Quotes & Sayings About Coming Out Of Your Shell

When I was in kindergarten, I had one line in a little play. I said, I am Patrick Potato and this is my cousin, Mrs. Tomato, and I heard laughter. I wanted to be an actress from that moment on. — Doris Roberts

There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed. Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes on with what he was doing...Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm. — John Steinbeck

Take a deep breath now. Do it again.
Let this moment be the beginning of a new life. — K.J. Kilton

I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad didn't see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments. — Gemma Files

The game against the Vikings back in my second year stands out. It was kind of a turnaround for us. It allowed us to make a run at the playoffs for the first time in quite a while. The memories are so many it's hard to pin one down. — Drew Bledsoe

I walked slowly out on the beach. A few yards below high-water mark I stopped and read the words again: WRITE YOUR WORRIES ON THE SAND. I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell. Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several words, one above the other. Then I walked away, and I did not look back. I had written my troubles on the sand. The tide was coming in. — Arthur Gordon Webster

Cormag caught his hand and pulled him back until they were facing each other. "I think you're amazing," he said, blurting the words out.
Lachlan smiled, completely shocked and thrilled by how captivating he found him.
He had never thought this could happen to him, that he would be attracted to another boy.
He thought he knew himself so well.
"I think you're smart, sexy, funny as hell. You have hidden depths, Lachlan. You only need the right person to coax you out of your protective shell," he claimed.
"Are you the right person?" Lachlan wondered, as he took a half step forward.
Cormag took a deep breath and brushed at a strand of hair that was sticking out at a funny angle from behind the top of his ear. He tugged at his short hair every time he talked about his recent break up. He was such a dork. — Elaine White

The day i met Cameron,the pieces started to flow into place,and the night that Cameron kissed me,the day that he sat next to me and told that he loved me,that was when the last piece of me were snapped into place.Every other second,minute,hour that i spent with Cameron after that moment made the last piece of my puzzle grow stronger,so that it made the damaged,the broken pieces become insignificant-mere background noise.But Cameron had taken the last piece of the puzzle with him,and a black hole was all that was left in its stead.How do you recover from that? How do you survive?You don't, I resolved.There's no coming back from that permanent void left inside of you.You become a shell,going through the motions without emotion,like a robot,while the rest of me was wherever Cameron was ... — Julie Hockley

And then, on September 11, the world fractured.
It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day and the days that would follow
the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction. — Barack Obama

All the things people carry in their hearts, love, hatred, fears, and they had to be shared with a friend or a loved one, because when we do not share them, sometime, all the things love, anger, hatred, fears ends up coming out of us mixed-up. We just become a shell with nothing inwards us, an empty soul with nothing in it, that is as bad as dying. — Shaikh Ashraf

Is that why you've been pushing me away? Because of how you look? [ ... ] I waited for you my whole life. Yearned for you my whole life. After Tersa told me you were coming, I spent seven hundred years searching for you[ ... ] I never gave a damn what you looked like
tall, short, fat, thin, plain, beautiful, ugly. Why would I care about what you looked like? The flesh was the shell that housed the glory[ ... ] Even if I couldn't be your physical lover, there are other ways to be a lover and I know them all. So don't stand there and tell me how you feel depends on how you look! — Anne Bishop

Chamberlain closed his eyes and saw it again. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty. He did not understand it: a mile of men flowing slowly, steadily, inevitably up the long green ground, dying all the while, coming to kill you, and the shell bursts appearing above them like instant white flowers, and the flags all tipping and fluttering, and dimly you could hear the music and the drums, and then you could hear the officers screaming, and yet even above your own fear came the sensation of unspeakable beauty. He shook his head, opened his eyes. Professor's mind. But he thought of Aristotle: pity and terror. So this is tragedy. Yes. He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question. — Michael Shaara

After an hour my senses begin to vibrate in a definite rhythm, I tune into the great stillness, I tune in. I gaze at the crescent moon sitting like a white shell in the sky, and I have a feeling of love for it, I feel I'm blushing. It's the moon, I say softly and passionately, it's the moon! And my heart beats toward it with a gentle throbbing. It lasts for several minutes. It blows a little, a strange wind is coming, an unusual blast of air. What is it? I look around and see no one. The wind calls me and my soul bows in answer to the call,37 I feel myself lifted out of my sphere, pressed to an invisible breast, my eyes are moist with tears, I tremble - God is somewhere near looking at me. This lasts for another few minutes. I turn my head, the strange blast of air is gone, and I see something like the back of a spirit wandering soundlessly through the forest. . . . — Knut Hamsun

