Hard Of Stone Quotes & Sayings

Dismissed like a dog. Damon groped for his jacket behind him, found it, and wished that his groping for his sense of humor could be as successful. The faces around him were all the same. They could have been carved in stone.
But not stone as hard as that that was coming together again around his soul. That rock was remarkably quick to mend - and an extra layer was added, like the layering of a pearl, but not covering anything nearly so pretty. — L.J.Smith

In his cradle he had been given four gifts. The ring in his hands and the locket that hung around his neck, the sword on his hip and an oath sworn in his name. The locket, containing the painted images of the mother and father he could not remember seeing in life, was the most precious, the oath the heaviest. "To stand against the Shadow so long as iron is hard and stone abides. To defend the Malkieri while one drop of blood remains. To avenge what cannot be defended." And then he had been anointed with oil and named Dai Shan, consecrated as the next King of Malkier and sent away from a land that knew it would die. — Robert Jordan

My safe, safe psychosis is broken.
It was hard.
It was made of stone.
It covered my face like a mask.
But it has cracked. — Anne Sexton

But they were not living, thought Harry: They were gone. The empty words could not disguise the fact that his parents' moldering remains lay beneath snow and stone, indifferent, unknowing. And tears came before he could stop them, boiling hot then instantly freezing on his face, and what was the point in wiping them off or pretending? He let them fall, his lips pressed hard together, looking down at the thick snow hiding from his eyes the place where the last of Lily and James lay, bones now, surely, or dust, not knowing or caring that their living son stood so near, his heart still beating, alive because of their sacrifice and close to wishing, at this moment, that he was sleeping under the snow with them. — J.K. Rowling

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes. — Thomas Moore

In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity - and it was an atrocity. — Oliver Stone

I think it's always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn't carry around a tape recorder ... I didn't chisel anything in stone ... Anybody can look and say, 'Well how do you know for sure?' And that's one of the most painful things about it. You don't. — Anne Heche

Near the Mexican border, rocky canyons cleave the mountains, laying them aside like broken wedges of gray cheese furred with a dark mold of pinon and juniper that sheds hard shadows on moon glazed stone, etched lithographs in gray and black, taupe and silver. Beneath feathery chamisa a rattlesnake flicks his tongue, following a scent. Along a precarious rock ledge a ring-tailed cat strolls, nose snuffling the cracks. At the base of the stone a peccary trots along familiar foot trails, toward the toes of a higher cliff where a seeping spring gathers in a rocky goblet. In the desert, sounds are dry and rattling: pebbles toed into cracks, hoofs tac-tacking on stone, the serpent rattle warning the wild pig to veer away, which she does with a grunt to the tribe behind her. From the rocky scarp the ring-tailed cat hears the whole population of the desert pass about its business in the canyon below. — Sheri S. Tepper

A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped. — J.R.R. Tolkien

But there is one thing only at which I have wondered at times, and yet it seemed foolish to think of it. It will happen sometimes when one has worked hard and done all that one can for the purpose before one-it is happened then that I have stood up and been content with the world of things and with what has been done there through me. And this may be pride, or it may be the full stress of the whole being and delight in labour-there are 100 explanations. That I have wondered whether that profound repose was not communicated from some far source and whether the life that is in it was altogether governed by time. And I'm sure that state never comes while I am concerned with myself, and I have thought today that in some strange way that state was itself the Stone. But if so then assuredly none of these men shall find it secret."
"Is that the end of desire?" Chloe said. — Charles Williams

Afternoon,Caputo," Cole said.
Jack's face remained a cool mask. "Hello, Cole.Becks."
Cole froze at Jack's casual use of his real name. His arm dropped from my shoulders. I couldn't help but smile.
Jack looked at me. "I'll see you in Mrs. Stone's room, Becks. You're coming, right? Mythology paper?"
I nodded.Just before he sauntered away, Jack winked at me and slapped Cole hard on the shoulder. "See you around, Neal. — Brodi Ashton

Remembering is my only job and it's hard work. We are natural-born amnesiacs, hardwired to let go of the past, to release ourselves from history; the only way to withstand our pain is to forget our pain. We may think we don't forget, but we do. Time wears down the rough edges of our memory, sure as a stone on the river bank is smoothed by the rushing current. And like the eroding stone, the memory fades so gradually we don't even feel it. We don't notice. Eighteen years fly by, whoosh, and we don't even realize that not long ago, we didn't all drink bottled water, the Soviet Union loomed as a threat, smoking was commonplace in restaurants, and Bono was just a rockstar.
What I want... all I want... is not to forget. But it's an uphill battle. Over time, the image blurs, the scent dissipates, the memory fades. — Greg Olear

Kids are meant to believe that their stepping stone to massive money is 'The X Factor.' Luck is great, but most of life is hard work. We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work. — Iain Duncan Smith

