Cold Like Ice Quotes & Sayings

Go out in the early days of winter, after the first cold snap of the season. Find a pool of water with a sheet of ice across the top, still fresh and new and clear as glass. Near the shore the ice will hold you. Slide out farther. Farther. Eventually you'll find the place where the surface just barely bears your weight. There you will feel what I felt. The ice splinters under your feet. Look down and you can see the white cracks darting through the ice like mad, elaborate spiderwebs. It is perfectly silent, but you can feel the sudden sharp vibrations through the bottoms of your feet.
That is what happened when Denna smiled at me. — Patrick Rothfuss

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revalation and wonder. — L.M. Montgomery

His voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking — George R R Martin

It was the scale, the extremity of things here that made an impression on her: the two beds in their double room that could comfortably sleep three people each; the throaty clunking of the machine down the corridor that ejected fat glinting ice cubes, tumbling like coins from a jackpotting fruit machine; the toothache temperature of the Cokes from the mini bar (she had never known drinks to be so cold); the improbable proportions of the cars on the freeway; the sleek gleefulness of the morning TV presenters with drawls so sassy they sounded put on; the enormity of the breakfasts and the people who ate them. America seemed souped-up to JoAnne, as though it had to be bigger, better, colder, hotter, cheerier, louder, just all-round "er" than everywhere else. — Tina Seskis

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows. — Herman Melville

The highest level of prayer is not a prayer for anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know Him. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined. Prayer is meant to dissolve the worldly focus, to dissolve our sense of a separate self, to help us detach from an insane world order. We pray that He might flood our minds. Prayer is like pouring hot water on an ice cube, melting the cold and encrusted thought forms that still surround our hearts. — Marianne Williamson

What's it like? Being married?
Cold feet. Middle of the night you're sleeping, suddenly, wham, you've got ice cold feet warming themselves on the back of your legs. — Alan Brennert

Do you think they have ice cream here?" Lanie asked.

Kyle cocked his eyebrow, obviously surprised by her question. "I have no idea. Why do you ask?"
"Because I like ice cream when I'm stressed," she replied, thinking she wasn't just stressed. She was burning up and needed something cold.
"I don't mean to cause you anxiety. Don't worry. I'll get you ice cream whether they have it here or not, if that's what you want."

"Wow, Kyle, that's the nicest thing you've ever said to me," she replied with a smile. — M.K. Schiller

( ... ) a man encased in ice, his eyes hard and his voice like a frosty exhale. — Veronica Roth

Your lingering presence erodes me. Heartbeat by heartbeat. Cell by aging cell. Washing away any sense of self I ever had. Intruding into a nothingness I've struggled to find the pieces to fill. A jar filled with stones, piled with pebbles, topped with sand, only to be left with the knowledge that water, with enough time and persistence, has the power to wash it all away.
Your name is on my lips. Frozen. A familiar cadence of syllables that once soothed me.
A name I can't speak. Can't think of.
Not on this shore, at our lake. Not on this day. When only a year ago, with a foreshadowing that is now ice in my veins, you stood next to me, in this jacket, your hand in mine, so warm, and stared out at this expanse and whispered in awe, This is what a cold lake looks like. — S.A. McAuley

If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not like a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly, again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across an expressway is deadly. — Douglas Adams

A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things. — George R R Martin

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature. — Sogyal Rinpoche

Most of our body is made of water, and we should aspire to be more like waters middle state. Seek not to be rigid, cold, and unchanging like ice, nor like water vapor with no direction or substance. Instead we should seek to be like that of flowing water; fluid, dynamic, able to float heavy burdens with ease, changing course with gentle guidance and adaptable. — Peter Arvo

Life was like the ice on an early-winter pond: more fragile than it appeared to be, riddled by hidden fractures, with a cold darkness below. — Dean Koontz

Afghan Girl

Ice blue eyes that look to the morning sky as I knit the pieces and remnants of my life. I have No books, no paper, no pencils, and no black boards. I look at the holes in my life as I see the hills of the Appalachians that echo. I think to myself, who will I marry? Is my life-like Pari?

