Umbilical Cord Quotes

It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, genetaring and degenerating itself. ~ Ingmar Bergman

Michael writes of sun, but all I can think of is sunsickness, too much in the sun never a daughter. As if God's light still shone on we who have shaded our eyes. A few phrases remain but the drift is vanish. No way out and no way in--a straight call to blast, Adrift on stage for all to view--the cringe, the sigh, the curveilinear clide. The scholar-trancemaker hangs from the end of a trope and asks to be cut down. An umbilical cord signifies no less. Yet despite, i can now see or is it all a mitake? & does it splatter? ~ Charles Bernstein

There is a cosmic "entanglement" between every atom of our body and atoms that are light-years distant. Since all matter came from a single explosion, the big bang, in some sense the atoms of our body are linked with some atoms on the other side of the universe in some kind of cosmic quantum web. Entangled particles are somewhat like twins still joined by an umbilical cord (their wave function) which can be light-years across. What happens to one member automatically affects the other, and hence knowledge concerning one particle can instantly reveal knowledge about its pair. Entangled pairs act as if they were a single object, although they may be separated by a large distance. ~ Michio Kaku

There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire. ~ Moss Hart

I stopped, torn between my concern for Samuel and my wish to vacate the kitchen before I dissolved into a howling puddle.

"If you talk to Samuel soon.....will you tell him I came by and asked about him? Please remind him about his umbilical cord."

Nettie and Don stared at me like I'd lost my marbles. "Just tell him, okay? He'll understand."

I fled through the house and out into the frigid February evening. ~ Amy Harmon

The British have an umbilical cord which has never been cut and through which tea flows constantly. It is curious to watch them in times of sudden horror, tragedy or disaster. The pulse stops apparently and nothing can be done, and no move made, until "a nice cup of tea" is quickly made. There is no question that it brings solace and does steady the mind. What a pity all countries are not so tea-conscious. World-peace conferences would run more smoothly if "a nice cup of tea", or indeed, a samovar were available at the proper time. ~ Marlene Dietrich

A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHECKLIST If we want our kids to have a shot at making it in the world as eighteen-year-olds, without the umbilical cord of the cell phone being their go-to solution in all manner of things, they're going to need a set of basic life skills. Based upon my observations as dean, and the advice of parents and educators around the country, here are some examples of practical things they'll need to know how to do before they go to college - and here are the crutches that are currently hindering them from standing up on their own two feet: 1. An eighteen-year-old must be able to talk to strangers - faculty, deans, advisers, landlords, store clerks, human resource managers, coworkers, bank tellers, health care providers, bus drivers, mechanics - in the real world. ~ Julie Lythcott-Haims

In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death. ~ Germaine Greer

I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." It's there, we just forget. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

This is the work of a lifetime, here on earth: To invent the astral body, to create it. giving it our consciousness. Thus one will survive death. One could also die when one chooses… And on dying, not lose the awareness 'from here.'

What has happened to you is a detachment of your astral body while your physical body sleeps. This occurs to vîras; it's an automatic unconscious process. Sometimes, by simple chance, a glimmer of consciousness reaches this fine body and then, on suddenly awakening or the next day, one gets the impression of experiencing something much more real than physical reality. The deja-vu of psychologists has its explanation in this phenomena of detachment.

Have you seen those children who elevate a kite and send messages with little rolls of paper that go slowly up to the kite? So it is, more or less, with that other. The astral body breaks away, still attached to the physical body by a string which has been called a 'silver cord' that is only cut at death. Thanks to this cord we can go immeasurable distances without losing the connection with our physical bodies. It always returns. So it reaches consciousness, like those messages of children with their kite. Yes, we must become like children to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven… with our astral bodies. Pay attention to this other analogy: As a child finds itself joined to its mother by the umbilical cord, so the astral body is joined to its father, the physical body, by a silver cord ~ Miguel Serrano

For a writer, mail is not just a collection of bills and letters and offers to subscribe to Sports Illustrated. It's an umbilical cord, a connection to the outside world, the giver of pleasure and pain. It shapes the day, is the moment, inexorable as the tide, toward which all the hours rise and fall. ~ Mameve Medwed

No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as [love] can do with a single thread. ~ Robert Burton

