Bleeding Out Quotes & Sayings

I lay on the ground, but then I can't reach - I don't want to take my foot out of the tub - but I've got to call somebody because I've got to get a band-aid or something to stop the bleeding. — Danny DeVito

The Bible stands apart from all other books, and has survived and will survive all the attacks of its enemies. It is like the electric torch that shines over the water of New York Bay, struck by the wing of many a seabird that dashes against it in its reckless flight, but still shining on unmoved while the foolish and reckless assailant falls bleeding and wounded at its feet. It is an anvil which has worn out many a hammer of hostile criticism, while the anvil still remains unshaken amid the wreck of all that have assailed it. — A.B. Simpson

Whatever they'd done to him, it had shaken something lose. "No," he repeated, calmer. "No. I'll save you for last. I owe you for what you did to me. I'll make you suffer like I did, then I'll bring you in."
And just like that, the fragile patchwork of hope shattered, stealing my breath and bleeding me dry. My hand closed around something - I had no idea what, but it was heavy. That was all I cared about. "Good," I said, resigned. I loved Kale and I'd do anything to get him back, but I wasn't stupid. "Then that gives me time."
"For what?"
I whipped the object - it turned out to be a wrench - around and slammed it into the side of Kale's head as Alex yanked up the garage door. "To knock some frigging sense into you."
I raced toward Alex as Kale went down and Kiernan burst through the door. — Jus Accardo

Despite what you've read, your sadness is not beautiful. No one will see you in the bookstore, curled up with your Bukowski, and want to save you.
Stop waiting for a salvation that will not come from the grey-eyed boy looking for an annotated copy of Shakespeare,
for an end to your sadness in Keats.
He coughed up his lungs at 25, and flowery words cannot conceal a life barely lived.
Your life is fragile, just beginning, teetering on the violent edge of the world.
Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth.
Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor. — Emily Palermo

Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end. — Henry A. Kissinger

Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective. Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out. — James S.A. Corey

Fetter Lane,' read Edie.
"Fetters are chains. Like handcuffs, On your legs," said George.
"I know," she said. "They don't go in for cheerful, do they, these City people naming their streets? I even saw a Bleeding Heart Yard once. Had a horrible atmosphere. I didn't touch anything and got out as fast as I could. — Charlie Fletcher

He looked like a kid caught making an angel in the snow, except his glasses had been blown off and one of his hands was bleeding. He breathed heavily; his belly rose and fell.
I knelt close. 'George?'
A groan, a cough. 'It's too late. Leave me ... Let me sleep ... '
I shook him firmly, slapped the side of his face. 'George, you've got to wake up! George, *please.* Are you okay?'
An eye opened. 'Ow. That cheek was the one part of me that *wasn't* sore.'
'Here, look - your glasses.' I scooped them out of the ash, put them on his chest. — Jonathan Stroud

I only know there's something unsettling about a door that closes forever. I feel a vague lament about the changing of my body, the alterations in my appearance, the bleeding out of motherhood, the fear that I will not find the mysterious green fuse again. — Sue Monk Kidd

If you can't hold your own, you're gonna get knocked out. You're bleeding all over the place. There are many, many nights that these boys are crawling off the mats. They drop from body shots, their nose is just bleeding like a faucet. On Wednesday nights, they come in and get a beating. It only happens once with these guys. You'll get karate experts or Tae Kwon Do experts and they can't hold a candle. — Tim Sylvia

A blanket could be used to stop the bleeding. But dammit you're going to have to hurry, before I bleed out all over the carpet. — Jarod Kintz

I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn't settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck. — Graham Greene

There were moments in your life that brought you to your knees. Moments that punched the absolute fuck out of you.
I was having one of those moments.
I thought life had already handed me my heart on a platter. Bleeding and bruised. Turned out life wasn't done with me yet. Bleeding and bruised wasn't enough. — Nina Levine

Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization. — Victor Hugo

Well, Arminius, I can't say you're the most natural horseman I've ever seen.'
Arminius sneered down at the men standing around him, then leaned out of the saddle and put a sausage sized finger in Double-Pay Silus's face.
'Just so we're clear, I hate horses. Tribune Scaurus says I ride like a mule tender with bleeding piles, and that I have all the skill in the saddle of a sack full of shit. And despite that, before you open your mouth, I'm one of your thirty-one horsemen and that's official. You don't like it, I don't like it, but the tribune couldn't give a toss what either of us think. Wherever Centurion Corvus goes, I go. So there it is. — Anthony Riches

Get out of debt. In a world of stagnant incomes and rising core expenses like mortgage and health care costs, that's a lot easier said than done. The middle class is under enormous pressure. But families can stop the bleeding by reducing their reliance on debt wherever they can. They can also start fighting back by taking a hard look at whom they do business with and rethinking whether they want tricks-and-traps banks to hold their money. They can also demand that public officials take the side of families over the side of banks. — Elizabeth Warren

I don't know. He was hit hard. Bleeding out his mouth, bright red blood, so he probably took a hit to his lung. He was alive when they took him into the operating room . . ." Lucas gave him the details he had, then gave the phone to the highway patrolman, who knew Wood, and Wood confirmed Lucas's status. — John Sandford

With the Gulf spill, I absolutely merged in the time when I had that infection. I couldn't get out of the Gulf spill. There were so many similarities: the drains and the siphoning and the tubes. And also in the way the earth was hurt, the ocean was bleeding. Remember the video cams of the oil gushing? I couldn't stop watching that. — Eve Ensler

Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. — Richard Huelsenbeck

When you're down, when you've been kicked down in the street and then kicked a few more times until you're bleeding and your teeth are out, then you only have up to go. You get reborn again, and expectations aren't so great because they've taken you away. It's beautiful to be down there. It's so beautiful! — David

Apprehensions"

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself-
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A grey wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually:
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two grey, papery bags-
This is what i am made of, this, and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and rain of pietas.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel their heads and cry.
There is no talk of immorality among these!
Cold blanks approach us:
They move in a hurry. — Sylvia Plath

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I — James Lee Burke

Saadi, what do you think you're doing?" I demanded.
"Well I thought I was helping you. As it turns out, I'm bleeding. — Cayla Kluver

All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade."
He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood driz-zling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?
"Speaking in the literature sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice - close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake. — Stephen King

I've been keeping an eye on Henry throughout the fight. I glanced at him just as he stepped onto the mat.
"Alpha," he called. "I chal - "
He never got the whole word out - because I drew my foster father's SIG and shot him in the throat before he could.
For a split second everyone stared at him, as if they couldn't figure out where all that blood had come from.
"Stop the bleeding." I said. Though I made no move to do it myself. The rat could die for all I cared. "That was a lead bullet. He'll be fine." But he wouldn't be talking - or challenging Adam - for a while. "When he's stable put him in the holding cell where he can't do any more harm."
Adam looked at me. "Trust you to bring a gun into a fist fight." He said with every evidence of admiration. Then he looked at his pack. Our pack. "What she said." He told them. — Patricia Briggs

It's a thin line between what we're calling acceptable and not acceptable. As a leader, you're supposed to know when not to cross it. But how do you know? Does the army teach us how to control our emotions? Does the army teach us how to deal with a friend bleeding out in front of you? No. — David Finkel

Now at this point you are probably thinking: so what? There is no Ebola in the world at the moment. Oh yes there is, but despite a twenty-year, multi-million-dollar hunt nobody has been able to find where it lives. Some say the host is a bat, others say it's a spider or a space alien. All we know is that occasionally, and for no obvious reason, someone comes out of the jungle with bleeding eyes and his stomach in a bag. — Jeremy Clarkson

I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root. Come. — Mark Lawrence

Everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try. — Maggie Stiefvater

I have a great respect for what can come out of the vagina: some wonderful kids and lots of bleeding — Pam Belluck

