Contours Quotes & Sayings

I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power status'? What were the images evoked by this tag?
Now, walking through this echoing old palace, looking at the pictures in the corridors, this aspiration took on, for the first time, the contours of an imagined reality. This is what the nuclearists wanted: to sign treaties, to be pictured with the world's powerful, to hang portraits on their walls, to become ancestors. On the bomb they had pinned their hopes of bringing it all back. — Amitav Ghosh

And so, finding that, for once, I was not sorry to be alone, I said to myself: I am happy. Perfectly happy, I repeated, as my eyes roamed wide over the brilliant desolate sea and the empty contours of the land. Were they, after all, searching for something that was lacking? I hardly knew. A tiny obstinate figure by the dwarf obelisk under an enormous sky, I declared for the third time: I am absolutely happy, absolutely content. And, increasingly overcome by a profound melancholy which I interpreted simply as an appetite for supper I began to walk downhill, towards my sitting room, my holiday task and my lonely bed. — Christopher Isherwood

You don't realize how much a dog's presence defines the contours of your home until, in its absence, the walls seem to relocate themselves. — Meghan Daum

Alice loved in order to make up for her own insufficiencies, she searched in others for qualities she aspired to, respected but lacked. Her emotional needs were like a puzzle incomplete without a segment brought by another but the dimensions of the void altered in response to self-development, the piece which fitted at fifteen would no longer fit at thirty. The gap redrew its contours, and unless the puzzle-person kept up she would be left to divorce or awkwardly force the issue. — Alain De Botton

The creator wrestles with a hard, invisible substance, a substance far superior to him. Even the greatest victor emerges vanquished, because our deepest secret, the only one that deserves expression, always remains unexpressed. This secret never submits to art's material contours. We suffocate inside every word. Seeing a blossoming tree, a hero, a woman, the morning star, we cry, Ah! Nothing else is able to accommodate our joy. When, analyzing this Ah! we wish to turn it into thought and art in order to impart it to mankind and rescue it from our own dissolution, how it cheapens into brazen, mascaraed words full of air and fancy! — Nikos Kazantzakis

Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. — Rudolf Steiner

Blair's support for the Americans should not be seen as an aberration; on the contrary, it is closely linked to the main contours of New Labour policy. This has been a government that has majored on hyperbole, but in fact, from the outset it was hugely timid and cravenly orthodox. — Martin Jacques

There comes a time when you have to decide whether to change yourself to fit the story, or change the story itself. The decision gets a little easier if you understand that refusing to shape your life and personality to the contours of an unjust world is the best way to start creating a new one. There — Laurie Penny

One of the powerful functions of a library - any library - lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict nor control, to lead us down new roads whose contours and vistas provide us with new perspectives. Sometimes, if we are fortunate, those other worlds turn out to have more points of familiarity with our own than we had thought. Sometimes we make connections back to familiar territory and when we have returned, we do so supplied with new perspectives, which enrich our lives as scholars and enhance our role as teachers. Sometimes the experience takes us beyond our immediate lives as scholars and teachers, and the library produces this result particularly when it functions as the storehouse of memory, a treasury whose texts connect us through time to all humanity.
[Browsing in the Western Stacks, Harvard Library Bulletin NS 6(3): 27-33, 1995] — Richard F. Thomas

Contours on the second half of a long putt have more impact on how the ball rolls because it's going slower. Adjust your speed if that last part is playing uphill or downhill. Don't get fooled by an early slope or break. — Ernie Els

I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can't start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn't say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is. — Anne Carson

But not you, O girl, nor yet his
mother,
stretched his eyebrows so fierce with
expectation.
Not for your mouth, you who hold him
now,
did his lips ripen into these fervent
contours.
Do you really think your quiet
footsteps
could have so convulsed him, you who
move like dawn wind?
True, you startled his heart; but older
terrors
rushed into him with that first jolt
to his emotions.
Call him . . . you'll never quite
retrieve him from those dark consorts.
Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved,
he makes a home
in your familiar heart, takes root
there and begins himself anew.
But did he ever begin himself? — Rainer Maria Rilke

So in 1924, Eleanor Roosevelt really gets a sense of what the limits of the battle and the contours of the battle are going to be. The men are contemptuous of the women, and the women really need to organize. She writes an article which becomes an article she writes in different ways over and over and over again: Women need to organize. They need to create their own bosses. They need to have support networks and gangs so that they are a force. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. — J.G. Ballard

Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine Substance ... — C.S. Lewis

