Transfixed Quotes

It's a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can't doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can't wait to start looking. ~ Terri Cheney

Kate was about to protest when something caused her to look in her mother's direction. She was standing statue-like in front of the television with that brave, painted-on smile. Then Kate realized what had caught her attention: her mother's tear-filled eyes were reflecting the on-off motion of the blinkers like a watery mirror. Kate stared transfixed at the flashing points of light that betrayed her mother's pain. The urge to tell her father how much she wanted him to be proud of her and how much he had hurt her, faded in the dark depths of her mother's eyes. ~ Sabrynne McLain

Ree is his. Is his, is devoted to him, is aggravatingly tender and possessively passionate and wrapped up in him in a thousand ways, loves him in a way that is very useful. It seems a law of nature, at this point. Even if the events of this startling evening have served to give him pause, a little. But Ree is still his. He's fairly sure. Such complex knots can't be untied so quickly, can they?

Still, it's not the only thing disturbing him, about the Dam's account of early events. She laughs when she sees his face, his sidewise look at her description, and there's definitely a mean note to it. "Oh, it was darling," she says, and he gets the feeling of a caged animal stuck behind bars, while a cruel child pokes at it. "You were enchanted by his wolf, would follow it anywhere, welcome or not, though mostly he tolerated it. But you couldn't manage his name – and a nickname hadn't stuck at that point – so instead you imitated the sound he made. Rather insultingly, too, if not intentionally – Ruff. Or Woof, or whatever it was that you intended to say, except that it actually came out as Wuff. Or Wuffy, depending, and at varying pitches and volume as you ran after him, falling down and rolling about half the time."

Penn is transfixed. It's outrageous, it's an outrage. It can't possibly be true. It was nothing like that. ~ Alex Ankarr

One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We'll get to that. I can't do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head. Meanwhile the heat from her home drifted through the open door and fogged up Andrew's eyeglasses. He stood there behind his foggy lenses like a blind man in the snowfall and was without volition when at last she reached out, gently took the swaddled infant from him, stepped back, and closed the door in his face. ~ E.L. Doctorow

Arys raised his head to look at me. His expression took on an intensity that held me transfixed. "I've spent over a century knowing I'd likely never know you. I've been waiting for you for a hundred years. Being with you is surreal. We were created as one. The moments that bring jealousy and pain, they're temporary. We are forever. ~ Trina M. Lee

When a sudden ray of sun or a moonbeam falls on a dreary street, it makes no difference what it illumines-a broken bottle on the ground, a fading flower in a field, or the flaxen blonde hair of a child's head. The object is transformed and the viewer is transfixed. Celebrate that moment of beauty and take it with you in your memory. It is God's gift to you. ~ Luci Swindoll

Reporters also tend to love trials. It may be that we are transfixed by a process in which the person being asked a question actually has to answer it. He cannot say he would rather not comment. He cannot tell an anecdote on a different subject. He has to answer the question - under oath that he is telling the truth. ~ Calvin Trillin

Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue.
Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up.
Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair.
You are unworthy of her. Yes. No.
Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky.
They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving.
It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination.
Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrat ~ Lauren Groff

Once I faced a female with diamond skin," Nix said breathlessly. "I was transfixed - even as she was choking the life out of me."
"Really?"
" No, I saw that character on X men. I just wanted to commiserate. Alas, I have no weaknesses."
"Except your insanity," Lucia pointed out.
sigh. "Well played, Archer. then carry on ... ~ Kresley Cole

No one leaves his or her world without being transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in time and misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence, possibly now forgotten by the one who said it. A word for so long a time attempted and never spoken, always stifled in inhibition, in the fear of being rejected- which as it implies a lack of confidence in ourselves, also means refusal to risk. ~ Paulo Freire

I was sorry to notice that my clumsiness with the safety-pin hurt her. Indeed, it might have been serious, for the skin of her throat was pierced. I must have pinched up a piece of loose skin and have transfixed it, for there are two little red points like pin-pricks, and on the band of her nightdress was a drop of blood. When I apologised and was concerned about it, she laughed and petted me, and said she did not even feel it. Fortunately it cannot leave a scar, as it is so tiny. ~ Bram Stoker

