Dumbly Quotes & Sayings

We won't be having an affair." I stare dumbly, certain I just heard an organ in my body crack in my chest. His hands clamp around me, and he crushes me to his body as he slides his nose along the shell of my ear. "When I take you, you'll be mine," he says, a soft promise in my ear. — Katy Evans

But he would have us most of all remember to be enthusiastic over the night. Not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer but also because it needs our love. For with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. They are exiles who long for a future that lies in our power. — W. H. Auden

Well, don't you look lovely," his voice dripped behind me, his breath tickling my ear as his words trickled in my brain.
Turning slowly, I saw him in his usual attire, a white t-shirt and jeans, but he looked incredible. His dark hair appeared darker in the dimmed lighting, his eyes shone with eagerness.
"You're here," I said dumbly. Like he didn't know he was here. I was such an idiot sometimes.
"I am," he said, a sexy smirk showing on one side of his mouth. "Wanna dance?" he asked, his leg shaking nervously, his eyes desperately searching mine for an answer.
I nodded, unable to speak. We'd kised, but only a couple of times. He grabbed me, pulling me to a spot close to where we stood. Warm fingers of one hand circled around my waist, while the others held my had. He pulled me close, every inch of our bodies touching. His eyes never left mine as we swayed and spun. I was lost in all that was Cade Kelling. — Felicia Tatum

How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did. — V.S. Naipaul

Talya was so taken by the magnificent creature that for a moment he forgot where he was. But then he remembered, and he looked up to see Saba on both knees, his arms spread wide and his face lifted to the sky, weeping softly. How wonderful was Saba! And beyond Saba, Kahil, seated tall on his stallion, staring at him with black eyes, frozen in shock. Lost. How beautiful was this poor man, so wounded to hurt so many! Still not a soul moved. Talya looked past Kahil to the warriors, who seemed not to know what to do, and beyond them to the platform where the queen and the king stood, staring dumbly. Shaquilath has lost her daughter, Talya thought, and his heart broke with hers. The king has great kindness that's been covered up by fear and greed. How or why these things came to Talya, he didn't know, because he wasn't as much knowing them as experiencing them. And — Ted Dekker

The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger-tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart. It may be only the clinging touch of a child's hand; but there is as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others. A hearty handshake or a friendly letter gives me genuine pleasure. — Helen Keller

I'm not some random guy you just met. I'm not someone who doesn't know that what's at the core of you is worth working at, breaking through those walls for."
Oh my God.
"People don't get second chances often, Sasha, but we got one, and I'm not going to let that pass us by."
"A second chance?" I repeated dumbly. "For us?"
"That's what I'm thinking."
Stunned, I was quiet for a moment. "What if I don't want a second chance?"
He laughed. "Oh, you want a second chance. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then. — Thomas Hardy

White angel wings, made up from thousands of short feathers, now surrounded him.

"Uh. Bird?" She pointed dumbly, unable to form a single coherent though more.
"Harpie." He gave her a glare that could have killed. — Constance Sharper

And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt, - dumbly calling, deafly listening - that in misfortune, even death, encourages others and in its defeat, stirs the soul to be strong? — Marianne Moore

Please - it would be my pleasure." And I believed him that it would. I nodded dumbly. If the paintings along the halls were exquisite, then the ones selected for the gallery had to be beyond my human imaginings. "I would like that - very much." He smiled at me still, broadly and without restraint or hesitation. Isaac had never smiled at me like that. Isaac had never made my breath catch, just a little bit. The feeling was startling enough that I walked out, grasping the crumpled paper in my pocket as if doing so could somehow keep that answering smile from tugging on my lips. — Sarah J. Maas

A l'amour, aux plaisir, aux boccage," he quoted softly, then turned the words to English: "In love, in pleasure, in the woods, spend your beautiful days ... " I stared up at him, dumbly, my heart rising in my throat. I was not aware of the precise moment when we stopped dancing, when he turned those deep, forest-colored eyes on mine and traced the outline of my face with a delicate touch. "These are your beautiful days, Mariana Farr," he said gently, and then his shoulders blocked the sunlight as he lowered his head to mine and kissed me. — Susanna Kearsley

Left weaponless, Roran was forced to retreat before the remaining soldier. He stumbled over a corpse, cutting his calf on a sword as he fell, and rolled to avoid a two-handed blow from the soldier, scrabbling frantically in the ankle-deep mud for something, anything he could use as a weapon. A hilt brushed his fingers, and he ripped it from the muck and slashed at the soldier's sword hand, severing his thumb.
The man stared dumbly at the glistening stump, then said, "This is what comes from not shielding myself."
"Aye," agreed Roran, and beheaded him. — Christopher Paolini