He's a filler," Cammie says with more conviction than a suicide bomber.
"What does that mean?" I am studying the menu, contemplating an almond croissant.
"You know - stuff something into your heart quickly to stop it from cracking open ... from
bleeding out ... — Tarryn Fisher

There was no way that these guys were going to let a bleeding, barefoot woman simply wander off alone into the streets. Two of them were already running toward her with hands reaching out in a manner that, in normal circumstances, would have seemed just plain ungentlemanly. What would have been designated, in a Western office, as a hostile environment was soon in full swing as numerous rough strong hands were all over her, easing her to a comfortable perch on a chair that was produced as if by magic, feeling through her hair to find bumps and lacerations. Three different first aid kits were broken open at her feet; older and wiser men began to lodge objections at the profligate use of supplies, darkly suggesting that it was all because she was a pretty girl. A particularly dashing young man skidded up to her on his knees (he was wearing hard-shell knee pads) and, in an attitude recalling the prince on the final page of Cinderella, fit a pair of used flip-flops onto her feet. — Neal Stephenson

The crew were all of them inclined to cough and sneeze, the boys particularly, and Keynes said, "We ought put them all in the water: to keep the chest warm must be the foremost concern."
Laurence agreed without thinking and was shortly appalled by the sight of Emily bathing with the rest of the young officers, innocent of both clothing and modesty.
"You must not bathe with the others," Laurence said to her urgently, having bundled her out and into a blanket.
"Mustn't I?" she said, gazing up at him damp and bewildered.
"Oh, Christ," Laurence said, under his breath. "No," he told her firmly, "it is not suitable; you are beginning to be a young lady."
"Oh," she said dismissively, "Mother has told me all about that, but I have not started bleeding yet, and anyway I would not like to go to bed with any of them," and a thoroughly routed Laurence feebly fell back on giving her some make-work, and fled to Temeraire's side. — Naomi Novik

The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts — D.T. Suzuki

My task over the last two years hasn't just been to stop the bleeding. My task has also been to try to figure out how do we address some of the structural problems in the economy that have prevented more Googles from being created. — Barack Obama

Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one. — Graham Moore

You can accept or reject the way you are treated by other people, but until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. You can bandage the bleeding with food, with alcohol, with drugs, with work, with cigarettes, with sex, but eventually, it will all ooze through and stain your life. You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them — Iyanla Vanzant

She's Awakening,' Aiden said, voice tight.
'But the blood ... ' I heard Marcus move closer. 'Why is she bleeding?'
I eased onto my side. 'I'm being tattooed by a giant, mother fu-' Another strangled scream cut of my words as a different type of pain settled in, moving under my skin. It was like lighting racing through my veins, frying every nerve ending.
'This is ... wow,' Deacon said, and I pried my eyes open. There was a whole audience by the door.
'Get them out of here!' I screamed, jackknifing on the floor. 'Gods, this sucks!'
'Whoa,' I heard Deacon murmur. 'This is like watching a chick give birth or something.'
'Oh my gods, I'm going to kill him.' I could feel the beads of blood breaking out under my jeans. 'I'm going to punch him-'
'Everyone leave,' Aiden ground out. 'This isn't a godsdamn show.'
'And I think he's like the father,' Luke said.
Aiden rose to his feet. 'Get. Out. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you for rejecting me by never being there, fuck you for making me feel like shit about myself, fuck you for bleeding the fucking love and life out of me, fuck my father for fucking up my life for good and fuck my mother for not leaving him, but most of all, fuck you God for making me love a person who does not exist.
FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU. — Sarah Kane

So John took out of his pocket A knife both long and sharp, And stuck it through his brother's heart, And the blood came pouring down. Says John to William, Take off thy shirt, And tear it from gore to gore, And wrap it round your bleeding heart, And the blood will pour no more. — Cassandra Clare

Poets, with no sponsors, no agenda, are the truest form of freedom today, bleeding out every drop of themselves for the world to either hate or devour. — Jason E. Hodges