Have you failed today? If not, you might not be trying hard enough. Failure is a part of growth, a stepping stone towards success. In its own right it is a small victory and should be celebrated as such. So I ask you again, have you failed today? — Shane E. Bryan

Instead of walking along the winding roads she had settled on hiking, which she had discovered was both more difficult and more likely to yield photographic possibilities. She carried her cameras in a nylon backpack. There was a dry wall of stone that she had photographed from a number of angles and that she thought might have possibilities. There was an old paper wasp nest built around the limb of a pine tree that had galvanized her for an entire morning and then when she looked at the pictures afterward on the computer screen they'd amounted to nothing, nothing that made her feel or think or look twice or hard. They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure. The — Anna Quindlen

You think of me as a ... living stone - hard and cold. That's true. We are set the way we are, and it is very rare for us to experience a real change. When that happens, as when Bella entered my life, it is a permanent change. There's no going back ... — Stephenie Meyer

Ezra felt his heart cry out, as though it were branded by the stone he now held. Then he roared against the tide of regret and anguish that suddenly filled him, a piercing grief for he knew not what. Ezra cast the first stone. Stephen was struck hard. But he straightened, lifted his eyes and his voice to heaven, and cried, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." The stones rained down upon him even as his face was lifted to the heavens, shining with that same light as in the Council chamber. The last words Ezra heard him speak were, "Lord, do not charge them with this sin. — Janette Oke

Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else. — Lemony Snicket

I could feel the hard part of Mom very strongly that time. It was like a stone in her that grew bigger every time my father lost his temper, right under her heart. Feeling the stone in her calmed me down. It told me that she would always be there for me. — Kaimana Wolff

He said you have to be on the side of the losers, the people with bad lungs. You have to be with those who are homesick and can't breathe very well in Ireland. He said it makes no sense to hold a stone in your hand. A lot more people would be homeless if you speak the killer language. He said Ireland has more than one story. We are the German-Irish story. We are the English-Irish story, too. My father has one soft foot and one hard foot, one good ear and one bad ear, and we have one Irish foot and one German foot and a right arm in English. We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't have just one language and one history. We sleep in German and we dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people. — Hugo Hamilton

When I was younger I could never get up in the morning, I always found it so difficult. If I had an appointment, I had no problem, but just getting up early for the sake of it was so hard, I just loved my bed (and still do!). — Benjamin Stone

Where I lived - winter and hard earth.
I sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,
to break the ice. My broken heart -
I tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.
She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,
In bare feet, bringing all spring's flowers
to her mother's house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,
the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon. — Carol Ann Duffy

A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge. Wil or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well. The desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone. — Cormac McCarthy

People with power tell people without it to cross a chasm they don't want to cross, to reach a goal that isn't their own, to bring back the achievement to the person who took no risks to get what they wanted, who then wears the achievement that is the culmination of someone else's hard work around their neck like gold. — Craig Stone

The university campus was in the old part of town. The combination of water and stone creates a special, majestic atmosphere there. It's hard to be a sluggard under those circumstances, but I managed. — Sergei Dovlatov

Hard-hearted shouldn't need senses. — Toba Beta

Wait," Kaidan called from behind me. I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, but kept walking. Then I felt his hand around my
wrist, spinning me in a half circle and pulling me to his chest. His face was so close. He reached down and cupped my face with one
woolly hand, and wiped the top corner of my lip hard with his thumb. I flinched back.
"What are you doing?"
"I ... " He appeared to have no idea himself. "I wanted to see your freckle."
A vulnerable tenderness flashed across his face, more painful to see than the coldness. It took every ounce of strength I had not to
beg for one last kiss. As fast as his expression had softened, it was back to stone again.
"What do you want from me, Kai?"
"For starters?" His voice lowered to sexy, dangerous depths. "I want to introduce myself to every freckle on your body."
A powerful shiver ripped through me. — Wendy Higgins

I focus my eyes on my jade bracelet. All these years and for all the years after I die, it will remain unchanged. It will always be hard and cold- just a piece of stone. Yet for me it is an object that ties me to the past, to people and places that are gone forever. Its continued perfection serves as a physical reminder to keep living, to look to the future, to cherish what I have. It reminds me to endure. I'll live one morning after another. — Lisa See

Fuuuck. Mark that hole, babe." Michaels was pushing his ass up into Judge but there wasn't another inch available, every part of him that could fit was inside Michaels already. His sexy partner moaned while Judge rode out the last shivers of his orgasm. Judge fell to the side, arms thrown over his head, his heart beating so fast he thought he'd pass out. Michaels chuckled next to him. Leaned over and kissed, laughed, swam in the moment. Michaels buried his nose in Judge's armpit, inhaled him a while before he licked around the fury patch in the center, slicking down the fine hairs with his spit. Judge held Michaels' head in place, moaning the more Michaels bathed him. "Feels good," Judge whispered. It was absolutely the most erotic thing in the world. Judge's eyes opened back up and he saw right before he felt that Michaels was still hard as stone. "You didn't come." "Nope," Michaels said, pushing until Judge was on his stomach. Oh — A.E. Via

