Boiled Quotes & Sayings

Brillat-Savarin claimed to have seen the vicar of Bregnier eat the following within forty-five minutes: a bowl of soup, two dishes of boiled beef, a leg of mutton, a handsome capon, a generous salad, a ninety-degree wedge from a good-sized white cheese, a bottle of wine, and a carafe of water. If Brillat-Savarin was not exaggerating, the amount of food eaten by the vicar in less than an hour would have provided enough calories for a day or more. It is hard to imagine a wild chimpanzee achieving such a feat. — Richard W. Wrangham

The only meals they could afford were bread and margarine for breakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbage for lunch, and cabbage soup for supper. — Roald Dahl

Wait!"
What?" I lowered my cup hastily, wondering if maybe there was a stray hair, or worse, a newly boiled bug inside my cup.
You got to smell it first. It's the proper way to cup coffee."
Cup coffee?"
Taste it."
What? Are you the coffee police or something? — Justina Chen

Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him ... Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness ... And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself. — Corrie Ten Boom

It was a stamp. It was a yellowy-green color. It showed - Moist peered - a field of cabbages, with some buildings on the horizon. He sniffed. It smelled of cabbages. Oh, yes. "Printed with cabbage ink and using gum made from broccoli, sir," said Stanley, full of pride. "'A Salute to the Cabbage Industry of the Sto Plains,' sir. I think it might do very well. Cabbages are so popular, sir. You can make so many things out of them!" "Well, I can see that - " "There's cabbage soup, cabbage beer, cabbage fudge, cabbage cake, cream of cabbage - " "Yes, Stanley, I think you - " " - pickled cabbage, cabbage jelly, cabbage salad, boiled cabbage, deep-fried cabbage - " "Yes, but now can - " " - fricassee of cabbage, cabbage chutney, cabbage Surprise, sausages - " "Sausages?" "Filled with cabbage, sir. You can make practically anything with cabbage, sir. Then there's - " "Cabbage stamps," said Moist terminally. — Terry Pratchett

Underneath his steal and wool and boiled leather, Jaime Lannister was a tapestry of cuts and scabs and bruises. — George R R Martin

Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws. — Haruki Murakami

Even that was all consumed after two days, and the patients had to try to choke down fresh fish, just boiled in water, without salt, pepper or butter; mutton, beef, and potatoes without the faintest seasoning. — Nellie Bly

I believe everything in moderation. But breakfast is important. I have two hard-boiled or scrambled eggs with whole-wheat toast and try to get some fruit in there. — Martina Mcbride

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to be
these days, when I got this call. I could hear the rain
battering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang. — C.S. Woolley

It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world's darkness had been boiled down to their ultimate density. — Haruki Murakami

Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book ... — Thomas S. Monson

The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights. This — Steven Pinker

Jess:"Sasha? I need some tissue to pack my nose with."
Sasha:"Is that hygienically sound?"
Jess:"Sasha ... "
Sasha:"Fine, but if you get toxic shock up your nose, buddy, remember I warned you."
Jess pulled a couple out and wedged them into his nostrils. He gave Abigail a sheepish smile. "Sexy, right?"
Abby: "Oh yeah, baby. You're so hot right now, if I was a chicken I'd lay hard-boiled eggs. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

nearby New York or distant Beijing, but whenever I was in town, I'd call to say I was on my way. Each time I'd arrive, she'd already have covered half the dining room table with the kind of items I only seemed to consume with her. They were a reflection of her more traditional fare from the old world - hard-boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers, herring in brine, black bread and cream cheese. We'd supplement this with ethnic staples — Leon Berger

Charles, a footman who had once worked on his father's farm and who loved animals, appeared and came over to help her prepare dishes of boiled chicken and brown rice for the cats and dogs waiting eagerly at their feet.
When guests were staying, Charles often assisted with the care of her furry brood. Without asking, he set to work, even taking a few moments to gather fresh meat scraps for Aeolus, her wounded hawk, and cut-up apple and beetroots for Poppy, a convalescing rabbit who had an injured leg. He gave her several more apple quarters for the horses, who got jealous if she didn't bring them treats as well.
Once all her cats and dogs were fed, Esme set off for the stables, laden pail in hand, Burr trotting at her heels. She stopped along the way to chat with the gardener and his assistant, who gave her some timothy grass, comfrey and lavender to supplement the hay she regularly fed Poppy. — Tracy Anne Warren

