Gutted Quotes & Sayings

You have a great shift." I tell him. "I'll see you around. It's a good thing we're not friends, or else maybe I'd miss you. Or something more than friends-it's a good thing we weren't going out, or I'd be gutted right now. But, you know, we're not. Going out. Obviously. It's so obvious. I'm not sure why I didn't get the memo on that. Maybe it was all the phone sex, addling my stupid female brain. Or, hell, maybe it was all those hours we spent at the bakery, hanging out, or that time when I slept in your bed and cried on your lap on the bathroom floor. I just got confused about what we are. I didn't get the memo. — Robin York

On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life. Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky about the rooftops. A sky shimmery with the possibilities of the death; lights exaggerated, the heavens peeled back- a swirling haze of nebulae and comets - in some distant place, intimations of the new beginning into which he would soon journey — Oscar Hijuelos

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city will someday make. — Tod Wodicka

my mother died unexpectedly, and in the months that followed I'd been gutted to discover that without our conversations, which I'd always assumed would be there for the having, I had absolutely no idea how to make sense of myself. — Kate Bolick

wondered if he was going to turn up. When he did, I was gutted. — Collette Elliott

If you wanted to kill me, why haven't you smothered me in my sleep?" "No sport in that." She gestured towards the ceiling. "Can I expect to be strung up on that bar and gutted like a deer?" He looked up at the bar and frowned. "Too much sport. Lots of heave-hoeing. Big mess to clean up after. Instead, why don't you just drink the poison-laced whiskey?" He extended the glass toward her again and when she didn't move he said, "No? Okay then." He shot the drink. She might not want the edge taken off but he sure as hell did. — Sandra Brown

New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free? — Nathan Myhrvold

There were photos of steel grappling hooks in the meat shed where the Watt Lake Killer had hung, gutted, flayed, and bled out his victims like slaughtered deer. Photos — Loreth Anne White

I consider myself a D.I.Y. home improvement guy. In a prior life, I completely gutted a house - redid the plumbing, wiring, moved sewage pipes, knocked down walls, everything. — Gary Locke

Let me tell you something: I salute womanhood worldwide, because women are exceptionally tough for enduring the misery of childbirth. I've cleaned hogs and gutted deer, but in my experience on Earth I've never witnessed such a brutal event. — Phil Robertson

I will be gutted if Roy does go because I would far rather he stayed at Old Trafford.
(on Roy Keane leaving Manchester United) — Rio Ferdinand

The city defeated him. It refused to be bent into shape; it stayed a willful, sprawling, sinful place. It even told him as much. When he walked through the gutted wreck of old Saint Paul's, he tripped and fell over a piece of rubble
a tombstone. When he got to his feet and dusted himself down he saw that it read, in Latin, 'Resurgam'
'I Will Rise Again. — Jonathan Barnes

As a result of manifest destiny, we gutted our resources. — Jonathan Evison

It seemed to Bosch to be a form of torture heaped upon torture. Corazon was hunched over the steel table, her bloody and gloved hands deep inside the gutted torso, working with forceps and a long-bladed instrument she called the "butter knife." Corazon was not tall and she stood on her tiptoes to be able to reach down and in with her tools. She braced her hip against the side of the autopsy table to gain leverage. — Michael Connelly

We live in a country where voting rights get gutted but Sharknado gets a sequel. — John Fugelsang

The wound, as I called it, was three inches across, eighteen inches long, and as deep as my backbone. I was gutted like a Halloween pig. It couldn't be stitched up because of infection danger and I had to heal from the inside out. When the nurse first saw it, she said, "Oh my God!" Which scared me to death. Just what I needed. And it had to be washed out with saline at least three times a day and disinfected. Slosh it in with a squirting machine, suck it out with a vacuum machine. The first time I looked down at what they were doing, I said it, too: "Oh my God!" I didn't look down there again for weeks. — William S. Burroughs Jr.

