Quotes & Sayings About Crawling Back

I felt the back of my neck crawl. The crawling reached around to the corners of my jaw, then up to my temple, and across my cheeks.

I reached up to touch it. Splinters, small fingers, hooks. Scraping at my fingertips, gouging. Slowly reaching for my eyes, reaching for my remaining flesh.

Tiny, like the legs of spiders, pincers, fish hooks, they stabbed and set themselves into the flesh that remained, around my mouth, near my eyes, at my forehead. Then they stopped. Waited.

Asking. Offering. A deal with the devil, metaphorically speaking.

Give up your face if you truly want wings. Give up your eyes.

I could hear the dragon screech, not all that far away. This crisis I faced was removed from a very large, very real crisis that threatened people and Others I cared a great deal about.

Do it, and you can fly. Fly, and you might be able to do something to save them. — Wildbow

I'd been about to say something...something...about human naivety...and the fact we had no fundamental right to happiness...or something...but his hand moved over my thigh, fingers brushing my cock through my trousers, and my breath hitched and my thoughts scattered, and I did not mourn them. He pushed me back onto the kitchen floor, crawling over me like some mountain cat stalking its prey. — Alexis Hall

Time plays no role in the life of one man - the subtle consciousness of it floating past me is more than enough. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds - what does it matter? Floating by, it rubs against my skin, face, and hair - wearing me down, yet polishing me all the while. Time is like fine grains of sand in a desert storm. At first, you don't pay any attention to it, but the more it hits you in the face, the more aware of it you become, the more annoying it gets until, one day, you find yourself suffocating. The weight of it eventually bends your spine, until you are crawling on your hands and knees, unable to stand straight. Then comes the time to crawl back into the womb, crawl inside and wait for rebirth. — Henry Martin

You're the measure of my true decline. Your home isn't in the underworld, you live in the back room of the liquor store. My eternally hung-over angel, my Satan crawling like an amber worm from a bottle of Zoladkowa Gorzka. — Jerzy Pilch

In "Drive," there's a heightened male edge. In "Only God Forgives," it was almost crawling back into the womb of the mother. And now with "The Neon Demon," being reborn as a 16-year-old girl. — Nicolas Winding Refn

Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. — H.P. Lovecraft

We got interested in aesthetics, and then at the end of all of it we fell off the precipice. It's almost like crawling back because so many techniques are lost, and so we're going to have a [small] reserve of teachers who can teach the vast number of interested students. We have these poor, hungry, starving people who want to learn something and no place to get it. It's a tragedy. — Nelson Shanks

We must wait," she said. "They are involved in important buisness."
Her tone was serious, almost reverntial. The two of them stopped, some five meters from the group of me. They were all leaning forward, staring intently at an upright rock placed in the middle of the circle. Will thought they must be praying, although no words were being said.
Then, as one, they all slumped back with a roar of disappointment.
"It flew away!" said one figure, and Will recognized the voice. It was the man who had rescued him. "Almost to the top and it flew away!"
e lookd questioningly to Cieliema and she rolled her eyes at him. "Grown men gambling on two flies crawling up a stone."
"Gambling?" he said. "I thought they were praying.
She raised an eyebrow. "To them, it's much the same thing. — John Flanagan

Once we finished, she climbed off me, went to the bathroom to clean up, then came back to bed with a rag, wiping me off before crawling on top of me. — Aurora Rose Reynolds

So with a lot of difficulty, I picked up this huge snapping turtle and slowly carried it down the road to the river.
Just as I had slipped it into the water and was watching it swim away, my geology professor came up behind me. "You know," he said quietly, "that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road - you have just put it back in the river."
I felt terrible. I couldn't believe what I had done, but it was too late. It took me many more years to realize this parable had taught me the first rule of organizing.
Always ask the turtle. — Gloria Steinem

After a few miles, I push play and the audiobook starts. It might be nice to ride through the night, believing in magic for a while, magic of either the Hogwarts variety or the Muggle sort that will keep Daniel alive.
But Aaron and Taylor must have been in the car a lot over the last few days, because they're way past the point where we left off. And I'd forgotten how dark this one is at the end. They're past the Ministry of Magic and back at Hogwarts now, where Dumbledore and Harry are arguing about Voldemort. About Voldemort crawling inside Harry's head and trying to control him.
Way too close to what happened in the lab for comfort.
Deo and I both reach to turn it off at the same time. — Rysa Walker

