The Thin Executioner Quotes

A world without pain, loss, betrayal, hate, death, loneliness? Impossible! ~ Darren Shan

It was a time for reflection. Jebel had regained some of his vitality and was mildly excited to be closing in on Tubaygat. But he was troubled too and often fell to studying Tel Hesani, trying to imagine himself driving a knife into the Um Kheshabah's chest or slitting his throat.
It had been easy in the beginning. Tel Hesani was a slave, fit only for execution. Now Jebel considered him a friend. Could he brutally end the older man's life and send him to the hold of Rakhebt Wadak's boat?
Jebel knew that he must, or the quest would have been for nothing, but he wasn't sure that he could. He prayed to the gods to steady his hand when the time came, but he didn't think they were listening. In a strange sort of way, he almost wished they weren't. ~ Darren Shan

We cannot help where we are born or how we are raised," Tel Hesani said. "But we can reject the twisted beliefs of those around us if we need to. Our loved ones and elders don't always know what is best. A man should listen to his heart and make his own decisions about what is wrong and what is right. ~ Darren Shan

The greatest performances where when fingertips took away a very thin veil between people and uncovered the universe in its entirety. ~ Peter Hoeg

Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a flyaway look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn't like it. Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone called her, was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression which was seldom disturbed. Her father called her 'Little Miss Tranquility', and the name suited her excellently, for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved. Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion at least. A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be ~ Louisa May Alcott

Something we've been working on in R and D for a while." He crossed to her, ran his fingers over the lining himself. "It's body armor."
"Get out." Her forehead creased as she examined it more closely. "It's too thin and light. Plus it moves."
"Trust me, it's been thoroughly tested. Leonardo was able to take the material and fashion it into the coat. It will block a stun on full, though you'll feel the impact. It'll protect from a blaster, though the leather would suffer. And it will block a blade - though again, pity about the leather."
"Seriously?" She pulled her weapon again, offered it. "Try it."
He had to laugh even as he thought: Typical. Just typical. "I will not."
"Not very confident in your research and development."
"I'm not firing a stunner at my wife in our bedroom. ~ J.D. Robb

Wind-voice looked in amazement at the sword in his claws. "I - I'll keep it safe," he muttered to Winger. "For the hero, when he comes ... "
Winger was smiling a light, dreamy smile that radiated all over his thin face. "The hero is here, Wind-voice," he said, awed. "You're the hero. ~ Nancy Yi Fan

You're not a smiling lady,' he explained simply. 'Everyone smiles. Overused and elementary, if you ask me! The world has enough pretty, smiling girls. You're better than that. Deeper than that. Standing and smiling vacuously at thin air all the time! Girls like that are hopeless, useless, and false. You're a thinking lady, I say. Zealous and thinking and true. And a decent man prefers a true lady over a false one any day. ~ K.B. Ezzell

I helped Master Crawford, the watchmaker, now that his sight had gone and faded to a thin pinpoint of light. That were my favorite time. I loved the beauty of all them parts working perfectly together, a little world that could be put to rights with the click of gears, like time itself answered to your fingers. There is a beauty to the way things work. Remove one part, add another, you've changed the mechanism ~ Kelly Link

And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a kind of inner light, a bio-emotional phosphorescence, that was overwhelming in its gorgeousness. I wondered why they weren't prouder of it. Of this magic. I wondered why, if they had to have flags, why they didn't just opt for one with a picture of sex. ~ Matt Haig

All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade."
He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood driz-zling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?
"Speaking in the literature sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice - close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake. ~ Stephen King

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and found ~ Donna Tartt

To improv-nerd-out for a second, it's like the most aggressive yes-anding you can do - if someone's like, "Yeah, you're super thin, right?" And you just pull that into a character and do seven more episodes of the podcast and remember to bring that up. ~ Jon Gabrus

There is some quite trivial, distant noise; a sound, moreover, which has nothin to do with me, to which there is not the slightest need for me to pay any attention; yet it suffices to wake me, and in no gentle way, either, but savagely, violently, shockingly, like an air raid alarm. The wheels, my masters, are already vibrating with incipient motion; the whole mechanism is preparing to begin the monotonous, hateful functioning of which I am the dispirited slave.

