Clumps Quotes & Sayings

Many different thoughts rise up in the darkness - like those gossamer plants that grow in the lake, oddly bewitching and pretty as they bob and sway; but enticing and sinister, they exert a dark pull as long as they're growing in the living, trickling mire. ANd yet as long as they're nothing but slimey brown clumps when the children pull them in to the boat. So many strange thoughts, both terrifying and enticing, grow in the night. — Sigrid Undset

But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire's account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict. — Noah Hawley

The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail. — Charles Dickens

Right whales, for all their size, are surprisingly athletic. They roll, they slap their flukes, they lift their heads out of the water in a move known as a spy hop. They find playthings and are particularly fond of swimming repeatedly through clumps of seaweed, which slides over them like a feathered boa. — Tim Cahill

The spicy sweet fragrance of the large full blooms, which rambled over the side and top of an arched metal framework, welcomed them as they walked beneath them. Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy, dust motes floating languorously in the golden beams that spotlighted clumps of wayward snowdrops growing in the lawn. — Ellen Read

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow. — Neil Kinnock

Death that tears away clumps of us folks, stuffs thousands of the living, freshly plucked into its sack. — Erri De Luca

the figures are shadow-swept, various, self-involved, and as turbulent as waves, as standing waves ...; and as I look at them, as I curl more tightly into shin-warmth on my preferred bench, I wonder which of these figures, too, are runaways, which of these scudding clumps are the moving forms of runaways ...but runaways whom I don't recognize, whose rightfulness I don't acknowledge: which of these figures am I denying ...; because it would take, I am sure, only a glance, only one shared eye-shudder, for all this to end, for their circumstances suddenly to reverse; it would only take one glance upon them...and one glance from them...; this, then, would be interpenetration, genuine interpenetration, a real refutation of figure and ground...; — Evan Dara

Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. — Cheryl Strayed

For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps reminiscent of black-spotted cauliflower. Better never to have thawed. — Lorrie Moore

Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist
holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew
moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling. — Zsuzsi Gartner

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I'd be a fool not to listen. If God's voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I'll prick up my ears. If night's faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I'll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine. — Chet Raymo

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. — Scarlett Thomas

When Sam's having a hard time and being a total baby about the whole thing, I feel so much frustration and rage and self-doubt and worry that it's like a mini-breakdown. I feel like my mind becomes a lake full of ugly fish and big clumps of algae and coral, of feelings and unhappy memories and rehearsals for future difficulties and failures. I paddle around in it like some crazy old dog, and then I remember that there's a float in the middle of the lake and I can swim out to it and lie down in the sun. That float is about being loved, by my friends and by God and even sort of by me. And so I lie there and get warm and dry off, and I guess I get bored or else it is human nature because after a while I jump back into the lake, into all that crap. I guess the solution is just to keep trying to get back to the float. This morning Sam woke at 4:00, so — Anne Lamott

Funny; people die in clumps too. — Rick Yancey

I ran my fingers around the interior of the skull getting the last few clumps of brain mater and sucked them from my fingers like icing from a mixing bowl. Desperately not wanting to wipe my mouth, I straightened and moved to the surviving gun man, crouched and did a quick pat down to make sure he didn't have another gun on him. No weapons but I did find a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in his shirt pocket. Grinning down at him I pulled the cigarette out and stuck it between my bloody lips and lit it, even allowed myself one sweet drag. Just one, didn't want to waste too many brains. But damn the moment called for it. I was reformed but I'd never be perfect. And that was okay with me. — Diana Rowland

Final Disposition

Others divided closets full of mother's things.
From the earth, I took her poppies.
I wanted those fandango folds
of red and black chiffon she doted on,
loving the wild and Moorish music of them,
coating her tongue with the thin skin
of their crimson petals.

Snapping her fingers, flamenco dancer,
she'd mock the clack of castanets
in answer to their gypsy cadence.
She would crouch toward the flounce of flowers,
twirl, stamp her foot, then kick it out
as if to lift the ruffles, scarlet
along the hemline of her yard.

