Fingering Quotes & Sayings

Dwelling on pain, spending too much time immersed in it, tasting its flavors, fingering its textures
this makes it only more potent. — Tayari Jones

In the mirror I stand, an injured deer in headlights,
or maybe high beams, judging by the way my eyes water. I measure my wrists with my fingers, and I clutch at my rib cage, fingering it languidly, tracing the rise and fall of sharp bones until my heartbeat slows, and I dream of a faraway ocean. — Kris Kidd

Shh." His breath at her ear sent a delicious shiver down her spine. "Be very quiet and very still or everyone will know I'm fingering your pussy under this blanket. It needs to be our little secret, doesn't it, baby girl? — Tessa Bailey

I'm about as useful as a fingerless eunuch during Fuck Fest February! someone give me a gun! — Robert Kirkman

Nate reaches over the counter to the sink, flinging a handful of water at me, and then flipping me off.
'Can we have one finger-free holiday, for Pete's sake?' Mom says.
'I don't know who Pete is, but tell him I don't like him fingering you,' I tease, my eyebrows high as I push backward out of mom's reach. She tries to fling water at me next, but it's too late. So instead, she just flips me off.
'Gosh, Mom. You're such a hypocrite,' I joke. — Ginger Scott

We can talk to one another on telephones
in banks, in cars, in line. No more
sitting on the floor
attached to a cord
while everybody listens.
No more
standing outside the booth
in the cold, fingering
an adulterous dime. We

send each other mail without stamps.
Watch television without antennas.
Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never
on a bus, never
in the lobby while we're waiting
for the lawyer to call on us.

Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon.
Quaintly the record album's scratch and spin.
Our groceries, scanned.
Pump our own gas.
Take off our shoes
before boarding our plane.
Those towers: Gone. And Pluto's
no longer a planet:
Forget it.
I could go on

and on, but you're still dead
and nothing's any different. — Laura Kasischke

What are you doing in there, waxing your mustache?" Iggy yelled, pounding on the bathroom door.
I yanked the door open and pushed him backward hard, making him stagger. "I don't have a mustache, you idiot!" Iggy giggled and put his arms up to protect himself in case I punched him. "And you know what?" I added. "You don't have one either. Well, maybe in a couple years. You can always hope."
I left him in the hallway, anxiously fingering his upper lip. — James Patterson

His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this-or more accurately, because of this-his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz-at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form. — Gunther Schuller

If once he has got the right fingering, plays in good time, with the notes fairly correct, then only pull him up about the rendering; and when he has arrived at that stage, don't let him stop for the sake of small faults, but point them out to him when he has played the piece through ... I have always adopted this plan; it soon forms musicians which, after all, is one of the first aims of art and it gives less trouble both to master and pupil. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

Here she is at her kitchen table, fingering a jigsaw of thalidomide ginger, thinking about the arthritis in her hands. — Craig Raine

Did my fingering turn you gay? I hope not. — Michael Ian Black

And, you know, my dad would show me some things sometimes, but the best things that I got to do were to actually see really good players play up close. That gives you an idea of fingering and technique and what not. — Dweezil Zappa

I want relations which are not purely personal, based on purely personal qualities; but relations based upon some unanimous accord in truth or belief, and a harmony of purpose, rather than of personality. I am weary of personality. Let us be easy and impersonal, not forever fingering over our own souls, and the souls of our acquaintances, but trying to create a new life, a new common life, a new complete tree of life from the roots that are within us. — D.H. Lawrence

The oboe's a horn made of wood.
I'd play you a tune if I could,
But the reeds are a pain,
And the fingering's insane.
It's the ill wind that no one blows good. — Ogden Nash

Happiness is not like we were walking around fingering razor blades or anything like that. But it just sort of seems as if - we sort of knew how happy our parents were, and we would compare our lives with our parents and see that, at least on the surface or according to the criteria that the culture lays down for a successful, happy life, we were actually doing better than a lot of them were. — David Foster Wallace

She touched his shoulder, very lightly, like a child fingering a forbidden object. — Ross Macdonald

Good morning sinners. vampiric red bull intake in pub smoking compound commenced. day of heavy brain-fingering ahead. — Warren Ellis

I grew up in St. Louis in a tiny house full of large music - Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson singing majestically on the stereo, my German-American mother fingering 'The Lost Chord' on the piano as golden light sank through trees, my Palestinian father trilling in Arabic in the shower each dawn. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map. — Junot Diaz

