Crowded Room Quotes & Sayings

Bells rang, the stewards rushed forward, and - like rye shaken together in a shovel - the guests who had been scattered about in different rooms came together and crowded in the large drawing-room by the door of the ballroom. — Leo Tolstoy

I want to be your stranger across a crowded room. — Jeffrey Archer

She saw that they felt themselves alone in that crowded room. And Vronsky's face, always so firm and independent, held that look that had struck her, of bewilderment and humble submissiveness, like the expression of an intelligent dog when it has done wrong.
Anna smiled, and her smile was reflected by him. She grew thoughtful, and he became serious. Some supernatural force drew Kitty's eyes to Anna's face. She was enchanting in her simple black dress, enchanting were her round arms with their bracelets, enchanting was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, enchanting the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, enchanting was that lovely face in its animation, but there was something terrible and cruel about her charm. — Leo Tolstoy

Taking Beatrix's gloved hand in his, Christopher lifted it and pressed a kiss to the back of her wrist. He wanted to carry her away from the crowded drawing room and have her all to himself.
"Soon," Beatrix whispered, as if she had read his thoughts, and he let his gaze caress her. "And don't look at me like that," she added. "It makes my knees wobbly."
"Then I won't tell you what I'd like to do with you right now. Because you'd topple over like a ninepin. — Lisa Kleypas

The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness. — Raquel Cepeda

Sometimes I felt lonely because I pushed people away for so long that I honestly didn't have many close connections left. I was physically isolated and disconnected from the world. Sometimes I felt lonely in a crowded room. This kind of loneliness pierced my soul and ached to the core. I not only felt disconnected from the world, but I also felt like no one ever loved me. Intellectually, I knew that people did, but I still felt that way. — Jenni Schaefer

The unsaid words pushed roughly against the thoughts that we had no craft to verbalize, and crowded the room to uneasiness. — Maya Angelou

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum. — Joseph Epstein

I'm alone even in a crowded room of people. I'm alone every time I laugh because you're not there with me. It's an empty dream when the other half of me is somewhere else. — S.D. Hendrickson

The bus was crowded, standing room only, and he clung apelike from a bar that hung down from the ceiling. It was humiliating to be packed in with all these people; it reminded him of a cattle car or worse, a sardine can, or worse...but what could be worse than this? — Joseph G. Peterson

Remember that, in any encounter, the only thing you can control is your own actions and reactions. You cannot dictate the actions of the other person, or in this case, the horse, but you can often send the right signals to get what you want. If you are often baffled by the reactions others have to you, it is probably because you are unaware of the silent signals you send through your posture, your facial gestures, your tone of voice, the amount of personal space you maintain, and so forth. Ever wondered why people don't listen when you try to assert yourself, or why people back away when you're trying to be friendly, or why you're never the one people seek out in a crowded room? Body language. Silent signals. Mixed signals. The trick is to focus outward, not inward. — Lisa Wingate

Secrets make life more interesting. You can be in a crowded room with someone and touch them without touching, just with a look, because they know a part of you no one else knows. And whenever you're with them, the two of you are alone, because the you they see no one else can see. — Mohsin Hamid

The old darkness has taken a seat alongside him. He is used to it by now, making room for it the way you make room for a commuter on a crowded bus. — Mitch Albom

There is no
room for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser's hole of a private
ego. Be empty in order to be filled. 'He that loveth his life shall lose it; and
he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. — Ayn Rand

I opened my door
and many, many crowded to come in
I therefore pushed back
the walls of my room
to welcome all my guests
And the room became the home
of my friends
and my room became the world. — Amir Gilboa

Were unaware that the room was crowded with ghosts who were about to propel us into the present and force us to face the future. — Ruth Reichl

Resurrection. In the crude form in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me. I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense. Where could you find room for all these hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out. They'd be crushed by these throngs greedy merely for the animal life.
But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn. You are anxious about whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it. — Boris Pasternak

In a crowded room my soul would still feel it's way to you. All we need to do is thank fate for putting us there. — Nikki Rowe

Every eye in the crowded ballroom turns in their direction. And then he releases her and walks away.
By the time Marco leaves the room, almost everyone has forgotten the incident entirely. — Erin Morgenstern

Just then, in that instant, I saw His eyes. I recognised them. They were the eyes of that trembling father in a smoke-filled room on the ninety-third floor of Tower One, dialing his little girls for the last time. Those were the eyes behind that calming voice singing 'Amazing Grace' in a crowded and slippery stairwell, trapped outside a roof door when the ceilings began to cave. The eyes of the people who stayed behind with the handicapped victims waiting for police officers who never made it up the stairs. Those were the eyes of firemen who pushed me to safety, the doctor who cared for me for more than a year free of charge, the therapist who visited my home regularly so that I could sleep a little, the children who loved me, the brother who prayed nonstop, and the pastor who became my friend. Those were the eyes of God. — Leslie Haskin

