Hand Signs Quotes & Sayings

The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy - smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit - was also the old man who'd clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out. — Donna Tartt

I opened my eyes today to a world that felt alien. For though things resembled the familiar, nothing was the same. Walls I once considered confining, crumbled at the slightest shove. Mountains that for ages had barred my view now faded, transparent. Meandering roads stretched out as straight as an arrow, void of stop signs. Obstacles no longer stood stationary. Pinnacles loomed within reach. Beasts were tame, bullies timid, wagging tongues all tied into knots, and in the palm of my hand glistened the end of a glorious rainbow. It took but a moment to realize that in my newfound sight, everything I'd ever longed for was accessible. Incredibly, the only thing that had really changed was the way I saw the world. — Richelle E. Goodrich

A person shows signs of clutching on too fast, of being needy, of not hearing the word "no," of jealousy, of guarding you and your freedom. But the signs can be so small they skitter right past you. Sometimes they dance past, looking satiny, something you should applaud. Someone's jealousy can make you feel good. Special. But it's not even about you. It's about a hand that is already gripping. It's about their need, circling around your throat — Deb Caletti

I struggled not to laugh at the brand-new bottle of lube in his left hand and the unopened box of condoms in his right. He watched me, his expression dark.
"Just buy those?" I asked lightly.
He nodded once.
"Had it all worked out in your mind, did you?"
He nodded again.
"Have you ever fucked a man, Seven?"
He shook his head, his right hand squishing the box of condoms as he tightened his grip.
"And ... this is what you want?" I looked at his face then, watching for any signs of doubt. There were none as he nodded again.
I opened my arms. "Come here," I said softly. — T.J. Klune

There's a much different message received, when the signs written in the flesh were not in your hand writing. — Dixie Waters

The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign.
The Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her. — Heraclitus

There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word. Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is simple repetition: tree + tree + tree = forest; more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness and east + east = everywhere. The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look. — James Gleick

I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like Shakespeare?" I sat up and took Tootsie's hands. "You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?"
The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap.
"Yes," Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. "Yes, it is exactly like that. — Therese Anne Fowler

All these delusions of Divination have their root and foundation from Astrology. For whether the lineaments of the body, countenance, or hand be inspected, whether dream or vision be seen, whether marking of entrails or mad inspiration be consulted, there must be a Celestial Figure first erected, by the means of whole indications, together with the conjectures of Signs and Similitudes, they endeavour to find out the truth of what is desired. — Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

There were copies on the table. Ten-A-Fly dressed like Snoop Dogg on a bender making gangsta hand signs that made one think not so much of intimidation as an unusual state of palsy. — Harlan Coben

I brush her hair back from her forehead. "You need to stop worrying about everything that can't be controlled." She signs and leans away from my hand, "That's just it, though. It's all I can think about anymore. It's like this fixation I have no control over which makes no sense because Im fixated on controlling the uncontrollable." She's breathing wildly. Shit. I need to calm her down. — Jessica Sorensen

The mistake we make is in thinking rape isn't premeditated, that it happens by accident somehow, that you're drunk and you run into a girl who's also drunk and half-asleep on a bench and you sidle up to her and things get out of hand and before you know it, you're being accused of something you'd never do. But men who rape are men who watch for the signs of who they believe they can rape. Rape culture isn't a natural occurrence; it thrives thanks to the dedicated attention given to women in order to take away their security. Rapists exist on a spectrum, and maybe this attentive version is the most dangerous type: women are so used to being watched that we don't notice when someone's watching us for the worst reason imaginable. They have a plan long before we even get to the bar to order our first drink. — Scaachi Koul

As if to proclaim his home a British Isle unto itself, Teabing had not only posted his signs in English, but he had installed his gate's intercom entry system on the right-hand side of the truck - the passenger's side everywhere in Europe except England. — Dan Brown

There are no footprints on the sea and no road-signs, not a single guard-stone or post, and no bends, only paths of light and dark from which to choose, the choice is always a difficult navigation and the storm's wingspan immeasurable as the depths and the horizon, but the sea holds you in its mighty hand your life is a sea-blue tale of love and death. — Ase-Marie Nesse

In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned [ ... ] with what the ordinary man understands by his religion, that system of doctrines and pledges that on the one hand explains the riddle of this world to him with an enviable completeness, and on the other assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a future existence for any shortcomings in this life. The ordinary man cannot imagine this Providence in any other from but that of a greatly exalted father, for only such a one could understand the needs of the sons of men, or be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that to one whose attitude to humanity is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be "bound hand and foot" and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners "went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy," in the words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner (in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes "infamous and embarrassing. — James W. Loewen

Waiting politely won't get you across the street in Boston," he informs me, "at least not in 1905. There aren't any of those blinking idiot signs that show a hand and count down the seconds for you. — Rysa Walker

Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested ... Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is this fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially by arranging objects. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification. — Michel Foucault

I didn't expect to see you again so soon."

