Fluttering Quotes - Page 3

I hear an almost inaudible but pervasive discontent with the price we pay for our current materialism. And I hear a fluttering of hope that there might be more to life than bread and circuses.

Bill Moyers

Strength, Might, Pay

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He is solid; immovable, iron-willed. He showed me one day his killing bottle. I'm imprisoned in it. Fluttering against the glass. Because I can see through it I still think I can escape. I have hope. But it's all an illusion. A thick round wall of glass.

John Fowles

Wall, Thinking, Glasses

John Fowles (1980). “The collector”, Dell Pub Co

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Vain-glorious man, when fluttering wind does blow
In his light wing's, is lifted up to sky;
The scorn of-knighthood and true chivalry.
To think, without desert of gentle deed
And noble worth, to be advanced high,
Such praise is shame, but honour, virtue's meed,
Doth bear the fairest flower in honourable seed.

Edmund Spenser

Flower, Blow, Men

Edmund Spenser (1965). “Books I and II of the Faerie queene: the mutability cantos, and selections from the minor poetry”

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To live as I incline, or not to live at all: so do I wish; so wisheth also the holiest. But alas! how have I still - inclination? Have I-still a goal? A haven towards which MY sail is set?A good wind? Ah, he only who knoweth WHITHER he saileth, knoweth what wind is good, and a fair wind for him.What still remaineth to me? A heart weary and flippant; and unstable will; fluttering wings; a broken backbone.This seeking for MY home: O Zarathustra, dost thou know that this seeking hath been MY home-sickening; it eateth me up.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Heart, Home, Wind

Friedrich Nietzsche (2016). “Thus spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None”, p.281, Friedrich Nietzsche

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The space that I can call mine.. is so small that my ideas have become small. I am like a caterpillar in a cocoon of paper; all around me are sketches for sculptures, small drawings that seem like moths fluttering against the windows, beating their wings to escape from this tiny space.. Every day the ideas come more reluctantly, as though they know I will starve them and stunt their growth.

Audrey Niffenegger

Wings, Ideas, Drawing

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That night, like every other night since I’d met her, I curled Grace into my arms, listening to her parents’ muffled movements in the living room. They were like busy little brainless birds, fluttering in and out of their nest at all hours of the day or night, so involved in the pleasure of nest building that they hadn’t noticed that it had been empty for years.

Maggie Stiefvater

Night, Years, Bird

Maggie Stiefvater (2011). “Shiver”, p.167, Scholastic UK

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He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

Philip K. Dick

Life, Reality, Moths

Philip K. Dick (2012). “Ubik”, p.136, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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You could be attached to merely a description of a plant or a flower. Or a narrative of an event. Or rage at injustice. Isaiah and the other Hebrew prophets, in their rage, were being altogether attached - not at all detached, although as I think of the word "detachment," I also think of a sheet of paper, loose from its notebook, fluttering around somewhere in the wind trying to find its home again.

Gerald Stern

Notebook, Flower, Home

Source: therumpus.net

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The gentle fair on nervous tea relies,
Whilst gay good-nature sparkles in her eyes;
An inoffensive scandal fluttering round,
Too rough to tickle, and too light to wound.

George Crabbe

Eye, Gay, Light

George Crabbe, John Crabbe (1834). “The poetical works of the Rev. George Crabbe: in eight volumes”, p.300

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Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is THERE, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate. The logic of events always gives way to the logic of the senses.

Ray Bradbury

Fighting, Order, Color

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The World Trade Organization, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of 'reform'.

Arundhati Roy

Writing, Organization, Arrogance

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The image that I remember most of all is of the Fenerbahçe players storming into the stadium before kickoff. They were called the canaries because of their yellow jerseys. It was as if they, like canaries, were fluttering into the stadium out of a hole. I loved it. It was poetry.

Orhan Pamuk

Player, Yellow, Jersey

Source: www.spiegel.de

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It's nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere - on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.

Ben Brantley

Mean, Play, Church

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From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth.

Robert Aris Willmott

Reading, Book, Thoughtful

Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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The orange sky is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill.

Isaac Babel

Horse, Sunset, Yesterday

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Those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know--and everything I had to know. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were. That within the real world, a place like this existed. In the space of those ten seconds I became I tiny bird, fluttering in the air, the wind rushing by. From high in the sky I could see a scene far away. It was so far off I couldn't make it out clearly, yet something was there, and I knew that someday I would travel to that place.

Haruki Murakami

Real, Air, Hands

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In my dreams I gorge on chocolates, I roll in chocolates, and their texture is not brittle but soft as flesh, like a thousand mouths on my body, devouring me in fluttering small bites. To die beneath their tender gluttony seems the culmination of every temptation I have ever known.

Joanne Harris

Dream, Temptation, Chocolate

Joanne Harris (2000). “Chocolat”, p.188, Penguin

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When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a flickering sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

Donna Tartt

Thinking, Land, Forever

"The Goldfinch". Book by Donna Tartt, 2013.

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All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.

Vita Sackville-West

Benches, Share, Craftsman

1926 The Land,'Summer'.

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Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights are fluttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack
And leave your friends and go.
O never fear, lads, naught's to dread,
Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There's nothing but the night.

Alexander Pope

Fear, Night, Fire

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And whether this happiness lasted a hundred seconds or ten minutes, it was so far removed from time that it resembled every other genuine happiness as completely as one fluttering blue lycaenid butterfly resembles another.

Hermann Hesse

Butterfly, Blue, Hundred

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It does help to actually realize that however stunning the person who is, you know, fluttering eyelashes at you, she doesn't do anything to match up to your wife.

Colin Firth

Eyelashes, Wife, Doe

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The train skimmed on softly, slithering, black pennants fluttering, black confetti lost on its own sick-sweet candy wind, down the hill, with the two boys pursuing, the air was so cold they ate ice cream with each breath.

Ray Bradbury

Sweet, Boys, Ice Cream

Ray Bradbury (2017). “Something Wicked This Way Comes: A Novel”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty.

Nicole Krauss

Book, Writing, White

Nicole Krauss (2006). “The History of Love: A Novel”, p.9, W. W. Norton & Company

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Handsome enough' is this Grim Reaper, Who can snuff all these 'brief candles,' every fluttering soul sucking the air, from this hall" -The Vampire Lestat

Anne Rice

Air, Soul, Vampire

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