Grimacing Quotes & Sayings

While God sustains the burden of the world, the spurious ego assumes its burden, grimacing like an image on a tower, seeming to support it. If the traveller in a carriage, which can carry any weight, does not lay his luggage down but carries it painfully on his head, whose is the fault? — Ramana Maharshi

When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,
I, for unknown reasons,
Surrounded by the books
Of prophets and theologians,
Of philosophers, poets,
Searched for an answer,
Scowling, grimacing,
Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.
What oppressed me so much
Was a bit shameful.
Talking of it aloud
Would show neither tact nor prudence.
It might even seem an outrage
Against the health of mankind ... — Czeslaw Milosz

Geralt finished his mug of herb tea, grimacing dreadfully. He valued and liked the settled elves for their intelligence, calm reserve and sense of humour, but he couldn't understand or share their taste in food or drink. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Last night ... I'm sorry if I was too forward with you." He paused. "Celaena, you're grimacing."
Had she been making a face? "Er- sorry."
"It did upset you, then!"
"What did?"
"The kiss!"
... "Oh, it was nothing," she said, thumping her chest as she cleared her throat. "I didn't mind it. But I didn't hate it, if that's what your thinking!" She immediately regretted saying it.
"So, you liked it?" He grinned lazily.
"No! Oh, go away!" She flung herself onto her pillows, pulling the blankets over her head. She was going to die from embarrassment. — Sarah J. Maas

Everything you see on screen is real. By doing what we do, there's naturally going to be a lot of grimacing. And whimpering. — Johnny Knoxville

Laughing and crying are closely related. Smiling and grimacing both involve a person showing their teeth as does laughing and growling. Crying and laughing always represents the expression of actual emotion. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I became a diligent condom carrier and when most subsequent lovers had the good fortune to lie under my grunting, sweaty mass, they were always the grimacing recipient of an eager and rubber-sheathed penis boner. — Rob Delaney

He isn't normal," Emma said, grimacing as if this were the direst insult. "He's one of us! — Ransom Riggs

Malphas surveyed the women's bodies with utter disgust and sorrow
until he realized Tabitha was still alive. He knelt by her side and cradled her head tenderly. "Tabby ... I'm so sorry"
Grimacing she opened her eyes as she labored to breathe. She laughed bitterly, exposing a set of bleeding teeth. "there are some things that sorry doesn't fix, Caleb."
"Shhh, don't speak. I can
"
"you failed us," She went limp in his arms. Her eyes went Dull.
Wincing, Caleb held her close to his heart and stroked her bloody hair. "No, Tabby. I failed myself."
"Most of all, I failed Nick. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

He found a grommet on one belt half-wrenched from its place and twisted it, grimacing, trying to force the iron ring back into the leather. He supposed the Suebi tribes were a bit like that - hard to force, tough to bend, and once driven in they were difficult to move. But the Romans had a talent for metallurgy, and Germania was one of its most productive forges. — Heather Domin

Get your hands off me," she commanded faintly, grimacing. "People don't order Billy Bonnet around," he snapped at her. "What's you name?" he demanded forcefully. "You arrogant brute! Leave me alone. Can't you see I'm hurt and sick?" she panted breathlessly. "Don't pain me none," Billy retorted as if utterly insensitive. "Please, Mister Bonnet," Cal entreated softly. "Please, what?" Billy taunted, his mood becoming larkish. "Please take your filthy hands off my wife before I put a slug in your miserable hide," Lynx warned icily from behind him.

-Calinda, Billy, & Lynx — Janelle Taylor

My God!" Amaury glared resentfully at the armed men surrounding his own as Castle Eberhart came into view. "See you the gall of the woman?"
Blake hid a smile an shrugged. "'Twould seem your bride would have you safely delivered."
"Safely delivered?" Grimacing,he shook his head. "She sends her man out to fetch me as if I am a stray cow."
"Surely she would not send so many for a cow?"
Amaury glared at his laughing friend.
Blake shrugged. "Well,I have said it afore and-"
"If you say once more that I should refuse to marry her,I will strike you down right here."
"You may try," Blake allowed with a small smile. — Lynsay Sands

I missed you."
There was a pause. Then Tariq turned to her with a half-grinning, half-grimacing look of distaste. "What's the matter with you?"
How many times had she, Hasina, and Giti said those same three words to each other, Laila wondered, said it without hesitation, after only two or three days of not seeing each other? I missed you, Hasina. Oh, I missed you too. In Tariq's grimace, Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn't make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk. Laila imagined it had been this way for her brothers too. Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
"I was trying to annoy you," she said.
He gave her a sidelong glance. "It worked."
But she thought his grimace softened. And she thought that maybe the sunburn on his cheeks deepened momentarily. — Khaled Hosseini

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. — George Orwell

So we have twenty-four hours to keep out of trouble,' he says to me.
I slide a glance in his direction. Judging from the way he's now grimacing at the sidewalk and the fact that I met him in a police station where he was being booked for stealing a car, I'm guessing that staying out of trouble is not his forte. — Sarah Alderson

This question was fired at me by one Ulf Bronner, an assistant director, in his mid-thirties perhaps, and a strikingly ill-dressed man. Still, he was not dressed as shabbily as the cameramen; through my recent work for and with broadcasting companies I have discovered that they are the scruffiest-looking individuals in any form of employment, outdone only by press photographers. I have no idea why it should be thus, but as far as I can make out press photographers seem to wear the ragged cast-offs of television cameramen. Perhaps they imagine that nobody will ever see them, because after all the camera is in front of their faces. Whenever I come across an unflattering picture of someone in a magazine - they may be grimacing or similar - I frequently wonder what the photographer must have looked like. This Bronner fellow was better dressed than that, but not much. — Timur Vermes

