Awkward Beginnings Quotes & Sayings

He actually cared. It was an odd friendship- awkward, grown slowly from beginnings of mutual contempt- but it was real nonetheless. — Anne Perry

He laughed and was about to retort when she grabbed his collar and pulled him into her. She clamped her lips around his mouth and mashed her face into his. He took a step back in surprise and she went with him, stepping in a patch of wet floor. Her legs went out from under her and flailed as she fell, whacking him in the throat on the way down. She looked up at him as he gagged and coughed, and from across the corridor she could hear Tanith laughing hysterically. "I think I need practice," Valkyrie muttered. — Derek Landy

...she knew from school that that sort of literature was boring: Gorky was correct but somehow ponderous; Mayakovsky was very correct but somehow awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin was progressive, but you could die yawning if you tried to read him through; Turgenev was limited to his nobleman's ideals; Goncharov was associated with the beginnings of Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoi came to favor patriarchal peasantry - and their teacher did not recommend reading Tolstoi's novels because they were very long and only confused the clear critical essays written about him. And then they reviewed a batch of writers totally unknown to anyone: Dostoyevsky, Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin. It was true that one did not even have to remember the titles of their works. In all this long procession, only Pushkin shone like a sun. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My moral code is no more or less than my likes and dislikes. — Albert Camus

I held my head back and looked upward. The moon was hidden and only a lone star dared to break through the darkness. — Nancy B. Brewer

I wonder at my incapacity for easy banter, smooth conversation, empty words to fill awkward moments. I don't have a closet filled with umms and ellipses ready to insert at the beginnings and ends of sentences. I don't know how to be a verb, an adverb, any kind of modifier. I'm a noun through and through. — Tahereh Mafi

The reason for my discomfort was simple. Our story - however romantic I could make it sound in my head - sometimes sounded a little tawdry in the re-telling. There was no escaping the fact that I'd been living with the father of my child when we met; that I'd cheated on him, then left; that what James and I now shared was born out of the ruins of another relationship. — Catherine Sanderson

I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things. — David Nicholls

No one, not even Shakespeare, surpasses Milton in his command of the sound, the music, the weight and taste and texture of English words. — Philip Pullman

Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack. — Sun Tzu

He looked at me with serious eyes, but not the kind that made me wonder what I'd done wrong. The kind that made me wonder what I'd done right. — Denise Jaden

Jesus Christ never went around grumbling and complaining — Harper Lee

I love talking to the youth and helping them as much as I can or encouraging them, if I can help them at all. — Sheila E.