Tangled Quotes - Page 6

• How can you shorten the subject? That stern struggle with the multiplication table, for many people not yet ended in victory, how can you make it less? Square root, as obdurate as a hardwood stump in a pasturenothing but years of effort can extract it. You can't hurry the process. Or pass from arithmetic to algebra; you can't shoulder your way past quadratic equations or ripple through the binomial theorem. Instead, the other way; your feet are impeded in the tangled growth, your pace slackens, you sink and fall somewhere near the binomial theorem with the calculus in sight on the horizon.

  Stephen Leacock

  Fall, Struggle, Math

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• I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.

  Colum McCann

  Wind, Rivers, Alive

  Colum McCann (2009). “Let The Great World Spin”, p.240, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• I pulled Lena's necklace out of my pocket. I let the charms roll around in my palm, but they were tangled and meaningless without her. The necklace was heavier than I imagined, or maybe it was the weight of my conscience.

  Kami Garcia

  Pockets, Weight, Necklaces

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• How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood, When fond recollection recalls them to view; The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled wildwood, And every loved spot which my infancy knew.

  Samuel Woodworth

  Nature, Heart, Views

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• In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate was inescapable. Why did these women love each other to the point of madness? Why did they loathe one another so vehemently, and why did sworn enemies feel such horror and fascination for one another? Why should furious hate become obsession, then intoxication and the very reason to live?Because love and hate were the two heads of the demon.

  Shan Sa

  Wall, Hate, Fate

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• Your hair is a tangled mess,"he said, thinking he liked it that way, like a lion's mane.

  Kim Harrison

  Thinking, Hair, Way

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• It's how they've stayed popular for so long. By not doing anything that will make them look like fools. They never leave home without their safety nets and I think, good for them, but the thing with safety nets is this. I got tangled in them so many times and the Stella girls always seemed to leave me dangling, upside down, to the point where I almost couldn't breathe anymore.

  Melina Marchetta

  Girl, Home, Thinking

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• Wait." "Stop?" I bit my lip and nodded. "Stop everything, or just go no further?" "Just...just no further." "Done." He gathered me into his arms and kissed me, one hand tangled in my hair and the other one caressing down my back, our hearts pulsing out a cadence that the musician in me translated into a concert of lust.

  Tammara Webber

  Heart, Hair, Hands

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• Gather up your telegrams
  Your faded pictures, best laid plans
  Books and postcards, 45's
  Every sunset in the sky
  Carry with you maps and string, flashlights
  Friends who make you sing
  And stars to help you find your place
  Music, hope and amazing grace
  Maybe what we leave
  Is nothing but a tangled little mystery
  Maybe what we take
  Is nothing that has ever had a name

  Mary Chapin Carpenter

  Music, Stars, Book

  Song: Your Life Story, Album: The Calling

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• There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

  Charles de Lint

  Memories, Distance, Collective Memory

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• No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

  Zadie Smith

  Lying, Soul, Infinity

  Zadie Smith (2001). “White Teeth”, p.408, Penguin UK

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• You don't know when you're twenty-three. You don't know what it really means to crawl into someone else's life and stay there. You can't see all the ways you're going to get tangled, how you're going to bond skin to skin. How the idea of separating will feel in five years, in ten - in fifteen. When Georgie thought about divorce now, she imagined lying side by side with Neal on two operating tables while a team of doctors tried to unthread their vascular systems. She didn't know at twenty-three.

  Rainbow Rowell

  Love, Lying, Team

  Rainbow Rowell (2014). “Landline: A Novel”, p.201, St. Martin's Press

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• Curiosity is a raw and genuine sign from deep inside our tangled psyches, and we'd do well to follow the direction it points us in.

  Po Bronson

  Psych, Curiosity, Genuine

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• Many a night I saw the Pleiads,
  Rising thro' the mellow shade,
  Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies,
  Tangled in a silver braid.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Stars, Science, Night

  Alfred Tennyson Tennyson, Baron, Alfred Lord Tennyson (2014). “Fifty Poems”, p.112, Cambridge University Press

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• Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which-miraculously, it seems-merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

  Arthur Koestler

  Fate, Destiny, Hands

  "Bricks to Babel". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1980.

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• Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can't tell which is which until you've shot 'em both, and then it's too late.

  M. L. Stedman

  Snakes, Too Late, Ems

  M. L. Stedman (2012). “The Light Between Oceans”, p.180, Simon and Schuster

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• Biblical references about knowledge and good and evil often get tangled up.

  James Rollins

  Biblical, Evil, Good And Evil

  Twitter post from Aug 10, 2014

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• No, I had never intentionally caused anyone physical pain, but I had hurt Ian deeply enough just by hurting myself. Human lives were so impossibly tangled. What a mess.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Hurt, Pain, Enough

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• Those East Coast rich kids are a different breed, on a fast track to nowhere. Your friends in Seattle are downright Canadian in their niceness. None of you has a cell phone. The girls wear hoodies and big cotton underpants and walk around with tangled hair and smiling, adorned backpacks. Do you know how absolutely exotic it is that you haven’t been corrupted by fashion and pop culture? A month ago I mentioned Ben Stiller, and do you remember how you responded? ‘Who’s that?’ I loved you all over again.

  Maria Semple

  Girl, Fashion, Kids

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• Adam was in the dream, too; he traced the tangled pattern of ink with his finger. He said, "Scio quid hoc est." As he traced it further and further down on the bare skin of Ronan's back, Ronan himself disappeared entirely, and the tattoo got smaller and smaller. It was a Celtic knot the size of a wafer, and then Adam, who had become Kavinsky, said "Scio quid estis vos." He put the tattoo in his mouth and swallowed it. Ronan woke with a start, ashamed and euphoric. The euphoria wore off long before the shame did. He was never sleeping again.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Tattoo, Dream, Sleep

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• A part of her wanted to tell him she still loved him, and that even though this love was hopeless and long over, it still consumed her year after year. It was a tangled hairball of feelings and she couldn't pull forth any one strand.

  Ann Brashares

  Years, Long, Feelings

  Ann Brashares (2011). “Sisterhood Everlasting (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants): A Novel”, p.88, Random House

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• A bachelor gets tangled up with a lot of women in order to avoid getting tied up to one.

  Helen Rowland

  Women, Order, Bachelors

  Irvin S. Cobb, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Helen Rowland, Richard Saunders (2017). “We Should All Be So Feminine: We Should All Be a Feminist: We Should All Be Feminists”, p.41, Lulu.com

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• Lord knows I've paid my dues getting through, tangled up in blue.

  Bob Dylan

  Sadness, Blue, Lord

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• If time was a string connecting all of your stories, that party would be the point where everything knots up. And that knot keeps growing and growing, getting more and more tangled, dragging the rest of your stories into it.

  Jay Asher

  Party, Would Be, Stories

  Jay Asher (2011). “Thirteen Reasons Why”, p.239, Penguin

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• Matt's brother and the blond cook spent a good portion of last season tangling the sheets. Historically, said cook tangled many other sheets with dexterity and aplomb." "Aplomb" "It's a polite way to say she banged often, well and without too much discrimination." "That also sounded polite." "I was raised well.

  Nora Roberts

  Brother, Way, Lasts

  Nora Roberts (2012). “The Novels of Nora Roberts”, p.999, Penguin

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