I can't believe I've missed this sport. It's all about fingering holes and caressing balls. — K.A. Mitchell

You're a freaking pschopath," I said, but he only chuckled.
"I don't expect you to understand, little bird," He turned toward me fully, fingering his blade and smiling. "I expect you only to sing. Sing for me, sing for Kanin, and make it a glorious song — Julie Kagawa

Come on, Seregil, let's show him how it's done."
"I'm busy," replied Seregil, working on a tricky bit of fingering.
Moving to stand over him, Micum groweled, "Put away that twopenny toy, you tit-sucking coistril, and show me the length of your blade!"
Seregil laid his harp aside with a sigh. "Dear me, that sounds rather like a challenge-"
Lunging swiftly past Micum, he sprang to his feet and drew his sword, then swung a flat-bladed attack at Micum's forearm. — Lynn Flewelling

I Imagine Them

turning some dog-eared page
tapping out a drum beat on the dash
sorting the laundry
digging for a matching sock
buried in deep pockets
breaking an egg on the side of a bowl
fingering guitar strings

Where are they now?

tenderly holding a pen to paper
furiously moving through air
in concert
with your conversation
resting assuredly on the back
of a chair

oh to be the steering wheel
or the spoon
to have your palms
pressed solidly upon me
the full fan of your fingers
curved to the slope
of my shoulders
oh to be warmed
to be wrapped
in hope
to be healed
by the laying on
of your hands — Nancy Boutilier

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it. — Honore De Balzac

There is a value in repetition. When we repeat certain phrases and even actions, like fingering prayer beads, we create a quiet rhythm within our spirits. The beating of our heart is a repetition as is the rhythm of our breathing. All of life has its rhythms, and the repetition of familiar prayers can bring our interior spirits into harmony with the Divine Heartbeat and the breathing of the Divine Christ. — Stephen J. Binz

The past is always with us, in the form of our photographs, which we feel as we might a rosary, wearing them smooth with the fingering of our eyes. — A. D. Coleman

Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic had whispered through hallowed hands his name, not Peter, but his private name which he called himself in his own thoughts. — Virginia Woolf

Brittany, I love hangin' with you. Shit, when I get to school I scan the halls lookin' for you. As soon as I catch sight of these angelic streaks of sunshine," I say, fingering her hair, "I know I can make it through the day. — Simone Elkeles

I concentrate intently on counting: hearing my voice break as the torment and torture builds; fingering myself intensely at his instruction. As we get past ten I slip up; overwhelmed by the sensations wracking my body, I realise in horror that I don't know which number is next. — Felicity Brandon

I caught professer ryan or as I call him beautiful face looking back at me with desire in his eyes as if I had just been naked and fingering my sex. — Brit Gosik

Civilization is only a pretense; in the crisis, we become mere apes again, forgetting the rational biped of our pretensions and becoming instead the hairy primate at the mouth of the cave, screeching at the enemy, wishing it would go away, fingering the heavy stone that we'll use the moment it comes close enough. — Orson Scott Card

In a consumerist culture, people rebel by buying a different brand, and instead of staging a real rebellion, which requires secret planning and stealthy strikes, American pseudo-radicals are constantly fingering themselves as soon as they hit the sidewalk. It's a fashion thing. In this illusionistic and narcissistic society, it's imperative that you look a certain way if you want to be slotted into one of the socially acceptable subgroups. It's all cosplay, all the time, for even the nerd look has been commodified and imbued with irony. — Linh Dinh

He's been known to steal a kiss under the branches of that big oak, too. You'd never know it to look at him, but my Arthur can be quite the man of passion." Nicole giggled, charmed by the idea of the staid butler sharing a passionate embrace with his wife in such a setting. "I can't imagine a better place for a tryst. It's a shame I don't have a beau to share it with." The housekeeper's expression sharpened an instant before the dust rag resumed its fluttering - a fluttering that seemed rather more frantic than necessary. "So you have no young man paying court to you? Hard to believe, as pretty as you are." Nicole blushed and became suddenly fascinated with the logbook in front of her. "Not yet," she said, fingering the pages, "but my father has a few prospects in mind. — Karen Witemeyer