These strings please come together.

Snowflakes give me hope, and my dreams dance all around me. I'll put another log on the fire. I watch the brown paper bag over the broken glass pane letting the cold wind in; I'll take some of these remnants and stuff it.

These strings are come together.

Mama told me that life would be hard. I bartered for flour the other day, and the chickens ain't laying no eggs. I struggle with life and these strings. My hands are worn and tired. Now, I have granny square hands.
I am unclean, unblemished, and finished,

Afghan girl. — Edna Stewart

Grasping the staff, Donia pressed her mouth to Beira's still body and inhaled. The rest of the Winter Queen's cold flowed into her, rolling through her like an icy wave, churning until it suddenly stopped and lay quiet - a fathomless frozen pool surrounded by ice-laden trees and unmarred white fields.
The words came to her from the white world, sliding through her lips like a winter wind, "I am the Winter Queen. As those before me, I will carry the wind and ice."
And she was healed, stronger than she'd ever been. — Melissa Marr

He'd fallen in the trap before of believing she had the cold soul of an ice queen, but moments like these, it seemed more like she'd been encased a long time ago and couldn't break free. — Katherine McIntyre

The doctor holds up her hands. I'm not going to hurt you. I need to check your tummy. Here. She gives me a cold, round sucky thing and she lets me play with it. You put it on your tummy, and I won't touch you and I can hear your tummy. The doctor is good ... the doctor is Mommy.
My new mommy is pretty. She's like an angel. A doctor angel. She strokes my hair. I like it when she strokes my hair. She lets me eat ice cream and cake. She doesn't shout when she finds the bread and apples hidden in my shoes. Or under my bed. Or under my pillow. Darling, the food is in the kitchen. Just find me or Daddy when you're hungry. Point with your fingers. Can cou do that? ... — E.L. James

The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water like some fleshy island. Her eyes were fixed on Danny's, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Her breasts lolled. Her pubic hair floated. Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws. — Stephen King

He's not my lover," Isolfr said.
She raised an eyebrow, a long feathery, shaggy sweep. "You're his beloved. Both of them. I saw enough on the war-trail to know." Then she laughed, and took her hand off his and pushed his chest like a wolf-cub nudging playfully. "We don't get to pick who loves us, you know. And better to get him to write the song than be remembered forever as 'fair Isolfr, the cold.'"
He scrubbed a hand across his face, roughness of beard and scars and the smooth skin of the unmarked cheek. "Is that really what they call me?"
She smiled. "You frighten them, Viradechtisbrother. You went down under the mountain and came out again, twice, and the alfar call you friend. They'll have you among the heroes before you know it. And you can seem quite untouchable - 'ice-eyes, and ice-heart, and ice-hard, his will.'"
"Othinn help me. It is a song already. — Sarah Monette

Jim flinched when their hands met. "Your hands are like ice."
She snatched her hands back and shoved them into her pockets. "You know what they say - cold hands, warm heart. — Nicki Edwards

The concept of karma is a beautiful concept in Sanskrit. The whole idea of karma is that every being has an innate tendency - the karma of ice is to be cold, the karma of fire is to burn, the karma of the trees is to grow and bear fruit. In the same way, a human has a certain thrust. What I've realized is that my thrust is to be in the world, like in the world of business. — Karan Bajaj

Where's the trail to Cold Mountain?

Cold Mountain? There's no clear way.

Ice, in summer, is still frozen.

Bright sun shines through thick fog.

You won't get there following me.

Your heart and mine are not the same.