The greatest satisfaction, I think, is when a building opens and the public possesses it and you cut the umbilical cord and you see it taking on its own life. There's no greater satisfaction. ~ Moshe Safdie

As a songwriter you have an umbilical cord to the song and it's hard to expand on your understanding of the lyrics. Whereas when you cover a song you can create your own reason why you're attached to it. ~ K.d. Lang

What interests me, ... is why people are so repelled when, after all, everyone started life attached. In a sense, the twins have never been born because they are still tied by an umbilical cord. Relationships between women - daughters, mothers, friends - are one of my strong interests. ~ Judith Perelman Rossner

Nobody is ever ready for the top job, despite what they may say. As long as there is at least one management layer above you, you are shielded. The management takes the final decisions and carries the ultimate responsibility for those decisions. Once you are at the top, reality hits and you feel the umbilical cord being cut. Now the buck stops with you. I ~ S. Ramadorai

With my first son I cut his umbilical cord and everything, so I'm a hands-on father, to say the least. ~ Mekhi Phifer

Suffering shows us what we are attached to - perhaps the umbilical cord between Mother and me has never been cut. Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

That accents of the hero's self-consciousness are really objectified and that the work itself observes a distance between the hero and the author. If the umbilical cord uniting the hero to his creator is not cut, then what we have is not a work of art but a personal document. Dostoevsky's ~ Mikhail Bakhtin

The umbilical cord is a precious lifeline that began in my primal mother and has come down to me. ~ Ilchi Lee

But in the end, without Earth, everything would eventually die. Humans had been out of the gravity well a long time. Long enough to have developed the technology to cut that umbilical cord, but they'd just never bothered to do it. Stagnant. Humanity, for all its desire to fling itself into every livable pocket it could reach, had become stagnant. Satisfied to fly around in ships built half a century before, using technology that hadn't changed in longer than that. Earth had been so focused ~ James S.A. Corey

In we go," he said grandly. And just like that, the Gansey who Adam has befriended ―the Gansey he would do anything for ― vanished, and in his place was the heir born with a silk umbilical cord wrapped round his blue-blooded neck. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

...the longing to return to the place where your umbilical cord was buried would become overwhelming as years went by, and that he would not be able to stay on in the new place. ~ Easterine Kire

In fancy I took the simple decision of going on, this time on the mere trail to which our roads had now given way. I played with the idea...To be alone, without possessions, without renown, with none of the advantages of our own culture, to expose oneself among new men and among fresh hazards...Needless to say it was only a dream, and the briefest dream of all. This liberty that I was inventing ceased to exist upon closer view; I should quickly have rebuilt for myself everything that I renounced. Furthermore, wherever I went I should only have been a Roman away from Rome. A kind of umbilical cord attached me to the city. Perhaps at that time, in my rank of tribune, I felt still more closely bound to the empire than later as emperor, for the same reason that the thumb joint is less free than the brain. Nevertheless I did have that outlandish dream, at which our ancestors, soberly confined within their Latian fields, would have shuddered; to have harbored the thought, even for a moment, makes me forever different from them. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

The object of a dialogical-liberterian action is not to 'dislodge' the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to 'bind' them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality." "In order for the oppressed to unite they must first cut the umbilical cord of magic and myth which binds them to the world of oppression; the unity which links them to each other must be of a different nature. ~ Paulo Freire

Life is transient and death is unfathomable, but questions nonetheless abound. What is the driving purpose behind the prosodic life of an ordinary person such as me? What emotional rhythms, pitches, pauses, stresses, and intonations drive the meter of person's life? When the church bells toll my parting day, what tone will it strike in the hearts of other people, if any? Is there a person whoever traversed this crusty rock that we call planet Earth who did not wish for other people to remember them after their death? I confess sharing the vain longing of all men, however humble, to be remembered, not for the crimes that I committed but for fully expressing the poetic gift of life. When I ask what other people will think when I die, I must also ask why I lived, what did I live for, and what joy did I bring other people, if any. What acts, thoughts, and deeds make people beloved? What resounding chime resonates with all loving people? What magical filament binds us? What serves as the ethereal umbilical cord that causes all conscience stricken humans to crave the same universal sense of being? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Farewell, eyes that I loved! Do not blame me if the human body cannot go three days without water. I should never have believed that man was so truly the prisoner of the springs and freshets. I had no notion that our self-sufficiency was so circumscribed. We take it for granted that a man is able to stride straight out into the world. We believe that man is free. We never see the cord that binds him to wells and fountains, that umbilical cord by which he is tied to the womb of the world. Let man take but one step too many... and the cord snaps.

