Quotes & Sayings About Grinding

I listen to the grinding whir of the clock, and the creaking of my listing bed, and the sound the phone doesn't make when it's shut off. — Michael Montoure

Sadly, prosperity is not the only reason people forget God. It can also be hard to remember Him when our lives go badly. When we struggle, as so many do, in grinding poverty or when our enemies prevail against us or when sickness is not healed, the enemy of our souls can send his evil message that there is no God or that if He exists He does not care about us. Then it can be hard for the Holy Ghost to bring to our remembrance the lifetime of blessings the Lord has given us from our infancy and in the midst of our distress.
There is a simple cure for the terrible malady of forgetting God, His blessings, and His messages to us. Jesus Christ promised it to His disciples when He was about to be crucified, resurrected, and then taken away from them to ascend in glory to His Father. They were concerned to know how they would be able to endure when He was no longer with them.
Here is the promise. It was fulfilled for them then. It can be fulfilled for all of us now. — Henry B. Eyring

I was grinding away to the climactic moan backtrack when I caught my reflection in the club's mirror, hips rotating, booty shaking. Years later, Grace described my smooth moves as a sad epileptic white girl's imitation of a twerk. Harsh. Could anyone look sexy dancing to lyrics that include "Sucky, sucky. Me sucky, sucky"? I don't think so. — Leah Marie Brown

This time I keep to the long shadows where the darkness gathers thickest, picking my way across the silvery damp grass until I reach the edge of the world. Below, the rocks and waves are grinding against each other, and the wind sucks at me, begging me to take one more step, to throw myself down. Sacrifice, the water says in its sea-witch voice, full of whispers and promises. Sometimes I have to wonder if the Hob belief that the sea is animate, alive and full of magic, is more than just primitive nonsense. — Cat Hellisen

If you're just grinding up hamburger at McDonald's, I see that as a bit of an affront to living things. You're not really honoring the life. — Bryan Fuller

He lay in bed open-eyed in the dark. There were intestinal moans from his left side, where gas makes a hairpin turn at the splenic flexure. He felt a mass of phlegm wobbling in his throat but he didn't want to get out of bed to expel it, so he swallowed the whole nasty business, a slick syrupy glop. This was the texture of his life. If someone ever writes his true biography, it will be a chronicle of gas pains and skipped heartbeats, grinding teeth and dizzy spells and smothered breath, with detailed descriptions of Bill leaving his desk to walk to the bathroom and spit up mucus, and we see photographs of ellipsoid clots of cells, water, organic slimes, mineral salts and spotty nicotine. Or descriptions just as long and detailed of Bill staying where he is and swallowing. — Don DeLillo

Do you believe in Evil, Mr Box?" said my companion, grinding his jaw and looking at the couple with unfeigned contempt.
"Only on Wednesdays. — Mark Gatiss

The ground recoiled, shocked. The worktable swooped beneath him as though it were a swing whose rope had broken. He turned over, grinding his belly against the table, holding the sides with his outstretched hands to kill the fear. The figure was standing now, and his feet held the ground flatly, directly on the damp, breathing earth. As trees do, he sought strength with grasping, rock-splitting notes. The first step shook the earth almost as the standing had. After — Gene Wolfe

Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally - oh, very rarely! - the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality. — Robert E. Howard

It becomes pretty crystal clear once you watch that first assembly [movie cut] the things that are just grinding it to a halt, so to speak, or slowing it down, or getting in the way, yeah. — Todd Phillips

"Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it ... have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind". — John Wesley

I'm sorry."
"Don't worry, dear," the woman said brightly. "The day I encounter Sophia again, I'll grab the nearest heavy object and bludgeon her myself."
Arriane flung out a hand to help Luce up, pulling her so hard her feet shot off the ground. "Dee's an old friend. And a first-class party animal, might I add. Got the metabolism of a donkey. She almost brought the Crusades to a grinding halt the night she seduced Saladin."
"Oh, nonsense!" Dee said, flapping a hand dismissively.
"She's the best storyteller, too," Annabelle added. "Or she was before she dropped off the face of the earth. Where've you been hiding, woman?"
The woman drew a deep breath and her golden eyes dampened. "Actually, I fell in love."
"Oh, Dee!" Annabelle crooned, clasping the woman's hand. "How wonderful."
"Otto Z. Otto." The woman sniffed. "May he rest ... "
"Dr. Otto," Daniel said, stepping out of the doorway. "You knew Dr. Otto?"
"Backwards and forwards. — Lauren Kate

