Clotted Quotes & Sayings

And suddenly, in the place of the woman-shape made of shadow, there was something else. Something huge, something ugly. Linay flung up both hands. The thing screamed like a hawk and opened to wings: one white as a death cap, one clotted in shadow. The wings came together and the whole pond shuddered.
Something hit Kate's ear and shoulder and smashed to the deck by her feet. It was a swallow, dead. She could hear them falling all over the pond. — Erin Bow

If it had been touch, it might have been pressure-not an uncomfortable pressure, but one that swept away all the pain of her headache. Like a river rushing through her mind, clearing out everything stagnant and clotted and decayed. — L.J.Smith

My knee struck a tree root as my vision went black. Suddenly, I was in a building at Haven Crest, kneeling on the floor. Blood, thick and clotted like canned cherries, crept down the walls. The lights above my head flickered off then on with a menacing hum. — Kady Cross

Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind. — Walter Lippmann

There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman - the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles - the work of a shell.
The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries - something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey - a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.
Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck. — Ambrose Bierce

After a few Republicans on the Houston city council supported the Democratic majority's proposal that stalled cars be towed immediately off the city's notoriously clotted freeways, local Republican officials promised retribution. 'We're not looking for council members who are going to go along and get along,' said Jared Woodfill, chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. 'We're looking for council members who are going to stand up for conservative values.' Surely, political ideology has teetered over some high cliff when towing can be described as a 'value.' What's next, a doctrine of potholes, the water pressure credo? — Bill Bishop

For a moment I was dizzied by the impulse to leave her there: shove the techs' hands away, shout at hovering morgue men to get the hell out. We had taken enough toll on her. All she had left was her death and I wanted to leave her that, that at least. I wanted to wrap her up in soft blankets, stroke back her clotted hair, pull up a duvet of falling leaves and little animals' rustles. Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head. She had tried so hard to live. — Tana French

If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing - flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it. High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender and adroit of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of dried blood, he is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings — Mervyn Peake

My voice is clotted with unshed tears. — Sophie Kinsella

One of you needs food,' said the Old Woman, 'and three of you need healing.'
So the Princess sat down to good soup, and fresh bread, and fruit tart with clotted cream and a mug of sharp cider, and the Old Woman put the creatures on the table, and healed them in her way. Her way was to make them tell the story of their hurts, and as they told, she applied ointments and drops with tiny feathery brushes and little bone pins ... — A.S. Byatt

I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my mittens clotted with ice, or my hands grimy with marsh mud- and from the back of my larynx I'd send part of my voice out toward the horizon and part of it straight up toward the sky. There must have been some pain in me. I wanted to howl and fly and break apart. — Lorrie Moore

And human love needs human meriting:
How has thou merited-
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee
Save Me, save only Me? — Francis G. Thompson

And though the blood of Abel had once cried out from the Earth, we had come now to a time when so much blood had been spilled over the millennia that the throat of the Earth was clotted and choked, and fresh blood could not raise a voice from it. — Dean Koontz

this was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. it was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. she wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people's pores. she used to think she was other people. other people have truer lives. — Don DeLillo

Great splashes of dried blood, flecked with tiny bits of grayish-white tissue, clotted the wallpaper. It made Danny feel sick. It was like a crazy picture drawn in blood, a surrealistic etching of a man's face drawn back in terror and pain, the mouth yawning and half the head pulverized - (So if you should see something ... just look the other way and when you look back, it'll be gone. Are you diggin me?) — Stephen King

It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body. — James Elkins

Ever see a hot shot hit, kid? I saw the Gimp catch one in Philly. We rigged his room with a one-way whorehouse mirror and charged a sawski to watch it. He never got the needle out of his arm. They don't if the shot is right. That's the way they find them, dropper full of clotted blood hanging out of a blue arm. The look in his eyes when it hit
Kid, it was tasty.
— William S. Burroughs

Ninth Floor

she ran across the parquet slipped the flokati mat
crashed the window

no

she stood at the window prism looked up at sky bruise night
spread her

no

she tilted dived swanning spinning
tip-toed ink air broke fingers first

no

she climbed the small gap the window gave
hung her finger joints clotted the view with frightened breath
fell ligament torn and sorry

no

she wandered to the glass hatch to watch tranquilised lights sputtering
leaned too hard fell faster than a bottle of Jack

no

this is how it was:

drunk screaming she crashed the parquet with grief
roared the ungiving window frames which gave

she spangled spaghetti-like ribbon-voiced
street lights crashed on her

no.

She did nothing. — Karin Schimke

She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it. — Laini Taylor

Twice a week I would receive injections or IV's of Factor VIII which clotted the blood and then broke it down. — Ryan White

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel. — Hilary Mantel

Now from his breast into the eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big serf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever. — Homer

The long horizon, the lunging, clotted sea like a swinging door opening, closing, opening. — Annie Proulx

After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed. — Mark Twain

The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held. — William Gibson

You are the one who wanted a happy ending, my dear. So you tell me, how does the story end?"
Tears slipped from my face, and he wiped them away with his thumbs.
"The foolish young man lets the beautiful maiden go."
"Yes." His voice was clotted thick with unshed emotion. "He lets her go. — S. Jae-Jones

The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. — Frederick Douglass

I had never been so extravagantly proud of having blood that clotted. — Rob Sheffield

Palant went to close the door, but she couldn't resist one last look. It was shocking, horrific, and magnificent. For so long she had studied these creatures, their body parts and belongings, trying to understand them through dead flesh, clotted blood, and disassociated tech and clothing. Now she was looking right at one. A living, alien creature, with mysterious thoughts, histories, and philosophies, and an outlook on the universe that she did not understand. However long she studied and theorised, she would never understand. — Tim Lebbon

He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice. — Catherynne M Valente

But when Lust By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, But most by lewd and lavish arts of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose The divine property of her first being. — John Milton

I am full of the milk of human kindness, damn it. My trouble is that it gets clotted so easily. — Gilbert Harding

And all my ethical reasoning crumbles to ash in the sheer fact of his presence. Because together, even in darkness, we light up a room; because the clotted guilt inside me breaks up and disperses before a surge of stupid happiness; because I love him, and I know I cannot leave him, am incapable of leaving him, unless he asks me to go. And he has not asked me. And that is the miracle which I live with, every day. — Anna Lyndsey

When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader. — Alastair Reynolds

Then you may have sheer clotted nonsense; I once chased Julius Caesar all over London to get his recipe for curried eggs. — Arthur Machen