Prejudices emerge from the disposition of the human mind to perceive and process information in categories. "Categories" is a nicer, more neutral word than "stereotypes," but it's the same thing. Cognitive psychologists consider stereotypes to be energy-saving devices that allow us to make efficient decisions on the basis of past experience; help us quickly process new information and retrieve memories; make sense of real differences between groups; and predict, often with considerable accuracy, how others will behave or how they think.24 We wisely rely on stereotypes and the quick information they give us to avoid danger, approach possible new friends, choose one school or job over another, or decide that that person across this crowded room will be the love of our lives. — Carol Tavris

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.

Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.

That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.

Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality. — Walter Jon Williams

I'd get into a room and disappear into the woodwork. Now the rooms are so crowded with reporters getting behind-the-scenes stories that nobody can get behind-the-scenes stories. — Theodore White

Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger Across a crowded room. — Oscar Hammerstein II

My mind is like a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stowed away therein - so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Although we kept the door ajar so that we could hear, we could not see beyond the gentlemen standing in front of the door in the crowded room. I felt trapped behind a wall of men that separated me from the main event. — Tracy Chevalier

ample confidence to flirt with her bridegroom from across the crowded room. Whether she could maintain such command over herself in six or eight hours was quite another proposition. How easy she is in company. Everyone seems to love her. As I do. Well, perhaps not quite as I do... Darcy glanced over at Jane, who sat in state in an armchair with Bingley standing at her side. They looked golden together with their honey-coloured hair. Jane's serenity greeted everyone who approached with the same smile and blush, and one might surmise Jane could still not believe such happiness was to be hers. However, she seemed a little nervous, and Darcy could guess why. Bingley fussed over her, touching her — Linda Beutler

History is not an agreed-upon fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn't what's heard, and what's heard isn't what gets repeated. Civilization is an agreement to keep people from shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater, but the moments we call historical occur when there is a fire in a crowded theater; and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first and what they said. The indeterminancy is built into the emotion of the moment. The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping and the room was full. — Adam Gopnik

It's a girl!" he cried, and stood there, not quite knowing what to do, until the others crowded around him, hugging him, hugging each other, laughing, crying, asking questions. A girl. Michael should have known. "How big is she?" "Who does she look like?" "How's Leigh?" "When can we see them?" The babbling continued nonstop until, shortly thereafter, Jon was allowed to carry his daughter into the hall just outside the delivery room, where the Popewells waited excitedly. — Barbara Delinsky

In English and Arabic. Clearly, even personal shoppers had him pegged as a complete geek. The shopper also managed to find some supplies for our magic bags - blocks of wax, twine, even some papyrus and ink - though I doubt Bes explained to her what they were for. After she left, Bes, Carter and I ordered more food from room service. We sat on the deck and watched the afternoon go by. The breeze from the Mediterranean was cool and pleasant. Modern Alexandria stretched out to our left - an odd mix of gleaming high-rises, shabby, crumbling buildings, and ancient ruins. The shoreline highway was dotted with palm trees and crowded with every sort of vehicle from BMWs to donkeys. From our penthouse suite, it all seemed a bit unreal - the raw energy of the city, the bustle and congestion below - while we sat on our veranda in the sky eating fresh fruit and the last melting bits of Lenin's head. — Rick Riordan

Amy Poehler was new to SNL and we were all crowded into the seventeenth-floor writers' room, waiting for the Wednesday night read-through to start. [ ... ] Amy was in the middle of some such nonsense with Seth Meyers across the table, and she did something vulgar as a joke. I can't remember what it was exactly, except it was dirty and loud and "unladylike",
Jimmy Fallon [ ... ] turned to her and in a faux-squeamish voice said, "Stop that! It's not cute! I don't like it."
Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. "I don't fucking care if you like it." Jimmy was visibly startled. Amy went right back to enjoying her ridiculous bit.
With that exchange, a cosmic shift took place. Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute. She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you like it. — Tina Fey

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show. — Matthew Arnold

I will not have him in my brain;there is no room for anyone else in the cakeshop of agony. it's crowded enough in there already. — Louise Rennison

originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." "But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently: "you — Arthur Conan Doyle

When I looked at a map in town, Rhode Island seemed lost up there in the corner. A state so small and crowded, there didn't seem to be room for a person at all. — Michelle Hoover

