Bracketed Quotes & Sayings

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you. — Jacques Lacan

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. — Steven L. Peck

Every happiness is a bright ray between shadows, every gaiety bracketed by grief. There is no birth that does not recall a death, no victory but brings to mind a defeat. — Geraldine Brooks

Would you give me anything I asked?" in a tone laced with power.
White lines bracketed his lips. "I'll be no one's slave. — Nalini Singh

I guess I've done a couple of boys-y movies and on the whole you get bracketed into things you've just done, so it was an imaginative surprise from my Disney family to pull me out of the hat, as it were [in Cinderella]. — Kenneth Branagh

I'm not mad at anybody. I'm not being forced out. It is what it is. I have no reason to lie. — Mike Hargrove

[I]n order to raise a soul to the highest perfection, He allows it to pass through dryness, brambles, and combats, causing it thereby to honor the times of weariness in the life of His Son, Our Lord, who suffered various kinds of anguish and abandonment. — Vincent De Paul

In this instance of the fire-arms, the Asiatic has been most improperly bracketed with the natives. The British Indian does not need any such restrictions as are imposed by the Bill on the natives regarding the carrying of fire-arms. The prominent race can remain so by preventing the native from arming himself. Is there a slightest vestige of justification for so preventing the British Indian? — Mahatma Gandhi

Everything I've ever told you, including this, is a lie. — Peter Cook

BLAM! BLOOEY!
Twin thunderstorms struck Chesapeake Bay at about the same hour two weeks apart in the last spring and summer of the eighth decade of the twentieth century of the Christian era and bracketed our story like artillery zeroing in. — John Barth

The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in a single interminable moment, when we discover the bomb, absolutely everything changes. But when we recall it from our now forever-changed lives, when we start with the plain brown wrapping, it looks like every other package, every other morning, every other walk. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

The shortest road man walks, is sadly the road of gratitude! — Avra Amar Filion

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject. — Julia Kristeva

We live and we love and we hurt each other. We don't always say the right thing, or do the right thing at the right moment. Sometimes we need space, and distance, and sometimes words fall from our lips that shouldn't have been said. [ ... ] And we always hurt the ones we love most. If we didn't love so love so much, it wouldn't hurt so much. — Lauren Blakely

The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals' motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified. — Alain De Botton

Can I have this dance?"
He held out his arms expectantly, waiting as she grappled with her feelings. She gazed up into his eyes. One heartbeat later she slipped into his arms and he pulled her close. Her palm against his was heady, sending all sorts of tingles coursing up and down her arm. His other hand, on the small of her back, kept her close. They were awkward at first, but kept at it. He hummed as they moved around in a circle, her skirt swishing against her legs and sometimes tangling between his. A slow burn started on her neck. When they finished he let her go and took a small step back.
"Charlie, I..."
"Stop talking, Nell."
His eyes closed and his lips covered hers. The kiss was gentle as he pulled her tighter against him, driving all thought from her mind. His hands moved down and bracketed her waist and he tilted his head, deepening the kiss. — Caroline Fyffe

That's really just the worst part of life really, you get bracketed somewhere and the next thing you know people are saying, 'No. No. That's not the type. Get me so and so.' I'm not a type. I'm an actor. — Morgan Freeman

Now if there is anything in this universe for which we do not have an "inkling," it is the ultimate goal of the Creator. Erroneous notions regarding this goal often stem from the misconception that all existence exists for man alone. The foible in this perception of the universe is the failure to realize that existence itself is good. The Five Books of Moses are bracketed by explicit statements of the worth of being. At the start we are told: "And God saw all that was made and behold it was very good" (Gen. 1:31) — Gerald Schroeder

Definitely not a sitcom, that's my first condition. No sitcoms. — Hector Elizondo

I would let myself be taken until I was nothing more than his creation, a poetic body, the divine alternative to womankind. — Laura Elizabeth Woollett

All it takes is six cuts," he said near her ear. She nodded, relaxing against him as he guided her hands with precision. One deep stroke of the blade neatly removed an angled section of wood. They rotated the pencil and made another cut, and then a third, creating a precise triangular prism. "Now trim the sharp edges." They concentrated on the task with his hands still bracketed over hers, using the blade to chamfer each corner of wood until they had created a clean, satisfying point. Done. — Lisa Kleypas

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