Inscribed Quotes & Sayings

Picture the Bay of Bengal as an expanse of tropical water: still and blue in the calm of the January winter, or raging and turbid with silt at the peak of the summer rains. Picture it in two dimensions on a map, overlaid with a web of shipping channels and telegraph cables and inscribed with lines of distance. Now imagine the sea as a mental map: as a family tree of cousins, uncles, sisters, sons, connected by letters and journeys and stories. Think of it as a sea of debt, bound by advances and loans and obligations. Picture the Bay of Bengal even where it is absent - deep in the Malaysian jungle, where Hindu shrines sprout from the landscape as if washed up by the sea, left behind. — Sunil S. Amrith

The World Cup is not just a great global sporting event, it is also inscribed with much deeper cultural and political importance. — Martin Jacques

And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine: — William Gibson

Queen Jane Seymour's epitaph, inscribed in Latin, translated roughly to:
Here lies Jane, a phoenix
Who died in giving another phoenix birth,
Let her be mourned, for birds like these
Are rare indeed. — Leslie Carroll

The Holy Spirit can't remind you of something you never read which is why it's important to memorize scripture. When you have Bible verses inscribed in your mind, you're carrying a concealed weapon to use against the enemy in battle. Find a passage today and begin laying up His words in your heart and in doing so you will be prepared for any trials that will come. — David Jeremiah

Inside it he inscribed a few lines of poetry, portraying us as the gypsy and the fool, one creating silence; one listening closely to the silence. In the clanging twirl of our lives, these roles would reverse many times — Patti Smith

He directed that the stone over his grave be inscribed: Hic jacet hujus sententiae primus auctor: DISPUTANDI PRURITUS ECCLESIARUM SCABIES. — Izaak Walton

No one would want to pay a penny for an empty canvas by me. But it would be quite another if the empty canvas were signed by a great artist. I would be surprised if an empty canvas by Picasso or Matisse signed and inscribed with the words, 'I wanted to paint such and such on this canvas, but did not do so,' would not fetch thousands ... After all, with an empty canvas, the possibilities are limitless, and so perhaps is the cash. — Semir Zeki

These are the oldest memories on earth, the time codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories. From the enzymes controlling the carbon-dioxide cycle, to the organization of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the pyramid cells of the mid-brain. Each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in a chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. — J.G. Ballard

This song of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all ... On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen ... and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it - a vast pulsing harmony - its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries. — Aldo Leopold

The words "Think and Thank" are inscribed in many of the Cromwellian churches of
England. These words ought to be inscribed in our hearts, too: "Think and Thank". Think
of all we have to be grateful for, and thank God for all our boons and bounties. — Dale Carnegie

Still. Four words.
And I didn't realize it until a couple of days ago, when someone wrote in to my blog:
Dear Neil,
If you could choose a quote - either by you or another author - to be inscribed on the wall of a public library children's area, what would it be?
Thanks!
Lynn
I pondered a bit. I'd said a lot about books and kids' reading over the years, and other people had said things pithier and wiser than I ever could. And then it hit me, and this is what I wrote:
I'm not sure I'd put a quote up, if it was me, and I had a library wall to deface. I think I'd just remind people of the power of stories, and why they exist in the first place. I'd put up the four words that anyone telling a story wants to hear. The ones that show that it's working, and that pages will be turned:
... and then what happened? — Neil Gaiman

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. — Hermann Hesse

Her grave is in Brocklebridge Churchyard: for fifteen years after her death it was only covered by a grassy mound; but now a gray marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word 'Resurgam'. — Charlotte Bronte

For a billion years the patient earth amassed documents and inscribed them with signs and pictures which lay unnoticed and unused. Today, at last, they are waking up, because man has come to rouse them. Stones have begun to speak, because an ear is there to hear them. Layers become history and, released from the enchanted sleep of eternity, life's motley, never-ending dance rises out of the black depths of the past into the light of the present. — Hans Cloos

Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite. — Michel Foucault

I stare at his forearms. I can make out a naked woman with a snake going up her vagina. She's holding a knife, slitting her own throat. There are three playing cards on the back of his right hand: the Queen of Spades, the Jack of Hearts and the Joker. Red flames lick his elbow.
There's a watch tattooed on his left wrist with 'Fuck Time' inscribed on its face. Fuck o'clock.
He's not that tall, but his body is carefully cut. The lines of his face, his cheekbones and jaw, are sharp and precise. I can see the tufts of his blond underarm hairs and under them the ladder of his ribs. He's beautiful, in the way that a knife is beautiful. — Kirsty Eagar

Imagine any problem you have to be a huge, locked door standing in front of you. Now see yourself taking a golden key out of your pocket. You brought the key here with you when you arrived on this planet, but you sometimes forget to use it. See yourself putting it into the keyhole, then watch the door swing open. On the key are inscribed these words, "Unconditional Love." — Marianne Williamson

I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone. — Charles Lamb

What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle. — David Foster Wallace

23"Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! 24Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! 25For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. [41] 26And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in [42] my flesh I shall see God, 27whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! — Anonymous

but I do take an enormous interest in the personal aspects of what archaeology reveals. I like to find a little dog buried under the threshold, inscribed on which are the words: 'Don't stop to think, Bite him!' Such a good motto for a guard-dog; you can see it being written on the clay, and someone laughing. The contract tablets are interesting, — Agatha Christie

I can't allow the pages of my life to turn with nothing memorable inscribed upon them. — Alex Rutherford

I wonder how many of our tombstones will have to be inscribed with the epitaph 'Died of too many meetings'? — Hannah Whitall Smith

She explained to him that she had been homesick, and that Father Flood had inscribed her on the course as a way of making her busy, and how studying in the evening made her feel happy, or as happy as she had been since she had left home. — Colm Toibin

The only furniture in the dank space was a flimsy cot. Water dripped steadily in one corner. A hole in the floor appeared to serve as a latrine. What most caught Kendra's eye were the messages scratched on the wall. She roamed the cell, reading the crudely inscribed phrases.

"Seth rules!

Welcome to Seth's House.

Seth rocks!

Seth was here. Now it's your turn.

Seth Sorenson forever.

Enjoy the food!

If you're reading this, you can read.

All roads lead to Seth.

Is it still dripping?

Seth haunts these halls.

You're in a Turkish prison!

Seth is the man!

Use the meal mats as toilet paper." And so forth.

Cold, hopeless, and alone, Kendra found herself giggling at the messages her brother had scrawled. He must have been so bored! — Brandon Mull

The fact that we humans are indeed omnivorous is deeply inscribed in our bodies, which natural selection has equipped to handle a remarkably wide-ranging diet. — Michael Pollan

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there. — Damon Galgut

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being. — Aleksandar Hemon

Most interesting," said Summerlee, bending over my shin. "An enormous blood-tick, as yet, I believe, unclassified." "The first-fruits of our labors," said Challenger in his booming, pedantic fashion. "We cannot do less than call it Ixodes Maloni. The very small inconvenience of being bitten, my young friend, cannot, I am sure, weigh with you as against the glorious privilege of having your name inscribed in the deathless roll of zoology. Unhappily you have crushed this fine specimen at the moment of satiation. — Arthur Conan Doyle

But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Today's believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. — Simone De Beauvoir

At ebb tide I wrote a line upon the sand, and gave it all my heart and all my soul. At flood tide I returned to read what I had inscribed and found my ignorance upon the shore. — Khalil Gibran

Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false. — Michel Foucault

Love could be immortalized. It could be remembered and written forever into the world, inscribed on some inanimate object. It could be wonderful words given by a loved one, or simple letters combined to show an unbroken bond." Alexis from "The Shoreline — Lindsay Chamberlin