Hurt her and you'll meet me in hell. I'll be the one tying your dick in a knot. You'll be the one bleeding out your eyeballs. (Hunter) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn ... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned. — Pete Hautman

I was in way too deep. I was cut in so many places that I felt like I was bleeding out from every part of my body. Being outside and watching people live their normal lives took me out of my head, but the minute I stepped back into the apartment, I was muted inside. No words, no actions, no me. - Unsettled — Alisa Mullen

When I wake, a piece of sharp green glass on the floor is cutting into my hand and I know it's a sign. I etch a letter on my hand; put it on top so I can see the jagged edges bleeding out; S. S is for sorrow, for all I don't say. S is for sick now, my punishing ways. — Ibi Kaslik

Hollywood, to hear some writers tell it, is the place where they take an author's steak tartare and make cheeseburger out of it. Upon seeing the film, they say, the author promptly cuts his throat, bleeding to death in a pool of money. — Fletcher Knebel

I've got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don't give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I'm no saint, the way you kid about. But I've always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It's a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You're always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don't just step off and walk in the cool grass. — Dean Koontz

Draw on the following Bill of Rights for support: Unless someone is bleeding or choking or otherwise at risk of imminent demise, you have a right to think about it. Someone else's pressure is their pressure. You have a right to let them keep it. If someone makes a request and demands an immediate response, say "no." It is easier to change a "no" to a "yes" than it is to get out of something. You have a right not to know until you know, especially when you're asked a big question. We all carry around a sense of knowing - that internal, inexplicable sense of when something is or isn't right, but we can't access that sense while under pressure. You have a right to obtain more information. If you don't know, find out more. You do not have to jump in with affirming comments when you don't feel it. You have a right to remain silent. Flow — Laurie A. Helgoe

Writing is mysterious, and it's supposed to be ... any path that gets you there is a good path in the end. But one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture forms, and where it all begins. — Andrea Barrett

Eddie Drood: Is this why we become agents? To play games, to chase after secrets that are rarely worth all the blood spilled on their behalf ... To end up stabbed in the back, just when you thought you'd won, bleeding out in some nameless backstreet ... With most people never even knowing who you were, or what you did, or why it mattered? — Simon R. Green

He relaxed into the dirt, it was all right, he was infantry and the dirt was home. He felt warm liquid all over his left thigh and wondered if he'd peed himself, it didn't matter, none of it mattered, the stars were out in the blackness overhead and that was where he was going. — Henry V. O'Neil

We spend most of our life bleeding from a blade that cuts from the inside out. . . I'm tired of bleeding. — Michael Knost

With a shock, the trooper who had arrived to render aid to his fallen comrade recognized the one whose life was now bleeding out inside his armor. They had trained together. Shared meals, stories, experiences together. Now they were sharing death together. — Alan Dean Foster

She stopped to think. "Twice. It happened so quick. Rob was just trying to warn Dean, but he accidentally hit him." "What did you do?" "Well, Dean fell down and started bleeding all over the stairs. I started freaking out. Rob was freaking out. We didn't know what to do." She clammed up all — J.R. Kendall

Get real. They'll try to kill us no matter what. I can find out how to open the files from Mickey. You may be impressed with this genius shit but you should really find out what a mess his head is. The right drugs, he'll cut his own throat and forget why he's bleeding. That was an interesting choice of metaphor. — Dan Ahearn

I looked at our hands, caked and coated in red, but entwined. The pristine moment when they were clasped like that earlier in the day seemed weeks ago.
"Clean." Peter said.
"Can I get a water bottle or something to clean his hands?" I scanned the crowd. He drew my attention back to him with a pull of my hand.
"No," Peter said. "I'm ... clean."
I had missed who Peter was until that very moment.
I had called him names and treated him callously. I had read every micro expression in a vacuum of how it related to Austin Glass. And in return Peter had cared for my wounds, treated me tenderly and assured me that he was HIV negative while bleeding out in a hallway of strangers.
I broke. It wasn't a visible fracture. I didn't sob or explode into anguish. I didn't give in to my vomitus urge that came from the burst of self-loathing. But I shattered nonetheless. — Dani Alexander