"And now you've assigned me a new job." I wrinkle my forehead. "'Our friends in the library'?"

He laughs. "The Resurgandi, of course. Everyone's got a silly nickname for them, and that's my father's."

"That footman can't have believed it," I say. "He's gossiping with the other servants right now."

"Oh, but I think he will believe it. There's talk of inducting me, since I did so well at university, and you know how they cloak all their goings-on in secretive mummery. Oaths and hand signs and the like. Keeps them occupied, I suppose. — Rosamund Hodge

The camp offices stood in the centre, adjoining the shrine to Jupiter that held the legion's Eagle. In the camps of the Vth Macedonica and the VIth Ferrata, these buildings were of grey stone, dressed by Gaulish masons to such smoothness that a man could run his hand down them and not feel the joins.
The legions' respective signs of the bull and the eagle had been carved thereon with such pride and perfection that men copied them on their shields and carved them on the bedheads in the barracks.
At Raphana, the camp office of the XIIth Fulminata and IVth Scythians before which we dismounted was built of the local baked mud, and some drunkard with a poor eye for detail had etched
the Scythians' sign of the goat and the Fulminata's crossed thunderbolts together, so that it seemed as if the goat were thunderstruck, or else that lightning grew from its anus. Both applied equally; each was unthinkable in a legion which had any pride in itself. — M.C. Scott

THE ABSENT ELEMENT IS what is expressed in the final sentence of the prayer recorded in Acts 4: "Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders" (v. 30). What gains unbelievers' attention and stirs the heart is seeing the gospel expressed in power. It takes more than academic rigor to win the world for Christ. Correct doctrine alone isn't enough. Proclamation and teaching aren't enough. God must be invited to "confirm the word with signs following" (see Heb. 2:4). In other words, the gospel must be preached with the involvement of the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven. — Jim Cymbala

The backcountry signs say stuff like BEYOND THIS POINT IS A HIGH RISK AREA, WHICH HAS MANY HAZARDS INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, AVALANCHES, CLIFFS, AND HIDDEN OBSTACLES, YOU MAY BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE COST OF YOUR RESCUE and I think, um, no thanks. I choose life. — Cynthia Hand

Jamie laid a hand on mine, and my fingers turned to intertwine with his. I could feel his pulse in my own fingertips, the solid bones of knuckle and phalanges. His right hand, battered and marked with the scars of sacrifice and labor. Marked also with the signs of my love, the crude repairs done in pain and desperation. Blood of my blood, bone of my bone ... — Diana Gabaldon

At the door to the locker room Dime asks [Ennis] to autograph his ball. Ennis rears back. He's chuckling but his eyes are wary.
'Why you want that? I'm just an old equipment hand, nobody cares about my autograph.'
'As far as I'm concerned you run the team,' Dime answers, so Ennis laughs and takes the Sharpie and signs his name to Dime's ball, and this will be the only autograph that Dime collects today. — Ben Fountain

Another one is cleaning up tool that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not being able to lay your hand on the tool you need right away. If you just stop and put tools away neatly you will both find the tool and also scale down your impatience without wasting time or endangering the work. — Robert M. Pirsig

Your name is a -- bird in my hand
a piece of -- ice on the tongue
one single movement of the lips.
Your name is: five signs,
a ball caught in flight, a
silver bell in the mouth

a stone, cast in a quiet pool
makes the splash of your name, and
the sound is in the clatter of
night hooves, loud as a thunderclap
or it speaks straight into my forehead,
shrill as the click of a cocked gun.

Your name -- how impossible, it
is a kiss in the eyes on
motionless eyelashes, chill and sweet.
Your name is a kiss of snow
a gulp of icy spring water, blue
as a dove. About your name is: sleep. — Marina Tsvetaeva

WARNING: UNHAPPY ENDING! she wrote. If more bookshop owners had taken the responsibility to hang warning signs, her life would have been much easier. Cigarette packets came with warnings, so why not tragic books? There was wording on bottles of beer warning against drinking and driving, but not a single word about the consequences of reading books without tissues to hand. — Katarina Bivald

Craving a physical connection, I slide my finger along the back of Rachel's hand. She's asleep. Has been for a while. Curled in the fetal position in the middle of my bed, Rachel wears the mask of a ravaged person. Somehow, I missed the signs: dark circles under her eyes, the clothes that once fit perfectly now hang, her skin so pale it's translucent. — Katie McGarry