In Hong Kong, I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera", in which the hero must wait until his seventies before being united with his beloved. In a moment of Melancholy, I inscribed my copy: Angelina, I will love you always. Adam and sent it to her, via Jacinta. It was an unhealthy book for me to have read at that time, and to have then inflicted on Angelina. Just wait long enough and somehow the right people will die. The starts will align, we'll get over ourselves and we'll be together. And in the meantime, what? — Graeme Simsion

Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us. He has inscribed His thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand. — Theodore Parker

His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapor sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed. The craving to know what had become of him followed me everywhere. — Charlotte Bronte

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
[These words are also inscribed upon his grave] — Karl Marx

Fascinating,' said Darvin. 'The mystery of life. The miracle of reproduction. I don't know why I didn't learn all this in school.' 'I did not,' said Orro. 'I read it in an imaginative but broadly accurate illustrated treatise inscribed, if memory serves, on the wall of a municipal pissery. — Ken MacLeod

Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.: Our earth is degenerate these days ... bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The sentences which Plato says were inscribed in the shrine at Delphi are singularly unlike those to be found in holy places outside of Greece. Know thyself was the first, and Nothing in excess the second, both marked by a total absence of the idiom of priestly formulas all the world over. Something new was moving in the world, the — Edith Hamilton

What do you get the man who has everything? Might I suggest a gravestone inscribed with the words: so what? — Simon Munnery

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart. — Ralph Ellison

Deists, not religious authoritarians, codified the clear separation of church from state in addition to the division of powers within the state. Deists, not the Continental philosophers, established our democratic republic upon uniquely radical interpretations of constitutional and procedural stability, representation, accountability, and transparency. Deists, not autocrats, formed a more perfect Union that preserved equally for each individual the universal civil liberties inscribed in the Bill of Rights. It was Deists who stood up for Everyman by instituting true equality and freedom for all. — Beth Houston

Thus, the flower exists: its forms and characteristics are inscribed in our mind. But its nature is devoid of any intrinsic existence. — Dalai Lama XIV

What is essential to the unconscious is that out life, precisely because it is not a consciousness of others, in indifferent balance, but a node of significations which are traces of events, consisting of excrescences and gaps, forms a baroque system. Exactly as an adult or elderly body has its dynamic, its privileged positions, its style of gestures, and its syntax, an implex has its wrinkles and its own balancing processes, and the unconscious is our practical schema, where everything is inscribed in shillings and pence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'. — George Bernard Shaw

Upon laying a weight in one of the scales, inscribed eternity, though I threw in that of time, prosperity, affliction, wealth, and poverty, which seemed very ponderous, they were not able to stir the opposite balance. — Joseph Addison

[Kieran]his head propped on a stack of poetry books he'd brought from the library. Almost all of them had been inscribed on the inside cover by a James Herondale, who had neatly written out his favorite lines. — Cassandra Clare

I will make a prophecy that may now sound peculiar. In fifty years Lincoln's name will be inscribed close to Washington's on this Republic's roll of honor. — Carl Schurz

I'm not to blame, Ramborg, if a man's heart is created in such a fashion that whatever is inscribed on it when it's young and fresh is carved deeper than all the runes that are later etched. — Sigrid Undset

Love is not written on paper, for paper can be erased. Nor is it etched on stone, for stone can be broken. But it is inscribed on a heart and there it shall remain forever. — Rumi

The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart — Martin Luther

Human rights are inscribed in the hearts of people; they were there long before lawmakers drafted their first proclamation. — Mary Robinson

DD and CP are inscribed inside a heart. Corny and sweet. I trace the letters with my finger. "What a coincidence," I murmur, for some reason aching on the inside, aching to be that CP and for Dare to be that DD. — Courtney Cole

Your work is a very sacred matter. God delights in it, and through it, He wants to best His blessings on you. This praise of work should be inscribed on all tools, on the forehead and the faces that sweat from toiling. — Martin Luther

'Thou shalt not kill' does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings and this commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai. — Leo Tolstoy