If your heart was like mine,

You'd have made it, and be there! — Han-shan

I would have done anything for him. But these days, I don't want to do anything. I don't want to get drunk or go to a wild party or make out with random boys-not that I've ever wanted to. I don't want to watch chick flicks or eat ice cream or get a haircut or buy out half of the mall. I don't want cold, cruel revenge. I don't want to see him suffer when karma catches up with him and kick his ass. I don't even want to talk to him right now, simply because it would be awkward and pathetic and I wouldn't know what to say to him. Yes, there is self-control, preventing me from being stupid and acting like a desperate doofus in the manner most heartbroken people do. But there is also a weary numbness threatening to consume every inch of me: Isn't there a way for me to skip straight to the part where I'm fine again? — Marla Miniano

He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched school-days, the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfish dishonour leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, all its squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to the hut, to the fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the river to Sulyma, to the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavours to destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a hallucination! He knew it was. A hallucination merely. For a moment he snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on the bracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at him ... With the stiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb of his arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.
("Pollock And The Porrah Man") — H.G.Wells

It was just Franz!"
"Just Franz?" Franz retorted, catching the last part as the window jerked free of the ice which held it to the window sill. "Since when did I become 'Just Franz'? I'm almost another member of your family!"
Japhet leaned on the frame, not caring when cold snow seeped into his sleeves. "That's when you became 'Just Franz'," he said. "Like Ruth is 'Just Ruth'. And you ruined my drawing. I hope you're happy. — Jack Lewis Baillot

I would carry myself with much more dignity than her. I wouldn't whisper with the king and demean myself as she did. I wouldn't send out dishes and wave to people like she did. I wouldn't trail all my brothers and sisters into court like she did. I would be much more reserved and cold. I wouldn't smile at anyone, I wouldn't bow to anyone. I would be a true queen, a queen of ice, without family or friends. — Philippa Gregory

It was towards the end of February, in that year, and a bitter black frost had lasted for many weeks. The keen east wind had long since swept the streets clean, though in a gusty day the dust would rise like pounded ice, and make people's faces quite smart with the cold force with which it blew against them. Houses, sky, people, and everything looked as if a gigantic brush had washed them all over with a dark shade of Indian ink. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Courage, Liam thought to himself, wasn't a hot, blistering emotion held only in the hands of men who joined the special forces and jumped out of airplanes and scaled unnamed mountains. It was a quiet thing, ice-cold more often than not; the last tiny piece you found when you thought that everything was gone. It was facing your children at a time like this, holding their hands and brushing their tears away when you were certain you hadn't the strength to do it. It was swallowing your own grief and going on, one shallow, bitter breath at a time. — Kristin Hannah

His lips felt dry with a literal thirst for righteousness, which was like a glass of ice-cold water on a table in another man's room. — Graham Greene

That is how they are. That is how the Cold Peace has made them. Afraid of what is new and different, and filled with hatred like ice. She — Cassandra Clare

What it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold. — Nadine Gordimer

She dared to cry? On this day of all days? I was the one who would be married at sunset, and I hadn't let myself cry in five years.
There was ice in my lungs and in my heart. I was floating. I was swept away, and out of the cold I spoke to her in a voice as soft as snow, the gentle and obedient voice I had used to consent to every order that Father and Aunt Telomache ever gave me, every order that they would never give Astraia because they actually loved her.
"You know, that Rhyme is a lie that Aunt Telomache only told you because you weren't strong enough to bear the truth."
I had thought the words so often, they felt like nothing in my mouth, like no more than a breath of air, and as easily as breathing I went on.
"The truth is, Mother died because of you, and now I have to die for your sake, too. And neither one of us will ever forgive you."
Then I shoved her aside and strode out of the room. — Rosamund Hodge