Apart from your suffering, I have no regrets. All in all, it has been a good life. If I got free of this I should start right in again. A man cannot live a decent life in cities, and I need to feel myself live. I am not thinking of aviation. The airplane is a means, not an end. One doesn't risk one's life for a plane any more than a farmer ploughs for the sake of the plough. But the airplane is a means of getting away from towns and their bookkeeping and coming to grips with reality. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

When I was born, the umbilical cord came wrapped around my neck, so when I came out, I wasn't breathing. The cord had cut off my oxygen - not the entire time, just at the end, when my mom was giving birth. When I came out, I wasn't conscious, so they had to work on bringing me back. It was a crazy moment. ~ LaMarcus Aldridge

Using adult stem cells drawn from bone marrow and umbilical cord blood system cells, scientists have discovered new treatments for scores of diseases and conditions such as Parkinson's disease, juvenile diabetes, and spinal cord injuries. ~ Nathan Deal

Creativity is your umbilical cord to happiness ~ Sandra Proto

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema? ~ Peter Greenaway

And so now, having been born, I'm going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry out as I'm sucked back between my mother's legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There's a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he's in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we're out of America completely; we're in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on a deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we're up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning... ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

You can talk yourself into a good emotional state. I stop for a second, take a deep breath, and think about something that's beautiful. A beautiful thought for me is cutting the umbilical cord for my child. I can guarantee you that your emotional state will change. ~ Montel Williams

was born trash. Literally, I was found in a dumpster with my umbilical cord still attached. ~ Lane Whitt

What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond - to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills turn to lungs. Our maternal environment is perfectly safe - dark, warm, and wet. It is a residency inside the Feminine.
When we outgrow our mother's body, our cramps become her own. We move. She labors. Our body turns upside down in hers as we journey through the birth canal. She pushes in pain. We emerge, a head. She pushes one more time, and we slide out like a fish. Slapped on the back by the doctor, we breath. The umbilical cord is cut - not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

We need a theory that goes before the Big Bang, and that's String Theory. String Theory says that perhaps two universes collided to create our universe, or maybe our universe is butted from another universe leaving an umbilical cord. Well, that umbilical cord is called a wormhole. ~ Michio Kaku

Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. ~ Ingmar Bergman

The pain of Mother was the pain of mine ,the umbilical cord reappearing to the invisible but hearty seen connection between mother and son. ~ Kieran Jamie Lee

The bloody red head emerged.
The white sheet turned crimson.
The infant sat up.
Unfurling soft, white feathered wings, the newborn demigoddess regarded the world around her with large, beguiling blue eyes. As if satisfied with what she saw, she seized her own umbilical cord between her small, sharp teeth and severed her tie with her mother with one, quick bite. ~ Georgina Anne Taylor

If we neglect Scripture in order to read only other books, we not only cut ourselves from the divine umbilical cord that feeds our souls, we also cut ourselves from the truth that makes it possible for us to benefit from the truth, goodness, and beauty in the books that we read. ~ Tony Reinke

If you want to win the heart of a person, first win the perception ~ Santosh Avvannavar

Hey birthers, wanna hear my theory? My theory was that Obama was born in America and you were born with the umbilical cord around your neck. ~ Bill Maher

Whose acts are greater, man's or God's?" Rabbi Akiva answered that man's acts are greater. Turnus Rufus responded that the heavens and earth are God's creations which man cannot equal. Rabbi Akiva then brings sheaves of wheat and cakes and says to Turnus Rufus, "The sheaves of wheat were made by God while these cakes were made by man." He explains that man is not meant to eat wheat as it grows from the ground but rather to process and develop it into a complete product. Rabbi Akiva then says, "Why does a child come out with an umbilical cord until the mother cuts it?" Rabbi Akiva is trying to communicate to Turnus Rufus that natural, God-created states are not necessarily perfect. Judaism does not believe in taking the natural world as it is; humans are meant to take the materials God provided and improve on them. There are imperfections in the world, and we need to perfect them. Successful ~ H.W. Charles

