Dampness Quotes & Sayings

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things. — Edgar Allan Poe

Led through lined and grimy streets down to the river and eastward, as he had expected, towards the Isle of Dogs. A raw wind blew up from the water, carrying the smell of salt, stale fish, the overspill of sewage and the cold dampness of the outgoing tide sweeping down from the Pool of London towards the estuary and the sea. Across the gray water endless strings of barges made their heavy way downstream, laden with merchandise for half the earth. Ships passed them outward bound, down towards the docks of Greenwich and beyond. — Anne Perry

The rolls of music that she herself had thrown into the trash with the pretext that they had rotted from dampness kept spinning and playing in her memory. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness. — Willa Cather

But in the closeness of the sewing room, Simon can smell her as well as look at her. He tries to pay no attention but her scent is a distracting undercurrent. She smells like smoke; smoke, and laundry soap, and the salt from her skin; and she smells of the skin itself, with its undertone of dampness, fullness, ripeness - what? Ferns and mushrooms; fruits crushed and fermenting. — Margaret Atwood

Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply. — Roger Caillois

There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas - something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails. — Jerome K. Jerome

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

As it is there isn't a single thing isn't an opportunity for some 'alert' person, including practically everybody by the 'greed', that, they are 'alive', therefore. Etc. That, in fact, there are 'conditions'. Gravelly Hill or any sort of situation for improvement, when the Earth was properly regarded as a 'garden tenement messuage orchard and if this is nostalgia let you take a breath of April showers let's us reason how is the dampness in your nasal passage
but I have had lunch in this 'pasture' (B. Ellery to George Girdler Smith 'gentleman' 1799, for £ 150)
overlooking 'the town'
sitting there like the Memphite lord of
all Creation
...
It is not bad
to be pissed off — Charles Olson

It was my baby, too." His voice was husky, filled with regret, with pain. "But even more than that, Sherra, you're my soul. You're every breath I take. I would give my life to have saved you. I would give it now if it would mean I could go back and spare you this pain." The dampness from his eyes soaked the swarthy complexion, lined with pain and regret. "I would do anything, everything, baby, to ease this pain for you. — Lora Leigh

I guess the difference is that dampness comes down but dankness rises up out of rot and fermentation. — John Steinbeck

As they scuffled in the grass, Adam closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He could nearly scry just like this. The quiet and the cold breeze on his throat would take him away and the dampness of his toes in his shoes and the scent of living creatures would keep him here. Within and without. He couldn't tell if he was letting himself idolize this place or Ronan, and he wasn't sure there was a difference.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that Ronan was looking at him, as he had been looking at him for months. Adam looked back, as he had been looking back for months. — Maggie Stiefvater

Her eyes sparkle with a rising dampness. I've seemed to overstep myself,
Samuel. — Nathan Reese Maher

A long time later, after the bath had cooled, Lottie dressed in a fresh white nightgown and approached the bedroom table, where Nick was standing. She felt herself color as he stared at her with a half-smile. "I like the way you look in this," he said, brushing his fingers over the high-necked bodice of the gown. "Very innocent."
"Not any longer," Lottie said with an abashed smile.
He lifted her against his body, his face rubbing into the cool dampness of her hair. His beguiling mouth found her neck. "Oh, yes, you are," he said. "It's going to require a great deal of time and effort to debauch you completely."
"I have every faith you'll succeed," she said, and sat before a plate loaded with ham, vegetable pudding, potatoes, and open-faced tarts.
-Nick & Lottie — Lisa Kleypas

No one ever has the answers you need, the ones you want most, the ones you whisper as you lay alone in your bed with the lights extinguished and the lonely ache of loss settling in. — Lee Thompson

I expected everyone to file out of the room, but the wedding party began to embrace happily. Raymond grabbed me. "God, you're a mess." He wiped the dampness on my cheeks with his index finger. "Such a mush. — Santino Hassell

Between the covers of the books that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He felt at his face, wondering what the hot dampness was. For a moment he thought he was bleeding. Swearing under his breath, he pushed the tears away, vowing that they would be the last he ever shed. Strength, not weakness, was what he needed from this day forward. — Morgan Rhodes

Then, for more than ten days, they did not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I'm a five-seasons griller! Did you know I added a new season? Living in Cali, I'm cooking in the yard all the time. I don't care what the weather is like. My hair is impervious to any kind of dampness, so I don't have too much to worry about. — Guy Fieri

A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don't take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you've gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can't remember who you were before the war. There's a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.
The Great War was the greatest changer of them all. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size. — Vladimir Nabokov

I took a breath, seeing from across the room the rain on his eyelashes. A sudden need to brush them free filled me. I could almost feel the dampness of the rain on my fingers, how soft it would feel. — Kim Harrison