I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it ... I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends. — George Bernard Shaw

...Mabel put on the boiled potatos, unmashed, the stewed tomatos, some inferior dried beef, and some bread that plainly said, 'Darling, I am growing old'. — Bess Streeter Aldrich

My glass is not only half-empty, I'm convinced someone spit in it. — Judy Nichols

And Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below. — China Mieville

She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it — Betty Smith

Over the years, a number of people have asked me why I tend to write at this great length. I've put some thought into the answer, and it can be boiled down one word: consequences. Well, maybe two words: consequences and characters. Or perhaps, consequences, characters, and the subconscious mind - above all the subconscious mind. — Katharine Kerr

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing. — Megan Abbott

It seems unlikely that so much literature
could be made from twenty-six letters.
Doesn't it seem it could all be boiled
down to one sentence? — Brenda Shaughnessy

I still like boiled potatoes with the skins on," he said, "and I do not want a man standing in back of my chair, laughing up his sleeve at me while I am taking the potatoes' jackets off." Of pleasure and material things he was wary. "I have never known what to do with money after my expenses were paid. I can't squander it on myself without hurting myself," he said, "and nobody wants to do that. — David Halberstam

She wore a boiled shirt and a bow-tie, and her hair, though long and bound, was sleek with oil. She was about two- or three-and-thirty, and her waist was thick; but her upper lip, at least, was dark as a boy's. They would have called her terribly handsome, I guessed, in about 1880. — Sarah Waters

It turns out that Molly wasn't her mother's daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGuyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly ...
Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don't know how. — Jim Butcher

The church has been preoccupied with the question, 'What happens to your soul after you die?' AS IF THE REASON FOR JESUS COMING CAN BE SUMMED UP IN, 'JESUS IS TRYING TO HELP GET MORE SOULS INTO HEAVEN, AS OPPOSED TO HELL, AFTER THEY DIE.' I JUST THINK A FAIR READING OF THE GOSPELS BLOWS THAT OUT OF THE WATER. I don't think that the entire message and life of Jesus can be boiled down to that bottom line — Brian D. McLaren

myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time." This — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I'm a terribly irresponsible eater - I love soft-boiled eggs and chocolate. I never met a chocolate I could not eat. — Danielle Steel

I was so mad you could have boiled a pot of water on my head. — Alice Childress

The meal she served was unlike any I had encountered in Vienna, or anywhere else: red seaweed garnished with pickled radishes; black rice noodles and spotted mushrooms boiled in wine, grilled squid stuffed with flying fish roe; and yellow cherries sauteed in butter. The hot bread was laced with cinnamon and paprika. The goat cheese was coated with thyme honey. — Nicholas Christopher

But lurid touches were everywhere, she saw with dismay. It was as if a giant mouth had sucked a bag of boiled sweets and then given the house a lick. — Sarah Waters

The worth of a culture, in his opinion, could be boiled down to one thing - how well that culture took care of its weakest members, particularly its women and children. — Brad Thor

I remember once, when I lived in the Capital for a month and bought the paper fresh each day, I went wild with love, anger, irritation, frustration; all of the passions boiled in me. I was young. I exploded at everything I saw. But then I saw what I was doing: I was believing what I read. Have you noticed? You believe a paper printed on the very day you buy it? This has happened but only an hour ago, you think! It must be true.' He shook his head. 'So I learned to stand back away and let the paper age and mellow. Back here, in Colonia, I saw the headlines diminish to nothing. The week-old paper - why, you can spit on it if you wish. It is like a woman you once loved, but you now see, a few days later, she is not quite what you thought. She has rather a plain face. She is no deeper than a cup of water. — Ray Bradbury

If there was a temperature at which drama boiled, they were all sitting in hot water. — Megan Duke

Do I have to do everything myself?" The cry was a soul-freezing mixture of rage and torment. "Ain't there no one to stop asking questions and just do my bidding? By God, I'll kill and kill and kill and kill and never stop killing if people don't do what I say. I'll beat you dummies till the blood runs out of your eyes. I'll tie every man on this godforsaken island to a tree and he'll bark like a dog for me to throw him a bone. — Walter Kaylin

