Cut Through Quotes & Sayings

I'm not gonna box Ruiz ... I don't box, I knock holes through people. I'm gonna cut Ruiz up. I'm gonna butcher him. He ain't gonna last five rounds. Either he winds up on the canvas or in the hospital. It's his choice. — James Toney

The Sun Dagger appeared on the rock face directly above the Shaman's shadowed head. It dazzled within the shade as the sunlight slipped through a gap in the overhead slabs. The dagger cut slowly down the rock, slicing through the very center of the etched spiral.
"The middle of time," Chaco whispered to himself. — P.J. Parker

With the money my mother earned from selling cakes, my father cut a deal with Mangochi and bought one pail of maize. My mother took it to the mill, saved half the flour for us, and used the rest for more cakes. We did this every day, taking enough to eat and selling the rest. It was enough to provide our one blob of nsima each night, along with some pumpkin leaves. It was practically nothing, yet knowing it would be there somehow made the hunger less painful.
"As long as we can stay in business," my father said, "we'll make it through. Our profit is that we live. — William Kamkwamba

Technology, while providing us many advantages, encourages us to race through our days so that we no longer know what we'd do if we were to slow down. Labor-saving devices seem not only to have failed to enhance the quality of our lives and free up more time, but get between us and the immediate, sensory pleasures of life and increase the pressures on us to do more. Many of us feel cut off from life's blessings, from our neighbors, from the wonders of nature, and from our sense of our own significance in the scheme of things. Modern life leaves us spiritually starved — Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett

Laurent stopped. Damen could see the moment when Laurent decided to continue. It was deliberate, his eyes meeting Damen's, his tone subtly changed.
'Damianos of Akielos was commanding troops at seventeen. At nineteen, he rode onto the field, cut a path through our finest men, and took my brother's life. They say
they said
he was the best fighter in Akielos. I thought, if I was going to kill someone like that, I would have to be very, very good. — C.S. Pacat

Peaches and Cheese:
The vagabond sun winks down through the trees,
While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze,
My friend, I was born for days such as these,
To inhale perfume,
And cut through the gloom,
And feast like a king upon peaches and cheese!
I'll travel this wide world and go where I please,
Can't stop my wand'ring, it's like a disease.
My only regret as I cross the high seas:
What I leave behind,
Though I hope to find,
My own golden city of peaches and cheese! — Rachel Hartman

Ty, have you ever considered how lucky we are, you and I, that certain genes skipped a
generation? Don't close off," she said before he could draw away. "You're so like Eli."
She combed her fingers through his hair. She'd come to love the way she could tease out the reds.
"Tough guy," she said as she touched her lips to his cheek. "Solid as a rock. Don't let the weak space
between you and Eli cut at you. — Nora Roberts

Winston Churchill, today an idealized hero of history, was in his time variously considered a bombastic blunderer, an unstable politician, an intermittently inspired orator, a reckless self-dramatizer, a voluminous able writer in an old-fashioned vein, and a warmongering drunkard. Through most of his long life he cut an antic, brilliant, occasionally absurd figure in British affairs. He never won the trust of the people until 1940, when he was sixty-six years old, and — Herman Wouk

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would. — Laura Lippman

Current relationship status?" Her voice cut like an arctic chill blowing through the room.
"If you mean me, then you're not my type. If you mean my dad, he's single, but I don't think you're his type either," I said with a small smile. Mercy didn't find it amusing. A small blue vein in her forehead started throbbing like crazy ... "Actually, come to think of it, I don't think he has a type. I've never seen him with a woman.
Mercy, I hate to break it to you, but there's a very real possibility my dad is gay. — Jus Accardo

No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity. They kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. And that somehow cuts your mind off from clearness, and sanity, and self-control, and justice? A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained. To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring. How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility. — Marcus Aurelius

A roar cut through the melee: a booming growl, a noise that might come out of a she-bear protecting a cub. It was Alec- and suddenly bodies were flying everywhere. — James Dashner

