Clanking Quotes & Sayings

The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes
Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism
Of machine within machine within machine. — Wallace Stevens

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. — Susan Hill

There are moments when tribulations occur in our lives, and we cannot avoid them. But they are there for some reason. — Paulo Coelho

Now by the Path I Climbed, I Journey Back

Now by the path I climbed, I journey back.
The oaks have grown; I have been long away.
Taking with me your memory and your lack
I now descend into a milder day;
Stripped of your love, unburdened of my hope,
Descend the path I mounted from the plain;
Yet steeper than I fancied seems the slope
And stonier, now that I go down again.
Warm falls the dusk; the clanking of a bell
Faintly ascends upon this heavier air;
I do recall those grassy pastures well:
In early spring they drove the cattle there.
And close at hand should be a shelter, too,
From which the mountain peaks are not in view. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery with chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands ... — Booker T. Washington

What Harry found most unusual about life at Ron's, however, wasn't the talking mirror or the clanking ghoul: It was the fact that everybody there seemed to like him. — J.K. Rowling

Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back. — Bram Stoker

Perhaps the only comfort which remains
Is the unheeded clanking of my chains,
The which I make, and call it melody. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

The sea is never quiet. There is always noise. Close to the city, the deep hum of the generators and the clanking of people and machines churning out whatever it was they made. — G.R. Matthews

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day-
Mandella - wake up, goddammit, your shift! — Joe Haldeman

All the jarring, rattling and clanking, spurting and hissing of the moving train of the train dissolved in the distance into something that was half a sob and half a sigh. — R.K. Narayan

Just then the Mustang made a loud clanking noise and started to vibrate. Hastily shoving his coffee in the drink holder, Alex peered down at the dashoard. None of the warning lights came on, But then with alarming speed the vibration got worse the car jolting back and forth.
Oh, you ancient piece of crap, — L.A. Weatherly

If you had a son, it would be a great thing to have him grow up to be just like Gil Hodges. — Pee Wee Reese

There is a just God, who presides over the destinies the nation, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone, it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. If we were base enough to desire it, there is no retreat but in submission and slavery. Our chains our forged. There clanking can be heard from Boston. Besides, sir, we have no election. — Patrick Henry

Thee is my wolf," she'd said to him. "And if thee hunts at night, thee will come home." "And sleep at thy feet," he'd replied. — Diana Gabaldon

Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight. — Neal Stephenson

Myrtle


How funny your name would be
if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please, and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river,
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here. — John Ashbery

There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. — Richard K. Morgan

As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played. — Ross Macdonald

The people welcome a new da yas if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy. — Nancy Mitford

I'm not bawling." "You were close." "You were being sweet." "Like I said, get used to that." "Then you were an ass." "You should probably get used to that too. — Kristen Ashley

For the briefest moment, they came face to face. Their eyes locked. Then he broke the stare, swiveled, sank into a sitting position, chains clanking, with his knees up.
She watched him speechlessly as he set a cooler bag between his boots, like he was settling down to a picnic or something. An image of the contents as hospital blood bags, complete with juice straws, flashed through her mind.
Unfolding her legs, she made herself as comfortable as she could on the cold outer edge of the sill. An intangible and unnameable charge electrified the space between them, and at first, neither of them said anything.
[ ... ] Finally she heard him unzip the bag and watched him pull out a small cylinder.
"I thought you might like some crappy ice cream," he said. — Kelly Creagh

Just as our love for God begins with listening to God's Word, the beginning of love for other Christians is learning to listen to them. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life. — Rohinton Mistry

In Russia, they say I'm a Pole, in Poland they call me Russian. — Konstantin Rokossovsky

It was a lie, of course, and she was prepared to confess it to her priest. But she'd be damned if she'd tell him she'd been playing with his music.
Her pride was worth the penance.
He felt a quiver in his heart that he took for sympathy. "There, Brenna darling. Have you gone and fallen in love on me?"
She jerked, whirled, gaped at him. He was watching her with such - such bloody affection, such patience and sympathy. She could have beaten him black and blue. Instead, she just shoved clear of him and snatched up her toolbox. "Shawn Gallagher, you are truly a great idiot of a man."
With her nose in the air and her tools clanking, she stalked out.
He only shook his head, then went back to his cleaning up. With that little quiver around his heart again, he wondered who it was that O'Toole had set her sights on.
Whoever, Shawn thought, slamming a cupboard door just a little too forcefully, the man had better be worthy of her. — Nora Roberts

America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life's sacred spontaneity. They can't trust life until they can control it. — D.H. Lawrence

A long suburb of red brick houses -some with patches of garden-ground, where coal-dust and factory smoke darkened the shrinking leaves, and coarse rank flowers, and where the struggling vegetation sickened and sank under the hot breath of kiln and furnace.
On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies.
Dismantled houses here and there appeared, tottering to the earth, propped up by fragments of others that had fallen down, unroofed, windowless, blackened, desolate, but yet inhabited. Men, women, children, wan in their looks and ragged in attire, tended the engines, fed their tributary fire, begged upon the road, or scowled half-naked from the doorless houses. — Charles Dickens

Ptah held up his mug. "Do you realize, we've fought together, starved together, bled together, endured slavery, and looked into the jaws of death..."
"But we never drank together!" Marcus finished, clanking his mug to Ptah's.
"Exactly! The drink flows freely, and we must make up for lost time, ha ha ha! — Jennifer McKeithen

Dating women was the hardest thing I had to to as Ned, even when the women liked me and I liked them. I have never felt more vulnerable to total strangers, never more socially defenseless than in my clanking suit of borrowed armor.
But then, I guess maybe that's one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man's armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't see. — Norah Vincent

I root through your remains,

looking for the black box. Nothing left

but glossy chunks, a pimp's platinum

tooth clanking inside the urn. I play you


over and over, my beloved conspiracy,

my personal Zapruder film — Erin Belieu

It seems that there is never to be any perfect rest. Even in Eden the snake rears its head among the laden boughs of the Tree of Knowledge. The silence of the dreamless night is broken by the roar of the avalanche; the hissing of sudden floods; the clanging of the engine bell marking its sweep through a sleeping American town; the clanking of distant paddles over the sea ... — Bram Stoker