Should the ruling hand show signs of weakness in such a State the result will not be to cause a kind of hibernation of the State but rather to awaken the individualist instincts which are slumbering in the ethnological groups. These instincts do not make themselves felt as long as these groups are dominated by a strong central will-to-govern. The danger which exists in these slumbering separatist instincts can be rendered more or less innocuous only through centuries of common education, common traditions and common interests. — Adolf Hitler

But I found signs of their trespass: a burned patch planted with a fistful of grain, a tree felled or stripped of fruit, a deer strung up in a snare. I never saw a poacher. They were too cunning, and for cause: the foresters would take a man's hands and eyes and leave him to the mercy of the wolves for such an offense. It was bad enough to steal the king's game, but snares were an abomnination. The gods abhor weapons that leave the hand, coward' weapons such as javelins, bows and arrows, slings. No man or beast should die by such means. — Sarah Micklem

30Stretch out your hand to bring healing and enable signs and wonders to be performed through the name of Jesus, your holy servant. — Common English Bible

29 And now, O Lord, hear their threats, and give us, your servants, great boldness in preaching your word. 30 Stretch out your hand with healing power; may miraculous signs and wonders be done through the name of your holy servant Jesus. — Anonymous

Mick required far less hand-holding than Michael. Signing the Stones, though, had required a full frontal assault worthy of General Patton, one of my heroes. The final battle exploded at the Ritz Hotel in Paris back in '83. After months of relentless pursuit, I had them. All they had to do was sign when suddenly at 3 A.M. Mick goes mental and calls me a "stupid motherfuckin' record executive." I lose it. I reach for his throat. I have a vision of punching out all ninety-eight pounds of him. I stop myself, envisioning tomorrow's headline - "Yetnikoff Kills Jagger." Jagger relents, signs and from then on it's wine and roses. It was Mick - wily and witty Mick - who later that year plotted with my girlfriend, the one called Boom Boom, to throw me a surprise fiftieth birthday bash where Henny Youngman emceed and Jon Peters, Barbra — Walter Yetnikoff

I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. — Steven Weinberg

We excel in cut-and-paste solutions. We make promises and provide quick fixes to tide over the crisis at hand, thereby abandoning long-term objectives. We also seem to keep widening the threshold of our tolerance. We see enormous wrong, abysmally high levels of corruption, but accept these as necessary evils and refuse to raise a voice against them. We need to ask ourselves not only why we choose to live with mediocrity, but also when we plan to stand up and say, enough is enough. I daresay - and I am relieved to see this in my lifetime - such change is on its way; we see welcome signs, particularly from GenNext. — Vinod Rai

We must also realize that nothing happens without a purpose. Nothing. Not even broken hearts. Not even pain. That broken heart and that pain are lessons and signs for us. They are warnings that something is wrong. They are warnings that we need to make a change. Just like the pain of being burned is what warns us to remove our hand from the fire, emotional pain warns us that we need to make an internal change. We need to detach. Pain is a form of forced detachment. Like the loved one who hurts you again and again and again, the more dunya hurts us, the more we inevitably detach from it. The more we inevitably stop loving it. — Yasmin Mogahed

Three hand-painted signs had been tacked to a broken-down gate. The first read,
THE QUIBBLER. EDITOR: X. LOVEGOOD
The second,
PICK YOUR OWN MISTLETOE
The third,
KEEP OFF THE DIRIGIBLE PLUMS — J.K. Rowling

I went down by a different staircase, and i saw another "fuck you" on the wall. I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on, with a knife or something. It wouldn't come off. It's hopeless, anyway. If you had a million years to do it in, you couldn't rub out even half the "fuck you" signs in the world. — J.D. Salinger

Charlus takes the narrator's chin and slides his magnetized fingers up to the ears "like a barber's fingers." This trivial gesture, which I begin, is continued by another part of myself; without anything interrupting it physically, it branches off, shifts from a simple function to a dazzling meaning, that of the demand for love. Meaning (destiny) electrifies my hand: I am about to tear open the other's opaque body, oblige the other (whether there is a response, a withdrawal, or mere acceptance) to enter into the interplay of meaning: I am about to make the other speak. In the lover's realm, there is no acting out: no propulsion, perhaps even no pleasure
nothing but signs, a frenzied activity of language: to institute, on each furtive occasion, the system (the paradigm) of demand and response. — Roland Barthes

These Greek capitals, black with age, and quite deeply graven in the stone, with I know not what signs peculiar to Gothic calligraphy imprinted upon their forms and upon their attitudes, as though with the purpose of revealing that it had been a hand of the Middle Ages which had inscribed them there, and especially the fatal and melancholy meaning contained in them, struck the author deeply. — Victor Hugo

It. At intervals of forty or fifty feet, air monitors were mounted on the right-hand wall. I found no signs of tampering. If the passageway led to the cooling-tower vault, as I was sure that it must, then it would be about four hundred feet long. Twice I thought I heard something behind me. When I looked over my shoulder, nothing loomed. The third time, I refused to succumb to the urge to glance back. Irrational — Dean Koontz