At that tasted Fruit The Sun, as from THYESTEAN Banquet, turn'd His course intended; else how had the World Inhabited, though sinless, more then now, Avoided pinching cold and scorching heate? These changes in the Heav'ns, though slow, produc'd Like change on Sea and Land, sideral blast, Vapour, and Mist, and Exhalation hot, Corrupt and Pestilent: Now from the North Of NORUMBEGA, and the SAMOED shoar Bursting thir brazen Dungeon, armd with ice And snow and haile and stormie gust and flaw, BOREAS and CAECIAS and ARGESTES loud And THRASCIAS rend the Woods and Seas upturn; — John Milton

I took a breath. Pictured the bed waiting for me upstairs. Then retreated to the lobby
bar alone and ordered an ice-cold gin martini, a small signal to myself that my work was
done. I held the glass, its inverted construction an insult to gravity and the order of things.
Just like our Movement, from the outside the balance of power seems all wrong. But hold a
martini glass in your hand and you know instinctively that it is just right. — Stuart Connelly

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. — Dylan Thomas

I lie in the dirt and pretend his words about my love don't hurt, but they slice me like the ice cold winds of winter. It takes all of the power I have left to lie there quietly and not remind him of the promises he has not kept. — Inger Iversen

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it were truly only for chopping ice, you'd think a completely different design might do. The people who produce and sell things like this don't understand, he thought. They don't realize that some of us break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip. — Ryu Murakami

The Shraken-nurse turned on the nozzles for each of the drips, and the contents began to work their respective ways through his system. The left drip had a chill to it that made him feel like he was bathing in a ice-bath pumped full of extra strong Earth-based mint; while the right hand fluids were warm and fuzzy, like he was four years old and sleeping in a barrelful of teddy-bears on a hot summer's day. They quickly found their way up to his brain, and collided there in a meeting of hot and cold that, had the encounter happened in the atmosphere, would have produced the biggest cumulus cloud in the cosmos. — John K. Irvine

She had seen those eyes dark with brooding anger and cold as ice, she'd seen his gaze veiled like a spiderweb and shattering like a gate under pressure. But she'd never seen them as they were now. Full of wondering joy and disbelief, and an almost frightened awe. — L.J.Smith

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling,' for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante's Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice---absolute coldness. — James Gilligan

It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like crystal. The trees, decked out in frost, seem to have sweated ice; the earth resounds beneath one's feet; the tiniest sounds carry a long way in the dry air; the blue sky is bright as a mirror, and the sun moves through space in icy brilliance, casting on the frozen world rays which bestow no warmth upon anything. — Guy De Maupassant

It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect's wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture? — Frank Schatzing

All day, the colours had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths. Briefly visible above the vapour, Kanchenjunga was a far peak whittled out of ice, gathering the last of the night, a plume of snow blown high by the storms at its summit.
Sai, sitting on the veranda, was reading an article about giant squid in an old National Geographic. Every now and then she looked up at Kanchenjunga, observed its wizard phosphorescence with a shiver. The judge sat at the far corner with his chessboard, playing against himself. Stuffed under his chair where she felt safe was Mutt the dog, snoring gently in her sleep. A single bald lightbulb dangled on a wire above. It was cold, but inside the house, it was still colder, the dark, the freeze, contained by stone walls several feet deep. — Kiran Desai

Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there's no good in it. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Really? So Chris turning the water ice cold while I was in the shower was friendly?'
'Gabriel paid him twenty bucks to do that.'
Hunter smiled.
Nick added, 'And then he felt like a moron when I told him he could have just turned off the hot water in the basement ... '
Hunter laughed softly. — Brigid Kemmerer

As the hooded figure spun, his cloak swirling around him. My stomach lurched as our gazes met. Cold ice-blue eyes stabbed at me from beneath the hood, and bright silver hair fell around his face, the only spots of color to be seen. Beneath the cloak, he was dressed in black: black shirt, pants, boots, even gloves. I remembered the smiling, easygoing faery from just a week ago. The hard-eyed creature dressed all in black, staring at me in this den of shadow and fear, seemed like a stranger. — Julie Kagawa

Patience is like ice cold water runing truth your veins, but our love will be immense — Alejandro Perez