I went to say no, but I winced as I pulled my tooth out of my lip.
I was absolutely hopeless. In a two minute period my front curls had
started to go straight due to my constant brushing them behind my ears
and I was pretty sure my lip was bleeding. Frustrated I pushed myself off of
the couch with a huff and walked around the glass coffee table to head for
the kitchen.
"I've made you angry."
"No."
Darren got up and cut me off in the middle of the room. "Yes, I did.
You're angry with me."
"No, not with you."
"Then what's wrong?"
"I'm angry with myself. — Kaitlin Scott

Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn't even know were under the ground. Pieces of dad, too. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Week after week we were reduced to starting the same letter over again and copying out the same appeals, so that after a certain time words which had at first been torn bleeding from our hearts became void of sense. We copied them down mechanically, trying by means of these dead words to give some idea of our ordeal. And in the end, the conventional call of a telegram seemed to us preferable to this sterile, obstinate monologue and this arid conversation with a blank wall. — Albert Camus

Two years ago," she says, "I was afraid of spiders, suffocation, walls that inch slowly inward and trap you between them,getting thrown out of Dauntless, uncontrollable bleeding, getting run over by a train, my father's death,public humiliation, and kidnapping by men without faces."
Everyone stares blankly at her.
"Most of you will have anywhere from ten to fifteen years in your fear landscapes. That is the average number," she says.
"What's the lowest number someone has gotten?" asks Lynn.
"In recent years," says Lauren, "four."
I have not looked at Tobias since we were in the cafeteria,but I can't help but look at him now. He keeps his eyes trained on the floor. I knew that four was a low number, low enough to merit a nickname,but I didn't know it was less than half the average.
I glare at my feet.He's exceptional. And now he won't even look at me. — Veronica Roth

I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; -neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Whatever your grievances, I'm sure we can address them without resorting to war," persisted Argyle ...
Nonsense," said the alien. "Do you know how many laborers and industries we'd put out of work if we were to stop the war just because a few bleeding hearts think we can talk out our grievances? — Mike Resnick

If you give them enough of yourself, they might realize that you're bleeding out from the pieces of you you keep giving them, and maybe give you something back. But then they don't. So you sit there. Less than you were. — Danielle Jordan

Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin? — Cormac McCarthy

Jimmy let's out a whistle.
"What?"
"Your hand."
I look at it. My ripped nail is still bleeding. I wipe the red off on my pants.
"You should get it taken care of. It looks awful" he says.
"I guess it does."
"You must be in pain, kid. Does it hurt?"
I nod. "Yeah, Jimmy. All the time. — Jennifer Donnelly

If you try to turn me against Lissa one more time the stories are going to be about you bleeding because I'll have ripped your throat out! — Richelle Mead

One of the bonds between Lily and me is that we both suffer with our teeth. She is twenty years my junior but we wear bridges, each of us. Mine are at the sides, hers are in front. She has lost the four upper incisors. It happened while she was still in high school, out playing golf with her father, whom she adored. The poor old guy was a lush and far too drunk to be out on a golf course that day. Without looking or given warning, he drove from the first tee and on the backswing struck his daughter. It always kills me to think of that cursed hot July golf course, and this drunk from the plumbing supply business, and the girl of fifteen bleeding. Damn these weak drunks! Damn these unsteady men! I can't stand these clowns who go out in public as soon as they get swacked to show how broken-hearted they are. But Lily would never hear a single word against him and wept for him sooner than for herself. She carries his photo in her wallet. — Saul Bellow

Until sunlight came bleeding up over the horizon, like more acid blood oozing out of his sick ruptured heart, which felt - not that anybody cared - like a rotten drum of biohazardous waste at the very bottom of a landfill, leaching poison into the groundwater, enough poison to kill an entire suburb full of innocent and unsuspecting children. — Lev Grossman