I began to feel that if I did not succeed in breaking out of the loathsome circle I should suddenly become mad, scream, perpetrate some shocking act of violence in the open street. But worst of all was the knowledge that the laws of my temperament would forbid me even a relief of this kind. I was inexorably imprisoned behind my own determination to display no emotion whatever.

Now I saw that I was in a street which I did not know very well. Night had fallen, the lights glowed mistily through a thin haze.

It was as though, in some mysterious way, I had become the central point around which the night scene revolved. People walking on the pavement looked at me as they passed. Some with pity, some with detached interest, some with more morbid curiosity. Some appeared to make small, concealed sights, but whether these were intended for warning or encouragement I could not be sure. The windows lighted or unlighted, were like eyes more or less piercing, but all focused upon me. The houses, th ~ Anna Kavan

Actually, the challenge I've always had is being too thin, so I love that now I have a booty, and obviously I love showing my cleavage. ~ Christina Aguilera

and three more for special "assignments." Nathanial provided long stiletto knives for the special training. The narrow knives were all black with thin blades that went straight to a point and sharp edges on both sides. They were design for one purpose, killing. ~ D.M. Stoddard

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. ~ Neil Gaiman

How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I've chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I've chosen to exercise out of a passion for change? ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

My friends were thin, pretty, naturally bronzed and accessorized with bug-eyed sunglasses. They slurped vodka straight from the bottle while they drove. They roamed the streets in bikinis by day and by night, skimpy dresses short enough to bare their ass cheeks when they bent over. They pushed up their breasts and snorted coke in the bathrooms of clubs before grinding their crotches into strangers until last call. And when the night came to an end, they romped through the filthy, gum-stained streets barefoot because they were too hammered to feel the glass shards beneath their soles. The PB girls were wild, edgy, and dangerously carefree. ~ Maggie Young

Or perhaps, despite your brave words to my parents, you've forgotten what love and loyalty look like. They aren't sacraments, Jane, for only God is perfect, only Go deserves our love without judgement. Men--women--we make mistakes. We judge those we love. But we keep loving them anyway, because we know that mistakes can be repaired, and that tomorrow, our love will be deserved again. It only takes faith--or loyalty, as you called it. Those ARE what tie a family together, through tick and thin. And they tie a husband and wife together, too. There is no happy ending, you're right--not in the singular. but in a marriage, there might be countless happy endings and even more sweet beginnings, if loyalty and love are what guide you. ~ Meredith Duran

Since we were on Everest, many other climbers have succeeded on the "big one" as well. She has now been scaled by a blind man, a guy with prosthetic legs, and even by a young Nepalese teenager.
Don't be fooled, though. I never belittle the mountain. She is still just as high and just as dangerous. Instead, I admire those mountaineers--however they have climbed her. I know what it is really like up there.
Humans learn how to dominate and conquer. It is what we do. But the mountain remains the same--and sometimes she turns and bites so damn hard that we all recoil in terror.
For a while.
Then we return. Like vultures. But we are never in charge.
It is why, within Nepal, Everest is known as the mother goddess of the sky--lest we forget.
This name reflects the respect the Nepalese have for the mountain, and this respect is the greatest lesson you can learn as a climber. You climb only because the mountain allows it.
If the peak hints at you to wait, then you must wait; and when she begins to beckon you to go then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might.
The weather can change in minutes, as storm clouds envelop the peak--and the summit itself stubbornly pokes into the fierce band of jet-stream winds that circle the earth above twenty-five thousand feet. These 150+ mph winds cause the majestic plume of snow that pours off Everest's peak.
A constant reminder that you have got to respect the mountain.
Or you ~ Bear Grylls

I drove on, and between the north and southbound lanes a construction crew worked under daylight-bright industrial lamps. I saw them through a gauzy fog of dust and strong light...they wore blood-red vests and hardhats and massive goggles, and as the road sank I saw that the workers were bone thin, with skeletal jaws and long teeth. They labored on platforms over gaping holes in the earth, and among the men, piled atop rickety pallets, lolled babies, piles of them, in ashy cerements. I could not tell whether the crew was excavating or burying them. ~ Matthew M. Bartlett

