Shells Quotes - Page 10

• Went to get coffee today-opened my change purse. Sea shells fell out. Barista goes "Sorry, we only take cash or credit." So there's that.

  Taylor Swift

  Sorry, Coffee, Sea

  Twitter post from Jun 23, 2012

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• I don't know if I've come of age, but I'm certainly older now. I feel shrunken, as if there's a tiny ancient Oliver Tate inside me operating the levers of a life-size Oliver-shaped shell. A shell on which a decrepit picture show replays the same handful of images. Every night I come to the same place and wait till the sky catches up with my mood. The pattern is set. This is, no doubt, the end.

  Joe Dunthorne

  Night, Sky, Waiting

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• The body on the ground is nothing more than a shell, a husk, and I am filled with a sense of peace. Yes, I think. Yes. This is what I want to be. An instrument of mercy, not vengeance.

  R.L. LaFevers

  Thinking, Body, Want

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• There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred. Suddenly we are touching the sacred part -- running to the shoreline, feeling the first cold burst of water on our ankles, reaching into the tide to catch at shells before they ebb away from our fingers. We have returned to a world that is capable of glistening, and we are wading deeper within it.

  David Levithan

  Running, Water, Childhood

  David Levithan (2013). “Every Day”, p.14, Egmont UK

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• That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.

  Ted Hughes

  Children, People, Walking Dead

  Ted Hughes, Christopher Reid (2008). “Letters of Ted Hughes”, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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• He likes you, too." Finn repeated. "And don't tell me to shut up." "Shut up!" -Kingdom Keepers, Shell Game

  Ridley Pearson

  Games, Kingdoms, Likes

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• There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

  Neil Gaiman

  Pain, Loss, Unique

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• ...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

  Milan Kundera

  Tragedy, Mazes, Way

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• Or at school you might have been prodded to come “out of your shell”—that noxious expression which fails to appreciate that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans are just the same.

  Susan Cain

  School, Animal, Expression

  Susan Cain (2012). “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking”, p.6, Broadway Books

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• Maxim 20: If you’re not willing to shell your own position, you’re not willing to win. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries

  Howard Tayler

  Winning, Mercenary, Position

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• Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people - what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes.

  Virginia Woolf

  Eye, Glasses, Mirrors

  Virginia Woolf (2017). “A arte da brevidade: Contos”, p.7, Autêntica

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• What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously. As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I've thought on it. Often I've thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man's in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. "It's hard and strong, that shell, and it's all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that's all. That's all there is. It's all him and nothing else, inside.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Strong, Men, Self

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• Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl

  Rumi

  Happiness, Death, Spiritual

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• A man who can take anything will find most things unsatisfying. And a man without memories is just a shell.

  Mitch Albom

  Memories, Men

  Mitch Albom (2012). “The Time Keeper”, p.74, Hachette UK

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• In school, they would tell you that life wouldn’t come to you; you had to go out and make it your own. But when it came to love, the message for girls seemed to be this: Don’t. Don’t go after what you want. Wait. Wait to be chosen, as if only in the eye of another could one truly find value. The message was confusing and infuriating. It was a shell game with no actual pea under the rapidly moving cups.

  Libba Bray

  Girl, Moving, School

  Libba Bray (2011). “Beauty Queens”, p.148, Scholastic Inc.

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• We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

  Erich Maria Remarque

  Real, War, Believe

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• My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water'd shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these, Because my love is come to me. Raise me a daïs of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me.

  Christina Rossetti

  Life, Work, Eye

  Christina Georgina Rossetti, “A Birthday”

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• In the summer I stretch out on the shore And think of you. Had I told the sea What I felt for you, It would have left its shores, Its shells, Its fish, And followed me.

  Nizar Qabbani

  Summer, Thinking, Sea

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• And then there was Tick. Brave little Tick, who had flown into the faces of an army of rats to save his baby sister. Tick - who never spoke much. Tick - who shared her food. Tick - who was after all just a roach. Just a roach who had given all the time she had left so that Boots could have more. Gregor pressed Boots's fingers against his lips and felt scalding tears begin to slide down his cheeks. He hadn't cried, not the whole time he'd been down here, and there had been plenty of bad stuff. But somehow Tick's sacrifice had crushed whatever thin shell remained between him and sorrow.

  Suzanne Collins

  Baby, Army, Sacrifice

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• What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

  Douglas Hofstadter

  Dream, Pedestal, World

  "Godel, Escher, Bach". Book by Douglas Hofstadter, observer.com. 1979.

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• The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel you must break the shell.

  Meister Eckhart

  Want, Break, Kernel

  Meister Eckhart, Raymond Bernard Blakney (1941). “Celebrated 14th Century Mystic and Scholastic Meister Eckhart”

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• Religion becomes a hollow shell of its former self when ritual remains and thoughtful reflection disappears.

  Nouman Ali Khan

  Reflection, Thoughtful, Self

  FaceBook post by Nouman Ali Khan from Aug 15, 2013

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• Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.

  Marcel Proust

  Oysters, Knives, Parent

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• 'I shall have heaven and earth for my coffin and its shell; the sun and moon for my two round symbols of jade, the stars and constellations for my pearls and jewels; and all things assisting as the mourners. Will not the provisions for my funeral be complete? What could you add to them?'

  Zhuangzi

  Stars, Moon, Jewels

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• The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.

  Hermann Hesse

  Voice, Self, Judging

  Hermann Hesse (1983). “Steppenwolf”, Bantam

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