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: 'No room! No room!' they cried out when they saw Alice coming. 'There's plenty of room!' said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.
'Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. 'I don't see any wine,' she remarked.
'There isn't any,' said the March Hare.
'Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,' said Alice angrily.
'It wasn't very civil of you to sit down without being invited,' said the March Hare. — Lewis Carroll

We're always alone. You can be in a crowded room and still feel the bite of loneliness. Personally, I find that it bites deepest whenever others are around. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Our eyes met across the crowded room, like in the movies, except we didn't share a knowing smile and race into each other's arms. Instead I fell into the trash can. — Julie Anne Peters

Poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room — Nikki Giovanni

It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life. — Rebecca West

Sabrina Thomas clutched the leather-bound notebook to her chest and tried not to be impatient as the elevator in the south tower of Texas Hospital near downtown Dallas stopped once again on its climb to the eighteenth and top floor. But it was difficult.
Dr. Cade Mathis, the bane of her existence, would reach Mrs. Ward's room first and then there'd be hell to pay. Sabrina jabbed the button to close the doors as soon as the last person stepped onto the already crowded elevator. — Francis Ray

I love the fact that we can't explain coincidences. I think it's like sometimes you walk into a crowded room and you'll see a stranger and you feel as if you know her better than the friends that you came with. And the very fact that you can't explain it is what gives it its power, that it lies in some deeper or mysterious realm, I think. — Pico Iyer

Is something art just because a museum hangs it on their wall? Are you networking just because you're standing in a crowded room? — Jarod Kintz

You know, I endeavor to be more like my older brother. He's very magnetic. He's actually very much like 'Castle' in that people are attracted to him, and just want to be near him. You want to know where my brother is in a crowded room? He's the guy with the crowd around him. — Nathan Fillion

Loneliness is a crowded room. — Bryan Ferry

The temperature must have been in the nineties, and there seemed to be far, far too much air in the room. It was bunched and crowded, and in your face and eyes, and it made you think the room was a rush-hour tube train, and a lot of extra air had managed to sneak in just as the doors were closing. — Hugh Laurie

He touches my cheek and, even though we're in a room full of people, crowded by laughter and conversation, slowly kisses me.
"Whoa there, Tobias," says the man to my left. "Weren't you raised a Stiff? I thought the most you people did was ... graze hands or something."
"Then how do you explain all the Abnegation children?" Tobias raises his eyebrows. — Veronica Roth

In that August of 1957, however, the cloakroom was often crowded, with senators talking earnestly on sofas and standing in animated little groups, and sometimes the glances between various groups were not comradely at all - sometimes, in fact, they glinted with a barely concealed hostility, and the narrow room simmered with tension, for the main issue before the Senate that summer was civil rights, a proposed law intended to make voting easier for millions of black Americans — Robert A. Caro

The power of affinity lies in its mystery: the way it stands outside everything logical; you step into a crowded room and see a stranger, and somehow you feel you know her better than you know the friends you came with. — Pico Iyer

Sandy's face was very close to mine in the crowded room. She had a wide mouth and a lot of teeth. She had turned in her seat so that she had one thigh on each side of my leg. Her chest was against my arm. In another minute we wouldn't have to go anywhere to have sex. — Robert B. Parker

I went through a living room crowded with overstuffed furniture in a green-and-white jungle design from which eyes seemed to watch me, down a short hallway past a pink satin bedroom which reminded me of the inside of a coffin in disarray, to the open door of a bathroom. Tom's jacket lay across the threshold like the headless torso of a man, flattened by the passage of some enormous engine. — Ross Macdonald

The time there was only the one warm-up room for everyone, a room so astonishingly hot and airless and noisy, so crowded with extraordinarily talented-seeming musicians, that everything had begun to spin like a merry-go-round, and a French cellist had reached out a languid hand to save Clementine's cello as it slipped from her grasp. (She was a champion fainter.) The — Liane Moriarty

There's too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there's no room for the living. — Kate Atkinson

What sets wilderness apart in the modern day is not that it's dangerous (it's almost certainly safer than any town or road) or that it's solitary (you can, so they say, be alone in a crowded room) or full of exotic animals (there are more at the zoo). it's that five miles out in the woods you can't buy anything. — Bill McKibben

Ran to the hallway, screaming for help. The girls and a few Sunday customers crowded into the room. Kate was writhing on the floor. Two of the regulars lifted her onto Faye's bed and tried to straighten her out, but she screamed and doubled up again. The sweat poured from her body and wet her clothes. — John Steinbeck

If you're born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown. — Isaac Asimov