I'm a firm believer that the wild-card teams, because they're grinding it out until the final days, have a tremendous amount of excitement. That excitement carries over into the playoffs and really helps. — Tim Salmon

1962 that "No data processing system, whether artificial or living, can process more than 2 x 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass," which means that a hypothetical supercomputer the size of the earth (= c. 6 x 1027 grams) grinding away for as long as the earth has existed (= about 1010 years, with c. 3.14 x 107 seconds/year) can have processed at most 2.56 x 2092 bits, which number is known as Bremermann's Limit. — David Foster Wallace

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation ... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. — Jean Arp

Now as always - humility and terror. Fear that the working of my pen cannot capture the grinding of my brain. It is so easy to understand why the ancients prayed for the help of a Muse. And the Muse came and stood beside them, and we, heaven help us, do not believe in Muses. We have nothing to fall back on but our craftsmanship and it, as modern literature attests, is inadequate. May I be honest; may I be decent; may I be unaffected by the technique of hucksters. If invocation is required, let this be my invocation - may I be strong and yet gentle, tender and yet wise, wise and yet tolerant. May I for a little while, only for a little while, see with the inflamed eyes of a God. — John Steinbeck

I knew I was in love with Lorri when I started to wake up in the middle of the night furious and cursing her for making me feel the way she did. It was pain beyond belief. Nothing has ever hurt me that way. I tried to sleep as much as possible just to escape. I was grinding my teeth down to nubs. Now, years later, it's exactly the opposite. Now there is no pain, yet she still makes my heart explode. Now there is only fun and love and silliness. She drives me to frenzy, because I can never get enough. — Damien Echols

(Krav maga is an Israeli-developed fighting style centered on the idea that when I put you down, you stay down. It's fast, it's brutal, and I love it. Sort of like club dancing with more eye gouging and less grinding.) — Seanan McGuire

Let all who build beware The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder, Is laid upon the man. Not on the Stuff - the Man! — Rudyard Kipling

And our task is harder even than that," he said, "for we also have to invoke the grey fumes without denying the palpitating breath of roses. We have to give glimpses of a world that sometimes seems to work like a machine bent on some inexorable but inscrutable task, with all of us caught in its coils, cogs meshing always with the absurd, frantic pistons pushing away at the futile."

"And yet," he added, his voice now only a murmur which seemed to be a part of the rustling of the withered bushes and the passing noises of the road, "we may also at times suggest a slight faltering in the grinding of the machine, or the brief opening of an unknown vista suggesting that the machine is not all that there is. — Mark Valentine

Life in the Church means experiencing leaders who are not always wise, mature, and deft. In fact, some of us are as bumpy and uneven as a sackful of old doorknobs. Some of the polishing we experience is a result of grinding against each other. How vital submissiveness is in such circumstances, especially if the lubrication of love is not amply present.
In a church established, among other reasons, for the perfecting of the Saints
an ongoing process
it is naive to expect, and certainly unfair to demand, perfection in our peers. A brief self-inventory is wise before we "cast the first stone." Possessing a few rocks in our own heads, it is especially dangerous to have rocks too ready in our hands. — Neil A. Maxwell

We're all of us what we are; and when it comes to turning ourselves into what we ought to be-well, it isn't easy. No, it isn't easy, Anthony Beavis. How can you expect to think in anything but a negative way when you've got chronic intestinal poisoning? Had it from birth I guess. Inherited it. And at the same time stooping, as you do. Slumped down on your mule like that - it's awful. Pressing down on the vertebrae like a ton of bricks. One can almost hear the poor things grinding together. And when the spine's in that state, what happens to the rest of the machine? It's frightful to think of. — Aldous Huxley

Still all the day the iron wheels go onward, Grinding life down from its mark. — Gerald Massey

The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there's only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself. (pg. 82) — Deb Caletti

Like most marriages, ours eventually wore down all the cartilage. We were a hip needing replacement. Bone on bone, grinding, day in and day out. It worked but it was hard. — Frederick Barthelme

As you wish, of course." Lucius lowered the volume on an old record player, which spun a warped vinyl disk that wailed unfamiliar music, scratchy and whiny, like cats fighting. Or a coffin with rusty hinges opening and closing over and over again in a deserted mausoleum. "Do you like Croatian folk?" heasked, seeing my interest. "It reminds me of home."
"I prefer normal music."
"Ah, yes, your MTV with all the bumping and grinding. Like a shot of raging adolescent hormones administered via television. I'm not averse. — Beth Fantaskey