I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well - his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun - and we couldn't begin to stop the bloodletting in that case. "Looking pretty thin down here," I hollered when the stuff coming out his wounds was no more than pink salt water. That baby's heart stopped, started, stopped and started a dozen times before it finally gave up the ghost and we pronounced him. I could have read a newspaper through the watery stuff coming out his veins by then. — Edison McDaniels

They all jumped on me and started beating me. They had me on the floor - eventually my arms and legs were chained. They dragged me by the chains to PSA and stopped only when a nurse asked them to please stop. So they put me on a mattress and dragged the mattress. They took me to the observation room and left me, hands and feet cuffed. I had no sanitary napkins, no means to wash myself. The cuffs cut into my skin (the scars are still visible), and my wrists were bleeding. Later i found out that i had received an infraction for slapping an officer in the face while they were beating me. — Assata Shakur

I clutched at my chest with both hands in a pathetic attempt to ease the discomfort. Or maybe I was just trying to prevent myself from bleeding out from the wounds his words had caused because any good doctor knew they needed pressure to stanch the flow — Max Monroe

Sometimes we cannot see and don't want to see because we are blinded. We need eye salve to put on our eyes. We cry out for revival, and yet God says, "I want to open your eyes so you can see what is before you. Revival has a face and a name. It lies bleeding on the roadside." If we want to see revival, we need to begin with the one in front of us. — Heidi Baker

She follows her nose and stands once more before the doors of a quintessential dilemma. Male or Female. Here is her paradox. A staccato voice seems to challenge her, berate her. Hombre or Mujer. Mann or Frau. Homme or Femme. Gentleman or Lady. Com on, decide. She knows them all. She is them all. Not fluid or all-encompassing, gathering the harvest of the reaping fields, but fractured and split and bleeding. Her inner core weeping out of itself. There is nothing for hermaphrodites. It's too confusing. The words rattle around in her earbones, androgynous and humming. How can she choose? She cannot choose. To choose is to sunder. — Mark O'Flynn

And, because in some hard core of me, in some stubborn trench of selfish refusal, I could not, even at ten years of age, surrender to anything or anyone, I fought that pain. I analysed its offensive, and found its lines of attack. It festered, like the corruption in a wound turned sour, drawing strength from me. I knew enough to know the remedy. Hot iron for infection, cauterize, burn, make it pure. I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root. — Mark Lawrence

I do my best work under pressure, so I'll nick an artery, and my husband isn't allowed to stanch the bleeding till I've banged out a chapter. — Zadie Smith

Twenty-eight years is a long time to think about why I loved you, and it's not for the reasons I first assumed: because you swam in the space below my heart; or because you stanched the youth I was bleeding out daily; or because one day you might take care of me when I couldn't take care of myself. [. . .] I loved you, Bethany, because you were the one relationship I never had to earn. You arrived in this world loving me more, even when I did not deserve it. — Jodi Picoult

Will only looked at her. There had been light in his eyes on the stairs, as he'd locked the door, when he'd kissed her
a brilliant, joyous light. And it was going now, fading like the last breath of someone dying. She thought of Nate, bleeding to death in her arms. She had been powerless then, to help him. As she was now. She felt as if she were watching the life bleed out of Will Herondale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. — Cassandra Clare

See! I went a little farther, and I saw one who hung bleeding upon a tree, and the very sight of Him made my burden fall off my back (for I had groaned under a very heavy burden, but then it fell off). It was a strange thing to see, and I have never seen anything like it before. And while I stood looking up at the one hanging on the cross, three Shining Ones came to me. One of them testified that
my sins were forgiven; another stripped me of my rags and gave me this embroidered coat that you see; and the third gave me the mark that you see on my forehead and gave me this sealed scroll. And with that he plucked it out of his coat. — John Bunyan

It was called 'We Wear the Mask', by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I transcribed the first stanza and then started jotting down my reaction to it.

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

I used to wear masks so subtle I barely noticed them. A compliment to my mother after a dismal meal, a smile at my best friend when she sang out of tune, a forced laugh at my uncle's bad jokes. I wore small masks that came and went, like fleeting expressions.