And so, I dug up, soil and all,
the thistle-toothed and gray-green clumps
of leaves, the testicle seedpods and hairy stems
both out of season, to transplant them in my less-exotic garden. There, they bloom
her blood's abandon, year after year,
roots holding, their poppy heads nodding
a carefree, opium-ecstatic, possibly forever sleep. — Jane Glazer

All of the third-world flights docked here, families waiting days for their connections, squatting on the floor in big bacterial clumps, and it was a long trek to where the European-North American travelers came and went, making those brisk, no-nonsense flights with extra leg-room and private TV, whizzing over for a single meeting in such a manner that it was truly hard to imagine they were shitting-peeing, bleeding-weeping humans at all. Silk and cashmere, bleached teeth, Prozac, laptops, and a sandwich for their lunch named the Milano. — Kiran Desai

There were angry clouds building up behind the moutains, black-gray clouds, great clumps of them colored just like cotton balls after Aunt Ruth cleaned off her eye makeup from a big night out, all gunky with mascara and eye shadow. (p 378) — Emily M. Danforth

I want it all to go away. I want to go away. I don't want to be here. I don't want to be in this suspended state where I can see what's happening, where I'm aware of what I'm feeling without being able to actually feel it. I cannot scream until my throat hurts or break a window with my fist until my hand bleeds, or pull my hair out in clumps until the pain in my scalp overcomes the one in my heart. — Gayle Forman

She [Anita] turns back to Raffe, her face melting into a radiant smile. She puts her hand on his arm as he's about to take off his pants.
And that's all the excuse I need.
I grab the sudsy shirt out of the gray water and throw it at her.
It makes a plop noise when it lands on her face, wrapping around her hair. Her perfect hair clumps into a stringy mass, and her mascara smears as the cloth slides wetly down her blouse. She emits a high-pitched squeal that turns every head within earshot.
"Oh, I'm sorry," I say in a sugary voice. "Did you not like that? I thought that's what you wanted. I mean, why else would you be putting your paws on my man? — Susan Ee

I didn't mean to upset you, Ms. Hamilton," his gaze shifted back to her. "It's a beautiful sight and I thought you'd like to see it." She gasped in delight at the vista before her. Distant purple mountains framed lush green meadows speckled with brown dots of cattle. A silver river threaded through clumps of trees. In the middle of the valley, ranch buildings clustered around a large white house. Elizabeth inhaled crisp air into her lungs... — Debra Holland

Last year in the region where we live part of the year there were violent windstorms, whole forests were leveled, two- and three-hundred-year-old trees torn up by the roots and tossed aside, houses sliced almost in half by the once-sheltering giants flung down through their roofs. Yesterday another storm, powerful but less so, took down no trees. The ground, though, is littered with leaves, as though autumn had arrived, but the leaves are still green, still alive, many torn away in clumps, with the twigs still intact that attached them to their branches. There's something disconsolate about them - the desiccated leaves of autumn always appear to have found the place to which they've been destined, but these don't seem to grasp what's happened to them: they lie on the ground at awkward angles, like things wounded that haven't completely given in to death and don't know yet they must. — C. K. Williams

The day before the disaster, Iris Carr had her first premonition of danger. She was used to the protection of a crowd, whom - with unconscious flattery - she called 'her friends'. An attractive orphan of independent means, she had been surrounded always with clumps of people. — Ethel Lina White

Weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one. — Cheryl Strayed

I wake to sunshine flashing on puddled water, to dirty clumps of hail melting in the shadowed lees of boulders, to rock wrens singing like it's the best day of their lives. — Rae Carson

As she wove in and out of all the people - rushing, talking, eating, laughing; some in clumps, some alone - she realized that no one, no one at all in the airport, or on the entire planet for that matter, knew her thoughts, knew what she was carrying inside her head and heart. And at that very minute, what was inside her head and heart made her feel as though there was no one else in the whole world she would rather be. — Kevin Henkes