Written and directed by French showman Georges Melies, 'Le Voyage' features one of the most indelible images in cinema history: the wounded Man in the Moon bleeding like a particularly runny Brie, grimacing in pain with a space capsule protruding from his right eye. — Kage Baker

She points to the door. "Leave!"
"No." So she picks up a hairbrush and throws it at him. It beans him on the head and ricochets to the wall, where it wedges behind the TV.
"Ow!" He grabs his head, grimacing. "That hurt!"
"Good, it was supposed to. — Neal Shusterman

Tourette's syndrome is seen in every race, every culture, every stratum of society; it can be recognized at a glance once one is attuned to it; and cases of barking and twitching, of grimacing, of strange gesturing, of involuntary cursing and blaspheming, were recorded by Aretaeus of Cappadocia almost two thousand years ago. Yet it was not clinically delineated until 1885, when Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a young French neurologist - a pupil of Charcot's and a friend of Freud's - put together these historical accounts with observations of some of his own patients. The syndrome as he described it was characterized, above all, by convulsive tics, — Oliver Sacks

I am in England and the food here is not to be tasted as much as just swallowed without grimacing. — Kristen Gilbert

Grimacing, I plunged a hand into the fouled water to clear the clog, morbid curiosity drawing my youthful eyes to the gray globs of gore floating upon the surface. It was not horror that seized my imagination so much as wonder: sixty years of dreams and desires, hunger and hope, love and longing, blasted away in a single explosive instant, mind and brain. The mind of Erasmus Gray was gone; the remnants of its vessel floated, as light and insubstantial as popcorn, in the water. Which fluffy bit held your ambition, Erasmus Gray? Which speck your pride? Ah, how absurd the primping and preening of our race! Is it not the ultimate arrogance to believe we are more than is contained in our biology? What counterarguments may be put forth, what valid objections raised, to the claim of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity"? — Rick Yancey

You make faces when you read, you know. I can always tell when you're reading something happy or suspenseful, or upsetting. Your face shows everything ... whenever you read, it's all reflected there in your face. Like that time you came over, and Andrew was busy studying, so you read In Cold Blood. You were grimacing and flinching through the whole book, as though it was happening personally to you. — Alicia Thompson

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else. — Franz Kafka

What are you doing?" she asked.
Grimacing, he considered returning his mouth to hers and kissing her until she forgot the question and his strange behavior, but he had to know the truth. Dammit, he had to know. "Amelia told me that her toes curl when Houston kisses her. I was just trying to see if your toes curl when I kiss you."
She turned a lovely shade of rose and rolled her shoulders toward her chin. "My whole body curls when you kiss me."
"Your whole body?"
She nodded quickly."Every inch."
"Well, hell," he said as he settled his mouth greedily over hers with plans to keep her body tightly curled for the remainder of the night.
-Dallas and Dee — Lorraine Heath

The owner was this very thin woman who looked sort of bitchy, which, think about it, most very thin women do-even when they smile, it's like grimacing. Fat people are often miserable too, but at least they LOOK jolly even though it's really mostly them apologizing, like, "Sorry, sorry, sorry I'm offending your idea of bodily aesthetics," "Sorry I'm clogging my arteries and giving the thumbs-up to diabetes. — Elizabeth Berg

With little effort, he rolled his late lover off the edge of the cliff and watched, grimacing, when her dainty body bounced off a rocky outcropping. True, he planned on packing her back to France, or to another of his associates. And true, he didn't see her death as a great loss, but he wouldn't have wished her bashed on the rocks, even in death. However, this was the most expedient way to rid himself of an inconveniently dead mistress. — Chris Karlsen

She paused before the fallen rider. He stared up at her from within a grimacing, battle stained face. Hatred and fear battled for supremacy in his eyes. Sasha met his gaze directly with a stare of utter contempt.
'Where are your gods now?' she said. — Joel Shepherd

An infant no more than six weeks old
a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy's path of becoming. [p.46] — Siri Hustvedt

If you care so much about it," she asks him, "then why did you run?"
He takes a moment before answering, shifting his weight and grimacing again. "Their work is good," he says. "It just isn't mine."
This baffles her. His motives - his hazy integrity. It was easy to dismiss Lev as "part of the problem" when she did not know him, but now it's not so easy. He's a paradox. This is a boy who almost blew himself to bits in an attempt to kill others, and yet he offered himself to the parts pirate in order to save Miracolina's life. How could someone go from having no respect for one's own existence to being willing to give himself as a sacrifice for someone he barely knows? It flies in the face of the truths that have defined Miracolina's life. The bad are bad, the good are good, and being caught in between is just an illusion. There is no gray. — Neal Shusterman

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way. — Richard Ellmann

Hey, sweet. Please open your eyes, Livia. Open your eyes and see what you did. I'm actually sitting here without grimacing. There's no pain at all. But you know that, don't you? I don't know why you stayed with me. God knows, I wasn't worth it. But I don't want you to leave me alone anymore. I need you, Livia. I can't live without you in my life. I can't ... I'm not that strong. Please open your eyes and look at me. Please. (Adron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

She was a carnival to watch--at
times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing--sometimes the
shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her
finger tips. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way. — Nick Hornby

Thumb and forefinger, grimacing at its matted feel. One of those low cellar windows was directly behind it, one pane broken, the other opaque with dirt. He leaned forward, now feeling almost hypnotized. He leaned closer to the window, closer to the cellar-darkness, breathing in that smell of age and must and dry-rot, closer and closer to the black, and surely the leper would have caught him if his asthma hadn't picked that exact moment to kick up. It cramped his lungs with a weight that was painless yet frightening; his breath at once took on the familiar hateful whistling sound. — Stephen King