Sadly, today there are only a few remaining speakers of kakadu or gagadju. The work, then, is concerned with my feelings about this place, its landscape, its change of seasons, its dry season and its wet, its cycle of life and death the melodic material in Kakadu, as in much of my recent music, was suggested by the contours and rhythms of Aboriginal chant. — Peter Sculthorpe

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs. — Graham Joyce

I confront the city with my body; my legs measure the length of the arcade and the width of the square; my gaze unconsciously projects my body onto the facade of the cathedral, where it roams over the mouldings and contours, sensing the size of recesses and projections; my body weight meets the mass of the cathedral door, and my hand grasps the door pull as I enter the dark void behind. I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me. — Juhani Pallasmaa

Psychologists call this cognitive impenetrability: our conscious understanding of the situation is unable to penetrate a compelling perception generated by relatively inflexible mechanisms that interpret visual contours, surfaces, and shapes. — John C. Wathey

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Cemeteries have always had a lure for me. They are well kept, free from ambiguity, logical, virile, and alive. In cemeteries you can summon up courage and arrive at decisions, in cemeteries life takes on distinct contours
I am not referring to the borders of the graves
and if you will, a meaning. — Gunter Grass

In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And there's this strange thing: you're never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it makes it very beautiful as well. — Hannah Kent

Judith Stacey - a prominent New York University professor who is in no way regarded as a fringe figure, in testifying before Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act - expressed hope that the revisionist view's triumph would give marriage "varied, creative, and adaptive contours . . . [leading some to] question the dyadic limitations of Western marriage and seek . . . small group marriages."44 In their statement "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage," more than three hundred "LGBT and allied" scholars and advocates - including prominent Ivy League professors - call for legally recognizing sexual relationships involving more than two partners.45 University of Calgary Professor Elizabeth Brake thinks that justice requires us to use legal recognition to "denormalize[] heterosexual monogamy as a way of life" and correct for "past discrimination against homosexuals, bisexuals, polygamists, and care networks."46 — Sherif Girgis

We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them. — Peter Watts

That you're so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you're here to do. And when people are here to do that, they almost always tell us something we need to hear. I want to know what you have inside you. I want to see the contours of your second beating heart. So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker. Yours, — Cheryl Strayed

She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing. — David Anthony Durham

She was older, no longer the wicked limber girl with the stalled Vespa, but no less beautiful to me for that: whatever elliptical beauty Cassie possesses has always lain not in the vulnerable planes of color and texture but deeper, in the polished contours of her bones. — Tana French

This was the curse of the voracious reader, she realized. Real life never quite measured up to the heightened and precise contours of her literary worlds. A real war was never as true as a fictive one. — Reif Larsen

One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it would stand so clearly before his eyes that disappointment is not a hot, destroying poison, but rather a cool calming balm that opens our eyes to the real contours of ourselves. — Pascal Mercier

Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry. — Romesh Gunesekera

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art. — Morton Feldman

Montana
A great many small failures have brought me to this
Dark room where, against the teachings of the church,
I lie in the forgiving dark with you and we kiss
And loosen our clothing and feel the hot urge
Toward nakedness, man's natural destination,
The slow unbuttoning, unclasping, until at last
We lie revealed. The fine sensation
Of you on my skin. A slender woman as vast
As Montana and I am now heading west
On a winding road through the dark contours
Of mountains and into a valley, coming to rest
In a meadow that I recognize as yours.
This is what I drove across North Dakota to find:
This sweet nest. And put all my failed life behind. — Gary Johnson

Seen from an aeroplane high in the air, even the most gigantic skyscraper is only a tall stone black, a mere sculptural form, not a real building in which people can live. But as the plane descends from the great heights there will be one moment when the buildings change character completely. Suddenly, they take on human scale, become houses for human beings like ourselves, not the tiny dolls observed from the heights. This strange tranformation takes place at the instant when the contours of the buildings begin to rise above the horizon so that we get a side view of them instead of looking down on them. The buildings pass into a new stage of existence, become architecture in place of neat toys
for architecture means shapes formed around man, formed to be lived in, not merely to be seen from outside. — Steen Eiler Rasmussen

In my address last year, I spoke on the issue of gaming. My preference then is my preference now: to keep gaming within its existing contours, but to explore a better deal for all Minnesotans. — Tim Pawlenty

To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative
this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality. — Joyce Carol Oates