He heard Tamara scream his name, and Jasper yell, "We're supposed to stay here," but Call didn't slow. He was going to be the apprentice that Aaron thought he was, the one who there was nothing wrong with. He was going to do the kind of things that got you mysterious heroic achievements on your wristband. He was going to throw himself right into the fray.
He tripped over a loose stone, fell, and rolled to the bottom of the hill, banging his elbow hard on a tree root. Okay, he thought, not the best start. — Cassandra Clare

Feel"

Hello everyone, how are y'all doing Y'all seem busy
Don't mean to disturb you, is it me or y'all look dizzy

Can you hear the ocean screaming, can you see the wind in your hair
I know it all seems scattered here and there

Do I sound odd to you, Do you already have a name for me
Where do I belong to, How hard is it for everyone to agree

Can anyone hear me I see all of your vague faces
Coming from all different places
Unconsciously robbed of own your rights,
I wish I could make you all feel despite of all your races

Touch the ground, grab a stone and y'all know you're not alone
Have a mind of your own

Time ticks on
Each hour closer the death
Love, feel what are you waiting upon
Don't waste one breath. — Mauro Lannini

The stone in quarries is found to be of different and unlike qualities. In some it is soft ... in others it is medium ... in still others it is hard as in lava quarries. There are also numerous other kinds: for instance, in Campania , red and black tufas ; in Umbria , Picenum, and Venetia , white tufa which can be cut with a toothed saw like wood. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

It is the psychic depression of decadence which has come to this place and time. It is what happens to people who ignore their artists and deny their children. It is a terminal case of involutional melancholia which comes from within and cannot be cured by T.V. or psychotherapy or anything but a creative life, which is hard to come by in a country where it doesn't pay to do anything for yourself. — Jennifer Stone

It is has been a long time since I have written one of my statuses about life. I have been very busy trying to promote my Fan page, Friends and services, and my books. However, I can tell you all one thing for certain. I am not a Quitter. I will not stop writing books. I will not stop pushing myself to succeed. I will not stop being who I am.
I am a winner. Winning is an attitude. You take the good with the bad and you keep on going. It gets hard, you get tired and sometimes burnt out but you keep on going anyway, because you can.
Winners have setbacks, but winners learn tighten their belts and go on. Winner look at what has gone wrong and instead of complaining they find ways of doing it better. Winners know that Rome was not built in a day and take every day as it comes.
Winners do not whine, they roar. — Alexander Stone

It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the crops of the present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of the sowing for next year, and the mowing is at hand; when the rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left untouched by the plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the fields there comes at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet, and on the low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among it. — Leo Tolstoy

Syn couldn't finish a single thought as Furi worked that wonderful gadget inside of him like a professional sex toy representative showing him all the features of the little wonder. Furi stroked Syn's hard cock with one hand, concentrating on the blushing head every few strokes while working the toy in and out of him, increasing in intensity and speed. Syn was so overwhelmed by sensation he was babbling some language that even Rosetta Stone couldn't teach. His — A.E. Via

I do not view suicide as wicked, just terribly sad. There is only one death, but it is like a stone cast into a pond - the ripples stretch far. Such an act must leave a burden of sorrow, guilt, shame and confusion on an entire family. A natural death, such as my father suffered, is hard enough to deal with. A decision to end one's life must be still more devastating for those left behind. I cannot imagine the degree of hopelessness someone must feel to contemplate such an act. — Juliet Marillier

Aelin took a step forward.
One step, as if in a daze.
She loosed a shuddering breath, and a small, whimpering noise came out of her - a sob.
And then she was sprinting down the alley, flying as though the winds themselves pushed at her heels.
She flung herself on the male, crashing into him hard enough that anyone else might have gone rocking back into the stone wall.
But the male grabbed her to him, his massive arms wrapping around her tightly and lifting her up. Nesryn made to approach, but Aedion stopped her with a hand on her arm.
Aelin was laughing as she cried, and the male was just holding her, his hooded head buried in her neck. As if he were breathing her in.
"Who is that?" Nesryn asked.
Aedion smiled. "Rowan. — Sarah J. Maas

Does the work get easier once you know what you are doing?"
"Your lungs grow thick with stone dust and your eyes bleary from the sun and fragments thrown up by the chisel. You pour your lifeblood out into works of stone for Romans who will take your money in taxes to feed soldiers who will nail your people to crosses for wanting to be free. Your back breaks, your bones creak, your wife screeches at you, and your children torment you with open begging mouths, like greedy baby birds in the nest. You go to bed every night so tired and beaten that you pray to the Lord to send the angel of death to take you in your sleep so you don't have to face another morning. It also has its downside. — Christopher Moore