Jim walked into the kitchen. He was wearing a white towel around his hips and nothing else. His skin glistened with dampness - he had obviously just taken a shower. I stared at him in horror. He nodded to my aunt, my mother, and the two other women. "Ladies." Then he walked to my silverware drawer, got a fork, took a plate out of my cabinet, walked to the breadbox, speared the steak with his fork, put it on the plate, turned around and walked out. This did not just happen. It did not happen. Aulia looked at me with eyes as big as dessert plates and mouthed, "Wow." All four of them stared at me. — Nalini Singh

When Mrs. Keane whispered, between contractions, that the baby was coming at least six weeks too soon, he shook his head and clucked his tongue, lifting the wet dish towel from her forehead and refolding it and then touching it gently to her cheeks. The dampness, and the perspiration, had darkened her hair and the pain had brought some color to her face. There was all about her a not unpleasant odor of oatmeal or wheat. He knelt beside the couch. When he leaned away, his T-shirt was wet with the amniotic fluid that had soaked her dress and the cushion beneath her. Her knees were already raised, her pale legs bare, and he asked, gently, if she would like him to check what was going on. She nodded and when the contraction had passed, added, "Modesty is always the first thing to go. — Alice McDermott

The heat at night is worse than the heat in daytime. Even with the fan on, nothing moves, and the walls store up warmth, give it out like a used oven. Surely it will rain soon. Why do I want it? It will only mean more dampness. There's lightning far away but no thunder. Looking out the window I can see it, a glimmer, like the phosphorescence you get in stirred seawater, behind the sky, which is overcast and too low and a dull gray infrared. The searchlights are off, which is not usual. A power failure. Or else Serena Joy has arranged it. I — Margaret Atwood

I truly believe that as a novelist, you cannot adequately describe the weather in England - the light, the dampness, the bitterness, the summer softness, and so on - without having experienced it. — Stephanie Laurens

But whatever he spoke he knew would be but another name for the wildness that he sought. It was a freedom and a goodness, a hope and a vigor that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life, which were not free or good or hopeful or vigorous. What he sought was the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out, as the prairie grass around him sent down its fibered roots into the rich dark dampness, the Wildness, and thereby renewed itself, year after year. — John Edward Williams

Autumn clouds, vague and obscure; The evening, lonely and chill. I felt the dampness on my garments, But saw no spot, and heard no sound of rain. — Bai Juyi

I ran to Joe and pulled him in. I pushed my face into his jacket and breathed in the wool and dry-cleaning. Joe's height was always a narcotic for me, the way my head hit him at the chest. I dug my fingers under his shoulder blades and turned my cheek so my nose touched flesh. The dampness of his clavicle, the tickle of his chest hair. The smell of Joe. My man. — Maria Semple

Some days i'm bursting at the seams
With all my half remembered dreams
And then it shoots me down again
I feel the dampness as it creeps
I hear you coughing in your sleep
Beneath a broken window pane
Tomorrow girl i'll buy you chips
A lollipop to stain your lips
And it'll all be right as rain
This ain't no love that's guiding me
— David Gray

It is possible too that I was experiencing something known as "anticipatory grief," the mourning that occurs before a certain loss. Anticipatory. Expectatory. Trepidatory. This grief had a dampness. It did not drench or drown me, but it hung in the air like a pallid cloud, thinning but never entirely vanishing. It followed me wherever I went and gradually I grew used to looking at the world through it. — Kyo Maclear

I always think of the Pacific Northwest as giant trees and rain and clouds and dampness, like the Native American art from that area. That all says Pacific Northwest to me. Salmon. It really only exists on the Western side of the Cascades. — Kyle MacLachlan

Now, don't get me wrong, I like men in all shapes and sizes, but let's be honest. There is a direct correlation between the size of the man and the dampness along the seam of my jeans. And this one is producing some serious humidity in my southern hemisphere. — Opal Carew

Awkwardly pressed up against him, the Princess seemed to take no notice of their proximity. In the dampness, though, her body heat was near palpable to Luke and he had to force himself to keep his attention on what he was doing. — Alan Dean Foster

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness , dear, my happiness will remain,in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness. — Vladimir Nabokov

No matter what happens," she said quietly, "I want to thank you."
Chaol tilted his head to the side. "For what?"
Her eyes stung but she blamed it on the fierce wind and blinked away the dampness. "For making my freedom mean something. — Sarah J. Maas

The warm dampness of her breath made me shiver at the mix of the familiar and the unknown, with a soft exhalation she shifted her head and her lips found my collarbone, teasingly shy of my old scar. Tendrils pulsed in time with my heart, building on the ones before to an unseen height. — Kim Harrison