One cannot really know an other without intimacy. Detached, objective observations alone leave a surface upon which it is too easy to project one's own image or fantasies. In intimacy, one respectfully interacts with the other, invites the penetration of the other, enters into a common effort, and then the strange and distinct contours of self and other become more apparent. — Deena Metzger

The dynamics of the global distribution of capital are at once economic, political, and military. This was already the case in the colonial era, when the great powers of the day, Britain and France foremost among them, were quick to roll out the cannon to protect their investments. Clearly, the same will be true in the twenty-first century, in a tense new global political configuration whose contours are difficult to predict in advance. — Thomas Piketty

A police photograph is like a passport photograph: the intelligence which casts a veil over the crude common shape is never recorded by the cheap lens. No one can deny the contours of the flesh, the shape of nose and mouth, and yet we protest, This isn't me. — Graham Greene

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there, binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But — Victor Hugo

There it was again: the entrance up the darkened ramp disclosing an expanse of amazing green, the fervent crowd contained in a stadium scaled to human dimensions, the players so close it almost seemed that you could touch them, the eccentric features of an old ballpark constructed to fit the contours of the allotted space. I — Doris Kearns Goodwin

You can barely make out the heavy wooden block of the contortion seat. I run my hands along it's contours, the wood grain smooth and polished from human flesh. — Adam Johnson

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going. — Michael Chabon

I felt like, by the end of the week in the U.S. Amateur, I was never aiming at a flag; I was just hitting it at slopes and just letting the natural contours take over. — Peter Uihlein

Wood is an endlessly adaptive material. You can plane, chisel, saw, carve, sand, and bend it, and when the pieces are the shape you want you can use dovetail joints, tenpenny nails, pegs or glue; you can use lamination or inlay or marquetry; and then you can beautify it with French polish or plain linseed oil or subtle stains. And when you go to dinner at a friend's house, the candlelight will pick out the contours of grain and line, and when you take your seat you will be reminded that what you are sitting on grew from the dirt, stretched towards the sun, weathered rain and wind, and sheltered animals; it was not extruded by faceless machines lined on a cold cement floor and fed from metal vats. Wood reminds us where we come from. — Nicola Griffith

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place. — Josephine Hart

I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life. — Sean William Scott

Among those ways and thoughts of God, then, is the principle of accommodation. God works within human limitations - both individual and corporate - to transform the world according to his good purposes. To be blunt, God works with what he's got and with what we've got. He does not create a whole new situation but instead graciously pursues shalom in the glory and the mess we have made. The living water of the Holy Spirit pours over the extant topography of the social landscape and rarely sweeps all before it. The Spirit usually conforms himself to the contours he encounters. But as he does so, like an irresistible flow of water, he shapes them by and by, eventually making the crooked ways straight and the rough places a plain (Isa. 40:3-4). — John G. Stackhouse Jr.

Nobody would dare look at himself in the mirror, because a grotesque, tragic image would mix in the contours of his face with stains and traces of blood, wounds which cannot be healed, and unstoppable streams of tears. I would experience a kind of voluptuous awe if I could see a volcano of blood, eruptions as red as fire and as burning as despair, burst into the midst of the comfortable and superficial harmony of everyday life, or if I could see all our hidden wounds open, making of us a bloody eruption forever. Only then would we truly understand and appreciate the advantage of loneliness, which silences our suffering and makes it inaccessible. The venom drawn out from suffering would be enough to poison the whole world in a bloody eruption, bursting out of the volcano of our being. There is so much venom, so much poison, in suffering! — Emil Cioran

There is no exact principle to be found here. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground - unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way." "I do have a dreadful love for — Elizabeth Gilbert

The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. It is a sort of ritual of familiarity. As a form, it is a form of contact with a known landscape. It is not destructive. It is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. — Wendell Berry

There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can't explain without handing over a full map of one's life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for long days and nights when things were bad or good, or when things were too small to be described at all: when things just were. This is a life. — Colm Toibin

My lady," says Aladdin, extending an arm toward the sun, "I give you gold as a token of my love."
"All I want is you," I reply. I turn and kiss him, pulling him against me, feeling the warmth of the dawn in my hair. Then I rest my head on his shoulder, simply feeling his arms around me, his heart beating against me.
"Are you cold?" asks Aladdin. "You're shivering."
"A little."
"I'll go get a blanket. And breakfast. If I can find the kitchen."
"Galley, love. It's called a galley."
"Right. Galley. Got it. I'll ask the captain. What was his name?"
"Sinbad, I think?"
"I'll be right back."
But I catch his hand. "I'm all right. Don't go yet."
He stays with me, and together we watch the sun stain the sea and sky a thousand and one shades of gold. My thumb rubs the ring on my finger, its dents and contours as familiar to me now as my hand.
So this is what it feels like to have all your wishes come true. — Jessica Khoury