Ah." Puck's emerald eyes sparkled with glee. "And so they come crawling back for Puck's help after all. Tsk tsk." He shook his head and took another bite of the apple. "How easy it is to forget grudges when someone has something you need. — Julie Kagawa

Whole realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge's sons; he escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge's daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on wintry nights he lay at the Judge's feet before the roaring library fire; he carried the Judge's grandsons on his back, or rolled them in the grass, and guarded their footsteps through wild adventures down to the fountain in the stable yard, and even beyond, where the paddocks were, and the berry patches. Among the terriers he stalked imperiously, and Toots and Ysabel he utterly ignored, for he was king, - king over all creeping, crawling, flying things of Judge Miller's — Jack London

I could feel someone watching me. Eyes boring a hole in the back of my neck, crawling over my skin. — Kaitlin Bevis

So Jafar knows I'm in the city- he probably already knew that. He doesn't know where I'll be next. Because... I never stay still. I never sleep in the same place twice. I move like the wind and the shadows. I am sheltered by the good and faithful all over Agrabah, in every neighborhood.
Go crawling back to your master, scum. Tell him that I am the eyes and ears of my people, and they do not want him. — Liz Braswell

I've tried so hard to stay away from you," he whispered one night, cuddling her while the moonlight made stripes across the shadowed hills of the bedclothes.
"Why?" Daisy whispered back, crawling over him until she was draped over the muscled surface of his chest.
He played with the dark cascade of her hair. "Because I shouldn't come to you like this until we're married. There's a risk - "
Daisy silenced him with her mouth, not stopping until his breath had hastened and his bare skin was as hot as a stove-plate beneath her. She lifted her head to smile down into his gleaming eyes. "All or nothing," she murmured. "That's how I want you. — Lisa Kleypas

That's why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God — John Updike

Rahul had been underwhelmed by the New Year's rituals of the rich. "Moronic," he had concluded. "Just people drinking and dancing and standing around acting stupid, like people here do every night."

"The hotel people get strange when they drink," he told his friends. "Last night at the end of the party, there was one hero-good-looking, stripes on his suit, expensive cloth. He was drunk, full tight, and he started stuffing bread into his pants pockets, jacket pockets. Then he put more rolls straight into his pants! Rolls fell on the floor and he was crawling under the table to get them. This one waiter was saying the guy must have been hungry, earlier- that whiskey brought back the memory. But when I get rich enough to be a guest at a big hotel, I'm not going to act like such a loser. — Katherine Boo

We tilt our heads back and open wide. The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.
Then it melts.
The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don't know what just happened. They can't remember. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Trouble in paradise? Want me to talk to him for you?" he offered. "I'm sure I can convince him to come crawling back. Even literally, if you're into that kind of kinky stuff. — Ada Adams

He broke off as two hands rose up out of the smoke. Alec grabbed one and Simon the other, and together they hauled Samuel like a limp sack of potatoes out of the cell and deposited him on the lawn. A moment later Simon and Clary were grabbing Jace's hands and pulling him out, though he was considerably less limp and swore when they accidentally banged his head on the ledge. He shook them off, crawling the rest of the way onto the grass himself and then collapsing onto his back. — Cassandra Clare

The glow flares bright - bright as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun.

Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star.

First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void.

Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos.

Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold.

Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating.

Generation to generation.

The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness.

Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies.

And from there, back to the stars that birthed them.

