Feet And Soles Quotes & Sayings

Blow, wind, crack your cheeks, I thought. Brian wasn't the only one who could quote Shakespeare. I made it to my room without thinking of any other suitably apocalyptic line from Lear, and I was too tired to start in on Othello. I flopped onto the bed facedown - and immediately I was bent into a bow shape, with the soles of my feet facing the back of my head. — Jeff Lindsay

I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand, or the rise and fall of his shoulders as he pulled through the salt. It was enough. — Madeline Miller

According to the historian Arrian who reported the encounter, the ascetics beat their feet on the ground as Alexander passed them. When asked about the gesture, they said that Alexander occupied, despite his conquests, no more ground than that covered by the soles of his two feet. Like everyone else, he, too, was mortal, 'except that you are ambitious and reckless, traversing such a vast span of land, so remote from your home, enduring troubles and inflicting them upon others'.4 — Pankaj Mishra

Almost everyone wears rubber on their feet these days, but there was a time when it was considered cheap. Luxury shoes had leather soles, which were rigid and heavy. — Diego Della Valle

One time, as the cold wind blew and she kept watch over the playground, Aomame realized she believed in God. It was a sudden discovery, like finding, with the soles of your feet, solid ground beneath the mud. — Haruki Murakami

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand — Robert Macfarlane

Winter sports aren't my thing. You can have your boards and blades and your glacier-gripping cleats: My feet prefer to negotiate the ground on a pair of dependable soles. — Julia Glass

She and I are as far apart as the stars in the sky and the soles of my feet." Detective Sean Ryan ~Deception on Sable Hill by Shelley Gray — Shelley Gray

He slipped off my shoes and began massaging the soles of my feet with his skilled hands. If it's one thing a guitarist knows, it's how to use his fingers. — Dannika Dark

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.
It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.
The brightest light casts the darkest shadow. — Matthew Woodring Stover

In looking back now, I see how it began in my childhood, altho' I was not conscious of the necessity until '67 or '68 when I broke down first, acutely, and had violent turns of hysteria. As I lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, strongest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end ... So, with the rest, you abandon the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, and refuse to keep them sane when you find in turn one moral impression after another producing despair in the one, terror in the others, anxiety in the third and so on until life becomes one long flight from remote suggestion and complicated eluding of the multifold traps set for your undoing. — Alice James

How many funerals had he attended, how many open graves had he seen, watched the coffins eased down, or sometimes just a frayed mat in which the corpse was bundled, the feet sticking out, the soles white and sometimes still specked with dirt if he was a farmer and could not afford slippers, least of all shoes.
-Istak — F. Sionil Jose

Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced. Moons he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs. Outside outside of them always but. Yellow. Feet soles with walking like. Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious concealed. With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity waiting for a touch to. Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed up. — William Faulkner

It's like cold silk. Cold, sumptuous silk onto which the sea has laid offerings: pebbles, shells, barnacles. Tiny slips of wrack. Her fingers dig and reach; the drops of rain touch the back of her neck, the backs of her hands. The sand pulls the heat from her fingertips, from the soles of her feet. A — Anthony Doerr

Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it. — John Burroughs

When we seek from Zen (or from any spiritual path) the fulfillment of our fantasies, we separate from the earth and sky, from our loved ones, from our aching backs and hearts, from the very soles of our feet. Such fantasies insulate us for a time; yet in ten thousand ways reality intrudes, and our lives become anxious scurrying, quiet desperation, confusing melodrama. — Charlotte Joko Beck

It is our custom
to consume
the person we love.
Taboo flesh: swollen
genitalia nipples
the scrotum the vulva
the soles of the feet
the palm of the hand
heart and liver taste best.
Cannibalism is blessed.

I'll wear your jawbone
round my neck
listen to your vertebrae
bone tapping bone in my wrists.
I'll string your fingers round my waist -
what a rigorous embrace.
Over my heart I'll wear
a brooch with a lock of hair.
Nights I'll sleep cradling
your skull sharpening
my teeth on your toothless grin.

Sundays there's Mass and communion
and I'll put your relics to rest. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

What does it take to break a person?
Torturers and interrogators would be able to provide statistics. This many nights without sleep, this many needles, this much water, this voltage of current on this many occasions.
But there is considerable variation in people's ability to withstand torture. Sometimes one can achieve the desired result simply by showing the instruments and explaining what is to be done with them. Sometimes it takes weeks; one may be forced to restart a heart which has given out from the pain, and even then one may not manage to break the subject down.
However, it is presumably possible to discern some kind of average. This many needles, this many blows to the soles of the feet, before most people are sufficiently destroyed to give up what they once held most dear.
But in everyday life? — John Ajvide Lindqvist