The courts are an easy scapegoat because at a time when everything has to boiled down to easy slogans, we speak in subtleties. — Rose Bird

Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy. — Haruki Murakami

common table sugar, or sucrose, is a carbohydrate made up of two simple sugars, fructose and glucose. All plants produce sucrose, but a few contain very large quantities. Natives in the land now called New Guinea, the massive island north of Australia, discovered a tropical grass that came to be known as sugarcane, perhaps around 8000 BC. The sweet-tasting stalks were eventually carried to other lands, including India, where juices pressed from sugarcane were first boiled to produce crystals. Darius — Richard J. Johnson

Harry's mouth fell open. The dishes in front of him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and, for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs. The Dursleys had never exactly starved Harry, but he'd never been allowed to eat as much as he liked. Dudley had always taken anything that Harry really wanted, even if it made him sick. Harry piled his plate with a bit of everything except the peppermints and began to eat. It was all delicious. "That does look good," said the ghost in the ruff sadly, watching Harry cut up his steak. — J.K. Rowling

This is every cook's opinion -
no savory dish without an onion,
but lest your kissing should be spoiled
your onions must be fully boiled. — Jonathan Swift

I had a long talk with Bruce Springsteen on a rooftop during the Vote for Change tour (in 2004). And it boiled down to this: That guy you used to be, he's still in the car. He'll always be in the car. Just don't let him drive. He might be shouting out directions. But whatever you do, don't let him get behind the wheel. — Eddie Vedder

You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn't die. That is when I began to believe.

God was real, and he hated us. — Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef's ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water. — Rex Stout

Well," said Apollo with a brave smile. "You were right, my dear. You had everything under control! Let's go see if we boiled anyone important, shall we? — Rick Riordan

It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed. — Walter Mosley

Grandfather always said school's a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either. — Haruki Murakami

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. — Jonathan Swift

So much interviewing these days is about the presenter - I?m a clever boy, I?m going to be smart with people; or it?s a trivial - how do you like your eggs boiled? — Michael Parkinson

Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny. — Freeman Dyson

It is the hard-boiled employer, not the soft-hearted species, that incites most of our strikes and does most ot endanger the harmonious progress of democracy. — B.C. Forbes

The next dish given him was spinach with hard-boiled eggs, while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, as an invalid, had jelly and milk. When with a preoccupied face she touched the jelly with a spoon and then began languidly eating it, sipping milk, and he heard her swallowing, he was possessed by such an overwhelming aversion that it made his head tingle. He recognised that such a feeling would be an insult even to a dog, but he was angry, not with himself but with Nadyezhda Fyodorovna, for arousing such a feeling, and he understood why lovers sometimes murder their mistresses. He would not murder her, of course, but if he had been on a jury now, he would have acquitted the murderer. — Anton Chekhov

The noise of horns and radios and shouted insults was part of the soundtrack of the capital (Hard-boiled P.I. Casta, on Rome, Italy) — Tobias Jones

She made love with the freshness of an impatient virgin and the ingenuity of a sex-scarred whore. — Lawrence Block

The meetings continued on, each one with the same grueling pace. The participants kept repeating the same information. What to do if the Vittra reneged on the deal. What to do if the Vittra attacked. What to do if the Vittra tried to kidnap me.
And it all boiled down to one answer-fight back. Tove and I would use our abilities,the trackers would use their strength and skill,and the Chancellor would cower in the corner. — Amanda Hocking

Nothing cools so fast as undue enthusiasm. Water that has boiled freezes sooner than any other. — George Iles

I envy these people. Wide-open suffering, their messes all hanging out. Lives boiled down to raw need--a near-holiness to it. And all of us driving our cars up and down the mountain--we'll go on forever trying to fool each other. — Jamie Quatro

Author and screenwriter Neil Gaiman, in a 2012 commencement address at the University of the Arts, said that excellence in business can be boiled down to three simple things: 1. Be Efficient: Turn in work on time. 2. Be Effective: Do great work. 3. Be Congenial: Be a pleasure to work with.1 Gaiman added that even mastering two of the three will take you far. If you do great work and are a pleasure to work with, most people will forgive you for missing a deadline. If you're always on time and a pleasure to work with, most people put up with less than perfect work. If you turn in great work on time, most people will put up with you being unpleasant. — Brad Lomenick