There is a feel about Galway you can wear around your shoulders like a cloak. It hangs in the air with its dampness; it walks the cobblestone streets and stands in the doorways of its gray stone buildings. It blows in with the mist from the Atlantic and lingers incessantly at every corner. I have never been able to walk the streets of Galway without feeling some unnamed presence accompanying me. — Claire Fullerton

If I release you, you won't scream? I'd rather not continue the conversation like this."
She shook her head, and he freed her. She scrambled away from him, feeling the grooves of the headboard bite into her back when she slammed into it.
He sat back on her bed, his hands on his jean-clad thighs. The hair at his neck curled from dampness. "You don't have to be afraid of me."
She almost laughed. "A stranger breaks in, and I'm supposed to be cool with that?"
"Amy, we're not strangers. — Jaime Rush

He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him. — George Orwell

The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves. — Alain De Botton

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule. — Djuna Barnes

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.
From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam. — Italo Calvino

Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn't choose them, I don't fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don't keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect. — Mary Oliver

She felt the dampness of her palms and wiped them on the back of her black cotton skirt. — Yiyun Li

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, how much beer is there in the German intelligence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

She faced Chaol. The wind ripped a few strands of hair from her braid, and she tucked them behind her ears.
"No matter what happens," she said quietly, "I want to thank you."
Chaol tilted his head to the side. "For what?" Her eyes stung, but she blamed it on the fierce wind and blinked away the dampness.
"For making my freedom mean something." He didn't say anything; he just took the fingers of her right hand and held them in his, his thumb brushing the ring she wore.
"Let the second duel commence," the king boomed, waving a hand toward the veranda. Chaol squeezed her hand, his skin warm in the frigid air.
"Give him hell," he said. — Sarah J. Maas

That after an hour's silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness ... That's all, it took him an hour to work that out. — William Gaddis

Andras went through the Sortie doors and walked out into a city that no longer contained his brother. He walked on benumbed feet in the new black Oxfords his brother had brought him from Hungary. He didn't care who passed him on the street or where he was going. If he had stepped off the curb into the air instead of down into the gutter, if he had climbed the void above the cars and between the buildings until he was looking down at the rooftops with their red-clay chimney pots, their irregular curving grid, and if he had then kept climbing until he was wading through the slough of low-lying clouds in the winter sky, he would have felt no shock or joy, no wonder or surprise, just the same leaden dampness in his limbs. — Julie Orringer

Rommel could smell the sea. At Torbruk the heat and the dust and flies were as bad as they had been in the desert, but it was all made bearable by that occasional whiff of salty dampness in the faint breeze. — Ken Follett

Look at a plant in the midst of its range! Why does it not double or quadruple its numbers? We know that it can perfectly well withstand a little more heat or cold, dampness or dryness, for elsewhere it ranges into slightly hotter or colder, damper or drier districts. In this case we can clearly see that if we wish in imagination to give the plant the power of increasing in numbers, we should have to give it some advantage — Charles Darwin

The music became a siren song. The melody was my lodestone, and I was powerless against its lure. With each step, I savored the dampness of the grass beneath my bare feet. I didn't remember when I'd lost my shoes. — Sarah J. Maas

They are all very serious people with stern expressions on their faces. They discuss nothing but important matters and like to philosophize a great deal, while at the same time everyone can see that the workers are detestably fed, sleep without suitable bedding, thirty to forty in a room with bedbugs everywhere, the stench, the dampness, and the moral corruption ... Obviously all our fine talk has gone on simply to hoodwink ourselves and other people as well. Show me the day nurseries that they're talking about so much about. And where are the libraries? Why, they just write about nurseries and libraries in novels, while in fact not a single one even exists. What does exist is nothing but dirt, vulgarity, and a barbarian way of life ... I dislike these terribly serious faces, they frighten me, and I'm afraid of serious conversations, too. We'd be better off if we all would just shut up for a while! — Anton Chekhov

He pressed the herb to his nose. Thyme. He loved the name and he loved the smell. He looked out the window at the illusion of deep woods. His face too was out there, hung on a tree and returning his gaze. He drew close to the glass to lose the mirror effect. Outside, the forest panted its beefy halitus; the soil held the breaths of gloom in its dampness. Fifteen thousand years ago a glacier had sliced through this park he was living in, bringing with it the nutrients from all its travels. Fifteen thousand years ago human beings were the fable that frightened the dark woods. — Nancy Zafris

He had no idea what missing was. Missing was lying in the dampness of your tears night after night. Missing was a constant hollow spot in the center of your chest. Missing was a yawning ache that was never satisfied. — Denise Hunter