A perfect circle. — Amie Kaufman

There's something called the Crab Effect. If you put a bunch of crabs in a bowl and if, while they're in there crawling all over each other, one of them tries to climb out, the rest of them will try to pull him back down instead of helping to push him out. No wonder they're called crabs. — Jen Sincero

Also," Nick added curtly, "I'm sorry about your face."
Jamie looked over his shoulder, and touched the demon's mark crawling along his jaw with the back of his hand. "Sorry about saving all our lives by doing something you had to do?"
"Oh no," Nick said blandly, "I just meant, you know. Generally."
Jamie stared at him, shocked, and laughed. It was a real laugh, helpless and sweet, and Mae memorized it in case he died. Jamie by the river at dawn, laughing. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Him. "This isn't the only item I questioned," he said. "I want to taste the others, too." "Try this first," she said, making no effort to conceal her certainty. "Taste it and weep. I'm going to step back a little so you'll have room to come crawling to me." Yeah, right. She'd served fish and chips. How good could — Susan Mallery

Helen Lawson: They drummed you out of Hollywood, so you come crawling back to Broadway. But Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope. Now get out of my way, I've got a man waiting for me. — Jacqueline Susann

It's finger time! Steve simply grunted.
Li responded like she always had to the request over the past years, by walking over to the tall oak cabinet in his office and pulling out a pack of Vienna Fingers. She then closed the door and walked around the desk and dropped to her knees, crawling the few extra feet under his desk. Li handed the red and white plastic package of cookies to Steve, who slid the tray open while his virtual slave unzipped the trousers of his blue Armani pinstripe suit and then dug deep to find his pleasure source.
Twenty seconds later, when both of them had consumed their mid-afternoon snacks, Steve transitioned back into his unrelenting work persona. — Phil Wohl

I remember being cast in the first "Harry Potter" film and being quite amused, because I was imagining that someone who'd been acting since they'd been crawling would be cast. The faith and trust that they'd put into everyone actually enabled you to gain confidence back, in the sense of feeling that sense of achievement, which is incredibly hard when you're young. — Bonnie Wright

But I have no desire for fame and power anymore. I crawled out of the swamp and I'm not crawling back in. — George W. Bush

When the stormtroopers parted, Hera saw Gord crawling back toward Moonglow's gate. She blinked away a tear of anger. Yes, she needed to see these things, to remind her what she was fighting for. — John Jackson Miller

There are people who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not crawl, once — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I've had a bad time, which we won't dwell on. We were married and we worked together for 52 years, and suddenly with her gone I was a quadriplegic. Slowly I'm crawling back. — Hume Cronyn

I knew the point wasn't the victory, but pulling yourself together and crawling your way back. That was life. — Chloe Neill

Strange to say, Behm was one of the first to fall. He got hit in the eye during an attack, and we left him lying for dead. We couldn't bring him with us, because we had to come back helter-skelter. In the afternoon suddenly we heard him call, and saw him crawling about in No Man's Land. He had only been knocked unconscious. Because he could not see, and was mad with pain, he failed to keep under cover, and so was shot down — Erich Maria Remarque

If your skin is crawling, pay attention. If something doesn't feel right, pay attention. If the hairs on the back of your neck prickle, if your gut clenches up, if a wave of wrongness washes over you, if your heart starts beating faster, pay, pay, pay attention. Do not second-guess yourself or rationalize anything that impedes your safety. Our instincts are the animal inside of our humanness, warning us of danger. — Inga Muscio

It's not the sickness that Number 23 reduced me to that frightens me. It's how long I willingly ingested it. The last time I heard Number 23's voice, he was telling me that I had a dependency on men, that I'd made him my life raft, that the only reason I put up with him was because I was broken inside. It was the truest thing I've ever been told. Although it was my life's greatest detriment, I was unconscious of it. Unconscious male dependency was the fuel to my Number 23 rebound, a rebound that sent me back to my preteen anorexia, driving me to the vulnerable weakness that sent me crawling back to The South. — Maggie Young

Crawling at your feet,' said the Gnat (Alice drew her feet back in some alarm), 'you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.'

And what does IT live on?'

Weak tea with cream in it.'

A new difficulty came into Alice's head. 'Supposing it couldn't find any?' she suggested.

Then it would die, of course.'

But that must happen very often,' Alice remarked thoughtfully.