As the plow pushes through a parking lot of light fluffy snow, the snow clumps together in bigger and bigger chunks. Out in space, pressure hitting a gas cloud has a similar effect, except, instead of snowballs, you get stars! — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall, she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her. — Toni Morrison

Her lungs, like moldering cheesecloth sacks, hung visible between cracked and yellowing ribs. Her internal organs, long absent, only flaked brown gristle clung to her spine. Sparse clumps of pale hair clung to the few shreds of flesh still gripping her skull. Five other Cotardist assassins stood mutely behind her. Though none looked to be such an advanced state of decay, they all showed signs of rot and neglect. — Michael R. Fletcher

What primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about — Yevgeny Zamyatin

The trick in foraging for a tooth lost in coffee grounds is not to be misled by the clumps. The only way to be sure is to rub each clump between your thumb and index finger, which makes a mess of your hands. — Roger Rosenblatt

Time seemed to have just gone, in big clumps, or all the day was happening at once or something, I was wondering so hard about what was to come, I was watching so hard the differences from our normal days. I wished I had more time to think, before she went right down, all the way down; my mind was going breathless, trying to get all its thinking done. — Margo Lanagan

Sybil and Nancy leaned over to catch a glimpse of the sun sparkling on the muddy waters of the River Plate. The skyscrapers stood proudly in clumps and Sybil assumed that the patches of green were parks. In no time the plane was screeching to a halt and they had arrived in Buenos Aires. — Phyllis Goodwin

We are all caught in the stream of a complicated legacy - a proof of the limits of human reason, a proof of our boundlessness. A declaration that were were down here on this crowded, lonely planet, a declaration that we mattered, we living clumps of ash, that each of us was once somebody, that we strove for what we could never have, that we could admit as much. That was us - funny and lousy and great all at once. — Janna Levin

Daffodils are an optimistic flower, and foolproof. You know what Shakespeare said:
"Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."
... I plant them in big clumps with a trusty shovel. I make several large holes all around and put quite a few in. That's why it makes such a spectacular look when they bloom. — Tasha Tudor

Huge, dizzying, clumps and clusters of snow falling through the air, patches of white against an iron-gray sky, snow that touches your tongue with cold and winter, that kisses your face with its hesitant touch before freezing you to death. Twelve cotton-candy inches of snow, creating a fairytale world, making everything unrecognizably beautiful ... — Neil Gaiman

When painting a landscape it is desirable to walk through the clumps and around the bushes, around the trees, the houses and the rocks. Familiarizing yourself in this way with the subject, you will get a better concept of the thing and not a visual and false snapshot. — John French Sloan

The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. — John Updike

All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by - whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans - all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires - show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there - ' he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, 'show business, show business, show business.' 'And what about dreams?' I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. 'You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we're fortunate enough to sleep? — Thomas Ligotti

But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancientes had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and i'm certain that i'm not mistaken if i say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

For years afterward, I had dreams in which my mother appeared in strange forms, her features sewn onto other beings in combinations that seemed both grotesque and profound: as a slippery white fish at the end of my hook, with a trout's gaping, sorrowful mouth and her dark, shuttered eyes; as the elm tree at the edge of our property, its ragged clumps of tarnished gold leaves replaced by knotted skeins of her black hair; as the lame gray dog that lived on the Mueller's property, whose mouth, her mouth, opened and closed in yearning and who never made a sound. As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not.
And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death - but kindness? — Hanya Yanagihara

I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced. — Henry David Thoreau

In the sheltered heart of the clumps last year's foliage still clings to the lower branches, tatters of orange that mutter with the passage of the wind, the talk of old women warning the green generation of what they, too, must come to when the sap runs back. — Jacquetta Hawkes

The sound of the ocean breaking our silence was like chocolate syrup poured into a glass of milk, dispersing into awkward dark clumps while waiting to be stirred. — Rachel Cohn