The hardest thing to convey is how lovely it all is and how that loveliness seems all you need. The ghosts that haunted you in New York or Pittsburgh will haunt you anywhere you go, because they're your ghosts and the house they haunt is you. But they become disconcerted, shaken confused for half a minute, and in that moment on a December at four o'clock when you're walking from the bus stop to the rue Saint-Dominique and the lights are twinkling across the river–only twinkling in the bateaux-mouches, luring the tourists, but still…–you feel as if you've escaped your ghosts if only because, being you, they're transfixed looking at the lights in the trees on the other bank, too, which they haven't seen before, either. It's true that you can't run away from yourself. But we were right: you can run away. ~ Adam Gopnik

I stood transfixed, the silence ringing in my ears. From the field of wild grasses; cocksfoot, tufted hair, wild oat, tall fescue, reed canary and perennial rye, their subtle shades of green, ochre and pink softly patching and blending in rustling movement, suddenly rose a small flock of starlings that had been feeding quietly unseen among the tall waving stems, the swish of their glossy wings startlingly loud in the stillness of midday. Heat held me captive. ~ Nell Grey

At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration. ~ Carl Sagan

Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth. ~ Hermann Hesse

Here before you lies the memorial to St. Cefnogwr, though he is not buried here, of course." At her words, an uncanny knowing flushed through Katy and, crazy-of-crazy, transfixed her. "Why? Where is he?" Traci stepped forward, hand on her hip. A you're-right-on-cue look crossed the guide's face. She pointed to the ceiling. Traci scoffed. "I meant, where's the body?" Her American southern accent lent a strange contrast to her skepticism. Again, the tour guide's arthritic finger pointed upward, and a smile tugged at her lips, the smokers' wrinkles on her upper lip smoothing out. "That's the miracle that made him a saint, you see. Throughout the twelve hundreds, the Welsh struggled to maintain our independence from the English. During Madog's Rebellion in 1294, St. Cefnogwr, a noble Norman-English knight, turned against his liege lord and sided with the Welsh - " "Norman-English?" Katy frowned, her voice raspy in her dry throat. "Why would a Norman have a Welsh name and side with the Welsh?" She might be an American, but her years living in England had taught her that was unusual.

"The English nicknamed him. It means 'sympathizer' in Welsh. The knight was captured and, for his crime, sentenced to hang. As he swung, the rope creaking in the crowd's silence, an angel of mercy swooped down and - " She clapped her hands in one decisive smack, and everyone jumped. "The rope dangled empty, free of its burden. Proof, we say, of his noble cause. He's been venerated ever since ~ Angela Quarles

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life. ~ Meg Wolitzer

We are not afraid of predators, we're transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal way, we love our monsters ... ~ E. O. Wilson

He concluded the speech with an irritated motion of his hands.
Unfortunately, Evie had been conditioned by too many encounters with Uncle Peregrine to discern between angry gestures and the beginnings of a physical attack. She flinched instinctively, her own arms flying up to shield her head. When the expected pain of a blow did not come, she let out a breath and tentatively lowered her arms to find Sebastian staring at her with blank astonishment.
Then his face went dark.
"Evie," he said, his voice containing a bladelike ferocity that frightened her. "Did you think I was about to…Christ. Someone hit you. Someone hit you in the past - who the hell was it?" He reached for her suddenly - too suddenly - and she stumbled backward, coming up hard against the wall. Sebastian went very still. "Goddamn," he whispered. Appearing to struggle with some powerful emotion, he stared at her intently. After a long moment, he spoke softly. "I would never strike a woman. I would never harm you. You know that, don't you?"
Transfixed by the light, glittering eyes that held hers with such intensity, Evie couldn't move or make a sound. She started as he approached her slowly. "It's all right," he murmured. "Let me come to you. It's all right. Easy." One of his arms slid around her, while he used his free hand to smooth her hair, and then she was breathing, sighing, as relief flowed through her. Sebastian brought her closer against him, his mouth brushing her temple. "Who was it ~ Lisa Kleypas

To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins,
All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception)
Is agony immobilized. While Time,
The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world. ~ Carson McCullers

Richard cocks his hand at me and yelps, "Tootles" then saunters off, and for a moment I am transfixed, imagining him walking to Ricky Martins, "Shake your bon-bon! ~ Mira Harlon