It always happens,' said the Gnat. — Lewis Carroll

Truth, like honor and courage and love, does not come in shades of gray. You either have it or you don't - there is no in between. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to uncover it, and sometimes it is clear and simple as a sunrise. Also like honor and courage and love, sometimes the truth can be lost, and you have to find your way back to it, crawling over fields of broken glass and dead bodies, your knees and hands bloody and raw, until you get to it and it's even sweeter than before because of what you suffered on the way. — J.T. Geissinger

Urquhart could somehow feel the glow on his skin as the hairs on his arms raised up and the thick pelt of man fur that covered his torso and back prickled as if the legs of a thousand insects were crawling on his body. — Clive Cussler

That girl has done things to your head.'

He pats my back, 'Don't pretend she's not crawling inside of yours. — James W. Bodden

Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.
Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type ... — Edward Abbey

I'm sorry about your face." Jamie looked over his shoulder, and touched the demon's mark crawling along his jaw with the back of his hand. "Sorry about saving all our lives by doing something you had to do?" "Oh no," Nick said blandly. "I just meant, you know. Generally. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Isabelle had been trained to wake up early every morning, rain or shine, and a slight hangover did nothing to prevent it from happening again. She sat up slowly and blinked down at Simon. She'd never spent and entire night in a bed with anyone else, unless you counted crawling into her parents bed when she was four and afraid of thunderstorms. She couldn't help staring at Simon as if he were some exotic species of animal. He lay on his back, his mouth slightly open, his hair in his eyes. Ordinary brown hair, ordinary brown eyes. His t-shirt was pulled up slightly. He wasn't muscular like a shadowhunter. He had a smooth flat stomach but no six-pack, and there was still a hint of softness to his face. What was it about him that fascinated her? He was plenty cute, but she had dated gorgeous faerie knights, sexy shadowhunters ...
"Isabelle," Simon said without opening his eyes. "Quit staring at me. — Cassandra Clare

I gradually shrank in size until I was a teenager, then a child, and then, at last, a baby, crawling, until inevitably I was sucked naked and screaming through that portal every man's mother possesses, into a black hole where all light vanished. As that last glimmer faded, it occurred to me that the light at the end of the tunnel seen by people who have died and come back to life was not Heaven. Wasn't it much more plausible that what they saw was not what lay ahead of them but what lay behind? This was the universal memory of the first tunnel we all pass through, the light at its end penetrating our fetal darkness... — Viet Thanh Nguyen

This is not our home. We can turn away and leave it to the skaven. We can abandon our brothers to slavery and atrocity at the paws of these beasts. We can go crawling back to Middenland. And when the skaven again come, when they bring this great horror against our homes, who will there be to stand with us? Who will help us fight? No, it is here we make our stand. A man can die but once. Do we die on our feet or on our knees? — C.L. Werner

Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.
Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?
Estragon: I don't know. — Samuel Beckett

To find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus-far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestor off all of us came crawling out of the sea. — Arthur C. Clarke

A while back I heard bears have to stick leaves up their arse to stop ants crawling up there and biting them! I know the world is getting overpopulated but it isn't that crowded that things have to live up an arse. No wonder Paddington Bear left Peru for London. When you've got bears wanting to leave the country it makes me wonder what I'm doing here. — Karl Pilkington

I felt someone behind me. I stopped and looked back ... There was Mom, crawling behind me, without saying anything ... Her tears falling to the floor ... All my suppressed emotions suddenly burst out and I started crying. — Aya Kito

Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.
It is sleeping in fields and river bottoms. It is bellying for miles along an irrigation ditch. It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers' lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity — Jim Thompson

Philip Marlowe, 38, a private licence operator of shady reputation, was apprehended by police last night while crawling through the Ballona Storm Drain with a grand piano on his back. Questioned at the University Heights Police Station, Marlowe declared he was taking the piano to the Maharajah of Coot-Berar. Asked why he was wearing spurs, Marlowe declared that a client's confidence was sacred. Marlowe is being held for investigation. Chief Hornside said police were not yet ready to say more. Asked if the piano was in tune, Chief Hornside declared that he had played the Minute Waltz on it in thirty-five seconds and so far as he could tell there were no strings in the piano. He intimated that someting else was. A complete statement to the press will be made within twelve hours, Chief Hornside said abruptly. Speculation is rife that Marlowe was attempting to dispose of a body. — Raymond Chandler