All forms of beauty are poignant, Japanese beauty particularly so. That lily-white complexion, those mellow eyes, the inimitable shape of the nose, the well-defined contours of the mouth, and the complicated sweetness of the features are enough, by themselves, to eclipse the most perfectly assembled faces. — Amelie Nothomb

On average, once a month for the last 10 years since her [Harper Lee] stroke, we have sat and talked and told stories and exchanged insults ... Which she loves. I think one secret to our friendship was I did not treat her like a marble woman, and my wife - I joked with her, and I joked with her, and that was the sort of contours of our friendship. — Wayne Flynt

He runs quickly and quietly through the dense woodland; his breathing is shallow yet steady. Beads of sweat glisten on the translucent skin of his forehead. His intense brown eyes drink in the surroundings of the forest as they flash by. The muscles flex in his arms and legs as he runs, and the sun reflects the contours of his body, showcasing his strong physique. I wake with a start; I can feel the blood pumping — Siobhan Davis

Suddenly, she saw herself once again, standing before a mirror, just as she had in the Q Continuum when her body had been collected from cosmic dust and made whole. Before her the outlines of a woman were visible, the contours of her body a rough approximation of Janeway's own. But this woman gave off her own illumination, an almost blinding light. Janeway stared at her, not in the mirror, but as the mirror. All she had ever been, or would ever be, gazed silently at her, quietly demanding recognition. That — Kirsten Beyer

Moonlight knew no colors and traced the contours of the terrain only very softly. It covered the land a dirty gray, strangling life all night long. This world molded in lead, where nothing moved but the wind that fell sometimes like a shadow over the gray forests, and where nothing lived but the scent of the naked earth, was the only world he accepted, for it was much like the world of his soul. — Patrick Suskind

The ocean is the last frontier of human empirical knowledge; even the contours on that eighth-grader's globe are the product of a mix of scientific measurement, inference and conjecture. — Alan Huffman

(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language ... forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening that it may translate them to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness ... In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which daylight would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and furthest recesses. — Theophile Gautier

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. — Hemmingway Ernest

Am touched that you are trying to comprehend me. A friend could not be more loving. I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. There is no exact principle to be found here. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground - unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive at revelation on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way." "I do have a dreadful love for understanding," Alma admitted. "Indeed you do love it, though it is not dreadful, — Elizabeth Gilbert

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

*lightly contours to go on a hike* — Unknown

All my early memories are of forms and shapes and textures. Moving through and over the West Riding landscape with my father in his car, the hills were sculptures; the roads defined the form. Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fullnessess and concavities, through hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour. — Barbara Hepworth

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants. — William Butler Yeats

Sometimes, when we're terrified of embracing our true calling, we'll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us. Are you pursuing a shadow career? — Steven Pressfield

I've developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way — Nick Hornby

What do the contours of your body mean, laid out like the lines on a hand, so that I no longer see them except as fate? — Rainer Maria Rilke

The information was like a secret weapon hidden in her pocket, which she held in the palm of her hand, caressing its contours, considering its power. — Liane Moriarty

A campaign, like a brand, is not just a number of bits put together-a claim here, a pack shot there, a reason why somewhere else. If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand. It will be a perfect description of the structure of the brand, as the Identikit can describe the contours of the face. But it won't be the same thing. The brand will never come to life. — Stephen King

It was the most beautiful view Shevek had ever seen. The tenderness and vitality of the colors, the mixture of rectilinear human design and powerful, proliferate natural contours, the variety and harmony of the elements, gave an impression of complex wholeness such as he had never seen, except, perhaps, foreshadowed on a small scale in certain serene and thoughtful human faces. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All the suffering and torment wrought at places of execution, in torture chambers, madhouses, operating theatres, under the arches of bridges in late autumn - all these are stubbornly imperishable, all these persist, are inaccessible but cling on, envious of everything that is, stuck in their own terrible reality. People would like to be allowed to forget much of it, their sleep gliding softly over these furrows in the brain, but dreams come and push sleep aside and fill the picture again. And so they wake up breathless, let the light of a candle dissolve the darkness as they drink the comforting half-light as if it was sugared water. But, alas, the edge on which this security is balancing is a narrow one. Given the slightest little turn and their gaze slips away from the familiar and the friendly, and the contours that had so recently been comforting take the sharp outlines of an abyss of horror. — Rainer Maria Rilke

