Gristle Quotes & Sayings

We are not blood and gristle and hair and spit. We are ideas, if we are anything at all. That part of us that was never truly living is the only part of us that cannot die. — Robert V.S. Redick

Talleyrand once said to the first Napoleon that the United States is a giant without bones. Since that time our gristle has been rapidly hardening. — James A. Garfield

North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy - they wouldn't tell me the breed - but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there. — Christopher Hitchens

Swelter's eyes meet those of his enemy, and never has there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred. Had the flesh, the fibres, and the bones of the chef and those of Mr Flay been conjured away and away down that dark corridor leaving only their four eyes suspended in mid-air outside the Earl's door, then, surely, they must have reddened to the hue of Mars, reddened and smouldered, and at last broken into flame, so intense was their hatred - broken into flame and circled about one another in ever-narrowing gyres and in swifter and yet swifter flight until, merged into one sizzling globe of ire they must surely have fled, the four in one, leaving a trail of blood behind them in the cold grey air of the corridor, until, screaming as they fly beneath innumerable arches and down the endless passageways of Gormenghast, they found their eyeless bodies once again, and reentrenched themselves in startled sockets. — Mervyn Peake

Eating The Bones
by Ellen Bass
The women in my family
strip the succulent
flesh from broiled chicken,
scrape the drumstick clean;
bite off the cartilage chew the gristle,
crush the porous swellings
at the ends of each slender baton.
With strong molars
they split the tibia, sucking out
the dense marrow.
They use up love, they swallow
every dark grain,
so at the end there's nothing left,
a scant pile of splinters
on the empty white plate. — Ellen Bass

Elodin looked at me. "What a remarkably honest threat," he said. "Normally they're much more growlish and gristly than that."
"Gristly?" I asked, emphasizing the 't.' "Don't you mean grisly?"
"Both," he said. "Usually there's a lot of, 'I'll break your knees. I'll break your neck.'" He shrugged. "Makes me think of gristle, like when you're boning a chicken. — Patrick Rothfuss

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood. — Edmund Burke

The poem is like a monster, against which the critic does battle. There is only one way to conquer the monster: you must eat it, bones, blood, skin, pelt, and gristle. And even then the monster is not dead, for it lives in you, is assimilated into you, and you are different and somewhat monstrous yourself for having eaten it. — Unknown

Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man's cheek, which you could actually hear the soft click of if you listened for it; the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man's temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow's feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man's collarbone as his throat muscles tenses, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up.He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away. — David Malouf

Shut your evil mucus-hole you truth terrorist. You LOSE every time a mirror implodes from your barbed and gristle image. — Charlie Sheen

I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe. — Maya Angelou

Bone and gristle of his nose crunch. He raised — John Steinbeck

Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art. — Arthur Symons

After the war, Lucian had drifted back to Wyoming and then back to Absaroka County. He then drifted into being sheriff on the strength of his being the toughest piece of gristle in four states. — Craig Johnson

Confederation is only yet in the gristle, and it will require five years more before it hardens into bone. — John A. Macdonald

Whenever you think that you are getting too big for the people around you, remember all that separates you from the guy sitting next to you is a little piece of gristle in your throat. — Marilyn Horne

It is defeat that turns bone to flint, gristle to muscle, and makes men invincible. — Henry Ward Beecher

She's the gristle stuck between Time's teeth, and I love her for it. — Shaun David Hutchinson

I think early on in my career, I was heavily inspired by bands like Throbbing Gristle and Test Dept, and films of David Lynch, for example, where the soundscape plays a very important role in the listening experience. — Trent Reznor

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle. — Anatole Broyard

Her lungs, like moldering cheesecloth sacks, hung visible between cracked and yellowing ribs. Her internal organs, long absent, only flaked brown gristle clung to her spine. Sparse clumps of pale hair clung to the few shreds of flesh still gripping her skull. Five other Cotardist assassins stood mutely behind her. Though none looked to be such an advanced state of decay, they all showed signs of rot and neglect. — Michael R. Fletcher

A soft death can be swallowed with Called home to be with the Lord or We'll see her again in glory, but hard deaths get caught in the teeth like gristle. We — Brit Bennett

Your goodness to me has been overwhelming. How tender you are, though I am often as tough as gristle. How patiently you have loved me since you made up your mind to love me always. — Jan Karon

I was standing outside myself trying to stop those hangings with ghost fingers ... I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants-a body-after the Long Time moving through odorless alleys of space where no life is, only the colorless no smell of death ... Nobody can breath and smell it through pink convolutions of gristle laced with crystal snot, time shit and black blood filters of flesh. — William S. Burroughs

Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all the good stuff was use to grease propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War. — Neal Stephenson

When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best ...
And ... always look on the bright side of life ...
Always look on the light side of life. — Graham Chapman

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

... as though it had known to the second when I was to enter, had waited there during that entire twelve miles behind that walking mule and watched me draw nearer and nearer and enter the door at last as it had know (ay, decreed, since there is that justice whose Moloch's palate-paunch makes no distinction between gristle bone and tender flesh) that I would enter - ... — William Faulkner

A bad past is like gristle. You can chew on it forever and starve yourself to death, or you can spit it out and see what else is on the table. — Lisa Wingate

No, now he didn't want to let himself get too close because he knew it wasn't going to last. Good stuff never lasted. Change would come and wipe it away, and what was the point? It hurt too much every time it was ripped away and he was getting tired of losing pieces of himself. Pretty soon there wouldn't be much left, just scraps of gristle and bone without feeling. He didn't need that — Steve Perry

Some get the gravy, some get the gristle. — Joni Mitchell

Promise me you'll be careful, my boy." She handed him the pack she'd assembled.
"Don't worry. The Wolf has no interest in me," he said, smiling through his pain. "I'm all gristle. — Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

It's worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it's within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words. — Chuck Palahniuk

The gristle of the underneath stings in the air of responsibility. — Mark Ryan

Kate wondered for a moment how it was that eyes conveyed such an immense amount of information about their owners. They were, after all, merely spheres of white gristle. They hardly changed as they got older, apart from getting a bit redder and a bit runnier. The iris opened and closed a bit, but that was all. Where did this flood of information come from? — Douglas Adams

It scored right away with me by being the smooth, fine-grained sort, not the coarse flaky, dry-on-the-outside rubbish full of chunds of gut and gristle to testify to its authenticity. — Kingsley Amis

I'm close to being a vegan, but I'm not one, technically. I don't eat eggs, or nearly any dairy - no cheese or milk. I do eat honey, and a piece of milk chocolate here and there. It's never really been that hard for me. I've never had any desire to eat meat. In fact, when I was a kid I would have a really difficult time eating meat at all. It had to be the perfect bite, with no fat or gristle or bone or anything like that. I don't judge people who eat meat - that's not for me to say - but the whole thing just sort of bums me out. — Tobey Maguire

Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. — Stephen King

His habitual melancholy was changing day by day into something more sinister. There were moments when he would desecrate the crumbling and mournful mask of his face with a smile more horrible than the darkest lineaments of pain. Across the stoniness of his eyes a strange light would pass for a moment, as though the moon were flaring on the gristle, and his lips would open and the gash of his mouth would widen in a dead, climbing curve — Mervyn Peake