When Sebastian reached his room, the Black Earl stood by his bed. Sebastian turned away, fingering the cufflink in his pocket. He didn't need the Black Earl's help in debauching Olivia anymore, he had apparently at last managed that well enough all on his own. He threw himself onto a chair, full of his memory of his hands on Olivia. Cold air sent a prickle along the backs of his arms. He opened his eyes and saw the Black Earl again. In one hand, he gripped a sword of unearthly silver, but held downward so that the point of the weapon touched the floor. He wept as if his heart were broken. "Aidez-la" Help her.
Sebastian heard nothing but the roar of those words tearing through his soul. Help her.
The Black Earl, weeping still, turned to the stone wall. A rent marred his crimson tunic, the edges jagged and blackened, and then he, too, vanished and left behind him nothing but an aching, unfillable emptiness.
Help her. — Carolyn Jewel

He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body and not him. All his strength and energy she drew into herself through some channel which united them. She did not want to meet him so that there were two of them man and woman together. She wanted to draw all of him into her. It urged him to an intensity like madness which fascinated him as drug-taking might. He was discussing Michael Angelo. It felt to her as if she were fingering the very quivering tissue the very protoplasm of life as she heard him. It gave her deepest satisfaction. And in the end it frightened her. There he lay in the white intensity of his search and his voice gradually filled her with fear so level it was almost inhuman as if in a trance. — D.H. Lawrence

He really wished she would stop fingering the brick. — Larissa Ione

Honestly, if you're looking for love and you're not too choosy, hang around a hardware store fingering screws. — Marian Keyes

Fingering those strings and watching ride that speaker like it was a vibrating cock was the highlight of my life. — Tabatha Vargo

The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. — John Updike

A steel door closed and the captain was on his own again. He hummed quietly and mused to himself, lightly fingering his notebook of verses. "Hmmm," he said, "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor ... " He considered this for a moment, and then closed the book with a grim smile. "Death's too good for them," he said. — Douglas Adams

Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a 'terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. — Mark Fisher

Authority doesn't come from a rank.," Kaladin said, fingering the spheres in his pocket.
"Where does it come from?"
"From the men who give it to you. That's the only way to get it. — Brandon Sanderson

Mostly, though, he looked at the girl, with her red hair and bare white arms. There was something about the whiteness of those arms that made them seem more naked than the bare arms of other women in church. A lot of red heads had freckles, but she looked as if she had been carved from a block of soap ... She was very pretty, about his age, her hair braided into a silky rope the colour of black cherries. She was fingering a delicate gold cross around her throat, and she turned it just so, into the sunlight, and it shone, became a cruciform flame. She lingered on the gesture, making it a kind of confession, then turned the cross away. — Joe Hill

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate. — Katherine Anne Porter

Why me?" she finally asked.
Sighing, I touched the end of her hair, fingering it slightly. It felt so silky. "You were the first person I saw at this school. I'd parked in the lot and was walking past the auditorium and saw this gorgeous girl come out of the music room. The sun hit your stunning red hair, and it shone so brightly it almost looked like you had a halo. You were staring down at some music you were holding, and you started humming something. I froze. I just stood there and watched you walk by. You were so engrossed you didn't even notice me." I twisted the loop of her hair around my finger. — Lacey Weatherford

Granuaile looked terminally depressed when she emerged from the bathroom with raven hair and, as a result rather Goth by accident. She didn't want to get her picture taken.
"Aughh!" she said miserably, looking in the vanity mirror in the truck of the cab and fingering a wavy curl near her temple. "This sucks more than anything has ever sucked before. You know what we look like? A couple of emo douche bags."
"Well, look at the bright side, Granuaile. Emo Douche Bags would be a great band name."
[That's brilliant! It's already the unofficial name of more bands than I can count.] — Kevin Hearne

She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it. — Edith Wharton

Additionally, if you want to share information, share it actively. Don't tell me she's an assassin, show me she's fingering a blade under her sleeve. Don't say that the youngest son is the least favorite of the family of five, show me the father bringing home presents for everyone except the fifth son. — A.J. Flowers

He smiled, setting his forehead to hers. "you are very bad for me. I am trying to turn over a new leaf
I am trying to be more gentlemanly."
"But what if I want you to stay a rake?" she teased, her fingers trailing down his neck and chest, fingering the buttons on his waistcoat. "A libertine, even?" she slipped one fastening from its seat and he grabbed her errant hand, bringing it to his lips for a swift kiss.
"Callie," he said, his voice thick with warning as she set her free hand to the second button on his coat.
"What if I want the rogue, Gabriel?" the question was soft and sweet.
"What are you saying?"
She kissed across the firm square line of his jaw and whispered to him, shyness in her shaking voice, "Take me to bed, Gabriel. Give me a taste of scandal. — Sarah MacLean