And then I stopped. I cut the whiny voice off midsentence. Because I was sick of it, and it wasn't doing me any good, and anyway, shouldn't I have some say over the endless thoughts running through my head — John Green

You mean the one that used to be advertised on late-night television? Where the guy on the commercial uses it to cut through a tin can?" She nodded. "That's the one." "Did you get it?" "It's the knife I'm using now." He smiled. "I've never known anyone who actually admitted to buying one." "Now you do," she said. — Nicholas Sparks

She closed her hands around his and shut her eyes, imagining their bed cut free of this strange prison, floating through space or on the surface of the ocean, just the two of them alone. — Cassandra Clare

So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment. — James Joseph Sylvester

Summer came whirling out of the night and stuck fast. One morning late in November everybody got up at Cloudstreet and saw the white heat washing in through the windows. The wild oats and buffalo grass were brown and crisp. The sky was the color of kerosene. The air was thin and volatile. Smoke rolled along the tracks as men began to burn off on the embankment. Birds cut singing down to a few necessary phrases, and beneath them in the streets, the tar began to bubble. The city was full of Yank soldiers; the trams were crammed to standing with them. The river sucked up the sky and went flat and glittery right down the middle of the place and people went to it in boats and britches and barebacked. Where the river met the sea, the beaches ran north and south, white and broad as highways in a dream, and men and babies stood in the surf while gulls hung in the haze above, casting shadows on the immodest backs of the oilslicked women. — Tim Winton

I love my country, by which I mean I am indebted joyfully to all the people throughout its history, who have fought the government to make right. Where so many cunning sons and daughters, our foremothers and forefathers came singing through slaughter, came through hell and high water so that we could stand here, and behold breathlessly the sight; how a raging river of tears cut a grand canyon of light. Why can't all decent men and women call themselves feminists, out of respect for those that fought for this? — Ani DiFranco

Will turned away, wordless. There was no use to argue. The wind was moving. It cut right through him. He went to the tree, a vaulting grey-green sentinel, and began to climb. Soon his hands were sticky with sap, and he was lost among the needles. Fear filled his gut like a meal he could not digest. He whispered a prayer to the nameless gods of the wood, and slipped his dirk free of its sheath. He put it between his teeth to keep both hands free for climbing. The taste of cold iron in his mouth gave him comfort. Down — George R R Martin

Life's fulfillment finds constant obstacles in its path; but those are necessary for the sake of its advance. The stream is saved from the sluggishness of its current by the perpetual opposition of the soil through which it must cut its way. The spirit of fight belongs to the genius of life. — Rabindranath Tagore

Astrid Dane. . . Her long colorless hair was woven back into a braid, and her porcelain skin bled straight into the edges of her tunic. Her entire outfit was fitted to her like armor; the collar of her shirt was high and rigid, guarding her throat, and the tunic itself ran from chin to wrist to waist, less out of a sense of modesty, Kell was sure, than protection. Below a gleaming silver belt, she wore fitted pants that tapered into tall boots (rumor had it that a man once spat at her for refusing to wear a dress; she'd cut off his lips). The only bits of color were the pale blue of her eyes and the greens and reds of the talismans that hung from her neck and wrists and were threaded through her hair. . .
"I smell something sweet," she said. She'd been gazing up at the ceiling. Now her eyes wandered
down and landed on Kell. "Hello, flower boy. — V.E Schwab

I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother's head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through. — Carol Rifka Brunt

This Land is mostly white space on the map ... which is how it should be; I'll leave more detailed map making to those graduate students and English teachers who feel that every goose which lays gold must be dissected so that all of its quite ordinary guts can be labelled; to those figurative engineers of the imagination who cannot feel comfortable with the comfortably overgrown (and possible dangerous) literary wilderness until they have built a freeway composed of Cliff's Notes through it - and listen to me, you people: every English teacher who ever did a Monarch or Cliff's Notes ought to be dragged out to his or her quad, drawn and quartered, then cut up into tiny pieces, said pieces to be dried and shrunk in the sun and then sold in the college bookstore as bookmarks. — Stephen King

Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest? — L.L. Barkat

After years of doing it, you learn the difference between your ego and your opinion. When you're married you have to cut through that. — Dan Castellaneta

It was a fossilized path: the will which had cut this gash out of these solitary places so that the blood and sap would flow there was long since dead - and dead too were the circumstances which had guided this will. A whitish and indurated scar remained, gradually gnawed away by the earth like a flesh that heals itself, yet its direction was still vaguely cut into the horizon; a language and crepuscular sign rather than a way forward - a worn-out lifeline which still vegetated through the fallow land as it does on the palm of a hand. It was so old that, since it had been constructed, the very configuration of the land must have changed imperceptibly. — Julien Gracq

I think about cutting my hair. How nice it would be to wash it, run a quick comb through it, and presto! all set, ready to rock and roll. I sigh. Henry loves my hair almost as though it were a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back. I know he loves it as a part of me, but I also know he would be deeply upset if I cut it off. And I would miss it, too ... it's just so much effort, sometimes I want to take it off like a wig and set it aside while I go out and play. — Audrey Niffenegger

Courage has you say in a defiant spirit you can take everything from me, you could cut me deep, you could render me in shame but you will never ever stop me from loving those who mock me, from loving those that hate me, from loving those who don't forgive me, from loving the cynics, from loving the darkness so much that I myself through my small acts of consistent unyielding love may bring on the light. — Cory Booker

Die, then!" This alarming counsel split the air. "Die if you must, Mukunda! Never believe that you live by the power of food and not by the power of God! He who has created every form of nourishment, He who has bestowed appetite, will inevitably see that His devotee is maintained. Do not imagine that rice sustains you nor that money or men support you. Could they aid if the Lord withdraws your life breath? They are His instruments merely. Is it by any skill of yours that food digests in your stomach? Use the sword of your discrimination, Mukunda! Cut through the chains of agency and perceive the Single Cause! — Paramahansa Yogananda

Panic bloomed in her mind and she seized it as a tool, compressing it to an edge with which to cut through her frightened immobility. — Stephen King

The Plowshares activists easily cut through Kitsap's perimeter fence, hiked around the huge base for four hours, ignored all the warning signs, cut through two more fences, and got to within about forty feet of the bunkers where the nuclear warheads are stored. Father Bix was eighty-one at the time. Sister Anne was eighty-three. Having survived two open-heart surgeries, Father Bix brought along his nitroglycerine tablets and paused to take some during the long hike. — Anonymous

The Origin of Violets

I know, blue modest violets,
Gleaming with dew at morn-
I know the place you come from
And the way that you are born!

When God cut holes in Heaven,
The holes the stars look through,
He let the scraps fall down to earth,-
The little scraps are you. — Anonymous

Wesley's touch lingers on my skin. His music echoes through my head. I remind myself as I scrub my skin that we are both liars and con artists. That we will always have secrets, some that bind us and some that cut between us, slicing us into pieces. — Victoria Schwab

Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into the vibratory fields of earthly barriers, but in neither case does the energy succumb; it goes on forever - which is why we, each of us, should take pains to make sweet notes. — Tom Robbins

With today's work, I'm about one-fourth of the way through the whole cut. At least, one-fourth of the way through the drilling. Then I'll have 759 little chunks to chisel out. And I'm not sure how well carbon composite is going to take that. But NASA'll do it a thousand times back on Earth and tell me the best way to get it done. — Andy Weir

With more [distribution] channels, it's important to have 'must-have' content and brands that cut through the clutter. — Thomas O Staggs

"Lay the knife at the tips of your fingers," Rob commanded. "So close you can feel the blade against your skin. Then cut the shadow away."
Jared had been silent in her head. Now Kami turned her mind to his and let his thoughts and feelings flow through her.
Kami, please, please wait just another moment, Jared begged, I'll save you, and later I'll be better, I'll do anything you want, be anything you want me to be. Please don't do it. — Sarah Rees Brennan