So what's the deal with you and my sister?"
He laughs shortly and rubs the back of his neck like something is there, tickling, tapping.
"Tamra." Clutching the dashboard, I turn and glare at her. "There is no deal."
She snorts. "Well, we wouldn't be sitting here if that was the case now, would we?"
I open my mouth to demand she end the interrogation when Will's voice stops me.
"I like your sister. A lot."
I look at him dumbly.
He looks at me, lowers his voice to say, "I like you."
I know that, I guess, but heat still crawls over my face. I swing forward in my seat, cross my arms over my chest and stare straight ahead. Can't stop shivering. Can't speak. My throat hurts too much.
"Jacinda," he says.
"I think you've shocked her," Tamra offers, then sighs. — Sophie Jordan

They were herded passively into the gas chambers. Weary of being hunted and persecuted, of living in constant fear, they dumbly awaited the hand of the sure physician, Death. For them life had lost all meaning and purpose. To prolong it would merely have prolonged their suffering. — Miklos Nyiszli

He broke out in a wide, cocky grin. "Have I rendered you speechless?"
I looked again and nodded dumbly. "Uh, huh. — Ashlan Thomas

And then, suddenly, an extraordinary question rose in my mind, whether this stupendous globe of green fire might not be the vast Central Sun - the great sun, round which our universe and countless others revolve. I felt confused. I thought of the probable end of the dead sun, and another suggestion came, dumbly - Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? The idea appealed to me with no sense of grotesqueness; but rather as something both possible and probable. — William Hope Hodgson

The imagination is a spiritual apparatus. Unable to invent the world, it does the next best thing, and that is to assemble it piecemeal, ugly and strange, bright and clear, and dumbly discovered. — Jan Peacock

Skylar todl you to come here?" I asked dumbly.
"No," Bethany said. "Skylar told me not to come here. Same dif. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Surely the greatest mercy granted us by Providence is our ignorance of the future. Imagine if we knew the outcome of our hopes and plans, or could see the manner in which we are doomed to die - how ruined our lives would be! Instead we live on dumbly from day to day as happily as animals. But all things must come to dust eventually. No human being, no system, no age is impervious to this law; everything beneath the stars will perish; the hardest rock will be worn away. Nothing endures but words. — Robert Harris

Chess, which exists predominantly in two dimensions, is one of the world's most difficult games. Three-dimensional chess is an invitation to insanity. But human relationships, even of the simplest order, are like a kind of four-dimensional chess, a game whose pieces and positions change subtly and inexorably between moves, whose players stare dumbly while their powerful positions deteriorate into hopeless predicaments and while improbable combinations suddenly become inevitable. To make matters worse, some games are open to any number of players, and all sides are expected to win. — Robert Grudin

All she could do was stare dumbly at him as she trembled all over, for he was so rampantly glorious, it had stolen her voice. — Thea Harrison

Zel so often put himself outside of where he wanted to be and then looked in dumbly through the window of his longing, hurt and beaten and knowing that he had hurt and beaten himself but still he did it, over and over. — Jeanette Winterson

Yeah! "I love you" is subject to the law of diminishing returns; like one or two other critical weekly elements of a relationship, it loses a bit of thrilling value every time you get it out.' ... That's what happens with "I love you", that same phrase that you once shouted Hollywood or Heathcliff-like in the lashing raining, now- now you are saying it dumbly at the end of every phone conversation, a follow-on from," I'll be back for dinner." Once it came out spontaneous rush, it forced itself out; now it's reflex. — David Baddiel

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. — Ernest Becker

There are times when we can feel destiny close around us like a fist around a doorknob. Sure, we can resist. But a knob that won't turn, a door that sticks and never budges, is a nuisance to the gods. The gods may kick in the jamb. Worse, they may walk away in disgust, leaving us to hang dumbly from our tight hinges, deprived of any other chance in life to swing open into unnecessary risk and thus into enchantment. — Tom Robbins

She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish. — Peter Trachtenberg

Suddenly a great sense of despondency comes over me. To-morrow we shall take the prepositions, I think to myself - and next week we shall have a dictation. In a year's time you will have by heart fifty questions from the Catechism; in four years you will start the larger multiplication tables. - And so you will grow up, and Time will take you in his pincers - one dumbly, another savagely, or gently or shatteringly. Each will have his own destiny and thus or thus it will overtake you. What help shall I be to you then with my conjugations and enumerations of all the rivers of Germany? Forty of you - forty different lives standing behind you and waiting. How gladly would I help you, if I could. But who can really help another here? Have I even been able to help Adolf Bethke? The bell rings. The first lesson is over. — Erich Maria Remarque