Whenever I visit a market and see the chickens crowded together in tiny cages that give them no room to move around and spread their wings and the fish slowly drowning in the air, my heart goes out to them. People have to learn to think about animals in a different way, as sentient beings who love life and fear death. I urge everyone who can to adopt a compassionate vegetarian diet. — Dalai Lama

We
are the only
people I have ever
known
that can
make love
from across
a
crowded
room. — Tyler Knott Gregson

A wedding is at once a crowded place and a private room, packed with trusts and empty of all but the heart's letters which one other heart may read and decipher. — Mark McMorris

If I'm talking to someone in a crowded room, I try to make this person feel as though we're the only ones present. I shut out everything else. I look directly at the person. Even if a gorilla were to walk into the room, I probably wouldn't notice it. — Mary Kay Ash

He expected the other man to be dead - not many could survive a thirty-foot fall to cobblestones with another's weight on top of him - but what he had not expected was to see the fellow's dagger driven to the hilt into his own heart. Such an ordinary-looking man to have tried to kill him. Mat did not think he would even have noticed him in a crowded room. — Robert Jordan

It was a small room, and it was as crowded with coffee- and end-tables, chairs and hassocks and bookcases, as a second-hand furniture store. The horizontal surfaces were littered with gewgaws, shells and framed photographs, vases and pincushions and doilies. If the lady had come down in the world, she'd brought a lot down with her. My sensation of stepping into the past was getting too strong for comfort. The half-armed chair closed on me like a hand. — Ross Macdonald

I think control is the wrong word. I would put it this way. You see a lovely girl across a crowded room and you walk toward her with hope in your mind. That's the way [my] pictures are made. — Henry Holmes Smith

Being a 'potential mate' was something rather different and much more complicated. It was when two people had the potential to become like one person, knowing each other's moods and feelings in a way no one else could. Being aware of their presence in a crowded room was just one example. If they were sad or angry, their mate would sense it to a point of feeling the emotion themselves. — A.Z. Green

I'll let you in on a little classified intel. See these people? Hardly know any of them. I mean, they go to my school, so technically I do, but we never hang out or anything. But the secret to LA is, if you throw a party - especially one of Jenna's parties - all you need to do is put out the word. If you build it, they will come, I say pointing to the crowded room. — Rachel Harris

I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed ... and as it was for me when I was young and surrounded by siblings, as it is today when I am surrounded by children, reading continues to provide an escape from a crowded house into an imaginary room of one's own. — Anna Quindlen

At the top of the Queen's Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private office of Louis the Last. You cannot go in.
That room is now the office of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee exists to supervise the Council of Ministers and to expedite its decisions. — Hilary Mantel

V had a passing thought that she used the word "anyway" like an eraser on a crowded chalkboard. She said it whenever she needed to clear off the things she'd just shared to make room for more. — J.R. Ward

She looked to the roses, but it was Tibe's face she saw. It was familiar now, after months of friendship. She knew his nose, his lips, his jaw, his eyes most of all. They stirred something in her, a connection she did not know she could make with another person. She saw herself in them, her own pain, her own joy. We are the same, she thought. Searching for something to keep us anchored, both alone in a crowded room. — Victoria Aveyard

Why doesn't he say something to her?
But I knew why. Because there's the creeping fear that these moments don't actually exist outside your own head. No eyes meet across a crowded room, no two people thing precisely the same thing, and if only one person actually has that moment, is it even really a moment at all?
We know this, so we say nothing. We avert our eyes, or pretend to be looking for change, we hope the other person will take the initiative, because we don't want to risk losing this feeling of excitement and possibilities and lust. It's too perfect. That little second of hope is worth something, possibly for ever, as we lie on out deathbeds, surrounded by our children, and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, and we can't help but quickly give on last selfish, dying thought to what could have happened if we'd actually said hello to that girl in the Uggs selling CDs outside Nando's seventy-four years earlier. — Danny Wallace

See," he began, leaning back into the booth, "I was at this car dealership today, and I saw this girl. It was an across-a-crowded-room kind of thing. A real moment, you know?" I rolled my eyes. Chloe said, "And this would be Remy?" "Right. Remy," he said, repeating my name with a smile. Then, as if we were happy honeymooners recounting our story for strangers he added, "Do you want to tell the next part?" "No," I said flatly. — Sarah Dessen

Naw! Mah own mind had tuh be squeezed and crowded out tuh make room for yours in me. — Zora Neale Hurston

A well-dressed, self-assured business executive steps into a quiet corner of the conference room, crowded with people. Everyone there is aware of her presence. She's dark-haired, petite, and alluring. She is quick to smile, and when she does, her whole face lights up. Her enthusiasm is infectious. Young men and women nod as they pass by, briefly breaking off their conversations with colleagues. The executive looks down at her compact electronic device and quickly texts: "Smile. Talk into the mic. Good luck. — Jill Bryant