I was in bed at my beach house, but could not sleep because of some fried chicken in the icebox that I felt entitled to. I waited till my wife dropped off, and tiptoed into the kitchen. I remembered looking at the clock. It was precisely four-fifteen. I'm quite certain of this, because our kitchen clock has not worked in twenty-one years and is always at that time. I also noticed that our dog, Judas, was acting funny. He was sanding up on his hind legs and singing, 'I Enjoy Being a Girl.' Suddenly the room turned bright orange. At first, I thought my wife had caught me eating between meals and set fire to the house. Then I looked out the window, where to my amazement I saw a gigantic cigar-shaped aircraft hovering just over the treetops in the yard and emitting an orange glow. I stood transfixed for what must have been several hours, though our clock still read four-fifteen, so it was difficult to tell. Finally, a large, mechanical claw extended from the aircraft and snatched the two pieces of chicken from my hand and quickly retreated. When I reported the incident to the Air Force, they told me that what I had seen was a flock of birds. When I protested, Colonel Quincy Bascomb personally promised that the Air Force would return the two pieces of chicken. To this day, I have only received one piece. ~ Woody Allen

No one goes anywhere alone, least of all into exile - not even those who arrive physically alone, unaccompanied by family, spouse, children, parents, or siblings. No one leaves his or her world without having been transfixed by its roots, or with a vacuum for a soul. We carry with us the memory of many fabrics, a self soaked in our history, our culture; a memory, sometimes scattered, sometimes sharp and clear, of the streets of our childhood, of our adolescence; the reminiscence of something distant that suddenly stands out before us, in us, a shy gesture, an open hand, a smile lost in a time of misunderstanding, a sentence, a simple sentence possibly now forgotten by the one who had said it. ~ Paulo Freire

promulgation of transfixed senses to circumnavigate total deeds brings forth everlasting preservation with augmented courage ~ Abdul Rehman

Bloodworth was not fooled, he had these folks' number, he'd been reading their mail walking a lifetime in their shoes. Beyond the mothriddled light their faces were rapt and transfixed, he sang about death as if it was the only kept promise out of all life's false starts and switchbacks, all there was at the end of the dusty road, his voice told them about calm and quiet and eternal rest. No landlord, no cotton to chop, no ticket at the company store growing like a cancer. Just time itself frozen like leaves in winter ice and nothing in the round world to worry about or dread. ~ William Gay

At that moment, the images in the giant sphere seemed to freeze in place as all motion suddenly ceased. The charging dragon stood transfixed with a plume of flame suspended in front of his nostrils. The knight hung motionless in mid-stride, both feet off the ground, sword raised but unmoving. Time stood still. The crowd waited in breathless anticipation. ~ Ed Dunlop

It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life. ~ Charles Bukowski

What is this powerful have over my tub? Surely, I am transfixed by your firecracker charm and your suspended electrified wit. ~ Isabel Yosito

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. ~ Lewis Thomas

While engaged in automatic writing I strain to create a protective personal haven, ferret out a padded cell where I can rapturously hold court with the voltaic cells of the self. I labor in solitary, transfixed in a suspended state of consciousness. Freewheeling writing creates a bridgeworks to the situs where hidden gems of insight and candid genuineness wait to be unsheathed by the penetrating beam of a reflective mind trolling for inspirational insight. Probing putative desires while contemporaneously fencing with a barrage of suppressed insecurities, requires piercing protective layers of denial and traveling with teratological demons to confront the monstrous self-destructive gene lodged in the deepest recesses of a confused psyche. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

No salvation comes from exhumed gods; we must penetrate deeper into substance. If I take a fossil, say, a trilobite, in my hand (marvelously preserved specimens are found in the quarries at the foot of the Casbah), I am transfixed by the impact of mathematical harmony. Purpose and beauty, as fresh as on the first day, are still seamlessly united in a medal engraved by a master's hand. The bios must have discovered the secret of tripartition in this primordial crab. Tripartition then frequently recurs, even without any natural kinship; figures, in transversal symmetry, dwell in the triptych.
How many millions of years ago might this creature have animated an ocean that no longer exists? I hold its impression, a seal of imperishable beauty, in my hand. Some day, this seal, too, will decay or else burn out in cosmic conflagrations of the future. The matrix that formed it remains concealed in and operative from the law, untouched by death or fire. ~ Ernst Junger

He let go of me long enough to wipe the fog then resumed his grip on my jaw. I stared, transfixed by the sight of his cock driving into me over and over. ~ Laurelin Paige

Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" - As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated? - the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, - you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Back-wards, sideways, forewards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous o ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It was the unicorn all right, and it was dead. Harry had never seen anything so beautiful and sad. Its long, slender legs were stuck out at odd angles where it had fallen and its mane was spread pearly-white on the dark leaves.
Harry had taken one step toward it when a slithering sound made him freeze where he stood. A bush on the edge of the clearing quivered ... Then, out of the shadows, a hooded figure came crawling across the ground like some stalking beast. Harry, Malfoy, and Fang stood transfixed. The cloaked figure reached the unicorn, lowered its head over the wound in the animal's side, and began to drink its blood. ~ J.K. Rowling