By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.
Not that year.
Winter hung in there, like an invalid refusing to die. Day after grey day the ice stayed hard; the world remained unfriendly and cold. — Neil Gaiman

Stars flicker above, points of bright ice in a dark river. I pull a heavy sheepskin around my legs and stretch my feet toward the fire. Despite the cold, Liam plays his flute, the sound whistling through the night. Soon my eyes are heavy, my head nodding.I open my eyes at the deep melodious baritone of Salvius's voice telling a tale. Liam's flute is silent now. I have heard Salvius tell many tales on market days; he is known for his memory of wandering minstrels and mummers who visit us at Whitsunday and through Midsummer. Salvius is a mockingbird: he can give a fair charade of the rhythmic tones of any wandering bard or any noble of the Royal Court.In this darkness, his eyes catch the light like a cat in the night. — Ned Hayes

For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism - like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice ... Who is in thrall to whom? And while you wait to learn, the deadly icicle, formed by all opposing forces, falls and drives its cold nail into penetrable flesh. — Gregory Maguire

Religion is like an ice cold whiskey on a hot day. — Ernest Hemingway,

No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I stare into the fridge. Like a mirrored image of myself. Cold and empty, and the lights come on only when you open the door. Otherwise ice-cold purring darkness. — Hallgrimur Helgason

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue. — Angela Carter

The air in the room was so cold, the exposed flesh of his face felt like ice. "I'll be the first person to get frostbite in a house sleeping several feet from a roaring fire. — Hunter Shea

The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice. — Yasunari Kawabata

The desert is cold early in the morning. Laying down on that sand is like laying on a block of ice. — Steven Michael Quezada

Everyone knows that ice cream is worth the trouble of being cold. Like all things virtuous, you have to suffer to gain the reward. — Brandon Sanderson

My Love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat? — Edmund Spenser

Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, 'tis nothing new.
More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their veins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.
Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there's neither heat nor cold.
But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night. — A.E. Housman

My Love Is Like To Ice, And I To Fire
My love is like to ice, and I to fire;
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolv'd through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not delay'd by her heart-frozen cold;
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold!
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice;
And ice, which is congeal'd with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device!
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind. — Edmund Spenser

He smelled of cold. Like ice and snow on the harshest days of winter. — Amanda Hocking

And I sit down at the kitchen table and realize that Mom really died. That she'll never come back. And that I am alone. Cold hands reach out for me, threaten to pull me into a dark place where I might never escape, and I let them. It's like I'm trapped in a block of ice that nothing can penetrate. Everything around me is just a blur of colour, a flash of movement, garbled sounds. I can't quite decipher and don't want to. Time passes like sludge — Michelle Krys

Have you ever climbed a mountain in full armour? That's what we did, him going first the whole way up a tiny path into the clouds, with drops sheer on both sides into nothing. For hours we crept forward like blind men, the sweat freezing on our faces, lugging skittery leaking horses, and pricked all the time for the ambush that would tip us into death. Each turn of the path it grew colder. The friendly trees of the forest dropped away, and there were only pines. Then they went too, and there just scrubby little bushes standing up in ice. All round us the rocks began to whine the cold. And always above us, or below us, those filthy condor birds, hanging on the air with great tasselled wings ... Four days like that; groaning, not speaking; the breath a blade in our lungs. Four days, slowly, like flies on a wall; limping flies, dying flies, up an endless wall of rock. A tiny army lost in the creases of the moon. — Peter Shaffer

Drinking really cold beer is like slapping yourself in the face with an ice pick. — Michael Jackson

Sometimes that's all you can do, I think. Hold hands. Because life gets so scary sometimes, so bleak, so cold, that you are beyond being able to be comforted by mere words.