I am stuck inside the mask I wear now. I want to rip it off. I want to show my scars to the world, to unveil the ugliness that breathes inside me. I want to be unashamed. I want to be unafraid. But every day the mask gets tighter, and I suffocate a little more.

I stopped writing. — Catherine Doyle

Came Honker's trip to Slice City along about then: our sax-man got a neck all full of the sharpest kind of steel. So we were out one horn. And you could tell: we played a little bit too rough, and the head-arrangements Collins and His Crew grew up to, they needed Honker's grease in the worst way. But we'd been together for five years or more, and a new man just didn't play somehow. We were this one solid thing, like a unit, and somebody had cut off a piece of us and we couldn't grow the piece back so we just tried to get along anyway, bleeding every night, bleeding from that wound. ("Black Country") — Charles Beaumont

You realize we can't go back to Sheridan."

"I know."

"Have to keep heading southwest now, and I don't know anything about the area. We'll probably get lost or walk into a road and a patrol."

"Well"-Hadrian looked down at Royce's side-"you're bleeding again, and I think I am, too, so the good news is we'll likely die before morning. Still, I suppose it could be worse."

"How?"

"They could have caught us at the tavern, or we could have drowned in that river."

"Either way we'd be dead. At this point I'm inclined to see that as better off."

"Anything can always be worse," Hadrian assured him.

They lay staring up at the sky and watching clouds blot out the stars. Royce heard it before he felt it. A distant patter on the blades of grass along the hillside. He turned once more to Hadrian. "I'm really starting to hate you. — Michael J. Sullivan

When you're trying to come up with a good approach to reporting on the bleeding edge of where the conversation's moving, you're just leaving a lot of people who aren't on the bleeding edge of that conversation out. — Ezra Klein

Max snorted. Not a chance. Did you see his face when he found out you didn't have shoes and were bleeding on my watch? I don't want him trying to kick my ass when he gets out of that bed. I would hate to hurt the poor bastard. — Elle Aycart

In the middle of the night, I saw chaos bleeding out of darkness and peace. Everything that was said and seen before seemed like a paradox. I saw the graves of lies breaking open and the truth crawling out silently into the cold hearts. — Akshay Vasu

Overconsumption is a "cancer eating away at our spiritual vitals." It cuts the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding humanity. It converts us into materialists. We become less able to ask moral questions. For example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts of the world's oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump because the world's demand has priced him out of the market, who is to blame? — Richard J. Foster

They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out? — Jodi Picoult

Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. — Margaret Atwood

What happened, man? Gerry and Ginsberg are cold, and dead, in the ground. Kesey's stoned, and out of town. We've come to the end of the brotherhood song. The children brandish knives upon each other's throats, and their loaded 45's sit snug in lunch boxes nestled safely between Oreo cookies and a ham sandwich. Where are you now, oh ancient hipsters? Raggedy Beats beat down and broken wheel raggedy wheelchairs down ghostly geriatric wards. Where are you now, oh day-glow dreamers? Have you gotten off the bus and into your Mercedes? Did you get that second mortgage, and bear your fattened little babies? Where is that girl with flowers in her hair? Where is the man with revolution in his veins? We ask ourselves "where did we go wrong?" But there is no we. There is you, and then there is I. You do what you need to survive, And I do what I must to stay alive. We stand here Bleeding, slicing each other's wrists With the icy ridges of hardened jagged hearts, Cassandra's — Bearl Brooks

We all grew up, those of us who took On the Road to heart. We came to cringe a little at our old favorite poet, concluding that God was likely never Pooh Bear, that sometimes New York and California could be just as isolated as our provincial hometown, and that grown men didn't run back and forth all the time bleeding soup and sympathy out of sucker women. But those are just details, really. We got what we needed, namely a passion for unlikely words, the willingness to improvise, a distrust of authority, and a sentimental attachment to a certain America ... — Sarah Vowell