Advent Prayer
In our secret yearnings
we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair
we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope
which runs so quickly to fatigue
and in this season of yearning
which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
and come in your weakness
in any case
and make all things new.
Amen. — Walter Brueggemann

Anxiety in human life is what squeaking and grinding are in machinery that is not oiled. In life, trust is the oil. — Henry Ward Beecher

By noon, in a gray February world, we had come down through snow flurries to land at Albany, and had taken off again. When the snow ended the sky was a luminous gray. I looked down at the winter calligraphy of upstate New York, white fields marked off by the black woodlots, an etching without color, superbly restful in contrast to the smoky, guttering, grinding stink of the airplane clattering across the sky like an old commuter bus. — John D. MacDonald

The strange thing about grinding that might surprise many people is that you can grind things and shape them using materials that are generally somewhat softer than the thing you're grinding and shaping. — Bill Nye

Some of ya'll SAY you be grinding but ... you don't really know how to GRIND!! — Eric Thomas

The day drew on, was swallowed in dusk. No bird called, no insect. Life in abeyance, the world itself grinding to a halt, who knew what would follow. Light through the glass grew dim but he read on as if the passage of day into night was of no moment. The world was winding down, and young Bloodworth wound down with it. — William Gay

The park is high. And as out of a house
I step out of its glimmering half-light
into openness and evening. Into the wind,
the same wind that the clouds feel,
the bright rivers and the turning mills
that stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge.
Now I too am a thing held in its hand,
the smallest thing under the sky. --Look:

Is that one sky?:
Blissfully lucid blue,
into which ever purer clouds throng,
and under it all white in endless changes,
and over it that huge, thin-spun gray,
pulsing warmly as on red underpaint,
and over everything this silent radiance
of a setting sun.

Miraculous structure,
moved within itself and upheld by itself,
shaping figures, giant wings, faults
and high mountain ridges before the first star
and suddenly, there: a gate into such
distances as perhaps only birds know... — Rainer Maria Rilke

When a family is broken by death, there is no clear way forward out of despair. It is easy to mistake grief for proof of love, and so refuse to relinquish it. For the first year or longer, there is a constant, grinding question that hands over you: Stay or go? You fixate on the fantasy of willing time to roll backward. You find the precise moment before they were taken, and plant your flag there. Death becomes the territory where our love lives, a dangerous place for the living to stay for very long. — Galadrielle Allman

Why do we love to grind our axes so much? How does schlepping that heavy load of medieval weaponry around affect those we encounter in our daily routines? What if it makes us more likely to provoke others?

What is so appealing about grinding our axes anyway? Why is it so difficult to stop? How would we interact with people differently if we didn't do it?

What other tools might we cultivate if most of us were willing to lay down our axes, even just for a little while? How much more energy might we have if we weren't so encumbered?

What would you do with that energy? — David Beem

I'm cracking up in this fucking Fishbinder Problem Box. A terrible seizure is coming on, I can feel its sinister pulsation creeping up my spine as I gnaw my tail apprehensively, grinding my teeth with anxiety, wishing I had some DDT to drown these rats in misery, repetitive cycles of poetry, symptoms of psychotic activity, rhyming of lines endlessly, results in Mazes D and E, dervish spinning round me vis-a-vis, Poole, Broome, Helvicki, help me, please, somebody, take a look at my pedigree, Albino Number 243, Doctor of Psychology, rashes, warts, and a small goatee, expert in lobotomy, performed six times on a chimpanzee, sweet land of liberty, Jesus this is agony, poisonous snake subfamily, here he comes after me! — William Kotzwinkle

It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone
journalist, student, academic
who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths. — David Edelstein

Greedy for more?"Grinding his hardness against her hip,he nuzzled her neck,her ear,murmuring words in Russian.His warn breaths against her made her shiver wildly."Wh-what did you say?"
"I talked filth in your ear."Voice gone ragged,he said,"I told you that you've got the prettiest little pussy I've ever seen,and then I told you what I'm going to do with it. — Kresley Cole

Grinding her teeth together, she hoped the bastards weren't cheering yet, because it was going to take more than one bullet to kill Jenny Jones. — Maggie Osborne

