman

I wandered through the stacks, running my hands along the spines of the books on the shelves, they reminded me of cultured or opinionated guests at a wonderful party, whispering to each other. ~ Janet Fitch

I smiled at the stacks, inhaling again. Hundreds of thousands of pages that had never been turned, waiting for me. The shelves were a warm, blond wood, piled with spines of every color. Staff picks were arranged on tables, glossy covers reflecting the light back at me. Behind the little cubby where the cashier sat, ignoring us, stairs covered with rich burgundy carpet led up to the worlds unknown. 'I could just live here,' I said. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

How strange it was to...watch her walk round the table and the chairs by the fire, pick up my shells from the shore along the mantelpiece, and smile at everything and examine it as if she were reading the story of my life in the intervening years. She ran her hand along the book spines on the shelves, stopping to greet an old friend as she took it down to read a little. ~ Elisabeth Gifford

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries. ~ Alix E. Harrow

When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened. ~ Billy Graham

And we exhaust ourselves with this playful joust, we look at each other, silently, eye to eye, no smiles, nothing more to be said. All at one, we both leap, like wolf mates reunited, searching for that which identifies us as belonging to each other: the scent of our skin, the taste of our tongues, the smoothness of our hair, the saltiness of our necks, the ridges of our spines, the slopes and creases we know so well yet feel so new. He is tender and I am wild, nuzzling and nipping, both of us tumbling until we lose all memory of who we are before this moment, because at his moment we are the same. ~ Amy Tan

For they were the stuff of nightmares; maggoty abominations possessed of incalculable and vile intellect that donned flesh and spines of men and beasts to shield themselves from the sun and enable themselves to walk upright instead of merely slithering. ~ Laird Barron

I saw a post the other day, where someone wrote that, when they walk through a library, they touch the spines of all the books they've read , as a way of greeting their favorite characters . . .

Try that with one of my novels, and you'll walk away counting your fingers! ~ Max Hawthorne

They were always coming together in surprising moments, going from easygoing to urgent in the space of a few breaths. She watched them kiss messily in the car in the driveway and she watched them tangle around each other in the laundry room and she watched Adam unbuckle Ronan's belt and slide his hand against skin. With intellectual curiosity, she watched ribs and hips and arms and legs and spines. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It's because they're in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round. ~ Alan Bradley

he sighed
but did not awaken.
so i removed him from my life like cactus spines from my skin. ~ Hend Suhail

one day, the boy with a
difficult name laid with a
boy who shall remain
nameless in the sun & they
rolled a round waiting for
something to burn. the next
day, the boy with the
difficult name woke up in a
blue sweat, walked the rim
of the lake & though nothing
burned, something was
growing from the ashes, for
mosquitos flew away from
his skin, ticks latched onto
his ankle & turned to smoke,
weeds & willows bowed
green spines to him & he
swore he heard the dirt
singing his name

saying it right ~ Danez Smith

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone. ~ Kim Edwards

Books are so strong, you can break their spines and they will still stand for eternity. ~ Donald J. Bingle

Parental love is a matchless thing; if it weren't for that, most of us wouldn't have a pot to piss in, affectionately speaking. But even at its most irreplacable, it's still pretty cheap. Any ape loves their children; spiders lie still while theirs crawl around inside them, happy to let them eat their guts.
The only reason anybody unrelated is ever nice to anyone else, meanwhile, is as a sort of pre-emptive emotional strike - to prevent themselves from being treated as badly, potentially, as they might have treated other people. Which makes love only the lie two brains on spines tell each other, the lie that says: "You exist, because I love you. You exist, because you can see yourself in my eyes."
So we blunder from hope to hope, hollowed and searching. All of us equally incomplete.
And after all these years, still the sting comes, the liquid pressure in the chest and nose, the migraine-forerunner frown. Phantom pain. The ghost without the murder.
But what the fuck? That's all it is, ever. You want to be loved. You tell other people you love them, in order to trick them into loving you back. And after a while, it's true. You feel the pull, the ache. ~ Gemma Files

Lion's mane mushrooms are not your classic-looking cap-and-stem variety. These globular-shaped mushrooms sport cascading teeth-like spines rather than the more common gills. ~ Paul Stamets

