Tether Quotes

I'm going to take you to the heavens, Angie. And I'm going to be your tether to this earth when you explode ~ J. Kenner

Now I feel adrift - except for the tether binding me here, to this girl at my side. ~ Amie Kaufman

All tools are weapons in the hands of the wrong people. ~ Anna Jarzab

His hair was mussed, and his teeth were very white in his swarthy, dust-streaked face. With his autocratic facade stripped away, and his eyes sparkling with enjoyment, his grin was so unexpectedly engaging that Lillian experienced a curious melting sensation inside. Hanging over him, she felt her own lips curving in a reluctant smile. A loose lock of her hair dangled free of its tether, sliding silkily over his jaw.
"What's a trebuchet?" she asked.
"A catapult. I have a friend who has a keen interest in medieval weaponry. He…" Westcliff hesitated, a new tension seeming to spread through his taut body as he lay beneath her. "He recently built a trebuchet using an ancient design…and enlisted me to help fire it…"
Lillian was entertained by the idea that the normally reserved Westcliff was capable of such boyish antics. Realizing that she was straddling him, she colored and began to wriggle off him. "Your aim was off?" she asked, striving to sound casual.
"The owner of the stone wall we demolished seemed to think so." The earl caught his breath sharply as her body slid away from his, and remained sitting on the ground even after she had gotten to her feet. ~ Lisa Kleypas

They were full of light, of fire and starlight and sunshine. They over-flowed with it as they snapped the final tether on the king's power and cleaved his darkness away, burning it up until it was nothing. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Tether even a roasted chicken. ~ Tsunetomo Yamamoto

There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. A strong gust of wind could dislodge me completely, and I'd lift off and blow away, like one of those seeds in a dandelion clock. The threads tighten slightly from Monday to Friday. ~ Gail Honeyman

Nae man can tether time or tide. ~ Robert Burns

These are the things that tether me, the things I've always been and just assumed would always be. What she's saying right now feels a lot like permission to leave it behind, and it scares me every bit as much as it relieves me. ~ Emma Lord

True opinions are a fine thing and do all sorts of good so long as they stay in their place; but they will not stay long. They run away from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason. Once they are tied down, they become knowledge, and are stable. ~ Plato

I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality. ~ Jason Bateman

sometimes I feel my tether is too short." "You will lose that tether soon enough, and then someday when you are in a heap of hurt and trouble, you are going to reach for it and wish your mama was on the other end. ~ Ronald Yates

A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back. ~ Ronald Reagan

I have never in my life walked with a harness. The weight of the tether, makes it feel like I'm dragging an anchor behind me. ~ Nik Wallenda

But this was how I'd always been... finite in my capacity for tolerating simple day-to-day contact. I could handle it just fine, all the way up to the point that I couldn't anymore, as if I existed on a tether, and not a particularly long one, finding myself able to wonder only so far into the territory of another human being before snapping back into myself. ~ Miriam Gershow

There was something practically tangible there, like a ray of sun, warming us through to our souls. You could see it, you could feel it, but you couldn't quite capture it in your hands. That didn't mean it wasn't there though. Oh, it was there and it weighted a thousand delicious pounds. I let that pressure inundate me, let it tether me to him. ~ Fisher Amelie

Let go your earthly tether. Enter the void. Empty, and become wind ~ Michael Dante DiMartino

Everytime he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to tether for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us. ~ Lauren Oliver

The Coach's head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes - they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach's only distinctive feature - for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon's beak. This snout - or beak, rather - was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man's face, it almost appeared - due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue - that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another.

'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and ~ Ashim Shanker

He had the face of a floating astronaut who had lost his tether and had only one chance to grab a lifeline or forever drift away into endless black. I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. ~ Lissa Price

Find an emotional tether. Someone you trusted before and someone you can trust now. A person who can connect you to your past but can pilot you into the future. Someone who can pull you back from the ledge when you find it and from the dark when it finds you. Find that person, hold on tight, and don't let go. ~ Nicole Williams

She knew he meant it. He'd burn the library, the city or the whole world to ashes if she asked him. It was their bond, marked by blood and scent and something else she couldn't place. A tether as strong as the one that bound her to her parents. Stronger, in some ways. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Some days I'm only passing through. Some days are all hello; some days are all goodbye. Some days I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing, and other days it's abundantly clear, as if the person I am for a day has left me a note, left me instructions. Today I am meant to maintain the golden tether between two people. It doesn't take much strength to hold on to my end. It's good to hold on to something, to feel the pull of another person on the other end, to feel the attachment before I must let go and pass the golden tether back into the person who should really be here instead of me. ~ David Levithan