The Poet With His Face In His Hands
You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn't need anymore of that sound.
So if you're going to do it and can't
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't
hold it in, at least go by yourself across
the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets
like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you
want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched
by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything. — Mary Oliver

Cricket was a manly game. Manly masters spoke of the 'discipline of the hard ball'. Schools preferred manly games. Games were only manly if it was possible while playing them to be killed or drowned or at the very least badly maimed. Cricket could be splendidly dangerous. Tennis was not manly, and if a boy had asked permission to spend the afternoon playing croquet he would have been instantly punished for his 'general attitude'. Athletics were admitted into the charmed lethal circle as a boy could, with a little ingenuity, get impaled during the pole-vault or be decapitated by a discus and did a manly death. Fives were thought to be rather tame until one boy ran his head into a stone buttress and got concussion and another fainted dead away from heat and fatigue. Then everybody cheered up about fives. — Arthur Marshall

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home - dear and familiar stone hearth and garden - and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. — Annie Dillard

Ave Maria

Ave Maria! Maiden mild!
Listen to a maiden's pleading
from these rocks, stark and wild,
my prayer shall be wafted to thee.
we shall sleep safely till morning,
though men be ever so cruel.
o Maiden, see a maiden's distress,
O Mother, hear a suppliant child.

Ave Maria, undefiled!
When we upon this rock lie down
to slumber, and they protection covers us,
The hard stone will seem soft to us.
If Though smilest, the scent of roses will float
Through this murky cavern,
O Mother, hear a child's petition,
O maiden, 'tis a maid that calls!

Ave Maria, Maiden pure,
the demons of the earth and air,
drien forth by thy gracious glance
cannot stay here with us.
we will camly bow to fate
Since they holy comfort hovers over us;
Mayest though be favourably inclined to the maiden,
To the child that pleads for her father! — Barbara Bonney

You're not honey. Your'e wine. You're the deepest, darkest shadow under a tree on a blazing day. You're strong and hard, coursing like a current at the bottom of a river. — Cate Tiernan

Somebody Within this world are the great oceans, And on those oceans the dark smudge Of continents and the green islands With towns and cities, their stone sinews Taut under the soft plumage Of dust and smoke. And in those cities Are streets full of people of many colours, Laughing, sighing, whistling tunes Of times and places that are not now. And one I saw a moment ago, Who tried to keep on his poor hearth Of bone the fire from going out; Who tried to grow to the full stature His shadow attained on the hard wall. And his hands were clenched and his feet sore; His mind ached and his brow was charted With care, and fear formed in his veins. Yet he looked up and smiled, as he passed. 1970 — R.S. Thomas

He was thinking of Marco, Daisy, Sono
Oguki, Madeleine, the Pontritters, and now and then of the difference between ancient and modern
tragedy according to Hegel, the inner experience of the heart and the deepening of individual
character in the modern age. His own individual character cut off at times both from facts and from
values. But modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, lacking the stone-like certitude of
archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth century, clear, hard theorems. — Saul Bellow

They think I am glass. But I am not. I am not delicate. I am stone. If they want to break me, they will have a hard time of it. I am unbreakable. — Jennifer Ellision

Out in the stone-pile the toad squatted with its glowing jewel-eyes and, maybe, its memories. I don't know if you'll admit a toad could have memories. But I don't know, either, if you'll admit there was once witchcraft in America. Witchcraft doesn't sound sensible when you think of Pittsburgh and subways and movie houses, but the dark lore didn't start in Pittsburgh or Salem either; it goes away back to dark olive groves in Greece and dim, ancient forests in Brittany and the stone dolmens of Wales. All I'm saying, you understand, is that the toad was there, under its rocks, and inside the shack Pete was stretching on his hard bed like a cat and composing himself to sleep.
("Before I Wake ... ") — Henry Kuttner

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch. — Ken Follett

I remember Cannae," she said, raising her head, "when we thought all was lost. Carthage had defeated us, and there were those who gave up hope. Yet we survived, by our fortitude, and by believing that we should endure. There are times, Marcus, when courage is all you have."
I looked down at the stone floor, chastened into silence by her cold, stern words. This was her way, as it had always been. It was the Roman way. Grief was an indulgence; and though she surely suffered, her suffering was for her alone. It seemed hard, but she had come from a hard family, brave men and brave women who through the generations had survived by facing down hardship and loss. Of all her long line of ancestors, she was not going to be the one to break.
And nor, I decided, was I. — Paul Waters

Government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker; ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God; set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another; and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community. — John Taylor Gatto