A PICNIC IS NOT AN ADVENTURE!
Excuse me, but at thirty-eight and over six foot, trying to sit cross-legged on the ground to eat a meal is a total adventure. Have you ever attempted to eat with a plastic knife and fork, off a paper plate, while balancing the plate on your knee? And in company? That's an adventure. I tried to cut into my pork pie and the knife broke, then my Scotch egg rolled off the plate and into some mud. What does one do in that situation? Wipe off the mud, and eat it anyway? Risky. I peeled off the meaty outside and ate the boiled egg. Result. And, once, on the beach, I sat down with fish and chips (not strictly a picnic, but still hardcore al fresco eating) and a seagull swooped down and took the whole fish from my box! It was terrifying. So don't you go telling me that picnics aren't an adventure, thanking you muchly. — Miranda Hart

Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't. — Philip Greenspun

I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face. — Ryu Murakami

Hard-boiled eggs are wonderful when they're really done right. I bring the water to a boil, and then I put in the eggs. And then I boil them for - well, it depends on the size of the egg - maybe eight minutes. — Alice Waters

We don't like murders here, said a man's voice, low and threatening, from the back of the crowd. Megan glanced at Cassie and her friends. They looked away, as if they didn't see what was happening.
Anger boiled in her chest. Why wouldn't they leave her alone? She hadn't killed anyone. She hadn't killed Harlen Trooper, all those years ago. She knew it and the judge knew it. She hadn't even been charged.
If I wanted to, I could have you all killed, she thought, and was stunned when the thought didn't scare her the way it should. She looked at their faces, stony and stubbled, shiny with alcoholic sweat. The power in her chest hadn't worked against Ktana Leyak, but it could against them, this miserable bunch of humans with their heavy boots and beer guts.
She pictured those guts exploding. She pictured the terror in their eyes when they realized they were messing with the wrong fucking demon, they were -
Demon? — Stacia Kane

The pulse of New York City can be found on the bent elbows of the patrons in Pete's Tavern. — Mickey Wyte

Sometimes it's a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it's the other way around. — Lawrence Block

Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression
how long before the pot boiled over. — Chris Abani

When it comes to inmates, we have boiled them down to just the few things we know about them - their crime, their current life situation, their identification number. But the reality is they were something before they were their crime. — Uzo Aduba

I get paralyzingly nervous a lot of times, so I tried bravado. The way I dress and carry myself, a lot of people find it intimidating. I think my whole career can be boiled down to the one word I always say in meetings: 'strength.' — Lorde

If you boiled down the gospel to one word, it would be love. — Adam Hamilton

[A]ll the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world, ... could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster. — Charles Kingsley

Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull. — C. Northcote Parkinson

Vegetables cooked for salads should always be on the crisp side, like those trays of zucchini and slender green beans and cauliflowerets in every trattoria in Venice, in the days when the Italians could eat correctly. You used to choose the things you wanted: there were tiny potatoes in their skins, remember, and artichokes boiled in olive oil, as big as your thumb, and much tenderer ... and then the waiter would throw them all into an ugly white bowl and splash a little oil and vinegar over them, and you would have a salad as fresh and tonic to your several senses as La Primavera. It can still be done, although never in the same typhoidic and enraptured air. You can still find little fresh vegetables, and still know how to cook them until they are not quite done, and chill them, and eat them in a bowl. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

A man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife. It is a miserable thing when the conversation can only be such as whether the mutton should be boiled or roasted, and probably a dispute about that. — Samuel Johnson

PARKER spent two weeks on the white sand beach at Biloxi, and on a white sandy bitch named Belle, ...
Beat that for a PC opening line ... not — Richard Stark

Each hour, every hour of peace was a treasure. War boiled black and violent on the horizon, and when it came, it would engulf the world. — Nalini Singh