Still not breaking eye contact, he slid a finger into me. "You're very wet."
"Yeah. You know, it's kind of hard to focus on relationship talk when you're fingering me."
"We can talk all you want later. Promise."
"'kay." I made a pitiful noise in my throat ...
"I mean, you got hot for me in Vegas. But this ... Sweetheart, Christ, this is fucking awesome."
"I masturbate. A lot. — Kylie Scott

Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer.
The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. — Azar Nafisi

Dude, you've been fingering that box in your pocket all this time? I thought you had crabs or something. I was going to let you borrow my cream. — Tara Sivec

When a man's eyes are sore his friends do not let him finger them, however much he wishes to, nor do they themselves touch the inflammation: But a man sunk in grief suffers every chance comer to stir and augment his affliction like a running sore; and by reason of the fingering and consequent irritation it hardens into a serious and intractable evil. — Plutarch

He smiled affably at the burglar, a burly fellow whom he continued to hold with one hand, as easily as if he had been a child. The entire household had been aroused, and a good number of them had joined in, shouting questions and brandishing various deadly instruments. The burglar glared wildly at Emerson, bare to the waist and bulging with muscle - at Gargery and his cudgel - at Selim, fingering a knife even longer than Nefret's - at assorted footmen armed with pokers, spits, and cleavers - and at the giant form of Daoud advancing purposefully toward him. 'It's a bleedin' army!' he gurgled. 'The lyin' barstard said you was some kind of professor! — Elizabeth Peters

While 'Visitation Street' has the markings of a traditional whodunnit mystery - starting with a missing girl, intrigue and many suspicious characters - Pochoda shows her hand early on by fingering a culprit. The book turns, then, into a 'whydunnit.' — Claire Cameron

I squinted through the big window, a portal to another world, trying to get a better view of the primal love scene before us. All I could see was a mass of wriggling fur and finger-like toes until my eyes focused in on one male and two females kissing, ear-tonguing and giving each other enthusiastic oral sex, punctuated with occasional somersaults, smacks and nibbles on fruit and leaves. Sometimes they interacted as a threesome. Other times, two would cavort together, while the third played with herself, alternating between fingering and using a red rubber ball as a kind of sex toy, rubbing and bouncing it vigorously against her large pink vulva. — Susan Block

I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering. — David Bowie

Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem. — Karen Tei Yamashita

But it's also true that my memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck even when I'm doing nothing more than playing Fish in the daylight with children. — Lorene Cary

There was our father, the heart we knew held all of us. Held us heavily and desperately, the doors of his heart opening and closing with the rapidity of stops on an instrument, the quiet felt closures, the ghostly fingering, practice and practice and then, incredibly, sound and melody and warmth. — Alice Sebold

Fingering spots where they had been torn or punctured by boarhound teeth. — Brandon Mull

I had a stroke in December of '99, and it affected my left side - my fingering side. — Johnny Gimble

I wish the world could better know this country for what it really is. Not just a greedy economic giant crouching fearfully behind its walls, not just a panoplied warrior nervously fingering his weapons. What is this, is a people who gather together in thousands to give a people's government its essential vitality. — Ralph Bellamy

I harbor ill feelings toward a society, and a clergy, that allows marriage partners to split over the smallest incompatibility, where divorce comes in a multitude of flavors, like Baskin Robbins ice cream, where men and women can blame one another and everything except themselves for matrimony's mess. They look for externals over which they have no control and, fingering them, take no responsibility. — Robert Dykstra

Tom, Tom, Tom," I said, fingering the top of the knife bar, which was dusty; I'd take care of that later. "You lost the right to ask for sympathy about three minutes ago. Now get out of our home before I stab you again. — Camille Pagan

My reading was good enough to play big-band charts, but I ran into trouble with Claude (Thornhill)'s theme song "Snowfall," which had a repeating bass line in D-flat that was very difficult for me to finger using my self-taught technique. I spent one morning figuring out an alternate fingering, and that started me on the way to learning a better use of the fingerboard. — Bill Crow

The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies. — Willard Van Orman Quine

He was fingering his great horn. — J.R.R. Tolkien