Imagine if you will - and you will - a mushroom cloud bigger than anything that you currently see out that window. Imagine jet planes and bombers the size of apartment complexes dropping technological marvels of deconstruction upon this city, this world, all around the epicenter of a blooming death cloud. Imagine that mushroom coming to a head, knowing that it is filled with unimaginable heat and concrete, dust, papers - human faces, eyes, and brains. Gray matter filling the radioactive cloud with electricity as all that is inside us leaves us and becomes one with the mushroom. Glass will melt and connect with steel, and we will melt and connect with each other as everything that made us whole is criminally dissected and rearranged. Everything below us, from the sewer tunnels to the subway line, will be consumed into the cloud and jettisoned into the stratosphere, where it will become nothing but silken ash, hardened to a black substance, and turned back to a black dust, transfixed into a black nothing. A stinking, glowing crater all that remains of where you had your first kiss and told someone that you loved them. A mess of a world where everything you've ever done quickly becomes all that you'll ever do. ~ Michael A. Ferro

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture. ~ Ernest Becker

Richard stood transfixed for a moment or two, wiped his forehead again, and gently replaced the phone as if it were an injured hamster. His brain began to buzz gently and suck its thumb. Lots of little synapses deep inside his cerebral cortex all joined hands and started dancing around and singing nursery rhymes. ~ Douglas Adams

On the day of the agni pariksha, light transfixed Amar's face.
"I have every faith in you, my love," he said, trailing fingers along my jaw. "This will put an end to every rumor. This will keep you safe from them. I know our days have been cold, but after this, we will be as we once were."
Inside, my heart snarled, but I kept my face blank. "I will not disappoint."
All the members of the Otherworld assembled for my trial. I wore white, the dress of mourning. In the Night Bazaar, a dim glow lit up the faces of the attendees, clinging to well-oiled horns and scaled skin. Leonine rakshasa waited patiently, weapons quivering in their grip. If I failed, they were free to depose me. If I succeeded, they would end their bloodshed in the human realms.
Sacred flames lapped up from the ground. Ribbons of fire snaked out like tongues and grasping hands. I looked to Amar. His face was stern. Hopeful. For what outcome, I thought I knew. But I was wrong. ~ Roshani Chokshi

Plume"

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure - dusky flutter - trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who've engraved on her locket phrases in script: "glide on a blade" and "rustling precedes the shuck." This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it's morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded. ~ Aaron Shurin

The camera has a mind of its own
its own point of view. Then the human bearer of time stumbles into the camera's gaze
the camera's domain of pristine space hitherto untraversed is now contaminated by human temporality. Intrusion occurs, but the camera remains transfixed by its object. It doesn't care. The camera has no human fears. ~ Frank Lentricchia

The moment I took hold of the line, I felt the mighty tug of the wind coursing into my palm and wrist, and there I stayed, transfixed. The pwer in that topgallant sail suddenly awed me, and yet it was among the smaller sails on the mast. It was a mere speck on the ocean, catching an infinitesimal fraction of all the howling winds that crossed the wide seas. I literally could not move a muscle, trying in vain to absorb the magnitude of it.
And there was something else, as well. This wind was blowing me westward. I was hurtling into my own predestined future. With neither star nor compass, I knew the heading of this wind. It bore down on a lonely river crossing in one of the last wild places on Earth, where timber moaned in a gale, and frosty grass sparkled in the dawn, and beasts lumbered and thundered the valley. A sacred place protected by Comanches. ~ Mike Blakely

If I go and try to watch a movie by myself I'll be completely transfixed the whole time, concentrating one hundred percent. But if I'm with another person on a date or something, within two minutes I'll be like 'This is rubbish, this is rubbish. We should leave and do something else.' I don't really know why. ~ Robert Pattinson

Oh, the way he was looking at her, really looking at her . . . this was the Christopher of her dreams. This was the man who had written to her. He was so caring, and real, and dazzling, that she wanted to weep.

"I thought . . ." Christopher broke off and drew his thumb over the hot surface of her cheek.

"I know," she whispered, her nerves sparking in excitement at his touch.

"I didn't mean to do that."

"I know."

His gaze went to her parted lips, lingering until she felt it like a caress. Her heart labored to supply blood to her nerveless limbs. Every breath caused her body to lift up against his, a teasing friction of firm flesh and clean, warm linen.