'Men are for amusement only. They are treats. Like candy. Like ice cream on an Alabama afternoon. A dessert. They are not the main course. As soon as you have a man in your life who becomes the main course, that is the time, my sweet, when you should go on a diet. Right that second. Men are for dessert only.' Envision: honey.
'Yum, yum,' I told her.
'They are yummy.' She winked at me. 'But never take them seriously. A bite here and there is puh-lenty. All three of my husbands died, bless their pea-brained souls, but I never thought of them as the chicken and potatoes. They were always the flamin' cherries jubilee at the end of dinner.' She stared off into space. 'And there was many a time, darlin', that I wanted to set them on fire. — Cathy Lamb

Birds are flyin' south for winter. Here's the Weird-Bird headin' north, Wings a-flappin', beak a-chatterin', Cold head bobbin' back 'n' forth. He says, It's not that I like ice Or freezin' winds and snowy ground. It's just sometimes it's kind of nice To be the only bird in town. — Shel Silverstein

The dawn, even when it is cold and melancholy, never fails to shoot through my limbs as with arrows of sparkling piercing ice. I pull aside the thick curtains, and search for the first glow in the sky which shows that life is breaking through. And with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting and pulling and letting fresh spaces of life in upon us. May it be mine to taste the moment before it has spread itself over the rest of the world! Let me taste the newest and the freshest. From my window I look down upon the Church yard, where so many of my ancestors are buried, and in my prayer I pity those poor dead men who toss perpetually on the old recurring waters; for I see them, circling and eddying forever upon a pale tide. Let us, then, who have the gift of the present, use it and enjoy it ... — Virginia Woolf

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery. — Lorrie Moore

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing. — Olivia Laing

When I picked him up originally, the boy's spirit was soft and cold, like ice-cream. He started melting in my arms. Then warming up completely. Healing. — Markus Zusak

Ice princess? Hardly. She was the opposite of cold. Christ, just the sight of her made Matty want to speak in fucking verse like he was Shakespeare incarnate. Genna — J.M. Darhower

His voice was like ice, cold and unforgiving, which was like hearing a different Draven altogether. Here he wasn't my Draven, soft and gentle. NO, here he was the Master, here he was the one in control ... here, he was a God! — Stephanie Hudson

It's been a long, hard day, and bit by bit you have been transformed into a single, vertical, barely ambulatory ache. All that awaits you now is another long, lonely night on the hard, cold ground. "What am I doing out here?" you ask yourself. "I must be mad!" Indeed, you are mad. Otherwise right now you could be warm and cozy and stretched out in front of your beloved TV, munching popcorn and swigging down ice-cold brew, just like a civilized person. "Oh well," you sigh to yourself. "I'd better stop and get a fire going. — Patrick F. McManus

Dona Crista laughed a bit. "Oh, Pip, I'd be glad for you to try. But do believe me, my dear friend, touching her heart is like bathing in ice."
I imagine. I imagine it feels like bathing in ice to the person touching her. But how does it feel to her? Cold as she is, it must surely burn like fire. — Orson Scott Card

In love afairs, there is no mediator like a merry, simple-hearted child - ever ready to cement divided hearts, to span the unfriendly gulf of custom, to melt the ice of cold reserve, and overthrow the separating walls of dread formality and pride. — Anne Bronte

I tell you, Mr. Okada, a cold beer at the end of the day is the best thing life has to offer. Some choosy people say that a too cold beer doesn't taste good, but I couldn't disagree more. The first beer should be so cold you can't even taste it. The second one should be a little less chilled, but I want that first one to be like ice. I want it to be so cold my temples throb with pain. This is my own personal preference of course. — Haruki Murakami

I only have one story now.
The story was heroin. It was made out of sensation, not words; it was invisible and murderous and unstoppable. Sam disappeared from her slowly, like a snowman melting, until all Blanca had left of him was a pool of freezing-cold blue water, arctic cold, sorrow colored, evaporating with every year. She did her best to hold onto him, but it was impossible, like carrying ice into the desert or making time stand still. After the final fight when Sam moved out, Blanca saw him less and less often. He no longer had a presence; he was like the outline of a person, an absence rather than a full-fledged human being. — Alice Hoffman