I thought of the stone angel. I pictured the snow falling over it, two classes of snow rising on the top of its wings. So silent, the both of them, the angel and the snow. I pretended I was the stone angel. I close my eyes and pretended as hard as I could, and after a while I was convinced I could feel wings sprouting from my shoulders. I wanted to look, to see my wings, but I was an angel stone, so I could not move. — Jerry Spinelli

History pays no heed to the unspectacular citizen who worked hard all day and walked at night to a humble home with dust on his tunic and his flat cap. But in the end the builders have had the better of it. The miracles they accomplished in stone are still standing and still beautiful, even with the disintegration of so many centuries on them, but the battlefields where great warriors died are so encroached upon by modern villas and so befouled by the rotting remains of motorcars and the staves of oil barrels that they do not always repay a visit. — Thomas B. Costain

The gargoyles were worth the climb: Some seemed so real they could easily have been demons turned to stone. One appeared to be biting the head off of some much smaller creature - a tiny man? - clutched in his claws. Another was contemplative, his monkeylike face resting in the palms of his oversized hands, as he observed his domain. Others stuck out their tongues, bared their teeth, made faces. Their expressions were so elastic and whimsical it was hard to believe they were carved of stone. — Juliet Blackwell

Choice: that was the thing. Other people claimed that you can't choose who you love
it just happens!
but Grace and Roman knew that was a bunch of happy horseshit. Of course you chose who you loved. If you didn't choose, you ended up with what was left
the drunks and abusers, the debtors and vacuums, the ones who ate their food too fast or had never read a novel. Damn, marriage was hard work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. Yet, year after year, Grace and Roman had pressed their shoulders against the stone and rolled it up the hill together. — Sherman Alexie

What's the difference between love and obsession? Didn't both make you stay up all night, wandering the streets, a victim of your own imagination, your own heartbeat? Didn't you fall into both, headfirst into quicksand? Wasn't every man in love a fool and every woman a slave?
Love was like rain: it turned to ice, or it disappeared. Now you saw it, now you couldn't find it no matter how hard you might search. Love evaporated; obsession was realer; it hurt, like a pin in your bottom, a stone in your shoe. It didn't go away in the blink of an eye. A morning phone call filled with regret. A letter that said, 'Dear you, good-bye from me'. Obsession tasted like something familiar. Something you'd known your whole life. It settled and lurked; it stayed with you. — Alice Hoffman

It was all still there, an immense quilt of bold, fantastical human will: the faded tawny golds and grays of the descending rooftops and scorched chimney pots, the cold steel-blue river with its fabled Left and Right Banks, the towers and steeples and crooked cobblestone streets, bisected by wide, brutish boulevards. As seductive as a mirage, but every slab of stone, every silent or uproarious inch of it, real. She had not returned triumphant as a brilliant painter or a self-made woman whose only worry about money was how to spend it ... but she had come back to Paris anyway. It was hard to imagine being unhappy here. — Christine Sneed

Take down the walls.
That is, after all, the whole point.
You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don't know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise or destruction.
Take down the walls.
Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.
Otherwise you may never know hell; but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying.
All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling you stomach.
And pull, and pull, and pull.
I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever.
Take down the walls. — Lauren Oliver

He could feel the earth beneath, all the deep stone of it, cool and hard near the surface of the earth, but hotter and softer as you went deep, until it flowed like honey, a vast sweet fiery ocean of molten rock a thousand times more voluminous and ten thousand times heavier than the sea. It felt to him as if it were his own blood, and his heart pumped it. — Orson Scott Card

When he[Thresh] shouts, I jump, never having heard him speak above a mutter. "What'd you do to that little girl? You kill her?"
Clove is scrambling backwards on all fours, like a frantic insect, too shocked to even call for Cato. "No! No, it wasn't me!"
"You said her name. I heard you. You kill her?" Another thought brings a fresh wave of rage to his features. "You cut her up like you were about to do to this girl here?"
"No! No, I-" Clove sees the stone, about the size of a small loaf of bread in Thresh's hand and loses it. "Cato!" she screeches. "Cato!"
"Clove!" I hear Cato's answer, but he's too far away, I can tell that much, to do her any good. What was he doing? Trying to get Foxface or Peeta? Or had he been lying in wait for Thresh and just badly misjudged his location?
Thresh brings the rock down hard against Clove's temple. It's not bleeding, but I can see the dent in her skull and I know that she's a goner. — Suzanne Collins

She felt something inside her turn to stone and fall down into her gut, where it lay cold and hard and uncomfortable. Which was impossible, of course. Human organs did not turn to stone and certainly could not shift into the stomach. — Trudi Canavan

It would indeed be a great delusion, if we stated that those sports of Nature [we find] enclosed in rocks are there by chance or by some vague creative power. Ah, that would be superficial indeed! In reality, those shells, which once were alive in water and are now dead and decomposed, were made thus by time not Nature; and what we now find as very hard, figured stone, was once soft mud and which received the impression of the shape of a shell, as I have frequently demonstrated. — Agostino Scilla