The black-and-white figures of the photographs have had to stand in place of my memory and yet I have always felt that their unmarked graves became a part of me. What was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself. — Siri Hustvedt

Some men are daylight readers, who peruse the ambiguous wording of clouds or the individual letter shapes of wandering birds. Some, like myself, are librarians of the night, whose ephemeral documents consist of root-inscribed bones or whatever rustles in the thickets upon solitary walks. — Loren Eiseley

Starlight beats when heart twinkles
Youthful sky beyond cloudy wrinkles
Muse of glory to flame the night
Verse inscribed as written light — Munia Khan

Now, we have inscribed a new memory alongside those others. It's a memory of tragedy and shock, of loss and mourning. But not only of loss and mourning. It's also a memory of bravery and self-sacrifice, and the love that lays down its life for a friend-even a friend whose name it never knew. — George W. Bush

I have looked at it with all possible attention," said Dantes, "and I only see a half-burnt paper, on which are traces of Gothic characters inscribed with a peculiar kind of ink. — Alexandre Dumas

And what about the most merciful Christian God, slowly roasting in the fires of hell all those who would not submit? Was He not an executioner? And was the number of those burned by the Christians on bonfires less than the number of burned Christians? Yet - you understand - this God was glorified for ages as the God of love. Absurd? No, on the contrary: it is testimony to the ineradicable wisdom of man, inscribed in blood. Even at that time - wild, shaggy - he understood: true, algebraic love of humanity is inevitably inhuman; and the inevitable mark of truth is - its cruelty. Just as the inevitable mark of fire is that it burns. Show me fire that does not burn. Well - argue with me, prove the contrary! — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted. — Lewis H. Lapham

The only identification that would be inscribed on any cat's collar would be "This is the cat's cat." — Elmer Davis

He greeted me in his usual attire - pajama pants. "Hey stranger!" he said, hugging me for a few long seconds. "I've already set up the board. Can I get you some rose"
I nodded, overwhelmingly relieved to be with another human being - even if he was really a wolf in grandma's clothing. Or was he just a wolf in wolf's clothing? After all, he wore pajamas ... Hmmm. I contemplated all this as he poured me a glass of wine.
"Mind if I smoke?" he asked as he lit up a joint and motioned me over to the sleek brown couch. Italian, of course.
Through the three windows that faced south, north, and west, I saw the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island, where I had paid to have my parents' names inscribed in the immigrant wall of honor. Some American Dream this was! — Inna Swinton

There occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this:
He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute. — P.G. Wodehouse

One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life's burning question has been inscribed in one's soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim's soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine. — Michael Meade

I realize the dust we return to is not the same dust from which we come. It is not that we come from ashes and nothingness and return to the same ashes and nothingness. The dust we return to has history. The ashes we become were touched, inscribed, detailed, adorned. They glowed. — Zoe Klein

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

John Muir, Earth - planet, Universe
[Muir's home address, as inscribed on the inside front cover of his first field journal] — John Muir

Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.'The Rediscovery of the Unique' Fortnightly Review (1891) — H.G.Wells

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator - computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about. — Gilles Deleuze

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature. — Charles Baudelaire

Passing over them [Egyptian kings], then, I will mention the person who reigned after them, whose name was Sesotris. [ ... ] Whenever he encountered a brave people who put up a fierce fight in defence of their autonomy, he erected pillars in their territory with an inscription recording his own name and country, and how he and his army has overcome them. However, when he took a place easily, without a fight, he had a message inscribed on the pillar in the same way as for the brave tribes, but he also added a picture of a woman's genitalia, to indicate that they where cowards. 2-[102] — Herodotus

While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To
, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw."
He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw. — George Bernard Shaw

Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know. — Flannery O'Connor

Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence. — Albert Camus

My art would be that of living: each moment, each breath is a work inscribed nowhere. — Marcel Duchamp