There is an old German fable about porcupines who need to huddle together for warmth, but are in danger of hurting each other with their spines. When they find the optimum distance to share each other's warmth without putting each other's eyes out, their state of contrived cooperation is called good manners. Well, those old German fabulists certainly knew a thing or two. When you acknowledge other people politely, the signal goes out, "I'm here. You're there. I'm staying here. You're staying there. Aren't we both glad we sorted that out?" When people don't acknowledge each other politely, the lesson from the porcupine fable is unmistakeable. "Freeze or get stabbed, mate. It's your choice. ~ Lynne Truss

When it came time to die, we knew and went to deep yards where we lay down and our bones turned to brass. We were picked over. We were used to fix broken clocks, music boxes; our pelvises were fitted onto pinions, our spines soldered into cast works. Our ribs were fitted as gear teeth and tapped and clicked like tusks. This is how, finally, we were joined. ~ Paul Harding

The one who swallows cactuses with spines should not complain about hemorrhoids. ~ Etgar Keret

I took my time, running my fingers along the spines of books, stopping to pull a title from the shelf and inspect it. A sense of well-being flowed through me as I circled the ground floor. It was better than meditation or a new pair of shoes- or even chocolate. My life was a disaster, but there were still books. Lots and lots of books. A refuge. A solace. Each one offering the possibility of a new beginning. ~ Beth Pattillo

All of our memories are, like S's, bound together in a web of associations. This is not merely a metaphor, but a reflection of the brain's physical structure. The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed. ~ Joshua Foer

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted. ~ Susan Orlean

Somewhere," he told her, "somewhere else lived a boy and a girl beside the sea and as they grew older they grew more transparent. At first blue blood vessels and then bones bloomed beneath the skin but soon they could see the shapes of the world behind their bodies, the shudder of leaves like shadows in the brain, a butterfly's flutter in the mutter of the heart, beetles in the coils of the bowels. They watched wine whirl down each other's throats and the sun rise up each other's spines, stepping vertically vertebra to vertebra. Soon the only substance they obtained was when their bodies overlapped and so they clasped each other, peering for the vestiges of eyes, teeth, ears, smears against the landscape. And one day they kissed and disappeared. ~ Keith Miller

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines. ~ Stanislaw Lem

There are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain. ~ Edith Wharton

Their happiness was the kind which is fashioned of the comfortable disorder of sauvignon bottles and coffee cups in the sink, paperback thrillers with split spines on the nightstand, bathrobes hung haphazard on high-backed, brocade-seated chairs, shutters left open all night, and the hallway ever in need of new paint. ~ Catherynne M Valente

My generation was obsessed with scoliosis. Judy Blume dedicated an entire novel to it. At least once a month we would line up in the gym, lift our shirts, and bend over, while some creepy old doctor ran his finger up and down our spines. Nuclear war was a high-concept threat, two words that often rang out in political speeches or on the six o-clock news. Our spines. Lice. Nuclear war. The Big Three. ~ Amy Poehler

It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to 'boil' up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory. ~ James David Lewis-Williams

Books need to have their spines cracked, their covers opened, and their pages ruffled for them to come alive. ~ Chris Grabenstein

Bookstores, invariably, are a refuge. There's one in the town where they live, and the first time Lydia ventures in, it takes her breath away. She has to steady herself against a shelf. The smell of coffee and paper and ink. It's nothing like her little shop back home. It's stocked mostly with religious books, and instead of calendars and toys, they carry rosaries, Buddha figurines, yarmulkes. Still, the upright spines of the books are bedrock. Steady. There's an international poetry section. Hafiz. Heaney. Neruda. Lydia flips past the twenty love poems and reads "The Song of Despair." She reads it desperately, hungrily, bent over the books in the aisle of the quiet shop. Her fingers ready the next page while she devours the words. The book is water in the desert. ~ Jeanine Cummins