SUCH SILENCE As deep as I ever went into the forest I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old, and around it a clearing, and beyond that trees taller and older than I had ever seen. Such silence! It really wasn't so far from a town, but it seemed all the clocks in the world had stopped counting. So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied. Sometimes there's only a hint, a possibility. What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots than reason. I hope everyone knows that. I sat on the bench, waiting for something. An angel, perhaps. Or dancers with the legs of goats. No, I didn't see either. But only, I think, because I didn't stay long enough. — Mary Oliver

The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them. — G.K. Chesterton

Kell swept Lila up into his arms, amazed at her lightness. She took up so much space in the world - in his world - it was hard to imagine her being so slight. In his mind, she was made of stone. — V.E Schwab

Slumped to the floor. The pit of blackness welcomed her to let go and fall into the murky depths where conscience and pain ceased to exist.
Hands to her head, face to the stone, screaming without sound, she pushed back hard.
For nine months she'd tasted happiness, a chance at the closest thing she'd known to peace and a real life. For nine months the rage and violence that had defined so many of her years had finally ebbed, and now those who had no right had come with impunity to rip her out of this newfound calm, throwing her into an impossible situation where no matter what she did or what she chose, the end result would be a return to madness. — Taylor Stevens

Be still and let it wash over you. You are a stone at the bottom of a river. You are hard rock. The water wears you down, but it only makes you smoother. And the smoother and harder you are, the less the flow can affect you. — D.J. Molles

The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown. — John Updike

Usually, Shakespeare gives me goose bumps. The guy knows everything. Like some ancient angel quill-ing out blueprints life. Hiding it in fiction. And usually I love the sound of the words, the way they dance on the page. Today, they fall flat. My attention bobbing in the cosmos. All free brain-space is marinating in gap month fizz. I chew my pen, candy-cane style. The million possibilities ahead make it hard to care about right now. I write my answers slowly, each letter carved in stone not ballpoint. I'm going to explore the world, find my passion, try everything! The fizz shoots up my spine and a smile sprouts. — Jolene Stockman

I know what you're doing," he whispered to Raphael, whose movements only became more fervent, and the thought slipped from the boy's mind so that he became dazed and undone with pleasure, staring up at the ceiling, watching as it blurred and became indistinct, and he felt the rising rush of pleasure, until he cried out in a sharp gasp.
And the pleasure went on and on, as it did, unbearably, until either Raphael took pity on him, or he pushed his Genitor away. Whichever it was, the pleasure that was leaking into pain, stopped, and he was lifted and laid down on the stone, cold and hard under his spine, and Raphael was bent over him, kissing up this time, up to his lips, flicking his tongue at them, and whispering: "Don't question my love for you. Ever again. — Carmen Dominique Taxer

Check this out," Nine says. He holds up a small purple stone and then places it on the back of his hand. The stone slides into his hand - through it. Nine turns his hand over just as the stone pops out in his palm. "Pretty cool, right?" he asks me, waggling his eyebrows.
"Uh, but what is it supposed to do?" Eight asks, looking up from his own Chest.
"I dunno. Impress girls?" Nine looks over at me. "Did it work?"
"Um ... " I hesitate, trying not to roll my eyes too hard. "Not really. But, I've seen guys teleport so I'm kind of hard to impress."
"Tough crowd. — Pittacus Lore

I fold back the sheet, get carefully up, on silent bare feet, in my nightgown, go to the window, like a child, I want to see. The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow. The sky is clear but hard to make out, because of the searchlight; but yes, in the obscured sky a moon does float, newly, a wishing moon, a sliver of ancient rock, a goddess, a wink. The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway. I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I — Margaret Atwood

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. ... All history is taken in by stones. — Susan Griffin

Always she had sounded sympathetic, always she had appeared to understand. But inside there was a bit of her that said that they couldn't have tried hard enough. If Celia had a daughter who was desperately unhappy at school and who had lost four stone in weight, she wouldn't hang around
she'd try to cope with it. If she had a father who couldn't cope she'd have him to live with her. Only now was she beginning to realize that it was not to be so simple. People had minds of their own. And her mother's mind was like a hermetically sealed box in a vault of a bank. — Maeve Binchy

First, we think all truth is beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain is good because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex is beautiful even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety without making moral judgments. We think the prostitute is as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet minister, for they all fit into the pattern of nature and are woven into the design of life! — Irving Stone