Every problem has a goal ~ Santosh Avvannavar

Spiritual is hooked up to the invisible umbilical cord of my Lord, Kumbiya. ~ Ludacris

The second sort was waking up alone. That was characterised by an awareness that he was alone in bed, alone in life, alone in the world, and it could sometimes fill him with a sweet sensation of freedom, and at other times with a melancholy that could perhaps be called loneliness, but which was perhaps just a glimpse of what anyone's life really is: a journey from the attachment of the umbilical cord to a death where we are finally separated from everything and everyone. A brief glimpse at the moment of awakening before all our defence mechanisms and comforting illusions slot into place again and we can face life in all its unreal glory. Then ~ Jo Nesbo

My mother was very involved with me. And we had a dialogue constantly. And it was like an umbilical cord. As long as the words were flowing back and forth we were connected and feeding each other. And I probably grew up very afraid of losing that connection. ~ Howard Stern

He probably came out of the womb, cut his own umbilical cord and said, "Milk, bitch. ~ Joel Abernathy

If an expectant mother stepped over a rope on the ground or under a clothesline, the umbilical cord would tangle during childbirth. Mothers-to-be should ~ Diane Ackerman

I am thirty," Ignatius said condescendingly. "You got a job?" "Ignatius hasta help me at home," Mrs. Reilly said. Her initial courage was failing a little, and she began to twist the lute string with the cord on the cake boxes. "I got terrible arthuritis." "I dust a bit," Ignatius told the policeman. "In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip." "Ignatius makes delicious cheese dips," Mrs. Reilly said. ~ John Kennedy Toole

Dan would entertain Owen and me by describing Mr. Tubulari's pentathlon, his "winterthon." "The first event," Dan Needham said, "is something wholesome, like splitting a cord of wood - points off, if you break your ax. Then you have to run ten miles in deep snow, or snowshoe for thirty. Then you chop a hole in the ice, and - carrying your ax - swim a mile under a frozen lake, chopping your way out at the opposite shore. Then you build an igloo - to get warm. Then comes the dogsledding. You have to mush a team of dogs - from Anchorage to Chicago. Then you build another igloo - to rest." "THAT'S SIX EVENTS," Owen said. "A PENTATHLON IS ONLY FIVE." "So forget the second igloo," Dan Needham said. "I WONDER WHAT MISTER TUBULARI DOES FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE," Owen said. "Carrot juice," Dan said, fixing himself another whiskey. "Mister Tubulari makes his own carrot juice. ~ John Irving

Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord," she said as she did, "because this makes me very uncomfortable. ~ James S.A. Corey

The first measn by which He draws is affinity, that affinity which brings creatures of the same species together, and like to its like. With this cord of affinity He drew men to the Godhead, Whom He always resembles. In order that God may draw more to Himself, and forget His wrath. ~ Meister Eckhart

Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Godly fear, faith, and humility is the true threefold cord that can't easily be broken (see Ecclesiastes 4:12). ~ John Bevere

He wondered if maybe just occasionally the gods designed a woman fit for a king or a prince and then gave her to an ordinary man. Maybe they did such a thing once in a while, knowing an ordinary man would treasure her more, love her better. Maybe they even let him keep her - for a while. ~ Ellen O'Connell

What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

Men are like a bungee cord, they stretch as far as they can, but always bounce back safely."
"Yeah, but once in a while you hear about one breaking."
"And then he's dead."
"What's the logic in that?"
"There is no logic in love. ~ Michael Hornburg

Mrs. Bailey twisted the window cord around her finger. She looked better than any wife whose husband had just been carted off for murder had any right to look. ~ E.N. McMahon

Many women are singing together of this:
one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia,
one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,
one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
one is wiping the ass of her child,
one is staring out the window of a train
in the middle of Wyoming and one is
anywhere and some are everywhere and all
seem to be singing, although some can not
sing a note. ~ Anne Sexton

There was a Sears, Roebuck catalogue painfully twisted and shellacked and tied with a red cord. The white card beneath it said, An inexpensive doorstop." ... There were catsup bottles made into bud vases, closthespins decorated with crepe paper butterflies for use as curtin hold-backers, crocheted bags for silverware, bouquets of crepe paper and velvet flowers, an enormous funeral set piece of white organdy gardenias and dark green oilcloth leaves with REST IN PEACE spelled out in white pipe cleaners, embroidered pictures, burned wood match boxes, and fancy pillows by the hundreds. The pillows embraced every sentiment from FRANKY AND JOHNNY WERE LOVERS in black beads on a cerise satin background to the Twenty-Third Psalm in white on black velvet. It was an impressive exhibit of what loneliness can do to people. ~ Betty McDonald

Open a dictionary at random; metaphors fill every page. Take the word "fathom." for example. The meaning is clear. A fathom is a measurement of water depth, equivalent to about six feet. But fathom also means "to understand." Why?

