Broken Spine Quotes & Sayings

Abandoned.
The word alone sends shudders down a sensitive spine, troubling the thoughts of pained souls as their hurt swells in ripples. It is a sentence of undesired solitude often pronounced on the innocent, the trusting - administered without warning or satisfactory cause.
One day the moon is yours, or so you believe. The next, his countenance transforms from Jekyll to Hyde with no intention of ever turning back, and you are left trampled upon in a deserted street, concealed by dirty fog that squelches all illumination or any hope for future rays of light.
It is the worst of mysteries why a beast considered noble would forsake his duty, exhibiting a heart of stone. And all who once looked on him, now turn down their eyes and suffer, beguiled.
Some poisons have no antidote, but are slow, silent, torturous ends that curl up the broken body swept into a cold, dark corner. There she is left to drown in her tears - a dying heart.
Abandoned. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Its a memorial, I said. What have you got in there that you could possible need at a memorial?

That sort of thinking is why you, young lady, have a scar on your sternum, and why my priceless copy of of the Apotropaicon has a broken spine. I prefer preparedness to a last minute scramble, thank you. — William Ritter

Books - the warm, leather-skinned weight of them in your hands, the way they smelled when you lifted them close to your face. The unfeasibly heart-jolting shock once, as a tome fell heavily open at some much-visited page, divided itself neatly in two blocky halves along the spine - and you thought, guiltily, that you'd broken it. — Richard K. Morgan

Scowling, Scarlet grabbed her aunt by the neck and twisted with one brutal slash. The woman's spine was instantly broken, her body flopping lifeless to the ground. But she could recover from that, and Scarlet had to know. Gideon opened his mouth to tell her she would have to find a way to remove the head from the body, but she beat him to it. She found a way. With her bare hands. That's my girl. "That won't kill her for good, will it?" he asked Cronus, just wanting assurance. Worked for immortals, but he'd never delivered the deathblow to a straight-up god or goddess. "Time will tell," Cronus replied cryptically. Gideon would just go ahead and take that as "bitch was wasted forever." Panting — Gena Showalter

I remember that day very clearly: I had received a phone call. A friend had been in an accident. Perhaps she would not live. She had very little face, and her spine was broken in two places. She had not yet moved; the doctor described her as "a pebble in water." I walked around Brooklyn and noticed that the faded peri-winkle of the abandoned Mobil gas station on the corner was suddenly blooming. In the baby-shit yellow showers at my gym, where snow sometimes fluttered in through the cracked gated windows, I noticed that the yellow paint was peeling in spots, and a decent, industrial blue was trying to creep in. At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God. When I walked into my friend's hospital room, her eyes were a piercing, pale blue and the only part of her body that could move. I was scared. So was she. The blue was beating. — Maggie Nelson

This girl had fought Aeduan - tricked him and broken his spine. She had battled city guards and faced cleaved Poisonwitches head-on, yet never had Aeduan seen her show fear. — Susan Dennard

The patron gets comfortable in bed and opens up the book
it opens tentatively
and the patron bends the open book backward until there is a satisfying crack and the book is a little more supple, a little easier to read. The book spine has just been broken, and a broken spine means a more submissive book. — Don Borchert

The broken spine of the book shows the webbing of binder's string, and my fingers have worn white spots in the cover. — Susan Straight

The library knows that it is a temporary fix. We have a stamp for the inside front cover: BROKEN SPINE NOTED. It is like a bracelet worn by a diabetic. When you return the book with this message stamped inside, we know you're not the one responsible for this horrible thing. It was some other bastard before you. The book has a preexisting condition. — Don Borchert

Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken — M T Anderson

She paused and unexpectedly stroked her fingers down the feathers of his neck.
He froze. She couldn't know how intimate that seemed, or how sensitive he was to her touch even through the sleek covering of eagle feathers. Pleasure at being petted ran down his spine.
He should say something or step away. He did neither. Instead, ever so slightly, he leaned into her touch.
It was wrong of him, but his wrong button seemed to be broken, and he didn't care. — Thea Harrison

The tower was battered, a relic of a distant past. Yet there was a dignity to it, a grace that belied the pockmarked walls and broken stone. It had endured through the centuries, its lonely vigil immune to the machinations of men. It was a symbol of what had been, and Jack shivered as an uneasy chill ran down his spine. — Paul Fraser Collard

But I was losing so much bone density that I would have been in grave danger. And I mean grave danger. If I had let it go just a few more years I could have broken my hip or spine just picking up my granddaughter. — Sally Field

And what, you think you can fix me?" she asks, turning in her stool to face me, shifting her body closer, so close I can smell the liquor on her warm breath as she whispers, "Think you can make me whole again? Save me from the world? Save me from myself? Fill me up, maybe fuck the feeling back into me, like the big, strong, man you are? Make me a real woman, instead of a broken little girl?"
There's a sickening sweetness to her voice that sends a chill down my spine. If I never heard a thinly veiled 'fuck you' before, that was certainly one for the books. I move closer to her, uncomfortably so, cocking my head slightly as I lean in, watching as her body tenses. She thinks I'm about to kiss her, my mouth just inches from hers, before I stop, my voice gritty as I say, "On the contrary, Scarlet, I don't think you need to be fixed at all."
"No?"
"No," I say. "I think you're perfect the way you are. — J.M. Darhower

From the third case, she took yet more books, but these were the traveling books that she had brought for her new ward: they were at once sterner and more reassuring that the others. She cared for for these, too- they were books after all, and she would sooner have her own spine broken than manhandle a book - but not with the same devotion, and they were placed in a neat pile on the floor. — Wesley Stace

Kade nodded as he reached out to trace one finger down the spine and along the legs of his image. "I don't look broken like this. — Tempeste O'Riley

They are books that have been read and read intensely. They are knocked about and shopworn. I would be ashamed of a book whose spine was not broken. — Linda Grant

I hit him so hard spittle and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table. — James Lee Burke

A HOW-TO ON DISAPPEARING

No one understands the way we break.
Not jagged. Not knife sliding between ribs.
Not the spine, cracking.

That would be too easy.

That would be being able to know that
you're broken. That would be X-rays
showing the gaps, the fissures.
Clean breaks are easier to heal.
We do not break cleanly.

We break without breaking.
Not a crack, but a fog.
We dissipate.
Body here one moment and
not here the next.

Hands working one moment and
a dead weight the next.

We watch ourselves turn
colourless. Watch ourselves
become invisible / invincible.

This way, at least the pain is our own.
That's what I wanted all along, I guess. — Darshana Suresh

Her magic sent him sprawling, and it then hurled into Rhysand again - so hard that his head cracked against the stones and the knife dropped from his splayed fingers. No one made a move to help him, and she struck him once more with her power. The red marble splintered where he hit it, spiderwebbing toward me. With wave after wave she hit him. Rhys groaned.
"Stop," I breathed, blood filling my mouth as I strained a hand to reach her feet. "Please."
Rhys's arms buckled as he fought to rise, and blood dripped from his nose, splattering on the marble. His eyes met mine.
The bond between us went taut. I flashed between my body and his, seeing myself through his eyes, bleeding and broken and sobbing.
I snapped back into my own mind as Amarantha turned to me again. "Stop? Stop? Don't pretend you care, human," she crooned, and curled her finger. I arched my back, my spine straining to the point of cracking, and Rhysand bellowed my name as I lost my grip on the room. — Sarah J. Maas

Her spine wasn't really made of steel, after all. That was a silly saying, made up by someone who had never felt what it meant to be broken. — Meredith Duran