There were other things too, something resembling soggy cotton balls, and something else, like clumps of tangled hair, and all of that inhabited the noxious grass, ate it, crawled in it, intoxicated by its vapors, gave birth, and died, turning into muck. It was all grass, if you stopped to think about it, all flesh was as grass and nothing more. Blind — Mariam Petrosyan

There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me. — Sue Monk Kidd

Helen, in a white coat and stethoscope, effortlessly achieving the sort of discipline for which lesser women would require black leather and a hunting crop, indicated we should form a line. Being St Mary's, we formed several clumps and a rhomboid. — Jodi Taylor

Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It's the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it's closed. We're watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun beings to set. It's a perfect afternoon. — Diane Keaton

He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can. — Eric Spitznagel

The stinging insects clung to one another and floated in clumps the size of basketballs, the ants on bottom giving their lives to save those on top. They — Judith Richards

Labor Day. We could hear their bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman's trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail underfoot crunched with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses. — Matthew Neill Null

Whenever you come back, you will be welcomed with open arms. And after everything that's happened, you're probably going to have about two hundred thousand guys wanting to take you to the Annual Peace Ball next year. I expect the offers to start rolling in any day now." "I highly doubt that." "Just wait, you'll see." He tilted his head, clumps of hair falling into his eyes. "I figured it couldn't hurt to get my name on the list before anyone else steals you away. If we start now, and plan frequent visits between Earth and Luna, I might even have time to teach you to dance." Cinder — Marissa Meyer

We need a bigger gun."
"We need a shower," Raphael said.
"Gun first. Shower later."
Ten minutes later I walked into the Order's office. A group of knights standing in the hallway turned at my approach: Mauro, the huge Samoan knight; Tobias, as usual dapper; and Gene, the seasoned former Georgia Bureau of Investigations detective. They looked at me. The conversation died.
My clothes were torn and bloody. Soot stained my skin. My hair stuck out in clumps caked with dirt and blood. The reek of a dead cat emanated from me in a foul cloud.
I walked past them into the armory, opened the glass case, took Boom Baby out, grabbed a box of Silver Hawk cartridges, and walked out.
Nobody said a thing. — Ilona Andrews

Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being
and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. — Carl Sagan

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo. — Jerry Saltz

The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows — Hope Mirrlees

I used to flirt with fundamentalism, and I had this idea that creation was something that happened. Now I see creation as something that is happening. Hundreds of millions of stars are still being born every day. Creation is an ongoing process. The Artist has not yet cleaned out the brushes. The paint is still wet. Human beings are the small clumps of clay and breath, and we have been handed brushes of our own, like young artist apprentices. The brushes aren't ours, nor the paint or canvas, but here they are in our hands, on loan. What shall we make? — Michael Gungor

E is definitely the biggest ERROR my mother has ever made - worse than the time she designed a litter-box-cleaning robot that flung clumps of kitty poop all over the house. — James Patterson

Disordered clumps, wrongly beautiful, like a scan of a damaged brain — J.M. Ledgard

The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito. — Tim O'Brien

Rhizan gathered in writhing clumps at his hands and feet, — Steven Erikson

Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilaccoloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it "the new thing" or "the new thing in the river," and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantly cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled. I — V.S. Naipaul

You will need to increase the number of eggs and liquid when using coconut flour. The general ratio rule I follow is 1/2 cup (60 g) coconut flour plus 5 eggs plus 1/2 cup (120 ml) coconut milk (or other liquid). This ratio will vary depending on the other ingredients in the recipe; for example, if the recipe calls for mashed bananas, the bananas will add extra moisture to the batter, so you'll need to reduce another liquid, say coconut milk, by 1/4 cup (60 ml). And if I'm adding cacao powder to a recipe, I usually adjust the flour down a little or increase the liquid slightly because cacao powder also absorbs moisture. Break Up Lumps. Coconut flour tends to be clumpy, so sifting the flour before mixing it into a recipe will help you avoid finding clumps in your baked goods. I tend to place my batters in a food processor, which helps break down the clumps without having to sift the flour. Store It Dry. Coconut flour is best if stored at room temperature in your pantry. — Heather Connell