My father looked as if I'd just gutted him, and I felt a pang of regret - but it was mingled with a twisted sense of satisfaction. It felt good to hurt his feelings - it was payback for the way his choices had irrevocably damaged my own. — Ernest Cline

I am a house gutted by fire where only the guilty sometimes sleep before the punishment that devours them hounds them out in the open. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Don't say it's the beautiful
I praise. I praise the human,
gutted and rising. — Katie Ford

Blood!" Froi said, horrified. "Loins? Same loins you stick
"
"Froi!" Trevanion snapped.
"Flowing at times like a gutted pig," Evanjalin said.
"Evanjalin! — Melina Marchetta

ISIS has a caliphate the size of Indiana! Also, US military has been totally gutted. Can't even project power anymore. — Jeb Bush

In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of quality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism. — Stephen King

An NDP government will establish, in law, clear criteria for resource extraction and transportation based on the principles of sustainable development, which include internalizing all pollution costs and putting a price on carbon. In our day and age there is no longer any way around it. Any new energy project requires a thorough, credible environmental assessment process, based on criteria of sustainable development and social acceptability. We don't have one in Canada, because the Conservatives have gutted all the relevant existing legislation and reduced the staff responsible for enforcing it. — Tom Mulcair

We now have a lack of readiness that is quite scary. We have planes that were - that Harry Truman inaugurated, the B-52. We have - the Navy has been gutted and decimated. The readiness of the Marines is way down. — Jeb Bush

Sophia could just as well have gutted me. In Allah's name, I drank beer for you. I dismantled my entire value system of holding Allah's word above all for you. I reinterpreted my Islamic teachings to justify being with you. — Sam Wazan

You know, Drake, I seem to recall this impertinent young pup who once told me that problems shared are problems solved. (Jake)
And I seem to recall a surly pirate telling me to mind my own business or I'd find myself gutted. (Morgan) — Kinley MacGregor

These two sections [of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise], plus some of the author's notes, are all we have
this in itself is a tragedy and waste of war. Had this novel been finished we would be hailing it as one of the supreme works of literature. As it stands, it is like a great cathedral gutted by a bomb. The ruined shell still soars to heaven, a reminder of the human spirit triumphing despite human destructiveness. — Irene Nemirovsky

There will never be peace between us. Ever. You shattered any hope of it when you watched your brother kill me and refused to speak up on my behalf. (Acheron) I was afraid. (Artemis) And I was butchered and gutted on the floor like an animal sacrifice. Excuse me if I don't feel your pain. I'm too busy with my own. (Acheron) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted the alga, casting away its nucleus and its mitochondria, keeping only the chloroplast. That thief of a thief was the ancestor or Plasmodium and Toxoplasma. And this Russian-doll sequence of events explains why you can cure malaria with an antibiotic that kills bacteria: because Plasmodium has a former bacterium inside it doing some vital business. — Carl Zimmer

A Veretian who treats honourably with an Akielon will be gutted with his own sword. It's your countryman who taught me that. You can thank him for the lesson." "Thank who?" Damen pushed the words out, somehow, past the pain, but he knew. He knew. "Damianos, the dead Prince of Akielos," said Laurent. "The man who killed my brother. — C.S. Pacat

Federal laws, including those that made so many people immigrate without documents, gutted the enforcement power of the Department of Labor and created a lower minimum wage for tipped workers than for everybody else, reinforcing the industry's — Rinku Sen

People are strange about animals. Especially large ones. Daily, on the docks of Wellfleet Harbor, thousands of fish are scaled, gutted, and seasoned with thyme and lemon. No one strokes their sides with water. No one cries when their jaws slip open. Pilot whales are not an endangered species, yet people spend tens of thousands of dollars in rescue efforts, trucking the wounded to aquariums and in some places even airlifting them off beaches. — Marina Keegan

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start here. — Cheryl Strayed

Believe me, when you're dealing with infectious alien mind parasites, I always find primitive is best. Then, calmly, almost as if it were a recognised form of verbal punctuation, she took aim with the needler and gutted a rat which had dared to stray into the corridor. — Alastair Reynolds

He glanced first at me, and then at his devastated flowerbed; all plowed up and butchered, like a Ripper victim- like Pearly Poll, lying gutted in Hanway Street, Spitalfields. — Russell Brand

Let's start a magazine
to hell with literature
we want something redblooded
lousy with pure
reeking with stark
and fearlessly obscene
but really clean
get what I mean
let's not spoil it
let's make it serious
something authentic and delirious
you know something genuine like a mark
in a toilet
graced with guts and gutted
with grace — E. E. Cummings

We are a gutted generation, born in the depression and obsessed with prosperity. — Paddy Chayefsky

Without any coherent international blueprint the White House has bombed its way around the globe, while dropping troops far and wide for ill-defined peacemaking duties. This policy has gutted the American military which now must be rebuilt. — Tom DeLay

When we left it, the city was still smoldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered by the bombed bakery. Broken baguettes. Crushed croissants. Gutted cars. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us. — Ocean Vuong