Scrabble around in the word's etymological roots. "Fathom comes from the Anglo-Saxon faethm, meaning "the two arms outstretched." The term was originally used as a measurement of cloth, because the distance from fingertip to fingertip for the average man with his arms outsretched is roughly six feet. This technique was later extended to sounding the depths of bodies of water, since it was easy to lower a cord divided into six-foot increments, or fathoms, over the side of a boat. But how did fathom come to mean "to understand," as in "I can't fathom that" or "She's unfathomable"? Metaphorically, of course.

You master something- you learn to control or accept it-when you embrace it, when you get your arms around it, when you take it in hand. You comprehend something when you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it-fathom it.

Fathom took on its present significance in classic Aristotelian fashion: through the metaphorical transfer of its original meaning (a measurement of cloth or water) to an abstract concept (understanding). This is the primary purpose of metaphor: to carry over existing names or descriptions to things that are either so new that they haven't yet been named or so abstract that they cannot ~ James Geary

Even the clearest localization of pain in one area may, in fact, be originating from a distant area ... The reference of pain implies the existence of convergence of inputs within the spinal cord. This leads to the necessary involvement in central neural circuits in the simplest of peripheral disorders. It also leads to the possibility that the basic disorder is entirely central ... ~ Patrick David Wall

The lamb, having survived the storm unharmed and no longer afraid, came up to Jesus and put its mouth to his lips, there was no sniffing, one touch was all that was needed. Jesus opened his eyes, saw the lamb, then the livid sky like a black hand blocking whatever light remained. The olive tree still burned. His bones ached when he tried to move, but at least he was in one piece, if that can be said of a body so fragile that it takes only a clap of thunder to knock it to the ground. He sat up with some effort and reassured himself, more by touch than by sight, that he was neither burned nor paralyzed, none of his bones were broken, and apart from a loud buzzing in his head as insistent as the drone of a trumpet, he was all right. He drew the lamb to him and said, Don't be afraid, He only wanted to show you that you would have been dead by now if that was His will, and to show me that it was not I who saved your life but He. One last rumble of thunder slowly tore the air like a sigh, while below, the white patch of the flock seemed a beckoning oasis.
Struggling to overcome his weakness, Jesus descended the slope. The lamb, kept on its cord simply as a precaution, trotted at his side like a little dog. ~ Jose Saramago

It felt like being shot with an arrow, and Will jerked back. His wineglass crashed to the floor and shattered. He lurched to his feet, leaning both hands on the table. He was vaguely aware of stares, and the landlords anxious voice in his ear, but the pain was too great to think through, almost too great to breathe through. The tightness in his chest, the one he had thought of as one end of a cord tying him to Jem, had pulled so taut that it was strangling his heart. He stumbled away from his table, pushing through a knot of customers near the bar, and passed to the front door of the inn. All he could think of was air, getting air into his lungs to breathe. He pushed the doors open and half-tumbled out into the night. For a moment the pain in his chest eased, and he fell back against the wall of the inn. Rain was sheeting down, soaking his hair and clothes. He gasped, his heart stuttering with a misture of terror and desperation. Was this just the distance from Jem affecting him? He had never felt anything like this, even when Jem was at his worst, even when he'd been injured and Will had ached with sympathetic pain.
The cord snapped.
For a moment everything went white, the courtyard bleeching through as if with acid. Will jackknifed to his knees, vomiting up his supper into the mud. When the spasms had passed , he staggard to his feet and blindly away from the inn, as if trying to outpace his own pain. He fetched up against the wall of the stables, beside the horse ~ Cassandra Clare