When I'd lost him the first time, before Culloden, I'd remembered. Every moment of our last night together. Tiny things would come back to me through the years: the taste of salt on his temple and the curve of his skull as I cupped his head; the soft fine hair at the base of his neck, thick and damp in my fingers ... the sudden, magical well of his blood in dawning light when I'd cut his hand and marked him forever as my own. Those things had kept him by me. — Diana Gabaldon

...He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert's sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time. — Mike Bond

We had proudly worn our handsome and colorful uniforms, which could be seen glittering from a distance, yet we could no longer see our opponent. Invisible marksmen took aim from long range and unhorsed us. If we managed to reach them, we found them bedded in a web of wires, which cut through the fetlocks of the horses and was impossible to jump. This was the end of the cavalry. We had to dismount. — Ernst Junger

Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely. — Rebecca West

The tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We — Malcolm Gladwell

I'd say, if you want to be an artist, start with your art; start with making great music and it will, hopefully, eventually cut through all of the nonsense that is out there. — Queen Latifah

It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate. — Barack Obama

Obedience, fasting, and prayer are laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real true freedom. I cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Once committed to fight, cut. Everything else is secondary. Cut. That is your duty, your purpose, your hunger. There is no rule more important, no commitment that overrides that one. Cut. Cut from the void, not from bewilderment. Cut the enemy as quickly and directly as possible. Cut decisively, resolutely. Cut into the enemy's strength. Flow through the gaps in his guard. Cut him. Cut him down utterly. Don't allow him a breath. Crush him. Cut him without mercy to the depths of his spirit.
-Richard Rahl — Terry Goodkind

Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage. — J.M. Barrie

I like your hair down." He twisted his fingers through the curls.
My eyes drifted shut as I relaxed next to him. "It's a mess. I need to get a haircut."
Hayden's fingers stilled. "No. You shouldn't cut your hair. It's beautiful."
I would never cut my hair. Ever. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Do not lose that hunger. You will always have to fight for everything. Even when you already have it, you will have to keep fighting to maintain it. You will have to be more ruthless, more brutal, more everything. Any weakness will undo everything you have accomplished. They will see any crack as evidence that they were right that a woman cannot do what you do.

Hunyadi knew what he spoke of. Her merits, her accomplishments, her strength would never speak for themselves. She would have to cut her way through the world, uphill, for the rest of her life. — Kiersten White

Ty removed his fingers from Zane's back as he saw the shiver run through him, and he pressed his lips tightly together, looking up and away in disgust as he resigned himself to what he was about to do. Broaching the subject could possibly cost him his job if Zane went tattling to the higher-ups about sexual harassment or some shit, but Ty was going to do it anyway. "Anything you need to say to me?"
...
The visual of Ty's nude body flashed behind Zane's eyelids, and he spoke before he thought better of it. "Nothing you want to hear," he murmured as he faced the mirror, hoping to diffuse the situation. "Thanks for the help," he added, wanting desperately to get away from this tension.
...
"You sure about that?" Ty asked as his stomach fluttered nervously. His voice finally betrayed the nerves. "Trying to be a real partner to you here, Zane. If you need to tell me something, then here's your chance. — Abigail Roux

You're scaring me," Jack's voice finally cut through, and I opened my eyes, barely able to see him. "okay, good, yes, breathe. Breathing helps one stay alive,I've found.What on earth is so bad about a stupid school saying no?" "My life"-I gasped-"is over.It's over. Everything." He frowned dubiously. "Who would want to go to a place called Georgetown, anyhow? Ridiculous. Now,I could understand your devastation if it had a distinguished name like, say, Jacktown, but as it is,you're overreacting. Why do you want to go to more school? I went once for a few hours and nearly lost my mind. — Kiersten White