She swabbed arms that kept bleeding. She removed so many pieces of shrapnel she felt she'd transported a ton of metal out of the huge body of the human that she was caring for while the army travelled north. — Michael Ondaatje

No. Cut me, if you get off on it. I'll enjoy it. I'll enjoy bleeding for you, hurting for you. I enjoy giving you pleasure, Cash," Zee said softly. "Haven't you worked that out yet? Anything you want. Anytime. Any which way. — Jae T. Jaggart

Lula hauled herself up off the floor and put her hand to her neck. "Do I got holes? Am I bleeding? Do I look like I'm turning into a vampire?"
"No, no, and no," I told her. "He doesn't have his teeth in. He was just gumming you."
"That's disgustin'," Lula said. "I been gummed by a old vampire. I feel gross. My neck's all wet. What's on my neck?"
I squinted over at Lula. "Looks like a hickey."
"Are you shitting me? This worthless bag of bones gave me a hickey?" Lula pulled a mirror out of her purse and checked her neck out. "I'm not happy," Lula said. "First off I don't know if I got vampire cooties from this. And second, how am I gonna explain a hickey to my date tonight — Janet Evanovich

Let the war-ravaged people speak
No more Hiroshimas
No more Warsaw Massacres

Oh martyred Lidice! Bleeding Poland!
Beautiful Dresden no one could save.
Nor art nor pity nor the Madonna's hovering angels.
Hearts broken at Stalingrad! Pearl Harbor!
The beaches of Normandy!

Oh my people of all nations.
Brothers and sisters of one human family,
all stricken by war
Cry your heart's anguish, my tears mingle with yours!
But cry out one mighty voice to leaders and statesmen:
NO MORE WAR! — Rebecca Shelley

The hobbit is hallowed for his terrible and grace-filled journey and hollowed out by it. His body seems too small for all that he endures but not so his heart. Fear, fatigue, cold, hunger, and thirst torment him, but he continues out of love. Frodo's struggle shows that there are, in fact, two quests going on: his to destroy the Ring and the Ring's to dominate and destroy him. Despite the despair that it causes, which both fills and empties him, the Ring-bearer remains as intent upon saving everyone as Denethor is not. Frodo's torn heart still beats, and it pushes past terror and hopelessness because of Sam's blessed aid and his own battered and bleeding will to do so. Both hobbits teach us the great value of redemptive suffering. — Anne Marie Gazzolo

My attitude about Hollywood is that I wouldn't walk across the street to pull one of those executives out of the snow if he was bleeding to death. Not unless I was paid for it. None of them ever did me any favors. — James Woods

I'm not sure if people understand what it means to be a writer. It's not like it feels so great. I mean, most of the time you are sitting at your desk and bleeding out onto your computer screen, your notepad, your notebook ... there's a lot of bleeding that goes on when you're a writer! You don't just work to sell books, you work to bind your wounds and put your skin back together again after opening yourself up all over the place! I don't know how other writers write ... but this is how I write. — C. JoyBell C.

What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all
eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips. — Samuel Beckett

We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length. — Siri Hustvedt

The bait's got a theory; the bait's finding a practice, working it out; the bait's going to write it down and she don't have to use words, she'll make signs, in blood, she's good at bleeding, boys, the vein's open, boys, the bait's got plenty, each month more and more without dying for a certain long period of her life, she can lose it or use it, she works in broad strokes, she makes big gestures, big signs; oh and honey there's so much bait around that there's going to be a bloodbath in the old town tonight, when the new art gets its start. — Andrea Dworkin

One night a guy hit his head on a welding gun. He went to his knees. He was bleeding like a pig, blood was oozing out. So I stopped the line for a second and ran over to help him. The foreman turned the line on again, he almost stepped on the guy. That's the first thing they always do. They didn't even call an ambulance. The guy walked to the medic department
that's about half a mile
he had about five stitches put in his head. The foreman didn't say anything. He just turned the line on. You're nothing to any of them. — Studs Terkel