I went into the woods with nothing to tether me to this world- to remember how to listen- to remember how to see- Someday I hope to stay who I am in the woods when out of them- Aware- Grateful- Awed ~ Tracie Vaughn Zimmer

Take my eyes; take my voice; take my hands; take it all. If the stars exist behind the night and there is a king who grants the wishes of kings, if hope is a tether that binds to the light, I'd pay all the years I have left in darkness, please don't take him. ~ K. Ancrum

Normality is way overrated. ~ Anna Jarzab

This was a bizarre moment: this crossing-over from a hypothetical plan to a concrete caper, giving in to what may turn out to be an utterly outlandish idea, possibly letting go of some important tether to sanity. Deciding yes: I will do this. But not deciding it 100 percent, because that wold be admitting too much to herself, about herself, that she didn't want to admit. But deciding it 95 percent, enough to take the possibly outlandish action, but not enough to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this wasn't just a goof, a lark, but an actual non-insane plan. ~ Chris Pavone

My life held endless prospects, and I could've lived it so many different ways. ~ Anna Jarzab

Emotional awareness is the tether between our Awakened and Dream States. It is the bridge that connects our island in the physical realm to the unexplored Universes that are waiting for us. ~ Gary Hopkins

Ground zero is where the normal people live their lives, but not us. We live in the negatives so often that we begin to understand that life when the sun shines should be lived full throttle, soaring. The invisible tether that binds the normal people on their steady course doesn't hold us in the same way. Sometimes we walk in sunlight with everyone else. Sometimes we live underwater and fight and grow. And sometimes ... ... sometimes we fly. ~ Jenny Lawson

Submission reaches the end of its tether when it becomes destructive. ~ Richard J. Foster

In order to be not bound by the tether of time, we must have a relationship with the timeless. ~ Deepak Chopra

You really can't see it, can you?"
"See what?"
"He has a tether too. And it points right at you. ~ Brodi Ashton

It is human nature to constantly reach out for something to tether oneself to, but it's the fool who cannot tell what he's trying to grasp. Is it a lifeline, or a length of rope just long enough to hang oneself with? And still he reaches out, in desperation and ignorance, taking hold of it with both hands, without ever wondering what the other end is attached to. ~ Northern Adams

Perhaps it wasn't age but what you were capable of, the lengths to which you were willing to go to get what you wanted, that mattered most. ~ Anna Jarzab

Whereas males of both species played the field in similar ways, a human marriage had nothing on a vampire mating. A marriage could be dissolved by a judge with a little slip of paper. A marriage could be ended in a blink if the humans got tired of each other or fell out of love. With vampires, there was no dissolving a mating. A mated pair didn't grow tired of one another, and they certainly didn't fall out of love. When two vampires mated, a link formed to tether them to one another on a level that transcended the physical plane and fused them into one on a spiritual and emotional level, which was why the loss of a mate left a male in a state of despair if it didn't kill him outright. A mating was for life and plainly demonstrated the vampire race's link to the animal kingdom. ~ Donya Lynne

A big wind came up and I hoped a storm would break the heat. But it just blew a
lot of dust around, and at sunset we had to bar doors and windows against mosquitoes. It
didn't do much for our comfort level, but - here's where the Chemin takes you - we were
grateful. We were grateful because we had (albeit narrowly) escaped heatstroke; because
the shelter, though unbelievably hot, was clean and quiet; and most of all, because it slept
six but we had it to ourselves. No people to deal with at the end of your (and their)
tether; no sodden bathrooms. No snoring. Pilgrim camaraderie was all very well, but
sometimes it was too damn much. ~ Denise Fainberg

For many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. You can tether a fly to a little stick. You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating. You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display. ~ Michael Dickinson

I pull on her tether all the time but it won't sink in. I have a feeling I'm using too much magic. I can't hold so many under my control and pull them in deep. Dean is the only one I have fully immersed. I am the puppet master. I am the only player on the board.
Pacey doesn't even know that the game has begun.-Lilith ~ Ashley Jeffery