All this blackness was within him, but that was where it really mattered. It was night without moon or stars, it was a doorless pit in the earth's bowels, it was forever. He felt black ice growing, blooming in his veins. One last sharp feeling was left to him
the bitter taste of failure. Then that went too. All was nothing.
Cold and everlasting night, and an everlasting laughter that was older and colder than the stars he would never see again. His heart squirmed wildly in his chest, seeking an escape that was denied it. Laughter like a glacier came again, rolling and crushing all else before it.
A bird sang. — Susan Dexter

Don't ever leave me again," I said in a tiny voice.
I won't," he promised into my hair, sounding most un-Fang-like. "I won't. Not ever."
And just like that, a cold shard of ice that had been inside my chest ever since we'd split up-well, it just disappeared. I felt myself relax for the first time in I don't known how long. The wind was chilly, but the sun was bright, and my whole flock was together. Fang and I were together.
Excuse me? I'm alive too." Iggy's plaintive voice made me pull back. — James Patterson

Someone told me I'd find a princess of great worth here. One with the strength to be the hero this realm needs."
He stared at me with those unsettling blue eyes. They were cold, like ice water - made me shiver from head to toe. Then his gaze seemed to search even deeper. Finally, he looked through me, like I was nothing. In brisk steps, he strode across the marble to the courtyard. But before crossing the threshold, he turned back to glare at me with his lip curled ever so slightly. "It seems she was mistaken."...
I felt my own lip curl in response. How rude! Who the Grimm was this peasant to judge me? I was wearing a Glenda original. Original! Not some fairy-godmother knockoff worn by those servant girls turned royal. I was a crown princess, for the love of fairy, and no one dismissed me. — Betsy Schow

"Ice" came in when my friends would say "cold as ice" - if you could rap and battle people you'd say "Dude, that was ice cold." It had nothing to do with jewelry. Back then, it was like "Your cold, dawg." "Vanilla Ice - that's cold." — Vanilla Ice

It was a large store and i did not like to go in it because its brightness was cold, like sunlight on distant ice. — Chaim Potok

With wings like clear ice, the purple-black fairy flew down and pressed her tiny lips to Ilyenna's. Suddenly, the cold embraced her like an old friend. She felt as if winter's secrets were hidden somewhere deep inside her, waiting to be discovered. — Amber Argyle

She stared out. She saw a vastness, a rising shape, indistinct in the rain, gray in the misty drizzle. At first she had thought it was a cloud, a great bank of fog drifting up over the mountains, but now she realized with a cold awe that it was real, a vast building climbing the mountainside, rising in a countless series of rooms, stairways, balconies, and galleries, far away and immense, its topmost roofs white with snow. And up there, like a needle sharp with ice, one uttermost pinnacle flew the remote black pennant of the Watch.
The Tower of Song. — Catherine Fisher

The snow was dancing like cotton wool in the light of the street lamps. Aimlessly, unable to decide whether it wanted to fall up or down, just letting itself be driven by the hellish, ice-cold wind that was sweeping in from the great darkness covering the Oslo fjord. Together they swirled, wind and snow, round and round in the darkness between the warehouses on the quayside that were all shut up for the night. Until the wind got fed up and dumped it's dance partner beside the wall. And there the dry, windswept snow was settling around the shoes of the man I had just shot I the chest and the neck. — Jo Nesbo

She slapped him, quick and hard. His head turned slightly with the blow, but other than that his only reaction was the narrowing of his eyes. Her chest was heaving as if she were running. "No! You must go to London. You must get him out. You must save my brother because if you don't, I swear upon everything I hold holy that I'll ruin both you and your illustrious name. I'll - " "Little bitch," he breathed, his face turned fiery red, and he slammed his mouth against hers. There was no softness in him. He claimed her lips like a marauder: hard and angry. If she'd once thought him cold as ice, well, that ice was burned away now by the fire of his rage. — Elizabeth Hoyt