Beatrix was transfixed by the subtle changes in his face, the heightening color, the silver brightness of his eyes.

She wondered if he were going to kiss her.

And a single word flashed through her mind.

Please. . . ~ Lisa Kleypas

A smile is hidden beneath the mustache, it crinkles the corners of his hooded eyes. "I didn't. I have other business in town and I told my friend I would attend to the matter of his son, as he could not do so himself."
"Very kind of you."
"Yes. I have been looking forward to it for quite some time."
Daddy's lemonade is almost gone, he sips it carefully, turning his eyes back to the water. "Looking forward to seeing the lad or to conducting your business?" Daddy is toying with him.
"Both. You see, I had never actually met his son." The glass rests against Daddy's lips, unmoving. Mr. Geyer watches him closely. "But now I have, so I can get on with my," he fixes his own gaze on the water, as though trying to see whatever it is that has transfixed my father, "business. ~ Gwenn Wright

Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans. ~ Peter Matthiessen

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life, I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

In the light from the rising moon, a miniature statue shimmered on a pedestal: a statue of a dragon, carved from an enormous emerald. He nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to reach it. He stretched out his hands. His mouth went dry. A dazzling light flooded the room as a door swung open. Toad froze. His stomach dropped through the floor. His arms were still raised, inches from the statue, but his eyes were transfixed upon the giant figure standing in the doorway. ~ M.L. LeGette

I'm in love with you," I responded. He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh. "Of course you are," he replied. "I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control. ~ Anne Rice

Gazing into his eyes, I was lost in their intensity. It was like looking into the bluest sky and carrying on to infinity. I felt mesmerised, hypnotised and transfixed all at once. ~ Pat Spence - Blue Moon

In the widely open cup of the armchair was I-330. I, on the floor, embracing her limbs, my head on her lap. We were silent. Everything was silent. Only the pulse was audible. Like a crystal I was dissolving in her, in I-330. I felt most distinctly how the polished facets which limited me in space were slowly thawing, melting away. I was dissolving in her lap, in her, and I became at once smaller and larger, and larger, unembraceable. For she was not she but the whole universe. For a second I and that armchair near the bed, transfixed with joy, we were one. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

We do not just fear our predators, we are transfixed by them. We are prone to weave stories and fables and chat endlessly about them. ~ Peter Benchley

So we must run back and forth between these two suns in our firmament - the presentiment of death and awareness of life - and avoid being transfixed by either of them. If we are lucky in this uncertain middle distance, we may form attachments and projects that enhance the sentiment of life. However, even as we try our luck, death comes to us, and brings our experiment to a end. ~ Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Across the street at the New Orleans headquarters of the Lighthouse for the Blind - a two-story building attached to a four-story stucco lighthouse - another Christmas party was under way, and Wright watched as the sightless guests arrived. Then, before his eyes, a curious scene unfolded. As they were greeted by their hosts, the blind whites were escorted to a large room at the front of the house, whereas the blind Negroes were taken to the rear, where they stayed. Separated. Transfixed, Wright had to look twice before it dawned on him: 'They couldn't see to segregate themselves ~ Gilbert King

Emma was horrified and transfixed at the same time. She was watching Jonah Kinlock doing what he did best. There was a certain macabre beauty in watching form and function wedded together. In Jonah's case, a dance of beauty and death. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books ... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and slaverous, chopping appetite for pink, plump, city-softened flesh. ~ Bill Bryson

Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. ~ Alan Lightman

Would you like me to court you?" the earl finally asked.
YES. She smoothed her hands over her skirts to keep from confessing it aloud. "I would like to know if you are," she replied. "Or what your intentions are, if you aren't."
"My intentions . . ." His slow smile acted like a torch held to her skin. She felt prickly with heat and yet transfixed by the glowing allure of it. "I intend to have you, Maggie, in every way a man can have a woman. I want your hand in mine while we dance. I want you laughing beside me in the theater. I want you lying naked in my arms at night. And I want you standing beside me in church, saying 'I will.' ~ Caroline Linden

His mouth is parted, and the sheets are kicked off. One of his hands rests on his stomach. His shirt has hiked up, and I can see his abdomen. My gaze is transfixed.

Holy crap. I just slept with St. Clair. ~ Stephanie Perkins

One minute he stood transfixed, the next he uttered a crushing oath, and took a hasty stride forward. Mr Ringwood, recovering from his own stupefaction, closed with him, just as George, flushing vividly, sprang to his feet.