Our sense of self, formulated in large part by the untold number of cross-related connections that we make with our physical, social, and family environments, is reliant upon fitting into our social fabric. The educational environment, family relationships, peer groups, books, television, films, music, along with an assortment of other cultural events shape our emergent persona. Our successes and failures interacting in the world leave their collective imprint upon the wet clay of our forming brains. We are sentimental creatures who cling to past memories. We are inquisitive critters who venture forth from our protective dens to explore new territory. We are perceptive organisms equipped with five basic senses. We are sentient beings who can consciously organize our sense impressions into guiding ideas and useful principles. Our survival responses form a central cord of our emotions. We are receptive, compassionate beings that respond with both body and mind to global stimuli. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

But Promethea cares carnally about what she says. Watch out for words with her! Because Promethea is the person who has not cut the cord binding words to her body. Everything she says is absolutely fresh. Comes straight from the flesh of her lungs, the fibers of her heart. She doesn't know any other way of speaking. That is why her words are few and fiery. And all her sentences are strong and young and incandescent, because they are caused by a convulsion of her whole earthly body. Promethea's thought is of quivering red lava. And all her remarks date from the beginnings of life. Even concerning details she is cosmogonic. She moves easily to the ends of the earth, the places where life takes on form or loses it. ~ Helene Cixous

My silver cord - the link between my body and my spirit - was extremely sensitive. It was what allowed me to sense dreamscapes at a distance. It could also snap me back into my skin. ~ Samantha Shannon

It's not called 'falling in love' for no reason. It's scary! It's like jumping out of a plane with no parachute. Or bungee-jumping without your cord attached. Or hang-gliding with only one wing. ~ Andrea Lochen

Love can be used to drain people. Through eye contact people send a cord out to drain you long distance. Through sexual manipulation, anyone who can make you like them can drain you. ~ Frederick Lenz

Interesting outfit."

Clearly unabashed, she merely glanced down at herself, slicked long-fingered, bloodred-tipped hands over her hips and thighs. Then laughed low in her throat. "I know. It's a little over the top, isn't it? But I've got a hot date tonight and zero time to go home to change."

Shock reverberated in his gut and zinged down the nerve rich column of his spinal cord. Taking a hot step forward, he demanded before he could stop himself, "With who?"

She gave him a cool look, clearly wondering what the hell business he thought it was of his. Still, she answered him, which he hadn't actually expected.

"Eduardo," she said, drawing the syllables out, her lips caressing them as if they were made of Godiva chocolates. "He's an - " Cutting herself off, she shook her head. "Well. You don't give a rat's rear end who he is."

"Sure I do," he forced himself to say in a bored tone, dismayed to discover that part of him was seriously tempted to grab those spandex- wrapped arms and shake the information out of her. ~ Susan Andersen

Mma Ramotswe found it difficult to imagine what it would be like to have no people. There were, she knew, those who had no others in this life, who had no uncles, or aunts, or distant cousins of any degree; people who were just themselves. Many white people were like that, for some unfathomable reason; they did not seem to want to have people and were happy to be just themselves. How lonely they must be
like spacemen deep in space, floating in darkness, but without even that silver, unfurling cord that linked the astronauts to their little metal womb of oxygen and warmth. For a moment, she indulged the metaphor, and imagined the tiny white van in space, slowly spinning against a background of stars and she, Mma Ramotswe, of the No. 1 Ladies' Space Agency, floating weightless, head over heels, tied to the tiny white van with a thin washing line. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

And upper to midcervical spinal cord, above C4. ~ David Baldacci

We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. ... Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity - our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels - can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate. ~ Murray Bookchin

This subject brings me to that vilest offspring of the herd mind
the odious militia. The man who enjoys marching in line and file to the strains of music falls below my contempt; he received his great brain by mistake
the spinal cord would have been amply sufficient. This heroism at command, this senseless violence, this accursed bombast of patriotism
how intensely I despise them! War is low and despicable, and I had rather be smitten to shreds than participate in such doings. ~ Albert Einstein

Your mortal attachments are like a puppet's strings," Avari said, both hands clasped casually at his back. "One need only pluck the right cord to make the puppet dance." His smile was almost creepier than his threats. "Dance, reaper! ~ Rachel Vincent

Once we understand just how to control genes, we have the potential for spinal cord regeneration, bone regeneration, and so on. It might also give us plumper chickens. ~ Jack Horner

You cannot sleep with the enemy and be successful ... Every cord that binds you to failure, every cord that binds you to fear, you gotta cut it! ~ Eric Thomas

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round. ~ William Butler Yeats

The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine ...
And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote: ... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment. ~ Harlan Ellison

As computer intelligence gets better, what will be possible when we interface our brains with computers? It might sound scary, but early evidence suggests otherwise: interfacing brains with machines can be helpful in treating traumatic brain injury, repairing spinal cord damage, and countless other applications. ~ Bill Maris

When we entered a classroom we always tossed our caps on the floor, to free our hands; as soon as we crossed the threshold we would throw them under the bench so hard that they struck the wall and raised a cloud of dust; this was "the way it should be done."