Let firm, well hammer'd soles protect thy feet Through freezing snows, and rains, and soaking sleet; Should the big last extend the shoe too wide, Each stone will wrench the unwary step aside; The sudden turn may stretch the swelling vein, The cracking joint unhinge, or ankle sprain; And when too short the modish shoes are worn, You'll judge the seasons by your shooting corn. — John Gay

Havna ye heard how the ancient Greeks associated sparrows with Aphrodite, the goddess of love?"...
"Och, 'tis no story. 'Tis the truth I give: When sparrows mated, it was due to their abandoned nature." His head inclined so he could whisper a kiss to her neck, sending shivers from her shoulders to the soles of her feet. "Even Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote about the sparrow's lustful conduct. — Vonnie Davis

Fear envelops bones like new skin,
envelops blood with night's skin,
the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet -
it is not your hair but the terror in your head,
like long hair made of vertical nails,
and what you see are not shattered streets,
but rather, within you, your own crushed walls,
your frustrated infinity, again the city comes
crashing down: in your silence, only water's threat
is heard, and in the water
drowned horses gallop through your death. — Pablo Neruda

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without the blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. — Jeanette Winterson

And during the day, to prevent stress from building up - which makes it harder to fall asleep at night - every few hours take sixty seconds of recovery time the way top tennis players introduce tiny slots of recovery rituals into their game. All you have to do is stop what you are doing, and simply bring your awareness to the palms of your hands or the soles of your feet, or both. Let it stay there for a minute, and feel all tension leaving your body, drifting away from you through your hands and feet. — Arianna Huffington

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window? — Pat Schneider

When she treads on my grave and feels as if she's trampling on that doting old man's bones, my spirit will still be alive, feeling the whole weight of her body, feeling pain, feeling the fine-grained velvety smoothness of the soles of her feet. Even after I'm dead I'll be aware of that. I can't believe I won't. In the same way, Satsuko will be aware of the presence of my spirit, joyfully enduring her weight. Perhaps she may even hear my charred bones rattling together, chuckling, moaning, creaking. And that would by no means occur only when she was actually stepping on my grave. At the very thought of those Buddha's Footprints modeled after her own feet she would hear my bones wailing under the stone. Between sobs I would scream: It hurts! It hurts! ... Even though it hurts, I'm happy - I've never been more happy, I'm much, much happier than when I was alive! ... Trample harder! Harder! — Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

The thousand thousand grasses, dry now in the late-summer heat, bristle like the brittle pages of a thousand ancient books being turned by invisible scholars. Every blade and leaf and rock speaking of loss and endurance, the birds settling down for another night or two before their long, familiar hegira. The landscape he walks is an endless cascade of loss and dying and coming to life again, and he feels the immense silence of the dead and the eternal pulse of the living in the soles of his feet. — Robert Goolrick

And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant. — Leif Enger

The King sat down and I noticed that a brood of small transparent roots grew from the soles of his feet. 'Yes, I am also errant. My roots can find no soil and this is why they are visible. — Leonora Carrington

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet. — Stephen Greenblatt

When the Taliban had found the paintings, Tariq said, they'd taken offence at the birds' long bare legs. After they'd tied the cousin's feet and flogged his soles bloody, they had presented him with a choice: Either destroy the paintings or make the flamingos decent. So the cousin had picked up his brush and painted trousers on every last bird. "And there you have it, Islamic flamingos," - "But he'll have the last laugh, the cousin," Tariq said. " He painted those trousers with watercolour. When the Taliban are gone he'll just wash them off. — Khaled Hosseini

Deep in the blood the pull of paradise. The beyond. It must have all started with the navel. They cut the umbilical cord, give you a slap in the ass, and presto! you're out in the world, adrift. You look at the stars and then you look at your navel. You grow eyes everywhere -in the armpits, between the lips, in the roots of your hair, on the soles of your feet. What is distant becomes near, what is near becomes distant. Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a turning inside out. — Henry Miller

I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and tress; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die. — Hermann Hesse

Live in the space between chaos and shape. I walk the line that continually threatens to lose its tautness under me, dropping me into the dark pit where there is no meaning. At other times the line is so wired that it lights up the soles of my feet, gradually my whole body, until I am my own beacon, and I see then the beauty of newly created worlds, a form that is not random. A new beginning. — Jeanette Winterson

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans. — Henry David Thoreau

From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it. — Eugene V. Debs

The priest rose to take up the crucifix; at that, she strained her neck forward like someone who is thirsty, and, pressing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she laid upon it with all her expiring strength the most passionate kiss of love she had ever given. Then he recited the Miserateur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began he unctions: first on the eyes, which had so coveted all earthly splendors; then on the nostrils, greedy for mild breezes and the smells of love; then on the mouth, which had opened to utter lies, which had moaned with pride and cried out in lust; then on the hands, which had delighted in the touch of smooth material; and lastly on the soles of the feet, once so quick when she hastened to satiate her desires and which now would never walk again. — Vladimir Nabokov