In the living room Derek sprawled on the floor on a blanket, his eyes closed, his body human, corded with hard muscle, and covered only with a strategically placed towel. Julie knelt by him, long tweezers in her hand.
"What's going on?"
"Quills," she said. "Very thin quills. There was a magic plant and he decided it would be a good idea to give it a hug. Because he is smart that way."
So they had taken Julie with them. Considering where I'd gone and what I did while there, I didn't have room to talk.
Derek didn't bother opening his eyes. "I wasn't giving it a hug. I was shielding Ella."
"Mm-hm." Julie plucked a thin needle from his stomach. "You shielded her really well. Because it's not like we didn't have Carlos with us."
Carlos was a firebug. The plant must've gotten torched.
"We'll need to work on mixed-unit tactics," Curran said. He looked tired. It must've been hell. "So what did you do in Mishmar?"
Umm. Ehh. In my head I had somehow expected Erra to stay in Mishmar.
"I saw my father," I said. Start small.
"How was that?" Curran asked.
"He's a little upset with me."
"Aha."
"I broke Mishmar a little bit."
The three of them looked at me.
"But it was mostly my grandmother who did it."
"How much is a little bit?" Derek asked.
"There might be a crack. About maybe seven feet at the widest point."
Derek laughed.
"And what else?" Curran asked.
Perceptive bastard.
"And this." ~ Ilona Andrews

As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter Straub's line, not mine), "You can never be too thin or too rich." And if you don't believe it, you were never really fat or really poor. ~ Stephen King

The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot on the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside-just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it. ~ Ayn Rand

Oh, good, it worked," Archer said, his ghostly face relieved. Unlike Elodie, his voice came in loud and clear, and so familiar that my heart broke all over again.
I stood frozen, my back against the door. Even though he was faint, I could see him smirk.
"Um…Mercer? Haven't seen you in nearly a month. I was expecting something like, 'Oh, Cross, love of my heart, fire of my loins, how I've longed-"
"You're dead," I blurted out, pressing a hand against my stomach. "You're a ghost, and you think-"
All the humor disappeared from his face, and he held up both hands. "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not dead. Promise."
My heart was still hammering. "Then what the heck are you?"
Archer almost looked sheepish as he reached inside his shirt and pulled out some kind of amulet on a thin silver chain. "It's a speaking stone. Lets you appear to people kind of like a hologram. You know. 'Help me, Sophie-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope.'"
"Did you steal it from the cellar at Hecate, too?" Archer had collected all sorts of magical knickknacks back when we had cellar duty at Hex Hall.
"No," he said, offended. "I found it at a…store. For magical stuff. Okay, yes, I stole it from the cellar."
I rushed across the room and thrust my fist at his solar plexus. It went right through him, but it was still kind of satisfying. "You jerk!" I cried, striking at his head. "You scared me to death! Cal said The Eye probably had you, and I thought they'd found out about you and ~ Rachel Hawkins

When I said I loved you, I didn't mean for a week, or maybe a year, I meant always, in the good times and the bad, through thick and thin. I'm playing for keeps here, Mags. ~ Sherry Gammon

In Panama, I found a spider that eats its own limbs during lean times. I am told they grow back. But though the distinction is razor-thin, desperation is not the same thing as determination. Nevertheless, auto-cannibalism is one the most intriguing phenomenon I have ever heard of. ~ Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That's right - something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that's never happened before. ~ Etgar Keret

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. ~ Sylvia Plath

Everything had shattered. The fact that it was all still there - the walls and the chairs and the children's pictures on the walls - meant nothing. Every atom of it had been blasted apart and reconstituted in an instant, and its appearance of permanence and solidity was laughable; it would dissolve at a touch, for everything was suddenly tissue-thin and friable. ~ J.K. Rowling

He gave her his hand, sensing the thin strong rod of obdurate competence that was the armature of her artsy Village style. ~ Michael Chabon

Up until the time I was cast in 'Star Trek,' the roles were pretty shallow - thin, stereotyped, one-dimensional roles. I knew this character was a breakthrough role, certainly for me as an individual actor but also for the image of an Asian character: no accent, a member of the elite leadership team. ~ George Takei

Little notes of music trembled in hesitation, and burst, and rolled in quick, fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass. Little notes leaped and exploded and laughed, laughed with a full, unconditional, consummate joy.
She did not know whether she was singing. Perhaps she was only hearing the music somewhere. But the music had been a promise; a promise at the dawn of her life. That which had been promised then, could not be denied to her now. ~ Ayn Rand