A mountain climber foolishly climbing alone slips off a precipice and finds himself dangling at the end of his safety rope, a thousand feet above a ravine. Unable to climb the rope or swing to a safe resting spot, he calls out in despair: "Hallooo, hallooo! Can anybody help me?" To his astonishment, the clouds part, a beautiful light pours through them, and a mighty voice replies, "Yes, my son, I can help you. Take your knife and cut the rope!" The climber takes out his knife, and then he stops, and thinks and thinks. Then he cries out: "Can anybody else help me? — Daniel C. Dennett

I am carved like David,
every line of my body perfectly chiseled.
Hunger is the blade that has made me smooth.
I am a statue, yet I am only air at my center.
I go to hug myself and
-poof!-
my arms go right through me
finding nothing to hold on to.
My hands meet behind my own back
in a stone handshake.
This is not what you were expecting.
I'm so cold.
I'm so sharp.
I've been cut, now I'll cut you.
Come closer.
Yes, come closer to me.
I am going to make you see what I see. — Madeleine George

I started inventing things, and then I couldn't stop, like beavers, which I know about. People think they cut down trees so they can build dams, but in reality it's because their teeth never stop growing, and if they didn't constantly file them down by cutting through all of those trees, their teeth would start to grow into their own faces, which would kill them. That's how my brain was. — Jonathan Safran Foer

I love the fact that, one time, my face was on the back of a cereal box - probably 3-CPO's - and it was a mask where you cut out the eye holes and put a string through the side. It makes me feel like I'm 11 years old all over again. — Mark Hamill

It was hard to understand, and all I knew was that you had to run, run, run without knowing why you were running, but on you went through fields you didn't understand and into woods that made you afraid, over hills without knowing you'd been up and down, and shooting across streams that would have cut the heart out of you had you fallen into them. And the winning post was no end to it, even though crowds might be cheering you in, because on you had to go before you got your breath back, and the only time you stopped really was when you tripped over a tree trunk and broke your neck or fell into a disused well and stayed dead in the darkness forever. — Alan Sillitoe

In order to be deep, we sometimes have to cut through and cut apart. That is to be seen in the common phrase, 'Cut it out!' The reason is that this thing is seen as superfluous and therefore it should be excised, as a growth, unnecessary, should be excised. — Eli Siegel

Mama tied a blindfold over my eyes. The next thing I felt my flesh was being cut away. I heard the blade sawing back and forth through my skin. The pain between my legs was so intense I wished I would die. — Waris Dirie

Daemon: We can go live in a damn cave. Look, I'm a selfish person. You know that. And I don't want you to go through that, so I'm willing to say screw it and we cut our losses.
Katy: Really? What kind of life would that give us?
Daemon: Don't bring logic into this conversation. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

[Olive's] left foot was bleeding through a wide swath of bandages onto the tarp it was resting on. The bowl next to her was full of blood.
Olive looked a little pale. "I don't think I should move," she said.
"What are you doing?" Roger shut the door behind him and stood with his back to it.
"I decided I might try to eat my toes," Olive said, closing her eyes. "But now that I've started, I don't think I should move."
Roger pushed himself off the wall and knelt down next to her. He unbuckled her silver belt and reached with it under her dress. He looped the belt around the top of her leg and tightened it. His hands were not shaking.
"Sit on the loose end," he said, pushing it under her. "I hope that works."
"You brought flowers," she said, blinking.
"Olive," he said. "You cut off your toes."
She looked down at the bowl. "Are they still toes?" she asked. — Amelia Gray

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white ... Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!
Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven. — Anne Rice

I would prefer," Pat said, his voice a little stiff, as if he expected resistance, "that I be the cosigner on the loan, if you go through with this. I know I'm not a famous billionaire, but I think my credit's just as good."
No, you're wrong about that," Tess said, shaking her head.
What?"
As far as I'm concerned, it's better. I'd much rather do business with you."
They shook on it. It was a deal, after all, not a time for hugging.
Favors, Arnie Vasso had once said. Your father knows all about favors. He had meant it as an insult, a sly reference to the corners the Monaghans and Weinsteins cut here and there. Now Tess saw it for the simple truth it was: Her father understood favors. How to do them, how to accept them, how to walk away when the price was too steep. It was a lesson she wouldn't mind learning someday.
Maybe this was the place to start. — Laura Lippman