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. — Terry Pratchett

Clear blue eyes settled on me. My body moved of its own accord. My fingers played with the ends of his hair, absently noting that it was longer and softer than any man should have, and then my hands moved to stroke the stubble on a chiseled chin, up to a pouty bottom lip. I grazed that lip with two fingers, and the end of his tongue poked out and licked my skin. Electricity flowed from the tips of my fingers down to the soles of my feet. — Michelle Jo Quinn

I don't like the beach. I think we have no business at the beach at all, as a species. We don't belong in the sea. The sea is full of things that bite us, sting us, hurt the soles of our feet, and it's extremely cold. When are we gonna take the hint that the things that live in the sea don't like us? — Billy Connolly

Every time a player goes out to ply his trade he's got to play from the ground up - from the soles of his feet right up to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads. That's O.K. You've got to be smart to be Number One in any business. But more important, you've got to play with you heart - with every fiber of your body. If you're lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he's never going to come off the field second. — Vince Lombardi

This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.
We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility. — Sam Harris

Got a job for you, Seven."
"Yeah?"
"I need you to find someone."
"Who?"
"A woman," I say. "About five and a half feet tall. Brown hair. Brown eyes."
"That describes half the women in New York."
"Yeah, well, the one I'm looking for is twenty-one or so," I say. "She's good-looking, kind of curvy for being so petite... got a red 'S' tattooed on her wrist..."
He stares at me, like he expects more information. "What else?"
I shrug, glancing at the high heels, flipping them over to look at the red soles. "She wears a size thirty-nine shoe."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Shouldn't be too hard," he says, blinking a few times as he looks at the ground. "Only a couple million people in the city."
"That's the spirit," I say, slapping him on the back. — J.M. Darhower

I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember. — Virginia Woolf

The moment the earthquake hits, Ted has a premonition: a burning sensation on his feet. Not the pins and needles from sitting cross-legged for too long, but like the restlessness of the soles after standing on the subway for an hour. Like the blood wants to burst from his skin. No blinding vision, no sudden trance - it's not until weeks later that he realizes what the feeling was. But in the future, he won't tell the story this way. — Viet Dinh

A kind of joyous hysteria moved into the room, everything flying before the wind, vehicles outside getting dented to hell, the crowd sweaty and the smells of aftershave, manure, clothes dried on the line, your money's worth of perfume, smoke, booze; the music subdued by the shout and babble through the bass hammer could be felt through the soles of the feet, shooting up the channels of legs to the body fork, center of everything. It is the kind of Saturday night that torches your life for a few hours, makes it seem like something is happening. — Annie Proulx

Death Valley is the perfect flesh-grilling device, the Foreman Grill in Mother Nature's cupboard.

It's a big, shimmering sea of salt ringed by mountains that bottle up the heat and force it right back down on your skull. The average air temperature hovers around 125 degrees, but once the sun rises and begins broiling the desert floor, the ground beneath Scott's feet would hit a nice, toasty 200 degrees - exactly the temperature you need to slow roast a prime rib. Plus, the air is so dry that by the time you feel thirsty, you could be as good as dead; sweat is sucked so quickly from your body,you can be dangerously dehydrated before it even registers in your throat. Try to conserve water,and you could be a dead man walking.

But every July, ninety runners from around the world spend up to sixty straight hours running down the sizzling black ribbon of Highway 190, making sure to stay on the white lines so the soles of their running shoes don't melt. — Christopher McDougall

If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles. — Jesmyn Ward

Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic. — Henry David Thoreau

I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles. — Isabel Allende

I find that if I'm watching somebody upon television or in a movie that is on a window ledge or in some high precarious position my hand starts sweating and I get that crawling feeling in the soles of my feet. — Alan Moore

The earth was quiet around him, but alive. He felt it through the soles of his feet when he walked. The vibrancy of the forest streamed into him, strengthening him. But there was less of it than there should be. The world had changed, and was still changing. It was being tamed, losing its feral wildness and strength. Alongside it, his power was dimming as well. He was still unmatched, but there were blind spots in his communion with the earth, and those blind spots were growing, shutting him off bit by bit, reducing him. The realms of men were expanding, scouring the earth, parsing it into meaningless plots and fields, breaking up the magic polarities of the wilderness... That which made him so powerful, his connection to the earth, was also becoming his only weakness. In a cold rage, he walked. As he passed, the trees spoke to him, but even the woodsy voices of the naiads and the dryads was dimming. Their echo was confused and broken, divided. — G. Norman Lippert

When I stood up, my steps were uncertain, as though I were wearing lifts in my shoes. I could feel the air between the soles of my feet and the ground. It was like something important had altered, like gravity, or the air itself. — Judy Blundell

One who hates is a man holding a magnifying-glass, and when he hates someone, he knows precisely that person's surface, from the soles of his feet all the way up to each hair on the hated head. — Hermann Broch