He was a shadow of the man that once intimidated us out of our home, a shell of a human being, a fragment of a father. — David Louden

When you choose to earn your living by helping people who are in emotional pain, you're also making a choice to carry them on your back for a while. To hell with all that talk of taking responsibility, assertiveness. That's crap. You're going to be coming up against helplessness every day of your lives. Your patients will imprint you, like goslings who latch on to the first creature they see when they stick their heads out of the egg shell. If you can't handle it, become and accountant. (82) When the Bough Breaks — Franz W. Kellermanns

When the soul opens its shell, it liberates the fundamental center that is the spirit. And once born, the spirit spreads its wings and flies with all the freedom of love, going to nestle in the heart where resides true Divine love. Love is God in full flight, and it is found inside our own selves. It is the bird coming back to its nest, the spirit returning to its reality, and the creature to the Creator, all coming together in the domain of the One who is and always was. — Alex Polari De Alverga

She was sweet, genuine, sexy as fuck, and broken. That was the one thing he kept coming back to. Even as she tried to put on a brave front, he could see that she was still suffering. He wasn't sure if his natural brand of fuck 'em and bounce was gonna be any help to her, but he knew he didn't like the raw deal she'd gotten. If he could bring her out of that shell just a little, give her some of her own back well then. — Jordan Silver

But the reality is that it is impossible to explain, to verbalize, to articulate the fear that they instill in you. The people who judge, the people who criticize, who don't get it - you have to understand, they're coming at the situation from a position of safety, of security, of self-esteem. You cannot imagine, when you're well and safe and contented, that you could ever feel otherwise. When you're in it... it's like a vortex, a dark, whirling whirlpool that swallows up everything that you ever thought was you, your thoughts, your values, your beliefs, and leaves you with an empty, shattered shell. And that shell, you realize painfully, gradually, is you. — Jeannette De Beauvoir

You know, that's what you've been doing in a way--coming out. Coming out of your room. Coming out of your house. Coming out of your shell. — Jennifer Niven

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face.The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.
The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hours I would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been, could I have lived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden in summer, and the birds that sang at dawn.Tea under the chestnut tree, and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns below.
I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved.They were memories that cannot hurt. — Daphne Du Maurier

The line moved slowly toward the window. Lieutenants, captains, senior lieutenants, some wearing neat new uniforms, others coming back from hospitals and wearing used uniforms, washed and mended where the bullet or shell fragment had damaged them. That whole long line on its way to the front passed by that food window. — Grigory Baklanov

When Francie brought a ticket and a dime back and pushed them across the counter, he gave her the wrapped shirt and two lichee nuts in exchange. Francie loved these lichee nuts. There was a crisp easily broken shell and the soft sweet meat inside. Inside the meat was a hard stone that no child had ever been able to break open. It was said that this stone contained a smaller stone and that the smaller stone contained a smaller stone which contained a yet smaller stone and so on. It was said that soon the stones got so small you could only see them with a magnifying glass and those smaller ones got still smaller until you couldn't see them with anything but they were always there and would never stop coming. It was Francie's first experience with infinity. — Betty Smith

Every crack is also an opening. When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped. Eventually, the chick begins to starve and feels suffocated by the ever-shrinking space of its world. Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end. Its sky is falling. As the chick wriggles through the cracks, it begins to eat its shell. In that moment - growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking - the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn't die, but falls into the world. — Mark Nepo

I am miserable now - not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me - resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, - the tenderness I never had. I don't want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I've carried around in me all my life. — Allen Ginsberg

The inevitable tears began to fall. So like I said before, it wasn't the clothes, and it wasn't the humiliation that drove me to cry. It was something much worse. See, I cried because I should have known what had happened had been coming at me. None of it should have come as a surprise. This is what happened when I dared to be happy in my life. When I stuck my head out of my turtle shell and dared to smile, fate made sure to lay the smackdown to remind me I was not allowed a life like everyone else. — John Goode

If you could see or feel the suffering you wouldn't think twice. Give back life. Don't eat meat. — Kim Basinger