How did you stand lying about yourself for years? You must have felt cut off from the whole world."
I fought down the lump in my throat. "I did indeed. And then I met this prince who seemed able to see through me, to the truth behind the lies. He was terrifying and fascinating, but to my amazement, it was an immeasurable relief to be seen. — Rachel Hartman

He cut her off with brutal precision. "And one last thing." His eyes
flicked toward the door, through which Jace, Alec, and Isabelle had
disappeared. "Keep in mind that when your mother fled from the Shadow World, it wasn't the monsters she was hiding from. Not the warlocks, the wolf-men, the Fair Folk, not even the demons themselves. It was them. It was the Shadowhunters. — Cassandra Clare

Let not thy sword skip one:
Pity not honour'd age for his white beard;
He is an usurer: strike me the counterfeit matron;
It is her habit only that is honest,
Herself's a bawd: let not the virgin's cheek
Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk-paps,
That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes,
Are not within the leaf of pity writ,
But set them down horrible traitors: spare not the babe,
Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy;
Think it a bastard, whom the oracle
Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut,
And mince it sans remorse: swear against objects;
Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes;
Whose proof, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes,
Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding,
Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay soldiers:
Make large confusion; and, thy fury spent,
Confounded be thyself! Speak not, be gone. — William Shakespeare

We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree. — Martin Luther King Jr.

My voice is the only material thing in which I can still reveal myself. Go ahead and cut off the hand or the testicles of a voice. Try to find the head of a voice, the orifice through which it passes, or even the breasts to which you can attach the clips of your electrodes. Nothing. Resonant tooth. — Abdellatif Laabi

Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds
So I write these lines for you
Who have felt the death-wish too,
All the wires are cut, my friends
Live beyond the severed ends. — Louis MacNeice

In the interests of friendship, I hope you'll forgive me what I'm about to do."
"Forgive you wha - "
My sentence was cut off as he clamped his mouth over mine, kissing me deeply.

...

"Ready to make a scene?"
He raised an eyebrow. "Do I have a choice?"
"Not really. To quote something someone said to me recently, in the interests of friendship, I hope you'll forgive what I'm about to do." I drew back my hand and slapped him across the face. The smack of flesh striking flesh echoed through the hall. Conversations stopped as people whipped around to stare at us. Raising my voice to something just below a shout, I snarled, "You asshole! — Seanan McGuire

Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up. — Jane Smiley

The brick is neither here nor there,' interrupted the stranger in an imposing fashion, 'it never merely falls on someone's head from out of nowhere. In your case, I can assure you that a brick poses no threat whatsoever. You will die another kind of death.
'And you know just what that will be?' queried Berlioz with perfectly understandable irony, letting himself be drawn into a truly absurd conversation. 'And can you tell me what that is?'
'Gladly,' replied the stranger. He took Berlioz's measure as if intending to make him a suit and muttered something through his teeth that sounded like 'One, two.. Mercury in the Second House ... the moon has set ... six-misfortune ... evening-seven ... ' Then he announced loudly and joyously, 'Your head will be cut off! — Mikhail Bulgakov

Keep at it! Remember marketing is building a relationship! If you use marketing for a year and stop, you cut off your relationship with the larger community. Then you will have to re-start the relationship all over again. The old adage "it takes six to stick" is proven true over and over again. I realized this in year three of our church plant. I think of the hundreds of people that came to our services that had no connection with me or our people because we were willing to build a sustained relationship with them through marketing. — Gary Rohrmayer