He sees dilapidated three- and four-story concrete blocks, their walls painted in peeling pastel colors and streaked with graffiti, and because of the corrugated tin roofs, he again thinks of the reserve, which he also doesn't know. Sunlight. Black people staring at him. Tropical greenery. Tough dusty roots and grasses, leaves and vines. Gutted buildings. Ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA, ta, ta-da DA. Cement walls give onto gapingly empty ideas of rooms. — Nancy Huston

I've gutted that poor rover so much, it looks like I parked it in a bad part of town. — Andy Weir

I love him. (Artemis) How can you say that? You don't even understand what love means. Love isn't being ashamed to be seen with the one you care about. It isn't about punishment or hurt. Love is what gives you the strength you need to face anything no matter how brutal or frightening. It's what allowed Ash to be beaten rather than tell his father about you. It's what allowed him to be gutted on the floor at your feet rather than publicly shame you. And you spat on him for that love and tore him apart. For a goddess, you're pathetic. (Tory) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

We have gutted our ability to detect the next attack. And I would not stand for that as president of the United States. — Lindsey Graham

He stared fixedly at the opposite bank where an angler was fishing, his line perfectly still. All of a sudden the man jerked out of the water a little sliver fish which wriggled at the end of his line. Twisting and turning it this way and that he tried to extract his hook, but in vain. Losing patience he started pulling and, as he did so, tore out the entire bloody gullet of the fish with parts of its intestines attached. Paul shuddered, feeling himself equally torn apart. It seemed to him that the hook was like his own love and that if he were to tear it out he too would be gutted by a piece of curved wire hooked deep into his essential self at the end of a line held by Madeleine. — Guy De Maupassant

Every weapons system has been gutted. — Jeb Bush

There is another, grimmer history to the filibuster, though, one that carries special relevance for me. For almost a century, the filibuster was the South's weapon of choice in its efforts to protect Jim Crow from federal interference, the legal blockade that effectively gutted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Decade after decade, courtly, erudite men like Senator Richard B Russell of Georgia used the filibuster to choke off any and every piece of civil rights legislation before the Senate, whether voting rights bills, or fair employment bills, or anti-lynching bills. — Barack Obama

Alone on the terrace looking up at the stars I would not feel lonely. With him glued to the screen, I feel gutted ... — Gabrielle Hamilton

To me, there's nothing worse than going to a concert and you're so looking forward to hearing your favorite song and they never play it. You're gutted. — Dido Armstrong

When Obama gutted Medicare by taking $717 billion out of it, the Romney plan does not do that. The Ryan plan mimicked part of the Obama package there, the Romney plan does not. That's a big difference. — John Sununu

The death of Nighteyes gutted me. I walked wounded through my life in the days that followed, unaware of just how mutilated I was. I was like the man who complains of the itching of his severed leg. The itching distracts from the immense knowledge that one will forever after hobble through life. — Robin Hobb

The Unites States used to use law enforcement to aggressively target North Korea illicit activities - counterfeiting U.S. currency, drug-running, counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals - until diplomacy gutted those efforts. The effort should be reinvigorated. — Ed Royce

They gutted the book, making an action movie for 15-25 year olds. Tolkien became ... devoured by his popularity and absorbed by the absurdity of the time. The gap widened between the beauty, the seriousness of the work, and what it has become is beyond me. This level of marketing reduces to nothing the aesthetic and philosophical significance of this work. — Christopher Tolkien

Winning is something you've dreamed about and hoped for, so that when you get there it's no big deal. But if you lose, you're gutted, and the gutted sense just goes on, and I know what that's like, because I've been having that gutted feeling since 1979. — Richard Griffiths

We want this - and I - we hope that right when they come back, that the Congress passes the Lilly Ledbetter Act which would correct the Supreme Court decision that was just recent that essentially guts wage discrimination law. It's been in place for years. It was gutted by this Roberts Court. We want it to be reversed by legislation. We hope that Congress passes it and that is on the desk for [Barack] Obama to sign as one of his first acts once he's sworn in. So it - I could go on, we have quite a well-developed list. — Eleanor Smeal

In 1972, my idol Gordon Banks was seriously injured in a car accident and lost an eye. He was still England goalkeeper and the world's Number One. I was absolutely gutted for Banksie. His career was over prematurely. He did make a comeback in America for a time, but he said he felt like people were coming to watch a bit of a circus act: 'Roll up, roll up! The world's only one-eyed goalkeeper.' And so he retired from football for good. When he lost his eye, I wanted to give him one of mine, that's how much I thought of him. — Stephen Richards