Pop pollution has an effect on musical appreciation comparable to pornography on sex. All that is beautiful, special and full of love is replaced by a grinding mechanism. Just as porn addicts lose the capacity for real sexual love, so do pop addicts lose the capacity for genuine musical experience. — Roger Scruton

Many authors hate to go on grinding book tours. But I've always found it a useful way to be a foreign correspondent in America and take the pulse of the country. — Thomas Friedman

An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross. — Neal Stephenson

That definitely wasn't a bunch of keys in your pocket getting jiggy with my thigh. I thought you were about to rip a hole in my jeans, you were grinding so hard. — Josephine Myles

Stop smiling!" she ordered. "I can see you, Carter. Oh ... and, uh, hullo, Walt."
The pot monster made squeaky grinding noises as it stood up straight. One clunky arm rose and tried to fix Sadie's nonexistent hair. Leave it to Sadie to be
self-conscious around boys, even when she's made out of pots and duct tape. — Rick Riordan

Nothing marks the change from the city to the country so much as the absence of grinding noises. The country is never silent. But its sounds are separate, distinct, and as it were, articulate. — Henry Ward Beecher

I'm a big believer in hard work, grinding it out, and not stopping until it's done, — Arnold Schwarzenegger

With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel. — Robert Gottlieb

In Garfield's experience, education was salvation. It had freed him from grinding poverty. It had shaped his mind, forged paths, created opportunities where once there had been none. Education, he knew, led to progress, and progress was his country's only hope of escaping its own painful past. In — Candice Millard

Fortunately I never came to enjoy the effect of heroin for its own sake, but floating away on a silk pillow was infinitely nicer than grinding my teeth in a drunken, paranoid stupor at the end of a coke binge. — Duff McKagan

Why will you be always sallying out to break lances with other people's wind-mills, when your own is not capable of grinding corn for the horse you ride? — J.G. Holland

In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk! — Charles Baudelaire

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. — Charles Darwin

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me - later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish. — Mary Karr

The apothecary's name was Owlglass. He hummed to himself as he worked in his back room. He'd found a new type of blue fluff, which he was grinding down. It was probably good for curing something. He'd have to try it out on people until he found out what. — Terry Pratchett

Because the other way wasn't working. The waking up just to get the day over with until it was time for bed. The grinding it out was a disgrace, an affront to the honor and long shot of being alive at all. — Maria Semple

Sex does not enrich or deepen a relationship, it permanently cheapens and destabilises one. Everyone I know who is unfortunate enough to have a sex-mate, joy-partner, bed-friend, love-chum, call them what you will finds that
after a week or two of long blissful afternoons of making the beast with two backs, or the beast with one back and a funny shaped middle or the beast with legs splayed in the air and arms gripping the sides of the mattress
the day dawns when Partner A is keen for more swinking, grinding, and sweating and Partner B would rather turn over and catch up with Jeeves and Bertie. — Stephen Fry

It is not known why motorists, who sing the joys of the open road, spend so much petrol every week-end grinding their way to Southend and Brighton and Margate, in the stench of each other's exhausts, one hand on the horn and one foot on the brake, their eyes starting from their orbits in the nerve-racking search for cops, corners, blind turnings, and cross-road suicides. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Downers some people grind away making their unhappiness the ultimate factor of their existence until finally they are just automatically unhappy, their suspicious upset snarling selves grinding on and at and for and through their only relief being to meet another unhappy person or to create one. — Charles Bukowski

Matthias flinched, teeth grinding. "Which one of them told you?" He zeroed in on Ayden.
"One?" I said.
With a growl, Matthias pushed a button on his watch and spoke into it. "What part of 'don't tell her anything' didn't you all understand?"
A moment of silence, then Blake's voice cracked through static, "Can't-" The static sounded suspiciously like crinkling paper. "Hear-" More "static" then, "break- up. — A&E Kirk

Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens. — Jerry Pournelle

Wait," I cleared my throat. "He eats the cows?"
"What else would he do with them?" Morgan put his empty brownie plate with the rest of the trash.
"I thought he had the cows because of his wife."
"He does."
"Then how can he eat them?"
"What do you think they were going to do with the first cow?"
"I don't know, I just thought, well ... I don't know what I thought, but it sure wasn't grinding them up and making burgers. That just seems wrong."
"Why?"
"They remind him of his wife."
"And she ran a restaurant. C'mon, Grant, this is real life, not a Hallmark movie. Man's gotta eat. — Adrienne Wilder