I scrambled backward on the bed, moving toward the headboard.
"Where you going, sweet Caroline?" he asked, crawling across the bed to get to me.
"I wanted to hold on for this," I quipped, arching an eyebrow and my back as I grabbed on to the iron headboard.
"That's my girl. — Alice Clayton

It's always in those moments when you've shunned God, or you've gone ahead as if you don't need Him, that you find yourself crawling back with pathetic little attempts to get His attention because suddenly you're weak and you need to convince yourself you're not alone on the bathroom floor. — Hannah Brencher

You look pretty unscarred. (Sin)
Boy, you better be glad you're stunning when you're naked or I'd skin you for that. I've been through hell this week because of you. Do you think I wanted to come crawling back here only to have you tell me to get lost again? I know it's hard for you to believe, but I do have my pride, and you've kicked it for the last time. (Kat)
You missed me? (Sin) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Life has its insidious way of crawling its way back into your sphere and you're dumbed down again by so many distractions including work obligations, social niceties and mountains of clothes washing. — Josh Langley

Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday's home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn't. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing. — Alex Gaskarth

This immoral system, how do you get outside it? Option one, you drop out, sever the connections. They got that far in '68, okay? People went as far with that as they could, to say, I'm free, you're free, kumbaya and barbaric yawp and yadda yadda, and look what happened. The problem with the whole Rousseau trip is that man is primordially a social animal, in the sense of clan or tribe. Marx says this somewhere. You detach completely, you not only find yourself way out on a limb, against your nature, but you've lost any power for group resistance. And eventually, you come crawling back, clutching credit-card applications, begging to be let in. — Garth Risk Hallberg

The front door slammed and Dad said, "Aurora, sure you aren't expecting a package?"
I leaned back to find him army-crawling under the window in the living room. Like all dads do. "Already told you no, Rambo."
"The new mailman is back." Dad reached up and pulled the curtains closed before standing up and peeking out. "Won't come to the door."
"M shot a tranquillizer dart at the last guy." Mom gave a tired look at M who shrugged unapologetically. "The fact that there's a new one willing to be on our sidewalk is a miracle. Don't scare him off, Clyde."
Dad tried to block me when I went for the curtains. "He won't let me sign for your package. Demanded you come out in person."
"I'll get my tranq gun!" M made for her room.
"Don't you dare!" Mom chased her.
I swished back the curtains to get a look at the petrifying postman.
"I find his interest in my teenage daughter creepy," Dad grumbled.
Oh, he had no idea. — A&E Kirk

I'm already scared out of my mind, mumbled Caitlyn as Meredith closed the bathroom door. She sat back down on the bed and pulled her legs into her chest, wondering if her crazy grandmother was going to come walking through that door naked, or worse, crawling around and pretending to howl at the moon. The thought sent a chill down her spine and tears to her eyes. — Kristen Middleton

What's changed? I'm a dad. That's fundamental. Watching your kids grow, you go back a bit. You can watch a bug crawling around for minutes at a time
just sit and marvel at its complexity, the utter bugness of it. I've learned to do that again. — Bob Weir

I think back to the day I drove Michelle and a newborn Malia home from the hospital nearly 13 years ago-crawling along, miles under the speed limit, feeling the weight of my daughter's future resting in my hands. I think about the pledge I made to her that day: that I would give her what I never had-that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father. I knew that day that my own life wouldn't count for much unless she had every opportunity in hers. — Barack Obama

Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich. Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling. — William Faulkner

Apparently, moving back home was just like joining Facebook, when middle-aged boyfriends came crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches, suggesting drinks, putting out their nasty feelers for potential affairs. — Liane Moriarty

Why is everything an argument with you?"
For some reason, that made her smile. "You like it that way and you know it. What would you do with someone who obeyed every command you gave her?"
He snorted. "I'd give her a lot of filthy commands that she could fulfill."
"Pig."
"Really? You're the one who mentioned this theoretical woman obeying all my commands."
"Oh, for fuck's sake, I'll sleep first," she grumbled, crawling in the back just to shut him up . Next thing, he'd be telling her what those commands would be - and she didn't need to hear it. — Lynn Raye Harris