What is the popular image of rock star? A rail-thin, overly-paid, narcissistic, average-talented individual who self-implodes in front of everybody, eternally having a party and who looks eternally youthful? ~ Ian Astbury

So I shall practice sorrow in my love,
stand in thin sun from old windows and grieve:
inevitability of the grave,
monotony of death, partitioned lives. ~ Grace Butcher

I knew I was treading on thin ice. Criticism of anyone's art, no matter how good the intentions, could be risky business. ~ Emma Scott

She had no mercy. He looked at her neck and thought how he would like to jab it with the knife he had for his muffin. He knew enough anatomy to make pretty certain of getting the carotid artery. And at the same time he wanted to cover her pale, thin face with kisses. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

J_Doe032692 wrote: I am not a thin person. However this does not give people the right to taunt me, calling me ugly and worthless, telling me to kill myself because no one will ever want me, or to make up songs about why I am so fat and how much food I eat. NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO HURT ANOTHER HUMAN BEING THIS BADLY.
My throat constricts. The neck brace feels as if it's shrinking and cutting off my esophagus. I reach up and cover the words with my hand and the web site dissolves.
I want to go.
Now. ~ Julie Anne Peters

He didn't say it; he had to keep his desperation from bursting through the thin layer of dignity it had been wrapped in throughout the interview. Clark smiled and patted him on the arm. ~ Imbolo Mbue

As the crowd thundered, a man eased up beside a thin, pale woman with a bent neck. In the next instant Jane Addams realized her purse was gone. The great fair had begun. ~ Erik Larson

The messages a woman receives from modern North American culture are contradictory; she needs a job for fulfillment but should be home with her children; she is more than her looks, but she had better wear makeup and stay thin; she has every opportunity men have but only on men's terms. ~ Janell L. Carroll

Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy's flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person's skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone ~ Tana French

All those poeple living in their paper houses, burning they paper future to stay warm. All the paper kids, drinking paper beer some bum bought for them at the paper convienience store ... All this things paper-thin and paper-frail. ~ John Green

The books were in no particular order, and Lundy found the process of sorting them remarkably soothing, involving, as it did, a strange sort of scavenger hunt through the entire shack. Books had been used to prop up tables and level out shelves; they were piled on surfaces where books had no business being and tucked under the edge of the thin mattress of the Archivist's bed. In the case of books that had become load-bearing, Lundy used her school ruler to carefully note their heights and went searching for rocks or pieces of scrap wood that would do the job as well, if not better. In the case of books left too near to water or exposed to the air, she rolled her eyes and whisked them away to literary safety. ~ Seanan McGuire

He may believe that he can skimp his intellectual labour without wearing his moral natuee thin or that he can break the laws of his moral nature without breaking his intellectual integrity. He may think that he can play fast and loose with his will without weakening his conscience or without impairing the truthfulness of his intellectual processes... For man is a unit. Weakness in one part becomes weakness in every part ~ Charles Franklin Thwing

The tackles are coming in thick and thin now. ~ Alan Brazil

Other freshmen were already moving into their dormitory rooms when we arrived, with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment, Dylan albums and varnished acoustic guitars, home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine, Janis posters, Bowie posters, Day-Glo bedsheets, hacky sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs terror invaded me. Although I was studying French because I dreamed of going to Paris, I actually dreaded leaving home, and in the end my parents did not want me to leave, either. But this is how children are sacrificed into their futures: I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too numb to cry, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car and waved. That moment is a still image; I can call it up as if it were a photograph. My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable, and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face and my father's were naked with love. It wasn't something thatwe talked about - love. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. It blazed from them. And then they left. ~ Louise Erdrich

Now that it was safe to drag their relationship out into the light and examine it mercilessly it was fantastic on what a thin basis they had proposed to build their life. Apart from physical attraction, there was nothing between them but fun and parties, and that was not entirely a taste in common.
Life was like a jigsaw, but if you tried to fit the pieces together yourself, you generally got them wrong. ~ Monica Dickens

My orphan bones are stretched thin through wasp limbs that now seem woefully inadequate to support all the pressures I have placed upon them. There are only so many nights I can confide in strangers before they all begin to wear their apologies the same. ~ Tyler Kent White