I held my breath, and refused to blink; he placed his hand on the bed to brace himself as he leaned towards me. Slowly, carefully, his lips
soft, warm, and perfect
found their way to mine. I want to say that it was magical, that I saw rainbows and fairy dust or something fantastic like that, but I couldn't. It was more. Much more.
It was as though the world has fallen down around us, and everything was frozen in ice. But I wasn't cold. I was blazing hot, the fire starting where our lips joined, where angel met mortal, and I could feel the flames flickering out towards the limbs that I was fighting with desperately to keep still, not wanting them to latch onto him, not wanting to seem out of control because at that moment, I would have given anything to be just that. — S.L. Naeole

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

When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood and marrow used to be, pushing every other feeling out as it fills you from your feet to your scalp. It leaves you with nothing. — Alexander Gordon Smith

We were letting go of October, relinquishing color,
readying ourselves for streets lacquered with ice,
the town closed like a walnut, locked inside the cold. — Mark Perlberg

Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit's existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers' shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap. — Paul Harding

He woke up frozen stiff. A cold dawn was lighting up the peaks on the other side of the valley, making them shine like giant lanterns. Above, through the broken bones of the roof, he could see the sky, clear now, a deep violet blue, waiting for the sun to breach the mountaintops. The snow clouds had gone, off to bother someone else. Where he lay was still dark, wrapped in leftover shadows. The wall, so deliciously warm when he'd fallen asleep, was like ice, sucking the heat out of him, but what had woken him were screams. Long piercing screams, over and over. — Stephen Deas

The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerful hot-air blower- standard equipment at Siberian airports- to break the icy seal. Stepping outside was like stepping onto another planet, for at those low temperatures nothing seems quite normal. The air burns. Sounds are brittle. Every breath hovers in a strangle slow-motion cloud, adding to the mist of ice that pervades the city and blurs the sun. When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars. — David K. Shipler

Nine out of ten humans killed? And you're not bothered."
A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. "A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out," he said.
A scream cut the air. It sounded nonhuman.
He took his eyes off the water and looked around. "Hear that pheasant? That's what I like about the Bighorn River," he said.
"Do you find viruses beautiful?"
"Oh, yeah," he said softly. "Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure." He laid a perfect cast on the water, and eddies took the fly down. (92) — Richard Preston

I come from the heart land of New Zealand. A place where men are men and there is no such thing as a latte. Where a day's work is only done one way. THE HARD WAY. Where the vehicle you drive doesn't symbolize who you are. A place where a beer is a beer and it comes only one way, ICE COLD. Yes the great land I like to call home the Waikato but yes all this beauty comes at a price obviously where men actually act like men not knob head; makeup wearing, tight jean wearing homos there will always be a shortage of real women. So just as the last generation of real men, almost every weekend we head into every bar, club, party or music festival we can in the hopes of finding a real women. Don't get me wrong, bars clubs a music fests are the best fun ever. And I drink alcohol like it's going out of fashion not that we care about fashion round here. See you in the heart land — Daniel Anderson

Dying is so simple. A fleeting moment of suffering. In the blink of an eye you are over the threshold, into another world. No more pain, no more fears. You sleep so well there.
Dying is like rubbing snow together, setting fire to a whole winter of cold and ice. — Shan Sa

Melkor's envy grew then the greater within him; and he also took visible form, but because of his mood and the malice that burned in him that form was dark and terrible. And he descended upon Arda in power and majesty greater than any other of the Valar, as a mountain that wades in the sea and has its head above the clouds and is clad in ice and crowned with smoke and fire; and the light of the eyes of Melkor was like a flame that withers with heat and pierces with a deadly cold. — J.R.R. Tolkien