There was something about the possession of a book that was important to me. Owning it gave me proprietary rights on the story. It meant that I could read as quickly or as slowly as I liked. No expectations, no deadlines, no proscriptions on bent spines or crumpled pages. I was not gentle on my books. I read while I ate, I read in the bathtub. At night, I rolled over on top of my books that had fallen between the covers as I dozed. For me, the worn pages and tattered covers were a sign of devotion. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, the books I read were only real when they were loved. And I understood that love was not always gentle. ~ Georgia Bell

On the shelves along the wall my stacks. Jumbled and worn. Pagers curled and stained. Spines creased and cracked. ~ Lucas Klauss

Peter suspects that the caltrop is evolving in response to the finches. Where the struggle for existence is fierce, the caltrop that is likeliest to succeed is the plant that puts more energy into spines and less into seeds; but in the safer, more secluded spot, the fittest plants are the ones that put more energy into making seeds and less energy into protecting them. The finches may be driving the evolution of caltrop while caltrop is driving the evolution of the finches. ~ Jonathan Weiner

But fierce as my attraction was, I also knew that it was more than just a physical attraction [ ... ], more than just a momentenry surge of animal desire. I understood that she wasn't a terribly articulate person and nothing she said that afternoon was particularly brilliant or memorable. And yet there I was in a state of maximum torment - burning and longing and pining, a man trapped in the spines of love. ~ Paul Auster

Ultimately, the important thing to companies isn't ethics. It's money and power. For decades, they've been happily complicit in this bullshit system as long as money was being made. Men like Harvey Weinstein aren't losing their careers because movie studios are growing spines and hearts. They're losing careers because of the Everest-esque mountain of damning evidence stacked against them and that the public outcry might make those studios lose money. ~ Mallory O'Meara

I'd forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn't cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was "sublime" in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth's skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight. ~ Julene Bair

I grabbed the closest box of books and heaved it onto my bed. It contained all the books I had read in Iraq. Dog-eared, with broken spines, speckled with dirt, food, and even a little blood, most of the copies were marked up with notes in the margins. The better the book, the worse it looked--that's the way it should be. As I saw it, they were almost more like diaries than books. ~ Michael Anthony

[Admiral Nelson's counsel] guided me time and again. On the eve of the critical battle of Santa Cruz, in which the Japanese ships outnumbered ours more than two to one, I sent my task force commanders this dispatch: ATTACK REPEAT ATTACK. They did attack, heroically, and when the battle was done, the enemy turned away. All problems, personal, national, or combat, become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them. Touch a thistle timidly, and it pricks you; grasp it boldly, and its spines crumble. Carry the battle to the enemy! Lay your ship alongside his! ~ William Halsey

Time in a bookstore is a selection process. You touch the spines, one by one, until your finger lands on the desired work. Marinovich calls this accidental research, because, at times, your finger slips and you land on the wrong book. That wrong book can ultimately be the most important book in your life -- as if, for once, it was the book that chose you. ~ Saskia De Rothschild

Take him away. Prepare a feast. Forget nothing. My crown: the golden cutlery. The poison bottles; and the fumes; the wreaths of ivy and the bloody joints; the chains; the bowl of nettles; the spices; the baskets of fresh grass; the skulls and spines; the ribs and shoulder-blades. Forget nothing or, by the blindness of my sockets, I will have your hearts out. Take him away ... ~ Mervyn Peake

My fingers positively itched to drift at length along their spines, to arrive at one whose lure I could not pass, to pluck it down, to inch it open, then to close my eyes and inhale the soul-sparking scent of old and literate dust. ~ Kate Morton

THE TWINS WERE eighteen months old now, walking (and standing and staring and screaming and sitting) just like other children more or less their age, and Andy found herself increasingly preoccupied with those baby scrapbooks her brother's wife had sent when they were born. Andy had gotten Janny's to the six-month mark - the last photo was of her sitting up in the baby bath with her fingers in her mouth. Richie's and Michael's - not even birth pictures. Birth pictures of the twins existed, but they reminded Andy more of mug shots than of baby photos, naked in incubators, little skinny limbs and odd heads, no hair except where it shouldn't be, on arms and back, like monkeys. She had stuffed the scrapbooks onto the upper shelf in the closet in Richie and Michael's room, and every time she slid open that door, she would see their spines, white, pink, and blue, the silliest objects in her very modern house, ready to get thrown out. ~ Jane Smiley

