Shells Quotes - Page 7

• ...like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?

  Robin McKinley

  Ocean, Oysters, What If

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• Someone creeping into his yard in the dead of night? More likely there's a very shell-shocked cat wandering somewhere, covered in potato peelings.

  J. K. Rowling

  Cat, Night, Potatoes

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• He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculates wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells.

  William S. Burroughs

  Dream, Wall, Sleep

  William S. Burroughs (1984). “Naked lunch”, Grove Pr

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• Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.

  Lionel Shriver

  Games, Three, Kevin

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.234, Counterpoint Press

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• His words were still clear in her mind from that first meeting. "Whoever eats this will love you." She looked into the mirror, at her birthmark, bright as blood, at her kiss-stung lips, at the absurd smile stretching across her face. Carefully separating out the crushed pieces of shell, she pulled the dried pulp free from its cage of veins. Piece by piece, she put the sweet brown fruit in her own mouth and swallowed it down.

  Holly Black

  Sweet, Love You, Kissing

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• No,” he responded, reaching out to trace the shell of her ear. “They grew back even more beautiful. Blue edged with silver.” Elena laughed at the scowl in his voice.

  Nalini Singh

  Beautiful, Blue, Voice

  Nalini Singh (2009). “Angels' Blood”, p.71, Penguin

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• Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?

  C. S. Lewis

  Trouble, Force, Stillbirth

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.11, Faber & Faber

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• She saw through the shell of me into the center of me

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Saws

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.113, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I’ve always felt almost human. I’ve always known that there’s something about me that’s different than other dogs. Sure, I’m stuffed into a dog’s body, but that’s just the shell. It’s what’s inside that’s important. The soul. And my soul is very human.

  Garth Stein

  Dog, Soul, Important

  Garth Stein (2011). “Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog”, p.2, Harper Collins

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• Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels / And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: / Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question.../ Oh, do not ask, 'What is it?' / Let us go and make our visit"' 'I'm in love with you,' he said quietly.

  John Green

  Love You, Night, Oysters

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.90, Penguin

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• I can't deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

  Sylvia Plath

  Suicide, Real, Character

  "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath".

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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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• I'm scared," she said. "These days I feel like a snail without a shell." "I'm scared too," I said. "I feel like a frog without any webs." She looked up and smiled. Wordlessly we walked over to a shaded part of the building and held each other and kissed, a shell-less snail and a webless frog.

  Haruki Murakami

  Frogs, Scared, Building

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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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• 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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• ...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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• 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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