Battens Quotes & Sayings

The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude. — Andrea Dworkin

Political correctness is a minefield — Marian Keyes

Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales. — Yuval Noah Harari

I have to have a passion in my life. — George McGovern

Midnight has fallen on the darkened streets of Haught and Battens Hill, and the watchman saith, All is well. We have prospered by the day, set our lock and bolt, and tried the windows, and all is well. Want, murder, desperation, and despair still roam in the filthy alleys and tenements of The Steps and breed countless wrongs in their path, yet the watchman passing cries, All is well. The watchman clears away the hungry children who hunt for scraps behind the New Theatre while a nobleman's carriage rolls by, but decent folk turn, sighing in their sleep, and faintly hear the report: all is well. The prison gates are shut, and what is within is surely confined there, and touches us not; therefore, all is well. — Andrei Baltakmens

It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists and battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent. — Henry David Thoreau

I've often described my book 'Anno Dracula' as 'literally, a vampire novel' - in that it battens on to other novels and sucks their lifeblood, transforming as well as feeding off them. — Kim Newman

Tom felt his darkness. His father was beautiful and clever, his mother was short and mathematically sure. Each of his brothers and sisters had looks or gifts or fortune. Tom loved all of them passionately, but he felt heavy and earth-bound. He climbed ecstatic mountains and floundered in the rocky darkness between the peaks. He had spurts of bravery but they were bracketed in battens of cowardice. — John Steinbeck

The biographies of great artists make it abundantly clear that the creative urge is often so imperious that it battens on their humanity and yokes everything to the service of the work, even at the cost of health and ordinary human happiness. The unborn work in the psyche of the artist is a force of nature that achieves its end either with tyrannical might or with the subtle cunning of nature herself, quite regardless of the personal fate of the man who is its vehicle. — Carl Jung

The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife. — Arthur Conan Doyle

The press of the United States? It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist class. Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it. — Jack London

It was by listening to Goodman's band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up. — Alvin Lee

So young and so lethargic! As though he had been born to sit and stare like this. Ever since Kiyoaki had confided in him, Shigekuni, who would have been bright and confident, as befitted such an able young man, had undergone a change. Or rather, the friendship between him and Kiyoaki had undergone a strange reversal. For years, each of them had been extremely careful to intrude in no way on the personal life of the other. But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection. It had taken hold so readily that Honda's disposition now seemed a far better host to it than Kiyoaki's. The first major symptom of the disease was a vague sense of apprehension. — Yukio Mishima

He peered up the ladder. In his young imagination, it must have reached the clouds. — Bruce H. Wilkinson