"Sherry!" Mr Ringwood said warningly. "For God's sake, dear boy, remember where you are! You can't choke George to death here! ~ Georgette Heyer

there is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. his specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter. ~ John D. MacDonald

Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity. ~ Virginia Woolf

Any earthly production would have been cancelled at the slightest suggestion of rain, but this was William's Stage - it was William's call - and if the children danced and the congregation remained transfixed, the show would go on. ~ Jake Vander Ark

Those cries rose from among the twisted roots
through which the spirits of the damned were slinking
to hide from us. Therefore my Master said:
'If you break off a twig, what you will learn
will drive what you are thinking from your head.'
Puzzled, I raised my hand a bit and slowly
broke off a branchlet from an enormous thorn:
and the great trunk of it cried: 'Why do you break me?'
And after blood had darkened all the bowl
of the wound, it cried again: 'Why do you tear me?
Is there no pity left in any soul?
Men we were, and now we are changed to sticks;
well might your hand have been more merciful
were we no more than souls of lice and ticks.'
As a green branch with one end all aflame
will hiss and sputter sap out of the other
as the air escapes- so from that trunk there came
words and blood together, gout by gout.
Startled, I dropped the branch that I was holding
and stood transfixed by fear, ... ~ Dante Alighieri

He made a small movement of his head. "Do you love Pennhyll as well as you do the mountain upon which it sits?"
"I find it much like you."
His mouth quirked, and then, curved in another smile. She stared, transfixed by the sight. "Unpleasant and forlorn?"
She tipped her head to one side, considering him. She felt an odd sensation of understanding this harsh man who was, in fact, a stranger to her. "Not entirely unpleasant, that I will admit. Nor forlorn, either."
"Do not tell me you find me amiable."
"Certainly not. Like Pennhyll, you are strong and fierce." She felt, ridiculous as it was, that she knew him better than she knew herself. "To make a life here is to have courage and heart, and those you surely have. ~ Carolyn Jewel

Do you feel it? It's a heightening of the senses, the kind that immobilizes a cat crossing the street, transfixed by the blinding headlights of a speeding car. You know you have to head for cover, run as far and as fast as your legs can carry you. But you can't. You just have to know what's coming - even if it kills you. ~ Psyche Roxas-Mendoza

At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. ~ Annie Dillard

We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.' ~ Dan Brown

There's a latter-day notion that artsy hippie types in the 1960s disdained the space program. Not in my experience they didn't. We watched, transfixed with reverence, not even making rude remarks about President Nixon during his phone call to the astronauts. ~ Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Then the screen comes on, showing a familiar menu on a blue background and I stare at it, transfixed, like a yokel who's never seen a television before. Because it's not a TV. It's a flat-screen PC running Windows XP Media Center Edition. They can't be that dumb. It's got to be a trap, I gibber to myself. Not even the clueless cannon-fodder-in-jumpsuits who staff any one of the movies on the shelf would be that dumb! ~ Charles Stross

You play with great skill," he said.
"Thank you."
"Is that your favorite piece?"
"It's my most difficult," Helen said, "but not my favorite."
"What do you play when there's no one to hear?"
The gentle question, spoken in that accent with vowels as broad as his shoulders, caused Helen's stomach to tighten pleasurably. Perturbed by the sensation, she was slow to reply. "I don't remember the name of it. A piano tutor taught it to me long ago. For years I've tried to find out what it is, but no one has ever recognized the melody."
"Play it for me."
Calling it up from memory, she played the sweetly haunting chords, her hands gentle on the keys. The mournful chords never failed to stir her, making her heart ache for things she couldn't name. At the conclusion, Helen looked up from the keys and found Winterborne staring at her as if transfixed. He masked his expression, but not before she saw a mixture of puzzlement, fascination, and a hint of something hot and unsettling.
"It's Welsh," he said.
Helen shook her head with a laugh of wondering disbelief. "You know it?"
"'A Ei Di'r Deryn Do.' Every Welshman is born knowing it."
"What is it about?"
"A lover who asks a blackbird to carry a message to his sweetheart."
"Why can't he go to her himself?" Helen realized they were both speaking in hushed tones, as if they were exchanging secrets.
"He can't find her. He's too deep in love- it keeps him from seeing clearly."< ~ Lisa Kleypas