I like your sister. A lot."
I look at him dumbly.
He looks at me, lowers his voice to say, "I like you. — Sophie Jordan

Did he ask what she'd done in her room? Hell, no. At that point, and after that bewitching smile, if she'd murmured, "I'm leading you into the fiery depths of hell," he'd have followed dumbly. — Kresley Cole

There was a single window that tapered into a funnel, with eerie moonlight passing through it, reflecting directly off the globe like a mirror. For a moment, as I rose I saw something glimmering within. Dumbly, with feverish whispers assailing me, I realized it was the center of one of the distant galaxies, flaring after some unknown cataclysm. Its radiance was such that it burst from its prison. It met the moonlight halfway. It created kaleidoscopic colours on the walls. Then, in answer, the reliefs transformed from majestic art into something approaching divine, alive, plays from Egyptian memory, given the spark of life from space. I saw animal-headed gods move. They stepped from the walls to take their place around the altar. All stared at the globe. Each raised their arms in silent supplication. And such was their toxic ecstasy that I wished to join them, to forget my dreadful experiences and revel in something truly wondrous. — Tim Reed

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance. Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet ... AM has won, simply ... he has taken his revenge ...
I have no mouth. And I must scream. — Harlan Ellison

All the ideals and beliefs you ever had have crashed about your gun-deafened ears - you don't believe in God or them or the infallibility of England or anything but bloody war and wounds and foul smells and smutty stories and smoke and bombs and lice and filth and noise, noise, noise - you live in a world of cold sick fear, a dirty world of darkness and despair - you want to crawl ignominiously home away from these painful writhing things that once were men, these shattered, tortured faces that dumbly demand what it's all about in Christ's name ... — Evadne Price

The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance. — Oswald Chambers

I don't want to be a widow, I don't want Michael Bayning, and I don't want you to joke about such things, you tactless clodpole!"
As all three of them stared at her openmouthed, Poppy leapt up and stalked away, her hands drawn into fists.
Bewildered by the immediate force of her fury - it was like being stung by a butterfly - Harry stared after her dumbly. After a moment, he asked the first coherent thought that came to him. "Did she just say she doesn't want Bayning?"
"Yes," Win said, a smile hovering on her lips. "That's what she said. Go after her, Harry."
Every cell in Harry's body longed to comply. Except that he had the feeling of standing on the edge of a cliff, with one ill-chosen word likely to send him over. He gave Poppy's sister a desperate glance. "What should I say?"
"Be honest with her about your feelings," Win suggested.
A frown settled on Harry's face as he considered that. "What's my second option? — Lisa Kleypas

It is as if Protestantism by clinging to the Scripture wished to preserve the last faint echoes of God's Word in a world that has fallen silent, a world where only things speak dumbly, a world delivered over to the silence and ruthlessness of the Absolute, - and in his fear of God the Protestant has realized that it is his own goal before which he cowers. For in excluding all other values, in casting himself in the last resort on an autonomous religious experience, he has assumed a final abstraction of a logical rigour that urges him unambiguously to strip all sensory trappings from his faith, to empty it of all content but the naked Absolute, retaining nothing but the pure form, the pure, empty and neutral form of a 'religion in itself', a 'mysticism in itself'. — Hermann Broch

HE DIDN'T RENT Hairspray or Harold and Maude. A few minutes after Sam left, after standing dumbly for a while in the Hs, Lincoln decided he didn't feel like going home anymore. He didn't feel like sitting still or being quiet. He left the Blockbuster empty-handed and stopped just outside to toss Sam's business card into the trash. — Rainbow Rowell

She poured the water, arranged some bread near enough the embers to scorch but not catch fire, and looked up at Little John. She was so accustomed to his step, to his bulk, that it took a moment to notice his face; and when she did ... It was, she thought, rather like the moment it took to realize one had cut one's finger as one stared dumbly at the first drop of blood on the knife-blade. You know it is going to hurt quite a lot in a minute. — Robin McKinley

This was what the poets couldn't put in their poetry, she thought dumbly, the rush of desire so fierce and pure it made one shake, all on the force of a word. — Lauren Willig

So I decided to do it [hike the Appalachian Trail]. More rashly, I announced my intention - told friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books ... It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in a tightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shredding clothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by the sight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo through water, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beady eyes, a piercing squeal, and slaverous, chopping appetite for pink, plump, city-softened flesh. — Bill Bryson