Fleshless Quotes & Sayings

To invoke Jesus' name is to place yourself in his presence, to open yourself to his power, his energy. The prayer of Jesus' name actually brings God closer, making him more present. He is always present in some way, since he knows and loves each one of us at every moment; but he is not present to those who do not pray as intimately as he is present to those who do. Prayers a difference; 'prayer changes things.' It may or may not change our external circumstances. (It does if God sees that that change is good for us; it does not if God sees that it is not.) but it always changes our relationship to God, which is infinitely more important than external circumstances, however pressing they may seem, because it is eternal but they are temporary, and because it is our very self but they are not. — Peter Kreeft

After Bill got his shot, a little color crept into his face and he would become almost coy. It was a gruesome sight. I remember once he told me how he'd been propositioned by a queer who offered him twenty dollars. Bill declined, saying "I don't think you would be very well satisfied." Bill twitched his fleshless hips. "You should see me in the nude," he said. "I'm really cute. — William S. Burroughs

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the
grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair. — William Faulkner

A man must have a stout digestion to feed upon some men's theology; no sap, no sweetness, no life, but all stern accuracy, and fleshless definition. Proclaimed without tenderness, and argued without affection, the gospel from such men rather resembles a missile from a catapult than bread from a Father's hand. — Charles Spurgeon

We are afraid of the instincts. We are afraid of the intuition within us. We suppress the instincts, and we cut off our intuitional awareness from one another and from the world. The reason being some great shock to the procreative self. Now we know one another only as ideal or social or political entities, fleshless, bloodless and cold like Bernard Shaw's creatures. Intuitively we are dead to one another, we have all gone cold. But by intuition alone can man really be aware of man, or of the living, substantial world. By intuition alone can man love and know either woman or world, and by intuition alone can he bring forth images of the magic awareness which we call art. — D.H. Lawrence

In order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. — Friedrich Schiller

People used to say to my friend Mary, a quadriplegic, 'You still have your mind.' She would say, 'I still have my body.' The world tells me to divorce myself from my flesh, to live in my head ... I didn't want to be fleshless. — Anne Finger

If we can't face death, we'll never overcome it. You have to look it straight in the eye. Then you can turn around and walk back out into the light. — Maya Lin

Today words like 'persevere' and 'hero's death' had been so ceaselessly bandied about that they had long since acquired an ironic sound - at least wherever there was actual fighting. . . . Once, before an attack, Sturm had heard an old sergeant say the following: 'Kids, we're going over there now to gobble up the Englishmen's rations.' It was the best battle address that he had ever heard. That was surely something good in the war - that it destroyed glorious-sounding phrases. Concepts that hung fleshless in the void were overcome by laughter. — Ernst Junger

I took a deep, deep breath and held it in my core; kept it close behind my protruding, fleshless ribs. I swallowed it whole. I was home. — Ava Bloomfield

The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips. — Francois Fenelon

My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie. — Diane Setterfield

If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. — Eve Arnold

He looked, from behind, like a fleshless stick figure in overlarge black clothing, a caricature poised for stringy movement at the direction of a puppet master. Only — Frank Herbert

And do I ask, wherefore my heart
Falters, oppressed with unknown needs?
Why some inexplicable smart
All movement of my life impedes?
Alas! in living Nature's stead,
Where God His human creature set,
In smoke and mould the fleshless dead
And bones of beasts surround me yet! — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Race is a constant factor in American life. Yet reacting to every incident,real or imagined, is crippling, tiring, and ultimately counterproductive. — Condoleezza Rice

To my abusers, the act of setting appropriate boundaries was viewed as hostile aggression. They believed that I was denying them something that belonged to them if I resisted. I was a resource to be exploited for their personal use. I was property who didn't have any rights over my time, my energy, my body, or my possessions. I viewed myself that way too. I believed that they were justified in being angry with me for saying no but I wasn't justified in being angry with them for abusing me. — Christina Enevoldsen

Frankly, the trouble with winter is, it is all backbone. It is fleshless, insensate, with neither a breast to be leaned on nor a heart to love and ache and, if need be, break, nor any kindly hand to fondle and caress like a sea-wave on a sunny shore half asleep. — William Alfred Quayle

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. — T. S. Eliot

He was searching his memory when suddenly a strange figure appeared in front of them, on horseback, trotted for a moment, then turned round in the saddle. His blood froze; he remained rooted to the spot in horror. That equivocal, sexless face was green, with terrible eyes of an icy light blue beneath purple lids; postules encircled its mouth; extraordinarily thin arms, bare from the elbows down and shaking with fever, emerged from ragged sleeves, and the fleshless thighs shivered in high boots which were far too large.
The dreadful gaze was fixed on Des Esseintes, boring into him, chilling him to the marrow, while the bulldog woman, now in even greater panic, clung to him with her head thrown back on her rigid neck, screaming blue murder. And instantly he grasped the meaning of the horrifying vision. He was looking at the figure of the Pox. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility. — Charles Sanders Peirce

We are a Body of contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless. — Catherynne M Valente

Marie's eyes slammed the furthest wall after a back-forth, back-forth swinging from horror to horror, from skull to skull, beating from rib to rib, staring with hypnotic fascination at paralyzed, loveless, fleshless loins, at men made into women by evaporation, of women made into dugged swine. the fearful ricochet of vision, growing, growing, taking impetus from swollen breast to raving mouth, wall to wall, again, again, like a ball hurled in a game, caught in the incredible teeth, spat in a scream across the corridor to be caught in the claws, lodged between thin teats, the whole standing chorus invisibly chanting the game on, on, the wild game of sight recoiling, rebounding, re-shuttling on down the inconceivable procession, through a montage of erected horrors that ended finally and for all time when vision crashed against the corridor ending with one last scream from all present. — Ray Bradbury