But the new boy either failed to notice this maneuver or was too shy to perform it himself, for he was still holding his cap on his lap at the end of the prayer. It was a head-gear of composite nature, combining elements of the busby, the lancer cap, the round hat, the otter-skin cap and the cotton nightcap--one of those wretched things whose mute ugliness has great depths of expression, like an idiot's face. Egg-shaped and stiffened by whalebone, it began with three rounded bands, followed by alternating diamond-shaped patches of velvet and rabbit fur separated by a red stripe, and finally there was a kind of bag terminating in a cardboard-lined polygon covered with complicated braid. A network of gold wire was attached to the top of this polygon by a long, extremely thin cord, forming a kind of tassel. The cap was new; its visor was shiny.

"Stand up," said the teacher.

He stood up; his cap fell. The whole class began to laugh.

He bent down and picked it up. A boy beside him knocked it down again with his elbow; he picked it up once again.

"Will you please put your helmet away?" said the teacher, a witty man. ~ Gustave Flaubert

We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud. ~ Russell Baker

The iron chain and the silken cord are both equally bonds. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Look deep within your soul and ask yourself - no matter who it concerns - is it worth it?
Is it worth losing your outer and inner peace?
Is it worth your happiness?
Is it worth your sanity?
If they are causing you stress; let them go and cut the cord.
The question that needs to be asked is - who do you love more? Yourself, or making other people happy? ~ Charlena E. Jackson

You know, Micah, that first night, when I saw you on Bridge Street, I wanted to kill you. I wanted to cut your throat and watch your blood soak into the dirt. I wanted to wrap a strangle cord around your neck and throttle you while you kicked and messed yourself."
"I'm shaking in my boots," Micah said, looking Han dead in the eyes.
Han stood and took a step toward him. "I'm what's hiding in the side street when you walk home from The Four Horses," he said. "I'm the shadow in Greystone Alley when you go out to take a piss. I'm the foot pad in the corridor when you visit the girlie at Grievous Hall."
Micah's eyes narrowed, his self-assurance wilting a bit. Han could tell he was going back over a hundred suspicious sights and sounds. "You've been following me?"
"I can come and go from your room, any time I want," Han said. "I can tell you what you say when you talk in your sleep. I know what your down low girlie whispers in your ear." He laughed...
Michah licked his lips. "Perhaps you take some kind of perverse pleasure in stalking me... ~ Cinda Williams Chima

If you can strike the cord of consistency on the guitar of life, the world will dance to your music of greatness ~ Osho Samuel Adetunji

My mom wasn't home to arbitrate, so he forced me to try to strangle him with a phone cord. ~ Felicia Day

I may not have any power over it at the moment, but at some point that must change. I can be very patient. I am the end of all things, nephew mine. I shall be the last. When birth has ended, I wil cut Clotho's cord, and she will be no more. The time will come when every last thread has been measured, and I will snip Lachesis from the great weave. In the end only Death and I will remain. Then I will cut his thread, and it will be me alone. With my last strength I will close the shears on my own life. I am the end of everything, including you. ~ Kelly McCullough

As Unto the bow the the cord is ,
So unto the man is woman;
Though she bends him, she obeys him,
Though she draws him , yet she follows:
Useless each without the other. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again.

How many books had she touched?

How many had she felt?

She walked over and did it again, this time much slower, with her hand facing forward, allowing the dough of her palm to feel the small hurdle of each book. It felt like magic, like beauty, as bright lines of light shone down from a chandelier. Several times, she almost pulled a title from its place but didn't dare disturb them. They were too perfect. ~ Markus Zusak

And Levin, a happy father and a man in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord, lest he be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun, for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living. ~ Leo Tolstoy