It's hard for me to speak to you as if you were not a tyrant," I say. "You sit here and think you are more civilized than Luna because you obey your creed of honor, because you show restraint." I gesture to the simple house. "But you are not more civilized," I say, "You're just more disciplined."
"Isn't that civilization? Order? Denying animal impulse for stability?" He eats his fruit in measured bites. I set mine on the stone.
"No, it's not. But, I'm not here to debate philosophy or politics."
"Thank Jove. I doubt we'd agree upon much. He watches me carefully.
"I'm here to discuss what we both know best, war. — Pierce Brown

As a songwriter, it's kind of hard to listen to your own stuff with clarity. — Stone Gossard

Was it really that fucking great to be gay? Ever since he got too fucked up to drive home and he'd crashed at Day and God's place after their cookout this summer. Green was in Miami testifying in a Federal case, so he didn't have his usual designated driver. Shit. He'd heard his lieutenants going at it in the middle of the night. It was so loud and violent, but wildly erotic. He didn't know if they forgot he was downstairs or if they just didn't give a fuck. He remembered being hard as goddamn stone lying there, and feeling like a pervert for listening. But since then, he hadn't been able to get the sounds out of his head. The sounds of furious passion and uninhibited ecstasy. The way God roared his lover's name when he ca - " "Time — A.E. Via

III
But may I, when alone again I have the city's crush
and tangled noise-skein and the furor
of its traffic all around me,
may I above the mindless swirl
recall sky and the gentle mountain rim
on which the far-off herd curved homeward.
May my spirit be hard as rock
and the shepherd's life to me seem possible-
the way he drifts and turns brown in the sun and with a practiced
stone-throw mends his flock, whenever it frays.
Steps slow, not light, his body pensive,
but in his standing there, majestic. Even now a god
might enter this form and not be lessened.
He lingers for a while, then moves on, like the day itself,
and shadows of the clouds
pass through him, as though space were slowly
thinking thoughts for him. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Some people work hard in this business and become really popular, really big stars but they never receive an award from within the business. Somehow, when your colleagues and friends believe in you to the point of handing you an award it means so much more. — Sharon Stone

But how to be present to another? Our hearts are so hard. We are so insensitive to the suffering of others. We must pray the Holy Spirit to change our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh so that we may give life, for love is giving of life and liberty. By our confidence in another we can bring forth new aspirations and a taste for life in him. We can help the miserable person to live, to progress and to grow. And he will only begin to want to live when he has been told by our gestures, words, the tone of our voice, our look, our whole being that it is important that he live. — Jean Vanier

I'm very expressive.
i deserve to feel pretty.
i kissed the blarney stone.
i am strong. i am brave.
im a good friend. I'm a good sister. I'm a good wife. i am a good in-law. I'm a good daughter. i am a good niece. I'm a good beagle mother. i am a good granddaughter.
i work hard for it, honey.
im superfly TNT motherfucker.
im a pilot of the airwaves.
im a better third baseman that brooks robinson.
I B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E.
i have exceptionally beautiful feet, eyes, ears, hips, hair, teeth, breasts. and shoulders. and fingernails. in a different pen, she added, and eyelashes and eyebrows, plus in yet another pen, and nose. and chin. — Rob Sheffield

You're hard sometimes, but you're genuine and easy to love. You give people everything you have to give, Silas. You're a rough diamond amongst pearls. You look like a dirty stone amongst the sheen, but your value far exceeds the silky dull shine of a pearl. — Criss Copp

How should Spring bring forth a garden on hard stone? Become earth, that you may grow flowers of many colors. For you have been heart-breaking rock. Once, for the sake of experiment, be earth! — Rumi

He belted his sword around his hips, threw a cloak over his shoulder, and knelt on one knee beside the bed. He kissed her with his eyes open and she understood completely because she couldn't rob herself of one last sight of him either. "Mend my hose while I'm gone," he said, straightening. "Don't count on it." He smiled, the brief satisfied smile of a man who knew in whose hands his heart was kept, then turned and left the room without saying anything else. Jessica rose and pulled a blanket around her. Then she knelt on the hard stone floor of a medieval tower chamber and prayed that she hadn't just seen the last of him. — Lynn Kurland

I was the illegitimate child of the legitimate theater. I had no training. I came from downtown rock and roll, and when I came in and auditioned for the Broadway revival of 'Hair,' I had no eyebrows - kind of a Bowie-esque glimmer kid. And it was hard representing the flower power era when we were stone cold punks. — Annie Golden

Rick and Scotty, who had heard Australian slang before from Digger Sears, one-time mate of the Tarpon, broke into chuckles.

