Shells Quotes - Page 8

• If that a pearl may in a toad's head dwell, And may be found too in an oyster shell.

  John Bunyan

  Oysters, Toads, Pearls

  John Bunyan (2013). “The Pilgrim’s Progress Simplified: Includes Modern Translation, Study Guide, Historical Context, Biography, and Character Index”, p.125, BookCaps Study Guides

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• I must be the only player in the world who ever injured himself for a tournament by stepping on a shell on the beach. I don't know what I'm going to do.

  Goran Ivanisevic

  Beach, Player, World

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• From the clayey soil of northern Wyoming is mined bentonite, which is used as filler in candy, gum, and lipstick. We Americans are great on fillers, as if what we have, what we are, is not enough. We have a cultural tendency toward denial, but being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We gave only to look at the houses we build to see how we build *against* space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Pain, Loneliness, Pie

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• If he'd been making shell-cases during the war it might have been better for music.

  Maurice Ravel

  War, Musical, Might

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• People have always frightened and bored me consequently I have been within my own shell.

  Jackson Pollock

  People, Bored, Frightened

  Jackson Pollock (2011). “American Letters: 1927-1947”, p.16, Polity

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• Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist...and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells....By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane.

  Robert Hunter

  Morning, Fall, Blood

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• I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

  Charles Stross

  Atheist, Believe, Waiting

  "The Fuller Memorandum (The Laundry Files, Book 3)". Book by Charles Stross, July 1, 2010.

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• In the name of what - except perhaps the coefficient of rarity - does man adorn himself with necklaces of shells and not spider's webs, with fox fur and not fox innards? In the name of what I don't know. Don't dirt, trash and filth, which are man's companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him and isn't it serving him well to remind him of their beauty?

  Jean Dubuffet

  Men, Names, Doe

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• War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Horse, Children, War

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• But now all the natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely that the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells.

  Mary Gaitskill

  Loss, Turtles, Order

  FaceBook post by Mary Gaitskill from Oct 30, 2011

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• Energy companies, such as Chevron and Shell, and oil producing countries, such as Kuwait and Venezuela, pump crude oil from their vast land holdings and sell it on the world market

  Gary Miller

  Country, Land, Kuwait

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• The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon . . . Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Sky, Horizon, Air Power

  Evelyn Waugh (1994). “The Sword of Honour Trilogy”

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• Do not let fear confine your life Inside a shell of doubt; A turtle never moves until His head is sticking out.

  Charles Ghigna

  Fear, Moving, Turtles

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• The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, - there is no Deity.

  Reginald Horace Blyth

  Smell, Religion, Looks

  Reginald Horace Blyth (1948). “Zen in English literature and oriental classics”

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• I think I need to spend some time with safari but what arrests my attention are salient, sadomasochism, saccadic, and salad days. I think I will go learn more about coral only to learn a lot more about corollary and counterturn and coffin nail. I go from magnificence to means to marquee to maniac to distyle, ductile, hindsight, shell game, veronica, yardstick, ball field, magpie, variegated, and close shave.

  Dara Wier

  Mean, Thinking, Games

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• She is a mortal danger to all men. She is beautiful without knowing it, and possesses charms that she's not even aware of. She is like a trap set by nature - a sweet perfumed rose in whose petals Cupid lurks in ambush! Anyone who has seen her smile has known perfection. She instills grace in every common thing and divinity in every careless gesture. Venus in her shell was never so lovely, and Diana in the forest never so graceful as you.

  Cyrano de Bergerac

  Romantic, Beautiful, Sweet

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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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• I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.

  Bryce Courtenay

  Country, Real, Night

  Bryce Courtenay (1989). “The Power of One”, Random House LLC

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• The roar of the traffic, the passage of undifferentiated faces, this way and that way, drugs me into dreams; rubs the features from faces. People might walk through me. And what is this moment of time, this particular day in which I have found myself caught? The growl of traffic might be any uproar - forest trees or the roar of wild beasts. Time has whizzed back an inch or two on its reel; our short progress has been cancelled. I think also that our bodies are in truth naked. We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Thinking, Two

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.691, Wordsworth Editions

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• Whatever distinguishes one lump of flesh from another when we're alive, we're all the same once we're dead. Just used-up shells.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Alive, Flesh, Used

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• ...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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