I glance through the rear window at the house. It amazes me slightly that it looks the same as it did, though it's been gutted of so many valuable things. You wouldn't know, to walk past that house, what it had lost. It looks as proud, and as firm, and as fancy as ever. As whole. — Kekla Magoon

I've seen a dead body, I've seen some pretty gruesome fist fights, I've been a hunter since I was a child, though I don't anymore, I've gutted wild game. — George Eads

DEAD FLIES ON THE SILLS OF sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty. The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist's wax, the organ has been gutted. — James Salter

You inhaled to the rhythm of her thick sighs as she scrutinized her form in the full-length bedroom mirror, her newly sewn skirt showing, she said, too much hip, too much leg. She yanked it off, snipping open the seams, laying it out across the dining table like a freshly gutted fish, where it eventually disappeared from view beneath sheaths of brown paper patterns, paisley skirts whose hems needed letting out, floral dresses whose cleavages needed closing in, and an assortment of garments whose long and short zippers would go neither up nor down, jammed from the humidity and the salt of August days. — Martin Munro

Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper?
I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question ... yes. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Returning his pen to its holder, he told us, 'I will have him gutted with that scythe. I will hang him by his own intestines.' At this piece of dramatic exposition, I could not hep but roll my eyes. A length of intestines would not carry the weight of a child, much less a full grown man. — Patrick DeWitt

Like when everything flipped upside down and the scream of metal on metal exploded the silence and the world churned around me, ground over sky over ground over sky, and then, with a thunderous crack and a crunching of glass and steel, a twisted roof crushing me into a gutted floor, ground, I wasn't surprised. — Robin Wasserman

Jenna's crying both gutted Easy and built him up - because she didn't fear him. Instead, she'd turned to him for comfort. — Laura Kaye

Most Wicked Words!-Forbear to Speak Them Out

Most wicked words!-forbear to speak them out.
Utter them not again; blaspheme no more
Against our love with maxims learned from Doubt:
Lest Death should get his foot inside the door.
We are surrounded by a hundred foes;
And he that at your bidding joins our feast,
I stake my heart upon it, is one of those,
Nor in their councils does he sit the least.
Hark not his whisper: he is Time's ally,
Kinsman to Death, and leman of Despair:
Believe that I shall love you till I die;
Believe; and thrust him forth; and arm the stair;
And top the walls with spikes and splintered glass
That he pass gutted should again he pass. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred. — Marisha Pessl

Baby, in a couple of minutes I'm going to rip off your god damned panties and show you some turkey neck you'll remember all the way to the graveside. I have a vast and curved penis, like a sickle, and many a gutted pussy has gasped come upon my callous and roach-smeared rug. First let me finish this drink. — Charles Bukowski

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled. — Christopher Hitchens

Technology won't protect you from being attacked for fresh water. A badass blade will. Back in Eden where I grew up, the closest thing to knifework I'd experienced was cutting up a loaf of warm bread. Last night, I'd gutted a wild prairie chicken after scaling a rock face to find its nest and slit its throat.
What a difference a year makes. — Georgia Clark

The gutted ruins of the Amazing Kingdom were razed, and the land was replanted with native trees, including buttonwoods, pigeon plums, torchwoods, brittle palms, tamarinds, gumbo-limbos and mangroves. This restoration was accomplished in spite of rigid opposition from the Monroe County Commission, which had hoped to use the property as a public dump. — Carl Hiaasen

So instead, I went to good old "Spare Parts" Rover 1 and stole its environment heater. I've gutted that poor rover so much, it looks like I parked it in a bad part of town. I — Andy Weir

You can't. He has it shielded. Besides, he's a god and can be a nasty one if you upset him. You try popping into any place where his beloved wife is and you'll get fried faster than chicken at KFC. He doesn't have a sense of humor when it comes to her. So wipe the frown off your face before you hurt her feelings and get gutted for it. (Phobos) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

O'Reilly, I've been running from the worst of myself all my life, and now it looks like the best of me just caught up. — Mel Bossa