The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.
The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the rooms four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace negligee stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin. — Angela Carter

She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God's plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world. — Cormac McCarthy

If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare ... we should be able to show why ... his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we ... call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein ... without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare's mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and simple. — William James

You attain to knowledge by argument;
You attain a craft or skill by practice;
If voluntary poverty's your choice,
companionship's the way, not hand or tongue.
The knowledge of it passes soul to soul,
not by way of talk or reams of notes.
Its signs are writ upon the seeker's heart,
yet still the seeker cannot ken those signs
until his heart becomes exposed to light
Then God reveals His: Did We not expose? [Qur'an 94:1]
for We've exposed the chambers of your breast
and placed the exposition in your heart — Rumi

When our earliest human ancestors left the trees and moved to the open grasslands of the savanna, they adopted an upright stance. Possessing already this powerful visual system, they could see far into the distance (giraffes and elephants might stand taller, but their eyes are on the sides, giving them instead panoramic vision). This allowed them to spot dangerous predators far away on the horizon and detect their movements even in twilight. Given a few seconds or minutes, they could plot a safe retreat. At the same time, if they focused on what was nearest at hand, they could identify all kinds of important details in their environment - footprints and signs of passing predators, or the colors and shapes of rocks that they could pick up and perhaps use as tools. — Robert Greene

Why, I ask, can I not finish the letter that I am writing? For my room is always scattered with unfinished letters. I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come. blundering, but fervid, I see myself buzzing round flowers, humming down scarlet cups, making blue funnels resound with my prodigious booming. How richly I shall enjoy my youth (you make me feel). And London. And freedom. But stop. You are not listening. You are making some protest, as you slide, with an inexpressibly familiar gesture, your hand along your knee. By such signs we diagnose our friends' diseases. "Do not, in your affluence and plenty," you seem to say, "pass me by." "Stop," you say. "Ask me what I suffer. — Virginia Woolf

Behind me the radiator goes on, giving yet another encore performance. Tink, tink, tink, tink.The warmth slowly comes up on my back. Hard worker, that heater. The bulb, on the other hand, is doing a flickering thing, showing some signs of fatigue. You're losing, bulb. — Veronica Rossi

Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her cunt a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the knotted tails of the cat were about to descend, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption 'Reproof of curiosity. — Angela Carter

A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It's a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity. — Jimmy Carter

Above all, there has never been a community that did not cohabit with its dead. But today, socially, the dead are no more. They are deceased. They are ontic has-beens. And with the vanishing of the dead, the most significant distinction between homo and all other primates is gone. When you show me a paleolithic skull, I recognize it as human not because of the cubic measure of the brain or because of the hand tools found in the grave but because of signs of burial. These reveal that this "person" lived a life on the borderline between the seen and the unseen, in the presence of the living and the dead. Neither the dead nor other invisible beings had to show themselves to be considered social realities. — Barbara Duden

I witness many signs of hope. I don't have to wait until all is well, but I can celebrate every little hint of the Kingdom that is at hand. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

-flashed Langdon the thumbs-up
sign. Langdon smiled weakly and returned the gesture, wondering if she knew it was the ancient phallic
symbol for masculine virility. — Dan Brown

Some prevailing signs of social climbers are their:
- ticking cunning ambition
- times of deceit
- hand of wickedness
- gloves of bigotry
- hidden bunch of schemes
- cup of pride
- sip of prejudice
- odour of greed
- grit of hatred
Their favorite hunger is comparing themselves to others. A thirst of competition with sloth, jealousy and anger at their spirits. — Angelica Hopes

Your majesty, please reconsider," Lord Dudley pleaded. "Your position will be much stronger with your husband as king. The people will see it as a sign of strength - "
She took a deep breath. "They need signs of my strength, not my reliance on the men around me — Cynthia Hand

This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one. — Primo Levi

To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes ... or so it seems, whose actual referent is always the other, the described, the reality of a world once removed. I prefer, on the other hand, to look at the photographs as something real and of my world, a strange and powerful thing ... part of a language, a system of communication, an economy of signs. — Sarah Charlesworth

It's not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America. It's the hand that casts the ballot. — Harry S. Truman

In the silence, the boy understood that the desert, the wind, and the sun were also trying to understand the signs written by the hand, and were seeking to follow their paths, and to understand what had been written on a single emerald. He saw that omens were scattered throughout the earth and in space, and that there was no reason or significance attached to their appearance; he could see that not the deserts, nor the winds, nor the sun, nor people knew why they had been created. But that the hand had a reason for all of this, and that only the hand could perform miracles, or transform the sea into a desert . . . or a man into the wind. — Paulo Coelho