"I'd better translate," Scotty said, "'Lord stone the crows' is just an expression. Oscar Ashe is hard cash. Yakka is hard work. And dinkum oil is gospel truth. — John Blaine

Like what you feel do you? Because there is more of me that's just as hard you know? — Kitty Berry

The Dutchman [Brannenburg] was hard ... he was stone. His brain was eroded granite where the few ideas he had carved deep their ruts of opinion. There was no way for another idea to seep in, no place for imagination, no place for dreams, none for compassion or mercy or even fear.
He knew no shadings of emotion, he knew no half-rights or half-wrongs or pity or excuse, nor had he any sense of pardon. The more I thought of him the more I knew he was not evil in himself, and he would have been shocked that anybody thought of him as evil. Shocked for a moment only, then he'd have shut the idea from his mind as nonsense. For the deepest groove worn into that granite brain was the one of his own rightness.
And that scared me. — Louis L'Amour

Okay, I think it's time for another distraction" Eight says, disappearing again. He reappears by the outer circle of stones, plants his hands on an upright slab, and pushes hard. All I can do is watch in horror, frozen to the spot. The huge stone wobbles and slowly tips backwards, then the horizontal slab on top falls too, and that's when Eight starts yelling, "Help! Help! The stones are falling over! Stonehenge is falling down!" I will kill him. I clench my fists at my side, which is when I realize I still have a small rock in my hand. I lean down and carefully, pointlessly, return it to its spot. — Pittacus Lore

Now, from the crown of my head to the curve of my toe-nails, there was an unguent for every part of me - oil for my eyebrows and cream for my lashes; a jar of tooth-powder, a box of blanc-de-perle; polish for my fingernails and a scarlet stick to redden my mouth; tweezers for drawing the hairs from my nipples, and a stone to take the hard flesh from my heels. — Sarah Waters

I feel like a stone you have picked up and thrown to the hard rock bottom of your heart. — Randy Travis

Diesel was about to place the cockroach on the casket, and my purse rocked out with "Thriller" again.
"Excuse me," I said. And I answered my phone.
"I'm beginning to appreciate Hatchet," Wulf said to Diesel.
Diesel smiled. "She has her moments. And she makes cupcakes."
I disconnected and stuffed my phone into my pocket.
"Well?" Diesel asked.
"It was Glo. Her broom ran away again."
"I would appreciate it if we could get on with this without more interruption," Wulf said in his eerily quiet voice, his eyes riveted on mine.
"Lighten up," I said to Wulf. "Glo lost her broom again. This is a big deal for her. And what have we got here anyway ... a dead guy and a Stone. Do you think they can wait for three minutes longer?"
Diesel gave a bark of laughter, and Wulf looked like her was trying hard not to sigh.
- Diesel, Lizzy, and Wulf, page 306-307. — Janet Evanovich

A rock or stone is not a subject that, of itself, may interest a philosopher to study; but, when he comes to see the necessity of those hard bodies, in the constitution of this earth, or for the permanency of the land on which we dwell, and when he finds that there are means wisely provided for the renovation of this necessary decaying part, as well as that of every other, he then, with pleasure, contemplates this manifestation of design, and thus connects the mineral system of this earth with that by which the heavenly bodies are made to move perpetually in their orbits. — James Hutton

We could go back," he said. In the dome light of the car, his face looked hard as stone. "We could go back to your house. I can stay with you always. We can know each other's bodies in every way, night after night. I could love you." His nostrils flared, and he looked suddenly proud. "I could work. You would not be poor. I would help you."
"Sounds like a marriage," I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. But my voice was too shaky.
"Yes," he said. — Charlaine Harris

Go, grieving rimes of mine, to that hard stone
Whereunder lies my darling, lies my dear,
And cry to her to speak from heaven's sphere. — Petrarch

Don't stop,' said Lymond pleasantly. 'You've my father, my brother, my late sister and a whole clecking of aunts to get through. Auntie May is a good one to start with. Fifteen stone, and every spring she goes broody; and we find her out in the hen run on a clutch of burst yolks; except the year mother got there first and hard-boiled them. — Dorothy Dunnett

What's the one superpower of June Elbus?"
I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands.
"Heart. Hard heart," I said, not sure where it came from. "The hardest heart in the world."
"Hmmm," Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. "That's a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is ... " Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously.
"What's the question?"
"The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt? — Carol Rifka Brunt

I imagined your stick, washing in the waves for hundreds of years, turning to driftwood, smooth and hard like stone. I imagined a little girl finding it on a beach so many years later. Saving it on her shelf, where she put the things that made her feel like the world was magical. — Ava Dellaira

He liked how it felt too, pulling himself up a wall stone by stone, fingers and toes digging hard into the small crevices between. He always took off his boots and went barefoot when he climbed; it made him feel as if he had four hands instead of two. He liked the deep, sweet ache it left in the muscles afterward. He liked the way the air tasted way up high, sweet and cold as a winter peach. He liked the birds: the crows in the broken tower, the tiny little sparrows that nested in cracks between the stones, the ancient owl that slept in the dusty loft above the old armory. Bran knew them all. Most of all, he liked going places that no one else could go, and seeing the grey sprawl of Winterfell in a way that no one else ever saw it. — George R R Martin