You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing. — Guy Kawasaki

When I got a lap dance, because I was 17, they had to put a massive pillow between me and the girl when she was grinding me. It was weird, yet pleasurable. — Emile Hirsch

Hard to believe that the world had ended and yet somehow these ridiculous activities kept grinding on. — Donna Tartt

When we sit down day after day and keep grinding, something mysterious starts to happen. A process is set into motion by which, inevitably and infallibly, heaven comes to our aid. Unseen forces enlist in our cause; serendipity reinforces our purpose. This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don't. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. — Steven Pressfield

Besides the elevator's grinding cables, the only sound was the thunderous pounding of Calvi's heart. He was sure everyone could hear it. But no one was saying a word. — Peter J. Tanous

When we overthink, we stop acting boldly and hide behind our endless streams of questions, objections, and insecurities. We drive away people and opportunities that are meant to be in our lives by overwhelming them with our expectations, stipulations, and worries. We shut off our hearts and allow our minds to work overtime, essentially turning ourselves into hamsters in wheels - endlessly grinding but going nowhere. — Mandy Hale

In another telling anomaly of the meat-grinding business, many of the larger slaughterhouses will sell their product only to grinders who agree to not test their product for E. coli contamination
until after it's run through a grinder with a whole bunch of other meat from other sources ... It's like demanding of a date that she have unprotected sex with four or five other guys immediately before sleeping with you
just so she can't point the finger directly at you should she later test positive for clap. — Anthony Bourdain

Workplace culture is the heartbeat of an organization, and either yields energy and motivates people to pursue greatness or sucks the inspiration out of employees and slowly brings a business to a grinding halt. — Kevin E. Phillips

I want a big dark room you can barely move in, with bodies grinding close together. I want to hear a thousand songs played incredibly loud. I want to dance so fast that my hair grows long enough to trample on. I want my voice to be thunderous above the throb of bass. I want to get so hot that I have to crunch ice in my mouth. — Jenny Downham

It's really grinding to always play out of both sides of your mind and always be thinking what will offend people. Or what won't. But I'm strong enough to deal with that. I own that I'm freakish in my way. — Johnny Weir

There's a phrase, "sitzfleisch", which means just plain sitting on your ass and getting it done. Just showing up for work. My uncle Raphael was a painter, and he used to say, "If the muse is late for work, start without her". You have to be there. You have to be there, and do it, and grind it out, even when it is grinding and you know you're probably going to rewrite all this tomorrow. — Peter S. Beagle

Without a doubt, the next few minutes would be the most hellishly exciting in my life. Grinding pain and killer fatigue waited just beyond the word, "Partez." But I tried to ignore those prespects, and concentrate on the priceless feelings that also awaited. I thought about the perfect strokes we would take, and about the merciless surge of power we would unleash in the last 500 meters. — Brad Alan Lewis

I was so busy trying not to break Rachel's heart that I didn't see it shatter. I've been walking on the pieces for months, grinding them into fucking dust. — Kit Rocha

I was close and when he spread my legs wider and firmly pressed me down to the mattress, I was nearly gone. My hips were now grinding against his mouth.

"That's it, fuck my mouth. My tongue is loving it." His thumbs spread my lips apart as he sucked hard and then moved down to tunnel inside me. — Christina Lee

A soldier's life is all grinding routine. Who sold you the rosy notion of honour, trumped up in bright flags and glory? We're here to burn barley. Tossing a torch takes a damned sight less practice than trenching hard ground with a spade. — Janny Wurts

I am the Saudi Arabia of unhappiness. I have so many reserves of misery that you wouldn't understand. I actually think that's part of why I connect with Canadians. I think they understand grinding misery underneath. — Craig Ferguson

In the expectant quiet, there were only the usual sounds of the night. Wind in the big trees out past the school wall, starting to rise as the sky darkened, Crickets beginning to chirp. Then Sabriel heard it
the massed grinding of Dead joints, no longer joined by gristle; the padding of Dead feet, bones like hobnails clicking through necrotic flesh. — Garth Nix

And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself. — Alexander Masters

I distrust the perpetually busy, always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters. — Mark Slouka