I've been frozen solid against the wall in Mazzo's, staring at my index finger for a couple of hours, when my dead brother Morton shows up. He does that literally. I mean, I look down on one side and see him coming up through the floor. Nothing special about that. People have been showing up through the floor all evening. They pop up and mushroom in bursts, clumps of people that explode and disappear. In the Mazzo theme park it's another of those acid nights. — John David Morley

Laughter and grief join hands. Always the heart Clumps in the breast with heavy stride; The face grows lined and wrinkled like a chart, The eyes bloodshot with tears and tide. Let the wind blow, for many a man shall die. — Karl Shapiro

When I thought of Eric with someone else, I wanted to rip out all his beautiful blonde hair. By the roots. In clumps. — Charlaine Harris

Nobody falls that way without being pushed. I know. And I know how it feels and looks, a body that falls fighting the air all the way down, grabbing onto clumps of nothing and begging once, just once, just goddamn once, Jesus, you sniveling son of a mongrel bitch, just once that air gives grip. — Marlon James

The strain on Roger (Maris) was unbelievable. After I dropped out the reporters only had one guy to go to. They surrounded him everywhere he went. He had big clumps of hair falling out. That he went ahead and did it was unbelievable. — Mickey Mantle

It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future. — Arthur Conan Doyle

She sat in the dew-damp grass and ripped up clumps of it, tossing them in the air and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Some gnome ought to pop out of the tree and scold her for torturing the lawn. — Holly Black

I left Kiki in the yard, and fetched my pick and brushes.
She lifted her leg and I dislodged the stone then pulled the shedding blade through her copper hair. After a while, I removed my cloak. When I finished, clumps of horse hair clung to my sweaty clothes.
You're beautiful and I need a bath, I said to her. Pasture or stall?
Stall. Nap time.
And what about your snooze before I groomed you?
Pre nap. — Maria V. Snyder

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled. — Marisha Pessl

It has been known, for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the sight of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of the lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps , can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature. Yet what and enormous portion of anthropology - not to mention the philosophy of man - refuses to take cognizance of this circumstance! But I am no exception here; whether scientist or laymen, we agree finally that our bodies detoriate with age - but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal - even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. — Stanislaw Lem

This is the autumn of wonders, yet every day, every single day, I go back to that burned afternoon in August when T. Ray left. I go back to that one moment when I stood in the driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at the porch. And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me. — Sue Monk Kidd

All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. — Bill Bryson

They arrived in a trickle, and then in clumps, and then in crowds. They marveled at the steady lights in the hallways and explored the offices. None of these people had ever seen the inside of IT. Few of them had spent much time in the Up Top, except on pilgrimages after a cleaning. Families wandered from room to room; kids clutched reams of paper; many came to Juliette or the others with the notes Raph had folded and dropped, asking about the food. In just a few days, they looked different. Coveralls were stained and torn, faces stubbled and gaunt, eyes ringed with dark circles. In just a few days. Juliette saw that they had only a few days more before things grew desperate. Everyone saw that. — Hugh Howey

Brambles, in particular, protect and nourish young fruit trees, and on farms bramble clumps (blackberry or one of its related cultivars) can be used to exclude deer and cattle from newly set trees. As the trees (apple, quince, plum, citrus, fig) age, and the brambles are shaded out, hoofed animals come to eat fallen fruit, and the mature trees (7 plus years old) are sufficiently hardy to withstand browsing. Our forest ancestors may well have followed some such sequences for orchard evolution, assisted by indigenous birds and mammals. — Bill Mollison

Oh God, please, I have to, please, just once more; I have to see her again. He marched onwards, his crippled leg dragging behind; his good leg hauling his exhausted body through the kind of pain he didn't think existed. He reached out, grasped clumps of hope with bloodied hands, and pulled himself onwards. — Andrew Barrett

I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there's no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate. — Tayari Jones

He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit. — Charles Yu