the One whom we most need to behold has made himself known. He has traced with a fine hand the lines and contours of his face. He has done so in his Word. We must search for that face, though babies continue to cry, bills continue to grow, bad news continues to arrive unannounced, though friendships wax and wane, though both ease and difficulty weaken our grip on godliness, though a thousand other faces crowd close for our affection, and a thousand other voices clamor for our attention. By fixing our gaze on that face, we trade mere human glory for holiness: — Jen Wilkin

Birgit Mampe and colleagues analysed the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns. They studied the ups and downs of their natural cries and it turns out that French babies produce more rising pitches, whereas German babies cry more with falling contours. — Victoria Williamson

I am more touched, still, that you are trying to understand - through rational thought - that which cannot be understood at all. The divine, as Boehme said, is unground, unfathomable, something outside the world as we experience it. But this is a difference of our minds, dearest one. I wish to arrive on wings, while you advance steadily on foot, magnifying glass in hand. I am a smattering wanderer, seeking God within the outer contours, searching for a new way of knowing. You stand upon the ground, and consider the evidence inch by inch. Your way is more rational and more methodical, but I cannot change my way. — Elizabeth Gilbert

The sea erupted. Often the sea and land changed places. The immobility of contours of continents and seas, a dogma in geology, has no basis in fact. And immediately there is the problem of the climate. There were ancient climates that were very different from what they are today. If those corals grew where they were found, certainly the Earth was not travelling with the same elements of rotation and revolution which means not in the same orbit, not with the axis directed in the same position as it is today. If you don't believe it, try to conservate corals on the North Pole. — Immanuel Velikovsky

If one kept the great yellow mounds of smashed brick in the corner of one's eye, then the mind understood them as the contours of nature and forgot its trick of making one unhappy. — Chris Cleave

Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight. I'm able to see those colors clearly. — Haruki Murakami

In general, I've found female protagonists more intriguing to work with than males. I cherish women and have always preferred their company, reveling in their perfumes, their contours, their finer-grained sensibilities, lunar intuitions, nurturing instincts and relatively unfettered emotions
although I'm certainly not unaware that there are plenty of neurotic, uptight, stupid women in the world. — Tom Robbins

She touched him everywhere she could reach. The rounded hardness of his biceps and chest, the ripped contours of his back, his thick, damp hair, until touching with his hands wasn't enough. — Melissa Cutler

He wasn't a bad person. He didn't want to fight. The trouble was that he'd tried to be part of the larger questions, tried to become part of politics and history. Happiness had a smaller location, though this wasn't something to flaunt, of course; very few would stand up and announce, 'Actually, I'm a coward,' but his timidity might be disguised, well, in a perfectly ordinary existence situated between meek contours ... Cowardice needed its facade, its reasoning, like anything else if it was to be his life's principle. Contentment is no easy matter. One had to situate it cannily, camoflauge it, pretend it was something else. — Kiran Desai

Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do. — Slavoj Zizek

The amusement fled from Royce's face and with a groan he pulled her roughly against his chest, crushing her to him. "Jenny," he whispered hoarsely, burying his face in her fragrant hair. "Jenny, I love you."
She melted against him, molding her body to the rigid contours of his, offering her lips up for his fierce, devouring kiss, then she took his face between both her hands. Leaning back slightly against his arm, her melting blue eyes gazing deeply into his, his wife replied in a shaky voice, "I think, my lord, I love you more. — Judith McNaught

Even the primary visual areas in the brain show the special organizing function of space. Each patch of cortical real estate is dedicated to a fixed spot in the visual field, and contours in the world are represented as contours across the surface of the brain, at least on a large scale. Time also has a presence in the mind that is more than just any old attribute of an experience. Neuroscientists have found biological clocks ticking in the brains of organisms as simple as fruit flies. And just as we see stuff that is connected in space as an object, we see stuff that is connected in time as a motion, such as a trajectory or gesture, or, in the case of sound, as a melody or stretch of speech. — Steven Pinker

She wished she could capture the moment and make it physical somehow, turn it into something that she could hold in her hands, or put somewhere safe like she would a book or a vase. But life wasn't like that. You didn't get to hold on to the moments that defined you or touch the things that touched you - not in the palm of your hand or with the tips of your fingers, at least. Destiny's machinations were as elusive as a sculptor's tool, swooping in, changing your contours, and then moving on to the next piece of clay. — J.R. Ward