A bitch is a bitch. I think that's inscribed in hieroglyphics on a pyramid somewhere. And hotness does not make up for it. — Brenda Rothert

Secrets have power. And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it's really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours. — Erin Morgenstern

At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, "To Rachel, from Daddy." The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me - both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father's dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, "The only paradise is paradise lost. — Mira Bartok

The Holy Ghost is not a Sceptic, and He has not inscribed in our hearts uncertain opinions, but, rather, affirmations of the strongest sorts. — Martin Luther

The planet Mars
crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms
has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planeto-logical theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin. — David Grinspoon

I want to take my rightful share of life by force, I want to give lavishly, I want love to flow from my heart, to ripen and bear fruit. There are many horizons that must be visited, fruit that must be plucked, books read, and white pages in the scrolls of life to be inscribed with vivid sentences in a bold hand. — Tayeb Salih

A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact. — Augustine Of Hippo

A scar is not always a flaw. Sometimes a scar may be redemption inscribed in the flesh, a memorial to something endured, to something lost. — Dean Koontz

This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription - insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself - and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. — Leslie Jamison

While I was at the funeral home, seeing my father for the final time, one of Darby's daughters gave me a box my dad left for me. When I opened it, it contained a silver bracelet, presumably a gift he'd gotten me for the wedding. Inscribed on the front were my initials, and as I looked at the back of the bracelet, I started crying even harder. My dad had inscribed, "To the man that you've become, and the son you'll always be. — Daniel Bryan

The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies - from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space - have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world. — Robert Macfarlane

In Biblical times, there were two different kinds of currency. One was shekels, which means weights,. The other coin was a zuz, which comes from the earth's circular movement and had nothing to do with the value of gold or silver. It had its own inherent value to it. The word "amen" was inscribed in the zuz, which is an acronym in Hebrew for the phrase "El Melech Neeman," meaning "the sovereign is trustworthy" and is an organizational copy of the statement "In God We Trust" that is found on our U.S. money. — Celso Cukierkorn

He pointed at Brother Jeremiah, who had come to a halt in front of a statue just slightly taller than he was, its base overgrown with moss. The statue was of an angel. The marble of the statue was so smooth it was almost translucent. The face of the angel was fierce and beautiful and sad. In long white hands the angel held a cup, its rim studded with marble jewels. Something about the statue tickled Clary's memory with an uneasy familiarity. There was a date inscribed on the base, 1234, and words inscribed around it: NEPHILIM: FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI.
"Is that meant to be the Mortal Cup?" she asked.
Jace nodded. "And that's the motto of the Nephilim - the Shadowhunters - there on the base."
"What does it mean?"
Jace's grin was a white flash in the darkness. "It means 'Shadowhunters: Looking Better in Black Than the Widows of our Enemies Since 1234.'"
"Jace - "
It means, said Jeremiah, The descent into Hell is easy. — Cassandra Clare

Money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. And it does not seem to matter much where it is inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display. — Niall Ferguson

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep. [ ... ]There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. [ ... ] His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar. — China Mieville

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [ ... ] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. — Michel Foucault

Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he will always see that word: murder - immortally inscribed upon the pediment of that vast slaughterhouse - humanity. — Octave Mirbeau

In order to arrive you must follow the signs. God inscribed on the world the path that each man must follow. It is just a matter of reading the inscription He wrote for you. — Paulo Coelho

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of man, without his vices. This praise, which would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of Botswain, a dog. — George Gordon Byron

An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea. The art of the novel (worn yet opulent phrase) is in the mix of idiosyncratic language - language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of a fingertip - and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image. Invention has little capacity for the true-to-life snapshot. It is true to its own stirrings. — Cynthia Ozick

Let us look forward to the time when we can take the flag of our country and nail it below the Cross, and there let it wave as it waved in the olden times, and let us gather around it and inscribed for our motto: 'Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever,' and exclaim, 'Christ first, our country next!' — Andrew Johnson