Denuded Quotes & Sayings

Omnivorous red devils with a vicious bite, they have denuded the ground surrounding their hill, destroying everything green and living within a radius of ten feet. I cannot resist the impulse to shove my walking stick into the bowels of their hive and rowel things up. Don't actually care for ants. Neurotic little pismires. Compared to ants the hairy scorpion is a beast of charm, dignity and — Edward Abbey

The child tends to be stripped of all social influences but those of the market place, all sense of place, function and class is weakened, the characteristics of region and clan, neighborhood or kindred are attenuated. The individual is denuded of everything but appetities, desires and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. A culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs and purposes, usurping more and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests and politics alike. — Jeremy Seabrook

Naturally we looked at each other. Naturally the single second that passed was more than enough time to enjoy a purified intimacy, to note each other's details and feel the exact weight of each other's history. naturally our essences, peremptorily denuded, exchanged a stunned glance.
Then I shot him in the face. — Glen Duncan

You don't owe the internet your time. Your time is yours, whatever time you give the internet is a gift. The internet does not know this, and it will never learn. Time is the most precious thing you have. More than money, or land, or prestige, or any valuable thing you can think of, a life is measured in time. The sooner you walk away from a useless fight, the more of it you get to have. — Quinn Norton

Shaking his head at the way of the world, Fred Colon walked right up to the wall so cruelly - or cruelleah - denuded of its covering. — Terry Pratchett

if you motherfuckers must know, I was looking up porn," Preppy said with a shrug of his shoulders. There was a rustling in the brush up ahead. A huge brown hog with wiry hair and a broken tusk darted out from its hiding place and into the clearing, making a run for his life through the trees. Preppy lifted his gun and pulled the trigger. He missed the fast moving pig and the bullet blew a huge hole into a tree stump. "But you'd be surprised how one little misspelling of the word BEASTIALITY can change the entire fucking nature of a search. — T.M. Frazier

In all things there is beauty. In the glint of dew clinging to the strands of a spider's web; in the way the setting sun winks off shards of broken glass; in the rainbow forming in the soap suds in a sink full of dirty dishes; in a blade of grass which manages to force its way, with patience and time, through the all too willing grasp of sidewalk cement. It is in the faded brown of leaves, turning, twisting against their fate, as they fall to the ground, light and dry as brittle bones, and in the bare, thin-tipped branches, denuded by a change in season. It is in the way a stranger's laughter cradles you if you let it. It is in the intricate scars of a lover's back and in our upturned eyes when we ask for forgiveness. — Marta Curti

The individual is denuded of everything but appetites, desires, and tastes, wrenched from any context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which they emit. — Jeremy Seabrook

Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea
the kind of idea that looks, as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything
tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different? There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly, with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You'd better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark. — Lewis Thomas

The oldest among Kashmiris often claim that their is nothing new about their condition, that they they have been slaves of foreign rulers since the sixteenth century, when the Moghul emperor Akbar annexed Kashmir and appointed a local governer to rule the state. In the chaos of post-Moghul India, the old empire rapidly disintegrating, Afghani and Sikh invaders plundered Kashmir at will. The peasantry was taxed and taxed into utter wretchedness; the cultural and intellectual life, which under indigenous rulers had produced some of the greatest poetry, music, and philosophy in the subcontinent, dried up. Barbaric rules were imposed in the early nineteenth century, a Sikh who killed a native of Kashmir was fined nothing more than two rupees. Victor Jacquemont, a botanist and friend of Stendahl's who came to the valley in 1831, thought that nowhere else in India were the masses as poor and denuded as they were in Kashmir. — Pankaj Mishra

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. — Susan Sontag

We need to protect our wilderness areas and national parks. Everywhere you travel, you see blight, denuded mountains, logging. If people know what's going on, they'll become activists to safeguard those places. — Christie Brinkley

I don't really understand why so many fantasy writers choose to focus on worlds that just seem strangely denuded. But to them, I guess it doesn't seem strange. And I guess that's their privilege. It isn't mine. — N.K. Jemisin

The artist's personality must be left in his dressing-room; his soul must be denuded of its own sensations and clothed with the base or noble qualities he is called upon to exhibit ... [he] must leave behind him the cares and vexations of life, throw aside his personality for several hours, and move in the dream of another life, forgetting everything. — Sarah Bernhardt

The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete - a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life. — Hanya Yanagihara

Today, basically, on Wall Street, the big money is made by taking risks. — Bernard Madoff

It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned. — Zadie Smith

But here, in the tide country, transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days. In other places forests take centuries, even millennia, to regenerate; but mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years. Could it be the very rhythms of the earth were quickened here so that they unfolded at an accelerated pace? — Amitav Ghosh

It is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from being
arbitrary. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor. — China Mieville

And so, my beloved Kermit, my dear little Hussein, at the moment America changed forever, your father was wandering an ICBM-denuded watseland, nervously monitoring his radiation level, armed only with a baseball bat, a 10mm pistol, and six rounds of ammunition, in search of a vicious gang of mohawked marauders who were 100 percent bad news and totally had to be dealth with. Trust Daddy on this one. — Tom Bissell

I suspect that if the practice could be denuded of all the spiritual preening and straight-out-of-a-fortune-cookie lingo such as "sacred spaces," "divine mother," and "holding your emotions with love and tenderness," it would be attractive to many more millions of smart, skeptical, and ambitious people who would never otherwise go near it. — Dan Harris

As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking. — Sharon Waxman

In those days Cheboygan was already something of a resort town, although Milo didn't realize this fact until he was older. For most of his childhood, he knew only the deep woods that ran behind their property - 350 acres of sugar maple, beech, and evergreen that had managed to remain unlogged during the huge timber harvests that had denuded much of the rest of the state. He spent a good part of his days inside this forest. The soil there was padded with a layer of decaying leaves and needles whose scents mingled to form a cool spice in his nose. He didn't notice the smell when he was in it so much as feel its absence when he wasn't. School, home, any building he had to spend time in - they all left him with the feeling that something had been cleaned away. — Ethan Canin

I glance back as I am pulling the door shut. I can see Mrs. Kasperek on her bed, in the apartment denuded of the books that were all her life. — Deborah Meyler

Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded. — Francine Du Plessix Gray