Unbent Quotes

The monumental pomp of age Was with this goodly personage; A stature undepressed in size, Unbent, which rather seemed to rise In open victory o'er the weight Of seventy years, to loftier height. ~ William Wordsworth

You are wind in a stark tree,
you are the stark tree unbent,
you are a strung bow,
you are an arrow. ~ Hilda Doolittle

Those who are skilled in archery bend their bow only when they are preparing to use it; when they do not require it, they allow it to remain unbent, for otherwise it would remain unserviceable when the time for using it arrived. So it is with man. If he were to devote himself unceasingly to a dull round of business, without breaking the monotony by cheerful amusements, he would fall imperceptibly into idiocy, or be struck by paralysis ~ Herodotus

Merris, this is Mae and Jamie."
Merris unbent slightly. "Alan's young lady, I presume?"
Mae actually blushed. "Er - no."
"Young Nicholas's, then," Merris said wearily. "What they all see in you, I cannot imagine."
Nick leaned against the stall ansd smirked at her. "You'll never know until you try. ~ Sarah Rees Brennan

Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the centre vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say 'patter' intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This is another thing that quantitative studies of American time use cannot show you: for the majority of mothers, time is fractured and subdivided, as if streaming through a prism; for the majority of fathers, it moves in an unbent line. ~ Jennifer Senior

Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave. ~ Frederick Busch

She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book. ~ Charles Lamb