Ox ran a finger along the spines of the new books. "You got me hooked on reading again and now I don't have enough time. ~ Elizabeth Hunter

Five minutes before Julian arrived, they might be slouched in the living room
curtains drawn, dinner simmering on chafing dishes in the kitchen, everyone tugging at collars and dull-eyed with fatigue
but the instant the doorbell rang their spines would straighten, conversation would snap to life, the very wrinkles would fall from their clothes. ~ Donna Tartt

The patron gets comfortable in bed and opens up the book
it opens tentatively
and the patron bends the open book backward until there is a satisfying crack and the book is a little more supple, a little easier to read. The book spine has just been broken, and a broken spine means a more submissive book. ~ Don Borchert

This was the place, the place I would have come on my own wandering binge, come here and lodged like a marble in a crack, this place, a haven for California Okies and exiled Texans, a home for country folk lately dispossessed, their eyes so empty of hope that they reflect hot, windy plains, spare, almost Biblical sweeps of horizon broken only by the spines of an orphaned rocking chair, and beyond this, clouded with rage, the reflections of orange groves and ax handles. ~ James Crumley

Maybe that's why I prefer this new library to my own bedroom: looking at the million book spines, I can imagine a million alternate endings. It turned out the butler did it all, or I ended up marrying Mr. Darcy, or we went and watched a girl ride the merry-go-round in Central Park, or we beat on against the current in our little boats, or Atticus Finch was there when we woke up in the morning. ~ Rebecca Makkai

On the map of you, my fingers could always find the green hills, Wales. Cool waters and a shore of white chalk. The ancient part of you carved out of stone in a prayerful circle, sacrosanct. Your spine's a ridge I'd die climbing.

If I could spread it out on my desk, I'd find the corner of your mouth where it pinches with my fingers, and I'd smooth it away and you'd be marked with the names of saints like all the old maps. I get the nomenclature now- saints' names belong to miracles ~ Casey McQuiston

Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.
Billy Graham ~ Billy Graham

When we got around to books, I was finally set, as our minister would say, on solid ground. I gorged on books. I sneaked them at night. I rubbed their spines and sniffed in the musty smell of them in the library. ~ Lorene Cary

The afternoon was very hot, so hot that the breaking of the waves on the shore sounded like the repeated sigh of some exhausted creature, and even on the terrace under an awning the bricks were hot, and the air danced perpetually over the short dry grass. The red flowers in the stone basins were drooping with the heat, and the white blossoms which had been so smooth and thick only a few weeks ago were now dry, and their edges were curled and yellow. Only the stiff and hostile plants of the south, whose fleshy leaves seemed to be grown upon spines, still remained standing upright and defied the sun to beat them down. ~ Virginia Woolf

Books can be possessive, can't they? You're walking around in a bookstore and a certain one will jump out at you, like it had moved there on its own, just to get your attention. Sometimes what's inside will change your life, but sometimes you don't even have to read it. Sometimes it's a comfort just to have a book around. Many of these books haven't even had their spines cracked. 'Why do you buy books you don't even read?' our daughter asks us. That's like asking someone who lives alone why they bought a cat. For company, of course. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

He reached out to stroke the spines of the books, as if they might whisper their secrets to him if he touched them. But the books remained silent, as all good books tend to do when touched by people to whom they don't belong. ~ Christoph Marzi

In the New World, "spinster" gained a more precise meaning: in colonial parlance, it indicated an unmarried woman over the age of twenty-three and under the age of twenty-six. At twenty-six, women without spouses became thornbacks, a reference to a sea-skate with sharp spines covering its back and tail. It was not a compliment ~ Rebecca Traister

It means I breathe the free air and walk where my feet take me. I do not cringe and fawn like a dog at a man's title. That looks like pride to people who have spent their lives cultivating supple spines. Sleat gave a lazy ~ Patrick Rothfuss

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books. ~ Laini Taylor

She holds secrets
that would break spines
yet she carries them so well. ~ U.F. Shah

I liked being with the books: they reminded me of how many ways of thinking existed outside my own - how small and fleeting my pulse was when set alongside those ageing spines. ~ Joanna Rossiter