Now, the more holy a man gets the more he cries in this fashion. While he is low down in the scale, he puts up with sin, and he is uneasy, but when he gets to see Christ and get somewhat like him, the more nearly he approximates to the image of his Master, the more the presence of the least sinful thought is horrifying to him. He would, if he could, never look on sin again - never have the slightest inclination to it, but he finds his heart getting abroad and wandering when he would tether it down, if he could, to the cross and crucify it there. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

When a certain kind of psychic detachment occurs, I retrieve my ribbon; I tie it around my ankle. I tell myself that should delusion come to call, or hallucinations crowd my senses again, I might be able to wrangle some sense out of the senseless. I tell myself that if I must live with a slippery mind, I want to know how to tether it too. ~ Esmé Weijun Wang

We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away
our stories. I guess that's what I love about books
they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be. ~ Libba Bray

In fierce March weather White waves break tether, And whirled together At either hand, Like weeds uplifted, The tree-trunks rifted In spars are drifted, Like foam or sand. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Tradition is like the tether which prevents an animal from getting a blade of grass beyond the length of that tether ~ E.W. Bullinger

'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was the work of a wayward imagination brought to the end of its tether by political disgust and personal confusion. ~ John Le Carre

I am numb. I don't know what to do. The absence of my link to Enzo is a yawning chasm, a hollowness I first felt when Teren took Enzo's life in the Estenzian arena. How long had he been a part of my world? How had my life been before he stepped into it? All I can think is that I am losing him all over again, except that I already lost him. ~ Marie Lu

Identity was just a box people liked to put themselves in, a mast to tether to in a storm, a security blanket. ~ Leonardo Donofrio

Trust your gut, and don't let fear get the best of you. ~ Anna Jarzab

Spacewalking is a little like rock climbing in that everything, including and especially oneself, must be tethered or docked at all times. If you forget to tether a tool, it's gone. Ditto yourself. ~ Mary Roach

The thing was,I knew exactly how I had survived.Mary had been on to something with her anchor theory,but she was a little unclear on the logistics. Jack told me he dreamed of me every night, and it was as if I were really there. I was in a dark place,and he helped me see.
Now Jack was invading my dreams every night. Not a dream Jack,but the real thing.
I know this because during one of the first dreams, he told me what the tattoo on his arm said. Ever Yours. The next morning,I rushed to draw the image from memory, and then I researched it.
The symbols were artistic versions of ancient Sanskrit words.They stood for eternity and belonging. Ever Yours, just as Jack had said. There was no way my subconscious could have come up with that explanation on its own.
I'd finally found the connection Meredith had longed for,the tether from an anchor that kept a Forfeit alive. They were bound together through their dreams,sustaining each other during sleep.
When I was asleep,Jack would come to my bedroom and sit on the end of the mattress and face me.He came to me every night,talking about his uncle's cabin, the Christmas Dance, how my hair hides my eyes,how my hand fits in his, how he loves me.How he'll never leave. I spent the first few dreams saying "I'm sorry" over and over and over, until he threatened to stay away if I didn't stop. ~ Brodi Ashton

Man is no island. We need those who love us. We need those who hate us. We need others to tether us to life, to give us a reason to live, to feel. ~ Pierce Brown

Enzo looks up at me. Suddenly, the blackness in his eyes seems to fade, replaced by the familiar warm brown of his irises, the red slashes, the glow of life. I see a hint of his old self there, fighting through the darkness of the Underworld to gaze at me one last time. It is the look he'd given me when we used to dance.
This is the real Enzo.
"Let me go," he whispers. It is his voice. It is the voice that once comforted me, gave me strength. And as I try to take in his words, the final tendrils of the tether linking us unravel from around my heart, freeing me. ~ Marie Lu

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Her bed faced three large uncurtained windows that looked due eat, and she loved the endless variety of sunrises that greeted her from day to day. Growing up in Florida and in the suburbs, she had never realized how the sun paced back and forth through the year, like a restless dog on a tether. During the winter it rose far to the southeast and skulked along the ridgeline, disappearing in mid-afternoon. But now it rising a little past due east, on its way to the northeast where it would achieve the summer solstice, then begin the slow day-by-day journey back to the winter solstice. Watching the sunrise, with its reminder of the endless and inevitable cycles of life, was, she thought, her version of religion. ~ Vicki Lane

The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons,coins,men. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Time is more a perception than a tether to the now. ~ Aaron-Michael Hall