I thought the other ones were so obviously - what are we going to do if she burns down the house? The DEA, which I think was maybe the best one because she's wearing the jacket when she goes through the mirror and I think that was kind of amazing because you really weren't expecting that. There's something almost slapstick about this in a way that worried me. It was a little pratfalley with the golf club and the - but I think it probably cut together okay. — Mary-Louise Parker

I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them. — J.M. Coetzee

Hunger is a blade that carves me
I open my arms and pull the air in
-big hug!-
then poof, right through me, nobody there.
It's only me holding myself.
My arms wrap two times
around my own ribs,
meet behind my back for a secret
handshake.
I am not what was expected.
I'm so sharp-
it's cut me now I'll cut you.
Come closer
closer
No, come closer
I'm gonna make you see what I see. — Madeleine George

They spent the next hour nibbling their way through the food stalls, sharing spiral-cut potatoes, pork sandwiches, and cream puffs. They found a table in one of the many shaded beer gardens, and Lou retrieved some ice-cold Summer Shandys to go with their food. The beer had a light lemon edge that offset the malt, making it an ideal hot-summer-day drink. The potato spirals, long twirls coated in bright orange cheese, combined the thin crispiness of a potato chip with a French fry. And the cream puffs... The size of a hamburger on steroids, the two pate a choux ends showcased almost two cups of whipped cream- light, fluffy, and fresh. — Amy E. Reichert

Women on the whole are often not as shallow as men are. They can be, but they cut through things a little more easily than men do in terms of that superficial stuff. — Peter Dinklage

She went as through a forest
the columns were furrowed like ancient trees, and in through the forest flowed the light, many-hued and clear as song, from the pictured windows. High up above her, beasts and men sported among the stone leafage, and angels played
and yet far, dizzily far higher, the vaulting soared, lifting the church towards God. In a hall that lay to one side, worship was being held at an altar. Kristin sank down on her knees by a pillar. The singing cut into her like a too strong light. Now she saw how low she lay in the dust ... Pater noster. Credo in unum Deum. Ave Maria, gratia plena. — Sigrid Undset

This is the ultimate narcissistic white-girl game. I would picture how I would handle the attack differently. Or the same. Inevitably, I'd think about my own death, which next to staring at your face in a magnifying mirror is probably the worst thing you can do for yourself. The ambulance-chasing aspect combined with the Monday-morning quarterbacking of it all is the luxury afforded to those of us left untouched by trauma. Sometimes I would use these tragedy-porn shows to unlock deep feelings or cut through the numbness. I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit. Either way, it was all gross and all bad for my health. — Amy Poehler

Do you know that when one who has influence with youth- be he teacher, leader or parent- seriously weakens the foundations upon which a young person has built, by faith-destroying challenges the youngster is not yet equipped to meet, he fashions a disciple who has been effectively cut loose from fundamentals at a time when he needs most to rely on them? The challenger may himself be a moral, educated, well-meaning person of integrity, doing what he does in the name of honesty and truth. His own character may have been formed in an atmosphere of faith and conviction which, through his influence, he may now help to destroy in his young follower. "Disenchanted" himself in his mature years, he turns his powers on an immature mind and leaves it ready prey for nostrums and superstitions and behavior he himself would disdain. — Marion D. Hanks

The motorcycle's headlights cut through the darkness. Ahead the road was nothing but a black hole. She roared toward it. — B. J. Daniels

They loved scenes of righteous Godly vengeance on sinful mankind. They loved to show God's chosen people safe from harm, watching with happy faces as they were proved right to the world. But they never showed the aftermath. They never showed weeping humans, crushed and dying in pools of their own fluids. Young men smashed into piles of red flesh. A young woman cut in half because she was passing through a hatchway when catastrophe hit. This was Armageddon. This is what it looked like. Blood and torn flesh and cries for help. — James S.A. Corey

I slept in van Gogh's bed. I worked in the room where he painted. I saw the place where he was cared for when he cut off his ear. I lived in the jail cell where he stayed. And I looked out the window. You remember that picture of the cornfields through the bars? That was what I saw. — Irving Stone