When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage. When we build hives or nests, mud huts or concrete towers, we re-sculpt the contours of the planet. When we eat, we convert living matter into waste. And when we walk, we create trails. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we should shape the earth, but how. — Robert Moor

[...] these questions gave way, in the course of time, to a different preoccupation, namely, a slow and growing awareness of familiarity with the landscape into which she was being carried. A familiarity based not on the sighting of particular landmarks, but on her feeling that the very contours of the hills and fields, and the very shapes and colours of the buildings, now appeared as surviving monuments to the existence of a much earlier self whom she had long forgotten. She knew, of course, that they could not bring that self back to life, perish the thought, but they reminded her of it in a way which she did not find disagreeable. — Jonathan Coe

For instance, the need of large corporations to analyze market opportunities according to established metrics prevented them from grasping the contours of nascent markets emerging around new technologies. Lower short-term profits from these new markets go against the culture of maximizing quarterly share prices. And the dilemma replicates itself with each wave of innovation: as the first companies to exploit disruptive technologies gain and grow, "it becomes progressively more difficult for them to enter the even newer smaller markets destined to become the large ones of the future."47 — Moises Naim

Here was the heart of dread. It was not fearsome. It was fetid, noxious, hopeless. A deep and exhausting misery, a crevasse so bottomless that, in the blackness, all one could make out were the contours of despair. — Laura Tillman

I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars. — Yves Klein

A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand? — Alan Moore

The happiest days of our lives [are] days such as this when one's work [begins] to reach fruition and to assume the contours of its imminent completion.

(A. Herzbruch, in A Murder at Dragon Bay) — Steven William Lawrie

The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security ... — Hugo Black

To draw does not simply mean to reproduce contours; the drawing does not simply consist in the idea: the drawing is even the expression, the interior form, the plan, the model. Look what remains after that! The drawing is three fourths and a half of what constitutes painting. If I had to put a sign over my door to the atelier, I would write: School of drawing, and I'm certain that I would create painters. — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

The old house had a thousand doors in it.

All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured angles of wall meeting wall; fireplaces grown chill with unused years. Archways with unseen contours you can trace with a finger in the cracks as brick grinds against brick in settling walls. Some nights, and some houses are doorways entire, silhouettes against the evening's last light black on black like an opening into a darker sky. You just have to look. An eye-corner glance will do, if you don't turn and stare and explain it away. — Michael Montoure

Here in Tibet live the people my mother taught me to love before I met them. We are family, and love has undetermined aptitude and great hunger. I wander around town with a heavy heart. You can love a place as you love a person and it is especially easy to feel that way here, where man and nature are intertwined deeply. I commit to memory little things: the thin film of dust incited by the ends of chubas dragging on the earth; the gentle contours of the mountains; the steady gaze of a yak; the alacrity with which children submit to authority; the patience of women who sit in the main square with bottles of milk and yogurt for sale; the songs on the streets. — Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

I left them to it, the pointing of fingers on maps, the tracing of mountain villages, the tracks and contours on maps of larger scale, and basked for the one evening allowed to me in the casual, happy atmosphere of the taverna where we dined. I enjoyed poking my finger in a pan and choosing my own piece of lamb. I liked the chatter and the laughter from neighbouring tables. The gay intensity of talk - none of which I could understand, naturally - reminded me of left-bank Paris. A man from one table would suddenly rise to his feet and stroll over to another, discussion would follow, argument at heat perhaps swiftly dissolving into laughter. This, I thought to myself, has been happening through the centuries under this same sky, in the warm air with a bite to it, the sap drink pungent as the sap running through the veins of these Greeks, witty and cynical as Aristophanes himself, in the shadow, unmoved, inviolate, of Athene's Parthenon. ("The Chamois") — Daphne Du Maurier

I have been photographing our toilet, that glossy enameled receptacle of extraordinary beauty. Here was every sensuous curve of the human figure divine but minus the imperfections. Never did the Greeks reach a more significant consummation to their culture, and it somehow reminded me, in the glory of its chaste convulsions and in its swelling, sweeping, forward movement of finely progressing contours, of the Victory of Samothrace. — Edward Weston

The parish is not an outdated institution; precisely because it possesses great flexibility, it can assume quite different contours depending on the openness and missionary creativity of the pastor and the community. — Pope Francis