Bosch had left Nigeria with his infamous Butcher Boys - assorted sizes, shapes and colors, but all killers for a price - when his scheme to take over a native village backfired. He had figured on cleaning up by selling the village girls in the Congo but found himself dodging spears, knives and related items of cutlery instead. — Walter Kaylin

I think that if you have a strong narrative, if the idea of the song can be boiled down to the basics, it won't change that much. — Suzanne Vega

An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. — Jane Austen

Flour boiled thoroughly in milk, so as to make quite a thick porridge, is good in cases of dysentery. — Lydia Maria Francis Child

What about confusing clutter? Information overload? Doesn't data have to be "boiled down" and "simplified"? These common questions miss the point, for the quantity of detail is an issue completely separate from the difficulty of reading. Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information. — Edward R. Tufte

This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing. — Ernest Hemingway,

Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny's whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this. Unexpected stuff could hit him like the thing at first: a girl he'd forgotten giving his number to suddenly calling up out of the blue, a friend with some genius plan for making money, better yet a person he'd never heard of who wanted to talk. Danny got an actual physical head rush from messages like these, but as soon as he called back and found out the details, the calls would turn out to just be about more projects, possibilities, schemes that boiled down to everything staying exactly like it was. — Jennifer Egan

Their diet is basically boiled vegetables, fish and rice. No fat, no sugar. You notice when you live there that there are no fat people. — Arsene Wenger

Adam returned his gaze to the cross. The Jesus was hurting. Guilt simmered and then boiled in him. Jesus had a whole world of suffering and horror to worry about and here Adam was in all his punk puniness. He didn't want to add to Jesus's burdens, but...

'Sorry about that. Look, I know you're busy and I don't want to get greedy with your time, but still, if you could just help me... If you could find a minute, please, please, please, dear sweet Jesus, fix me. — Teresa Toten

[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. — William Gibson

That's it - hundreds of texts and conversations, thousands upon thousands of words spoken and sent, all boiled down into a single line. is that what relationships become? — David Levithan

Sassafras wood boiled down to a kind of tea, and tempered with an infusion of milk and sugar hath to some a delicacy beyond the China luxury. — Charles Lamb

The national dish of Scotland is something called haggis, the specific ingredients of which I won't go into other than to say that if you can visualize boiled, inside-out road kill, you're pretty close. — David Grimes

I had older brothers who would pick on me, and injustice always boiled my blood. — Michelle Rodriguez

I remember I did quite a lot of interviews when the book and the CD came out, and I did a drivetime interview for Radio London or something. You wouldn't immediately associate the music on Ocean Of Sound with drivetime radio, but people found things that they liked, and the DJ was playing some records at 5 o'clock in the afternoon on a weekday.The man who was playing them said to me, "That Peter Brotzmann track, it's like having your head boiled in acid." — David Toop

They say that at Thomas More's trial, Master Secretary here followed the jury to their deliberations, and when they were seated he closed the door behind him and he laid down the law. "Let me put you out of doubt," he said to the jurymen. "Your task is to find Sir Thomas guilty, and you will have no dinner till you have done it." Then out he went and shut the door again and stood outside it with a hatchet in his hand, in case they broke out in search of a boiled pudding; and being Londoners, they care about their bellies above all things, and as soon as they felt them rumbling they cried, "Guilty! He is as guilty as guilty can be! — Hilary Mantel

Love was like walking on the moon. A springy step in your heel like you had a heart for cushioning to step on until it burst and the blood floating in red pods among the glowing craters to be boiled into a refining mist in the naked, eternal sunlight. — Carl-John X. Veraja

It was what his mother would have done in the circumstances. Boiled some fresh water, warmed the pot and counted out the spoonfuls of tea. Setting domestic order against the chaos, in the hope of winning some temporary reprieve from the vale of tears. — Clive Barker

The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen. — Cormac McCarthy

But how do we know it's really you? I mean, I could put a saucepan on my head and call myself the God of Boiled Dumplings; wouldn't mean I was telling the truth. — K.J. Parker

At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea. — Dana Stabenow

Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity. — Christopher G. Moore

Really, all religious teachings can be boiled down to: Just be cool. Don't be an asshole. — Nick Offerman

They were no more than steaks served up to portly politicians who controlled the personnel departments of the TV stations. (Showgirls in Italy) — Tobias Jones