You guys used to walk through graveyards?" Iona asked, horrified.
"It cut at least ten minutes off the walk to Tesco," Harriet tried to reason.
"I am so glad I go to Uni in the city," Iona said, shaking her head. "A Tesco Metro on every second corner."
"And a Sainsbury's Local on all the others," Adam joked. — Erin Lawless

Around the plate before finding its way into the keyhole and socking itself home. She turned it and heard the lock snap back. She fumbled for the cut-glass knob. It tried to slide through her hand again - not because the door was locked this time but because her palm was wet with sweat. She firmed her grip and — Stephen King

Through her voice I saw a free woman, down on her land, a woman who knew how to kill her own chickens, hunt her own possum, cut her own cotton, fix her own roof, make her own whiskey, walk in her own shoes, and speak her mind, tell her own story.

A black woman.
Ready for the journey.
The Journey. — Bonnie Greer

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. — Stephen King

It always amazes me that once you cut through the clutter, people are pretty much the same. Especially through adolescence and early adulthood. For the most part, people go through the same experiences and think the same things, but somehow no one ever escapes the belief that his experience is unique in every conceivable way. — Nicholas Sparks

Her tender feet felt as if cut with sharp knives, but she cared not for it; a sharper pang had pierced through her heart. — Hans Christian Andersen

When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit, for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where, sucking [only I think she used some more recondite word] was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty used to rise up, possess themselves each of an orange in silence, and withdraw to the privacy of their own rooms to indulge in sucking oranges. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Moonlight cast its gentle light before her, highlighting everything from the burgeoning garden to where cut alfalfa lay in wakes of swerving shadows. She kicked through it thoughtfully, remembering the first time. — Marcha A. Fox

If you threw Elvis and a scarecrow in a blender, topped the whole thing off with Seagram's 7 and pressed dice, you would make my dad. He's got tar black hair and shoulder blades that cut through his undershirt like clipped wings. He looks like a gray-skinned, skinny-rat cowboy and I would be lying if I didn't say that I am, maybe sorta kinda, keep it secret, in love with him.
And you would be, too, you would, if you met him before drink number five or six. Just meet him then. Get lost before things get ugly. — Andrea Portes

Women show off their personality and character through accessories more than with low-cut shirts and skirts with huge slits. — Sarah Lafleur

... they couldn't do it the easy way, so they cut through the problem and made another option. — Evan Currie

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles. — Holly Black

People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality, a barrier which Buddhism calls the attachment to the false view of self.
Attachment to the false view of self means belief in the presence of unchanging entities which exist on their own. — Thich Nhat Hanh

I have taken a terrible beating from the truth and feel tamed, wise and desperate, as if I had taken a short route to wisdom through a mirror, and cut myself badly on it as I passed through. — Derek Raymond

She should be more frightened herself, she knew. She was only ten, a skinny girl on a stolen horse with a dark forest ahead of her and men behind who would gladly cut off her feet. Yet somehow she felt calmer than ever had in Harrenhal. The rain had washed the guard's blood off her fingers, she wore a sword across her back, wolves were prowling through the dark like lean grey shadows, and Arya Stark was unafraid. Fear cuts deeper than swords, she whispered under her breath, the words that Syrio Forel had taught her, and Jaqen's words too, valar morghulis. — George R R Martin

Here! Turn left, I know a short cut through Barons Court.
We spend the next twenty minutes mired in roadworks in Barons Court with a bunch of other people who know Edie's short cut. — Mark Mills

For a while I didn't want to look at the men and their hawks any more and my eyes slipped to the white panels of cut light in the branches behind them. Then I walked to the hedge where the hawk had made her kill. Peered inside. Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn. Reaching through the thorns I picked them free, one by one, tucked the hand that held them into my pocket, and cupped the feathers in my closed fist as if I were holding a moment tight inside itself. It was death I had seen. — Helen Macdonald