February
Boris Pasternak
It's February. Get ink. Weep.
Write the heart out about it, sing
Another song of February
While raucous slush burns black with spring.
Six grivnas* for a buggy ride
Past booming bells, on screaming gears,
Out to a place where drizzles fall
Louder than any ink or tears
Where like a flock of charcoal pears,
A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry
From trees to puddles, knock dry grief
Into the deep end of the eye.
A thaw patch blackens underfoot.
The wind is gutted with a scream.
True verses are the most haphazard,
Rhyming the heart out on a theme.
*Grivna: a unit of currency. — Boris Pasternak

Every time you lot leave me at home, someone manages to get gutted. — Sarah J. Maas

[Barack] Obama has betrayed Israel, gutted the military, and apologized on ten world tours. — Marco Rubio

If I am sufficiently brave to extract the cancer of fear, I have effectively gutted my conviction that what stands before me is impossible. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

[T]he most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies. — Camille Paglia

Free-market capitalism, in the blink of an eye, was gutted and replaced by an oligopoly. — Gerald Celente

Throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down. — John D. MacDonald

You're a cruel, cold-gutted, heartless bastard but you've got majesty, no doubt about that. — James Clavell

He stared at me. "Are you done? "
"Yes."
"May I get up? "
"No."
"I see you like your men with their egos gutted."
"Only when I'm feeling generous. — Roshani Chokshi

Park is faster, but their pursuit seems almost ideological - a matter of committed belief. It's as though they were appointed to the task of laying hands on him, of bringing him back into the gentle fold, of taking him home.

They follow him all the way down to the ground floor. He bursts through the stairwell door, sprints down the hall, and ducks into an alcove where two vending machines stand gutted, their weighty doors cracked opened with a prybar. He wedges his body between them, pulls the knife and crouches down. His pulse is throbbing. He struggles to regain his breath, to silence himself. — Jonathan R. Miller

I was gutted to leave my boyfriend at home when I started my tour, but taking my pillow was like taking a little bit of him with me. — Amy Winehouse

It was May's idea," Quentin added.

"I'm sure it was," I said. Sylvester started circling. I dropped into a defensive position. "I'm not really comfortable with this, May."

"Cope," she said.

"Maybe an audience will make you shape up," Sylvester said, and lunged.

I parried. "Maybe an audience will distract me and get me gutted."

"Let's see some carnage!" hollered May, pumping her fist in the air.

"This isn't professional wrestling!" I snapped, trying to hit Sylvester's ankle. He blocked, turning my thrust aside and nearly disarming me. "And I swear if you shout 'take it off,' I am coming over there."

"Take what off?" asked Sylvester.

"Nothing, Your Grace," Quentin and I said in unison. — Seanan McGuire

I knew a pure heart who refused tot be mistrustful ... He had written at his doorstep: "From wherever you are, enter and be welcome". Who do you think responded to this lovely invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and gutted him. — Albert Camus

Love is like a tide. When it's in, everything looks beautiful and inviting. Only when love recedes can you see the debris beneath the surface - the old bottles, the rusty prams, the sewage pipes, the bloated cats and dogs weighted down to drown. The man I had once loved so passionately I now saw as weak, gutted like a fish. — Kathy Lette

I walked across the snowy plain of the Tiergarten - a smashed statue here, a newly planted sapling there; the Brandenburger Tor, with its red flag flapping against the blue winter sky; and on the horizon, the great ribs of a gutted railway station, like the skeleton of a whale. In the morning light it was all as raw and frank as the voice of history which tells you not to fool yourself; this can happen to any city, to anyone, to you. — Christopher Isherwood

I felt so much more than horror. I was so afraid, shocked by what I saw. There were hundreds of men, women and children hanging from the trees ... there was blood everywhere! We all saw that every person had been gutted, like a fish. My instinct was to run, but where to ... I was on a train. As I watched those around me on the train, so many others also looked like they had explosions in their eyes and they too wanted to flee. — Alfred Nestor

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth's eager devastation. — Lorrie Moore

Ghislaine didn't look up from the book she was poring over. There was a stack of them on the desk before her, and another beside the narrow bed. Where the eldest and cleverest of her Thirteen had gotten them from, who she'd likely gutted to steal them, Manon didn't care. "Hello, and come right in, why don't you" was the response. Manon leaned against the door and crossed her arms. Only with books, only when reading, was Ghislaine so snappish. On the battlefield, in the air, the dark-skinned witch was quiet, easy to command. A solid soldier, made more valuable by her razor-sharp intelligence, which had earned her the spot among the Thirteen. — Sarah J. Maas

Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." It gutted me pretty badly. — John Green