Even in a crowded room, likable leaders make people feel like they're having a one-on-one conversation, as if they're the only person in the room that matters. And, for that moment, they are. Likable leaders communicate on a very personal, emotional level. — Travis Bradberry

Cat lovers take cover. Believe it or not, in the 15th century, there was a 'sport' involving the swinging of cats (by the tail) into the air where they would become moving targets for archers at fetes, fayres and country festivals. Crowded festivals would be described as having no room to 'swing the cat' as revellers would be in danger of being hit by stray arrows. When — Albert Jack

Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs, or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I worry about you a great deal, Mma. I worry that you will take all the cares of the world on your shoulders and that you will collapse under the weight. I worry that you will open your heart to so many people that eventually it will be full - crowded - and it will stop because there is no room for the blood to go round. I am worried that you will look after so many people that you will forget that there is one person who also needs looking after, and that person is you, Mma. I am worried about all these things. — Alexander McCall Smith

Anyway, lots of warrior tribes think that when they die, they go to a heavenly land somewhere," said the toad. "You know, where they can drink and fight and feast forever? So maybe this is theirs."
"But this is a real place!"
"So? That's what they believe. Besides, they're only small. Maybe the universe is a bit crowded and they have to put heavens anywhere there's room? I'm a toad, so you'll appreciate that I'm having to guess a lot here. — Terry Pratchett

We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder. — Eugene Kennedy

Hell on earth: A crowded room with no books, no music and not a soul around that understands you. — Brooke Hampton

For an instant he felt nettled at the irony, the lightest shadow of a snub, with which she had met his decisiveness, and at the way he had risen to her quick glance. But it was only an infinitesimal clink of foils and as the bowing maitre d'hotel led them through the crowded room, it was forgotten as Bond in her wake watched the heads of the diners turn to look at her. — Ian Fleming

GGibbie never thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a phosphorescent gleam
the summer lightning of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. — George MacDonald

I think a lover, when broken, is given a gift
not a scar, not a poem, not a rhyme
(unless it fits.)
I think as humans, we see a set of hues
but when wounded, we see something more:
deeper shades of hurt and worry,
colors never seen before.
Because I can't imagine a child
could see the same black as a widower,
and I don't think healthy hearts
know the true meaning of blue.
When children close their eyes,
they see a color they call empty.
But in the eyelids of the bruised,
the empty black's a crowded room. — Katya Polo

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Loneliness is a crowded room,
Full of open hearts turned to stone,
All together all alone — Bryan Ferry

Xhex couldn't stop herself from torturing them both. She sent him a mental scene, drilling the image right into his head : the two of them in a private bathroom, him up on the sink and leaning back, her with one foot planted on the counter, his sex deep in hers, the two of them panting. While he stared accross the crowded room, John's mouth parted, and the flush on his cheeks had nothing to do with embarrassment and everything to do with the orgasm that was no doubt pounding up his shaft. God, she wanted him. His buddy, the readhead, snapped her out of the madness. Blaylock came back to the table with three beers hanging from their necks, and as he took a look at John's hard, sexep-up face, he stopped short and glanced over at her in surprise.
Shit.
Xhex waved off the bouncers who were coming up to her and walked out of the VIP section so fast, she nearly bowling-pinned a waitress. Her office was the only place that was safe, and she headed there at a dead run. — J.R. Ward

Only when you can feel contempt for your own priceless little ego, only then can you achieve the true, broad peace of selflessness, the merging of your spirit with the vast collective spirit of mankind. There is no room for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser's hole of a private ego. — Ayn Rand

A skilled observer might notice there was something his gaze avoided. The same way you avoid meeting the eye of an old lover at a formal dinner, or that of an old enemy sitting across the room in a crowded alehouse late at night. — Patrick Rothfuss

I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.' — Ira Sachs

Despite the other men and women in the crowded room, Nate felt as if Adam played for him. Only for him. Blood pounded through his veins, his cock drawing tight beneath the unforgiving denim of the faded jeans he wore. It was the same every time Adam played his saxophone or sang in that smoky voice of his. Intense arousal surged through Nate's mind along with confusion. How could one man make him feel this way? So lost. So incredibly aroused. So damn needy. — Shelley Munro

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation within the great foul nest of one high building - that is to say, the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general staircase - left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay. — Charles Dickens

I'd always felt that one could read a woman's discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery. — Amy Stewart

But she would have to wait until there were not a hundred people crowded into the room. — Rosamund Hodge