Well, I am almost finished. Perhaps if you find something upon which to focus your attention, the pain will remain at bay a while longer." As she leaned forward, Rafe could see the tantalizing display of her breasts above the fabric of her apron. "I think I've found just the thing." Anthony chuckled beside them, but Cassandra was too occupied with her surgery to notice Rafe's gaze. He wanted her to notice. He wanted her to see him as more than the subject of her experiments. He wanted her to see him as a man. He wanted to see if her beautiful breasts felt and tasted as delicious as they looked. He stared, transfixed, until she finished. ~ Brooklyn Ann

Once after Barefoot In the Park had been playing for about a week I went back to see it, watching the audience, which was just falling over laughing except for one guy sitting the aisle. I was transfixed. I said to myself, there seems to be no way to get to him. No one else would I watch except this one man. My wife joined me about 20 minutes later and asked me how it was going, and I said, terrible. I really meant it. There was no way to get to this man. It destroyed me. ~ Simon Neil

My father, father!' - she might pray to the winds;
no innocence moves her judges mad for war.
Her father called his henchmen on,
on with a prayer,
'Host her over the alter
like a yearling, give it all your strength!
She's fainting - lift her,
sweep her robes around her,
but slip this strap in her gentle curving lips...
here, gag her hard, a sound will curse the house'-
and the bridle chokes her voice... her saffron robes
pouring over the sand
her glance like arrows showering
wounding every murderer through with pity
clear as a picture, live,
she strains to call their names...
I remember often the days with father's guests
when over the feast her voice unbroken,
purees the home her loving father
bearing third libations, sang to Saving Zeus -
transfixed with joy, Atreus' offspring
throbbing out their love. ~ Aeschylus

We went down into the silent garden. Dawn is the time when nothing breathes, the hour of silence. Everything is transfixed, only the light moves. ~ Leonora Carrington

Much of the time, we're transfixed by all of the ways we can reflect ourselves into the world. And we can barely find the time to reflect deeply back in on our own selves. ~ Ariel Garten

The movement of descent and discovery begins at the moment you consciously become dissatisfied with life. Contrary to most professional opinion, this gnawing dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of "mental illness," nor an indication of poor social adjustment, nor a character disorder. For concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense - to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided. It has been said, and truly I think, that suffering is the first grace. In a special sense, suffering is almost a time of rejoicing, for it marks the birth of creative insight.

But only in a special sense. Some people cling to their suffering as a mother to its child, carrying it as a burden they dare not set down. They do not face suffering with awareness, but rather clutch at their suffering, secretly transfixed with the spasms of martyrdom. Suffering should neither be denied awareness, avoided, despised, not glorified, clung to, dramatized. The emergence of suffering is not so much good as it is a good sign, an indicatio ~ Ken Wilber

But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. ~ Annie Dillard

There are many ways to be transfixed, and no season is safe. If it is winter you may be transfixed by ice; if it is springtime, by fire-finch music or phoebes singing or the squeaky compositions of fox kits. And if it is summer, you may be transfixed, like Dryope, leaf by leaf, by clambery vine-winding love-bind. For love, onslaught-love, beleafs all things. ~ Amy Leach

According to my rule, you can find in every woman something - damn it! - something extraordinarily interesting, something you won't find in any other woman. Only you must know how to find it - that's the point! That requires talent! For me ugly women do not exist: the very fact that she's a woman is half the attraction for me- but how could you understand that? Even in old maids you sometimes find something so attractive that you can't help marvelling at the damn fools who've let them grow old without noticing it! The first thing to do with barefooted girls and ugly women is to take them by surprise - that's how one should deal with them. You didn't know that, did you? They must be surprised till they're enraptured, till they're transfixed, till they're ashamed that such a gentleman should have fallen in love with such a swarthy creature. What's so wonderful is that so long as there are peasants and gentlemen in the world - and there always will be - there will also be such lovely little scullery maids and their masters - that's all one needs for one's happiness. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

But then the golden stars began to fall. The effect was incredible. Golden streaks against a dark sky. It was mesmerising. They floated down to about a metre above the ground and then winked out. I was transfixed by the beauty of it. ~ Christie Nieman

And so long as you say 'one' instead of 'I,' there's nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit to yourself that it is yourself you feel as though transfixed and horrified. ~ Franz Kafka

I'll tell you all about it, but let's eat first. I've had nothing to eat. Although I was offered some raw squirrel. Canned pudding, that's what I want. I've been dreaming about it."
She hauled out a can and feverishly worked the can opener. She didn't wait for a dish or spoon, but thrust her hand in and scooped some into her mouth. Then she stood transfixed, overwhelmed by the wonderful sweetness of it.
She was crying when she said, "I'm sorry, I've forgotten how to be polite. I'll get you guys your own can."
Sam hobbled over and scooped some pudding of his own, following her lead. "I'm way past polite myself," he said, although she could see he was a little appalled by her wolfish behavior. She decided then that she liked him. ~ Michael Grant

Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon. ~ Philip Caputo

He was transfixed at the sight of the lords and ladies of his realm running about like demented chickens. ~ Jonathan Stroud

Try to imagine a face of idyllic charm and stunning, dazzling beauty; one of those before which you stop, transfixed in sweet confusion, trembling with delight; a face that makes you grateful for its existence, for allowing your eyes to fall upon it, for passing you by ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As I came up from the galley, the sun was going down into the ocean in a blaze that paved the western sea with gold like the streets of Heaven. I stopped for a moment, just a moment, transfixed by the sight. It had happened many times before, but it always took me by surprise. Always in the midst of great stress, wading waist-deep in trouble and sorrow, as doctors do, I would glance out a window, open a door, look into a face, and there it would be, unexpected and unmistakable. A moment of peace. The ~ Diana Gabaldon

Dear God in heaven."
Nik and Ban turned away, but Alek stood. Transfixed. "My God, y'all. She's the worst goddamn dancer I've ever seen."
"Turn away. It'll hurt your eyes. Turn away! ~ Shelly Laurenston

Parents embraced "Sesame Street" for several reasons, among them that it assuaged their guilt over the fact that they could not or would not restrict their children's access to television. "Sesame Street" appeared to justify allowing a four- or five-year-old to sit transfixed in front of a television screen for unnatural periods of time. Parents were eager to hope that television could teach their children something other than which breakfast cereal has the most crackle. At the same time, "Sesame Street" relieved them of the responsibility of teaching their pre-school children how to read - no small matter in a culture where children are apt to be considered a nuisance ... We now know that "Sesame Street" encourages children to love school only if school is like "Sesame Street." Which is to say, we now know that "Sesame Street" undermines what the traditional idea of schooling represents. ~ Neil Postman

He felt him transfixed, captured, nailed by his vow to the hard wood of the impossible thing he had to do. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

Then there are those who think their bodies don't exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o'clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock. They make love between eight and ten at night. They work forty hours a week, read the Sunday paper on Sunday, play chess on Tuesday nights. When their stomach growls, they look at their watch to see if it is time to eat. When they begin to lose themselves in a concert, they look at the clock above the stage to see when it will be time to go home. They know that the body is not a thing of wild magic, but a collection of chemicals, tissues, and nerve impulses. Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock. As such, the body must be addressed in the language of physics. And if the body speaks, it is the speaking only of so many levers and forces. The body is a thing to be ordered, not obeyed. ~ Alan Lightman

I linger near Galileo's telescopes, then round the corner and stand transfixed: I did not expect this- a dark, cool room full of globes of the night sky from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Globo celeste, they are called in Italian: 'celestial globe,' maps of the night sky… I imagine him making another globo celeste, this one smaller, yet still exquisitely painted, still breathtaking in detail. It's a map of the earth still flowing with creation, one you can spin and when you stop it with your finger, there is some tiny detail…some miraculous beauty, some wonderful example from each location at night. The white flower of a night blooming saguaro cactus, the feathers from a great-horned owl, the crunched, smiling face of a particular bat- here, I'm spinning it, I stop it at in the north, where I want there to be something still- he's painted the black-and-white feathers of a loon…or a globe of night sounds, so that by touching your location you hear the night there- the cricket song, the ocean surf, the frog mating calls. ~ Paul Bogard

Anya's final sweep of the bow was as if she had delivered the coup de grâce in a sword duel. The last note reverberated around the empty theatre until only the white noise from the speakers remained, lapping back in like a gentle wave.
It was probably the most beautiful rendition I had heard her perform, but there was no applause; there was only silence.

I flicked my eyes across to Malcolm, the theatre director, but his gaze was transfixed on a particular seat. Even Anya, rigid and breathless with the violin at her side, was staring at that same seat. ~ Christian Cook

Bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with
sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles,
their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised
to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems
to be riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so
transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts
over which they pore like possessed students of a cabbalistic
text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours
at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them:
coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If possible, they sleep on cots near
the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and
unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are
oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move.
These are computer bums, compulsive programmers ... ~ Joseph Weizenbaum

Etsuko grew silent, utterly transfixed by the realization that how she saw herself was actually how her children saw her, too. They thought she was a monster. ~ Min Jin Lee