Clutch Quotes - Page 3

• It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Letting Go, Ashes, World

  Madeleine L'Engle (2008). “A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles”, p.95, Macmillan

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• Night of Sleepless Love The night above. We two. Full moon. I started to weep, you laughed. Your scorn was a god, my laments moments and doves in a chain. The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand. Dawn married us on the bed, our mouths to the frozen spout of unstaunched blood. The sun came through the shuttered balcony and the coral of life opened its branches over my shrouded heart.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Pain, Distance, Heart

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• When a man dies he clutches in his hands only that which he has given away during his lifetime.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Men, Hands, Generosity

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• Anthony looked down at his evil clutches -- hands, he reminded himself, hands -- and grinned anew.

  Julia Quinn

  Hands, Evil

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• Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.

  Rebecca Solnit

  War, Commitment, Doors

  "Hope In The Dark". Book by Rebecca Solnit, 2010.

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• Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Sex, Animal, Men

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• Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.

  Zadie Smith

  Girl, Fall, Dark

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• Oh, the strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

  John Steinbeck

  Taste, Used, Lost

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.113, Penguin

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• In New York’s Times Square a white-clad girl clutches her purse and skirt as an uninhibited sailor plants his lips squarely on hers.

  Alfred Eisenstaedt

  Girl, New York, Squares

  "Mets-Phillies enters timeline of history" by Steve Berthiaume, www.espn.com. May 2, 2011.

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• How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Memories, Raw Materials, Daily Work

  Lawrence Durrell (2012). “The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea”, p.129, Faber & Faber

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• Well, there it is. That's Jeeves. Where others merely smite the brow and clutch the hair, he acts. Napoleon was the same.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Hair, Jeeves, Wells

  P.G. Wodehouse (2009). “Joy in the Morning: (Jeeves & Wooster)”, p.181, Random House

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• The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Voice, Giving

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• Love is like quicksilver in the hand. Leave the fingers open and it stays. Clutch it and it darts away.

  Dorothy Parker

  Love, Inspirational, Life

  Dorothy Parker (2004). “Dorothy Parker in Her Own Words”, Taylor Trade Publishing

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• You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bolt; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life. I would not wish such a love on anyone, man or woman, for it can make your life a paradise, or it can destroy you utterly.

  Juliet Marillier

  Heart, Men, Wish

  Juliet Marillier (2010). “Daughter of the Forest: Book One of the Sevenwaters Trilogy”, p.72, Macmillan

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• Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

  William James

  Lonely, Independent, Science

  William James (2012). “The Will to Believe and Human Immortality”, p.133, Courier Corporation

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• I feel the urge, familiar now, to wrench myself from my body and speak directly into her mind. It is the same urge, I realize, that makes me want to kiss her every time I see her, because even a sliver of distance between us is infuriating. Our fingers, loosely woven a moment ago, now clutch together, her palm tacky with moisture, mine rough in places where I have grabbed too many handles on too many moving trains. Now she looks pale and small, but her eyes make me think of wide-open skies that I have never actually seen, only dreamed of.

  Veronica Roth

  Distance, Moving, Eye

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• Eventually your body will learn the alliances it has to make with itself,' Kenny had said - as if Cam was a factory full of strike-prone workers, or worse, a clutch of slaves forced into unwanted labor.

  Neal Shusterman

  Alliances, Body, Slave

  Neal Shusterman (2012). “Unwind Unboxed: Unwind; UnStrung: an Unwind story; UnWholly”, p.629, Simon and Schuster

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• Good. Now the first thing you do is press in the clutch and slide the gear into reverse." She placed his hand on the gear shift in the center of her car, and showed him how to move it up and down. "You know, you really shouldn't fondle that in front of me, Grace. It's cruel." "Julian! Do you mind? I'm only trying to show you how to shift my gears." He snorted. "I wish you'd shift my gears like that.

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Moving, Hands, Car

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• Crank, You See isn't any ordinary monster. It's like a giant octopus, weaving its tentacles not just around you, but through you, squeezing not hard enough to kill you, but enough to keep you from reeling until you try to get away. Try, and you hunger for it grasping clutch, the way its tendrils prop you up, your need intensifying exponentially every minute you refuse to admit its being (p.469)

  Ellen Hopkins

  Octopus, Trying, Monsters

  Ellen Hopkins (2012). “Ellen Hopkins: Crank Trilogy”, p.328, Simon and Schuster

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• There's no point in comforting words, in telling her she'll be all right. She's no fool. Her hand reaches out and I clutch it like a lifeline. As if it's me who's dying instead of Rue.

  Suzanne Collins

  Hands, Comforting, Dying

  Suzanne Collins (2011). “The Hunger Games Trilogy”, p.310, Scholastic Inc.

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• Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.

  Patricia McCormick

  Fog, Trying, Remember

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• It was love, she thought, love that never clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of human gain. The world by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reading, Mean, Boys

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Ao farol: To the lighthouse: Edição bilíngue português - inglês”, p.208, Editora Landmark LTDA

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• How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!

  Margaret Mitchell

  Chains That Bind, Chains

  Margaret Mitchell (2007). “Gone with the Wind”, p.255, Simon and Schuster

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• This is a long goodbye, yet not time enough. I have no aptitude for this. I cannot learn this. I would hold on, and hold on, until my hands clutch at emptiness.

  Juliet Marillier

  Goodbye, Hands, Long

  Juliet Marillier (2010). “Son of the Shadows: Book Two of the Sevenwaters Trilogy”, p.47, Macmillan

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• The United States tried, by depressing the clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to remain neutral, but it became increasingly obvious that the nation was going to get into a war, especially since it was almost 1812.

  Dave Barry

  Depressing, War, United States

  Dave Barry (2010). “Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States”, p.60, Ballantine Books

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