And when I die all the memories of my own life will go to the grave with me, God willing, and Dick will never have to look back at them. And his children will never even know what my life was like. They'll know nothing of grinding stones and being hungry and ashamed all day and being beaten by a teacher who couldn't write himself and being sure you kept your mind so empty that you had no thoughts at all. And that's what I've done for them, that's my gift to them and to all their children ever after, so don't talk to me about being hard. — Sebastian Faulks

In every village there will arise a miscreant to establish the most grinding tyranny by calling himself the people. — Robert Peel

It was an age of lavishness. Of enormous meals, enormous families, enormous spreading skirts and an enormous, spreading Empire. An age of gross living, grinding poverty, inconceivable prudery, insufferable complacency and incomparable enterprise. — M.M. Kaye

Like all of us, I was born for joy. This broken world, however, breaks most of us, grinding relentlessly on its metaled tracks. — Dean Koontz

Then his mouth was on hers and they were kissing hard and deep and wet, and they were moaning and rubbing and tugging and grinding. Harper's heart crashed in her chest and her pulse roared in her ears and her breathing came in shallow gasps and her breasts were squashed against his chest and they were in a goddamn bathroom at her work
and she didn't care. — Amy Andrews

Love faded, or flipped over into loathing. Or settled somewhere in between into a kind of grinding detachment. It could snap like a dry twig, with one careless step. — Nora Roberts

No one put a gun to your head and ordered you to become a writer. One writes out of his own choice and must be prepared to take the rough spots along the road with a certain equanimity, though allowed some grinding of the teeth. — Stanley Ellin

X. IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding — Donna Tartt

I run through the woods, at once applauding myself for my wit-"
"Well deserved, sir. Well deserved."
"And at the self instant, I am grinding my teeth because I am a vain, revenging idiot and shall be run down because of it. — M T Anderson

I settled for a cup of coffee. Only it wasn't coffee. It was a coffee substitute made by grinding up dandelion roots. The idea was that it wouldn't keep you awake, and it's always seemed to me that the only thing coffee really has going for it is that it will keep you awake. — Lawrence Block

I like to work on a number of things simultaneously. If you're working on a variety of projects and if you get stuck on one of them, you can move to another without grinding your gears indefinitely. — Eric Maskin

The point is that by seventh period, he's been exposed to four hours of grinding stupidity, and he wants to slit his wrists. For the first ten minutes of lunch, he shakes his head angrily at everything I say. Then eventually he snaps out of it. — Jesse Andrews

No money shots! No shifting, grinding, joyfully thrusting crotch shots. It didn't matter. It was all there in his eyes, his face, the face of a Saturday night jukebox Dionysus, the shimmying eyebrows and rocking band. — Bruce Springsteen

Hitler is a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder. Not content with having all Europe under his heel, or else terrorized into various forms of abject submission, he must now carry his work of butchery and desolation among the vast multitudes of Russia and of Asia. The terrible military machine, which we and the rest of the civilized world so foolishly, so supinely, so insensately allowed the Nazi gangsters to build up year by year from almost nothing, cannot stand idle lest it rust or fall to pieces. It must be in continual motion, grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and the rights of hundreds of millions of men. Moreover it must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil. — Winston S. Churchill

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I still sweat. My guts are still grinding out there. Sometimes I have enough cotton in my mouth to knit a sweater. — Lee Trevino

Just as he'd done to her, she slowly moved up and down, caressing him with her body, drawing out his response. He ground his teeth together, fighting not to come when she was just as determined he would.
Frustrated, she wondered why he was holding back - until she heard herself moan, and realized the friction was working on her, too.
The battle there in the shower was in close-combat conditions. With the clinging grip of her body she tried to wring a climax from him, locking her legs around him and pumping hard. He slowed her down with that one arm around her hips, grinding her against him and sending her response rocketing. — Linda Howard

Then a sound came. It was like the grinding of gears on a colossal ship engine. The sound was like mountains of iron scraping and rubbing against each other, forced together by some godlike impulse. Uselessly, I covered my ears. It went on and on, and I felt as though I would never again know peace. My senses were consumed by the light and heat and sound, their power interrupted only by the tactile sensation of my heart pounding against my chest. It will be very difficult for you to really grasp what happened next. I warn you that my description will inevitably fall far from conveying the astonishing sight I witnessed. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to convey some sense of what happened. — Alec Merta

He pushed against her, their hips grinding slowly, and it was Lyssa's turn to moan. — Kate Forster

College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line. — Bill Gaede