He could tell me he loved me, but he doesn't know me the way a lover would; he knows the shape of me, though, the curve of my heart, as I know his. He could tell me he doesn't want to lose me, but we're both already lost, and only the tether between us keeps us from drifting out into the black. ~ Amie Kaufman

The beasts are very wise,
Their mouths are clean of lies,
They talk one to the other,
Bullock to bullock brothers
Resting after their labors,
Each in stall with his neighbors,
But man with goad and whip,
Breaks up their fellowship,
Shouts in their silky ears
Filling their soul with fears.
When he has plowed the land,
He says: "they understand."
But the beasts in stall together,
Freed from the yoke and tether,
Say as the torn flank smoke:
"Nay, 'twas the whip that spoke." ~ Rudyard Kipling

Her voice had brought him back from the dark; it had been the tether he gripped and used to drag himself back to some semblance of sanity. ~ Leigh Bardugo

People," Wax said, "are like cords, Steris. We snake out, striking this way and that, always looking for something new. That's human nature, to discover what is hidden. There's so much we can do, so many places we can go." He shifted in his seat, changing his center of gravity, which caused the sphere to rotate upward on its tether.
"But if there aren't any boundaries," he said, "we'd get tangled up. Imagine a thousand of these cords, zipping through the room. The law is there to keep us from ruining everyone else's ability to explore. Without law, there's no freedom. That's why I am what I am. ~ Brandon Sanderson

And then my chance really happened in 1996 when we added the second flight of the tether satellite. ~ Umberto Guidoni

But what Andy never understood about him was this: he was an optimist. Every month, every week, he chose to open his eyes, to live another day in the world. He did it when he was feeling so awful that sometimes the pain seemed to transport him to another state, one in which everything, even the past that he worked so hard to forget, seemed to fade into a gray watercolor wash. He did it when his memories crowded out all other thoughts, when it took real effort, real concentration, to tether himself to his current life, to keep himself from raging with despair and shame. He did it when he was so exhausted of trying, when being awake and alive demanded such energy that he had to lie in bed thinking of reasons to get up and try again, ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Chains
chains that hold me to the ground
chains that keep me solidly bound
chains that tether my heart to you
chains that only one truth ... ~ Muse

For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout's gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller's property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.
And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death - but kindness? ~ Hanya Yanagihara

It often feels as if I'm not here, that I'm a figment of my own imagination. There are days when I feel so lightly connected to the earth that the threads that tether me to the planet are gossamer thin, spun sugar. ~ Gail Honeyman

But even then, even all those years when she was never physically by herself, she was beginning to feel the chasm growing between her and the rest of the world. It was like a small tear in the seam of a dress, a certain pulling away. A ripping. And once it started, there was no stopping it. Of course, she tried so hard to keep it together, to tether herself to this world. She filled her life with people. With friends and family. But even then she knew that mere presence of people in one's life cannot eliminate the terrifying sense of one's aloneness in the world. Being surrounded by people is not the same as connection. As friendship. As love. When Robert came along, she believed for a little while she had found the answer, the bridge that crossed the deep canyon. And children too became links between herself and normalcy. The accident didn't start it, it just proved the faultiness, the tenuousness of these connections. ~ T. Greenwood

Her momentum ran out, and she spun quietly, whiteness below, light above. She noticed that she'd trailed a line of mist up out of the main cloud. This hung like a tether ready to pull her back down. In fact, all the mists were spinning slightly in what looked like an enormous weather pattern. A whirlpool of white. The heart of the whirlpool was directly beneath her. ~ Brandon Sanderson

You have to fight to hold on to the important things. ~ Anna Jarzab

How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot? ~ Virginia Woolf

Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approachesTam maun ride; That hour, o'night's black arch the key-stane, That dreary hourTam mounts his beast in. ~ Robert Burns

Sentiment would undo her - each of its ties were a tether that would hold her from her purpose. Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind; but for a woman there could be no such luxury. Had not Catherine drowned in the London air while practicing the virtues of love and obedience? How readily the rules of female behavior - gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness - turned to shackles. ~ Rachel Kadish

trust the universe (or God), but tether your camel. ~ Teri Meehan

The understanding, like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself: and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object ...
If by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the reach of our capacities. ~ John Locke

Dad the launching pad. Dad the landing zone. Dad the tether that kept Sams - and me - from hurtling into the nullity of deep space, a nullity himself now. ~ Rick Yancey