Jawed Quotes & Sayings

Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness - so to speak - are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures co-exist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other. — Christopher Isherwood

Does it bother you that I'm not a virgin?" He hesitated a moment before answering.
"Well, no," he said slowly, "so long as it doesna bother you that I am." He grinned at my drop-jawed expression, and backed toward the door.
"Reckon one of us should know what they're doing. — Diana Gabaldon

There! There it is again! What language is that?"
From the bed, Roarke shifted. "I believe it's known as rooster."
With the weapon at her side, she stared at him, slack-jawed. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Not a bit. It's morning, more or less, and that's a cock signaling the dawn."
"A cock?"
"I'd say. I don't think Sindead and her man want you to stun their rooster, but I have to say, Lieutenant, you make a fascinating picture."
She heaved out a breath, set her weapon down. "Jesus Christ, we may as well be on another planet." She slid back into bed. "And if your cock gets any ideas about signaling the day, remember I've got a weapon. — J.D. Robb

No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man ... it is simply incredible to think that ... he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites. — Thomas Huxley

The driver tried to help Emma down, but he found himself elbowed aside by a tight-jawed Steven. "Where the hell have you been?" Emma's husband demanded, grasping her shoulders in his hands. Emma met his eyes steadily. "What do you care?" she countered. His hands came to rest on her cheeks. "I care," he answered. Emma pulled away from him and started to walk into the house, but he caught hold of her hand and pulled her back. "We're going to talk," he announced, and then he dragged her around the front of the house, through the complex and well-tended garden, where Lucy liked to spend time when she was having a good day. He didn't stop until they'd reached the screened summerhouse, which was practically overgrown with wisteria. Opening — Linda Lael Miller

That was the trouble with pride, and courage, and all those clench-jawed virtues bards love to harp on. The more you have, the more likely you are to end up bottom in a pile of dead men. — Joe Abercrombie

I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run
off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent
wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare
to be that rivalry which occurs between apes. — Marisha Pessl

Guys who are larger than life and theatrical and deliciously unpredictable - they're far more interesting than the good guys most of the time. They have these psychological layers that an audience can really cling on to, become fascinated with, much more so than these true-blue, one-dimensional, square-jawed good guys. — Ron Perlman

I had one last try.
"Does it bother you that I'm not a virgin?" He hesitated a moment before answering.
"Well, no," he said slowly, "so long as it doesna bother you that I am." He grinned at my drop-jawed expression, and backed toward the door.
"Reckon one of us should know what they're doing," he said. The door closed softly behind him; clearly the courtship was over. — Diana Gabaldon

Where did you get this?" he asked.
"In a pocket in your coat," said Lila, stretching. "By the way, did you know that your coat is more than one coat? I'm pretty sure I went though five or six to find that."
Kell stared at her, slack-jawed.
"What?" she asked.
"How did you know what it was for?"
Lila shrugged. "I didn't."
"What if it had been poison?" he snapped.
"There's really no winning with you. — Victoria Schwab

Hadrian held the headphones close to one ear. "What is this, Eden? You're listening to music? Stupid, crappy music?"
The square-jawed man stared blankly at him. "It's Celine Dion, sir."
"Get security up here! I want this man in irons. Prepare the Dark Hole! — Steven Erikson

While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy's considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character. — Joyce Carol Oates

Mr. Gibbs: Curse you for breathin' ya slack-jawed idiot. Mother's love. Jack. You should know better than to wake a man when he's sleepin'. Its bad luck.

Jack Sparrow: Fortunately, I know how to counter it; the man who did the waking buys the man who was sleeping a drink; the man who was sleeping drinks it while listening to a proposition from the man who did the waking.

Mr. Gibbs: Aye, that'll about do it. — Jack Sparrow

Well, I'm here to tell you: I've seen women passionately devoted to men who couldn't pile bricks, and whole families of slack-jawed nose pickers held together by "love," not to mention all those people who curl up at night with dogs that have gunk running out of their eyes, dogs who earlier peed where they were about to walk and spent ten minutes licking their own wormy butts. — Haven Kimmel

Anyone who remembered the grim, gun-toting, thug-murdering Batman of 1939 could see that he'd become a fundamentally different guy: a grinning, lantern-jawed, wisecracking adventure hero who'd left that emo "creature of the night" shtick far behind. — Glen Weldon

This bastard was in a self-help program? For what? Square-jawed, cleft-chin sufferers? Handsome Bastards Anonymous? — Susan Juby

I must endure, fighting the temptation simply to become slack-jawed like most of my school 'peers' (they wish!), who will themselves into a collective, vacant, trancelike state for the duration of each class. (Although I sometimes secretly envy their ability to empty their minds completely for a full fifty minutes, reanimating only at the sound of a bell, like Pavlov's dogs ... ) — Beth Fantaskey

For a while he'd tried molding himself into the tragic Romantic hero, brooding and staring clench-jawed off into space as he composed dark verse in his head. But it turned out that trying to appear tragic in Incontinence, Indiana, was redundant, and his mother kept shouting at him and making him forget his rhymes. "Tommy, if you keep grinding your teeth like that, they'll wear away and you'll have to have dentures like Aunt Ester." Tommy only wished his beard was as heavy as Aunt Ester's
then he could stare out over the moors while he stroked it pensively. — Christopher Moore

If everyone approved, there'd be no point to it. — Sally Robinson

We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side so few died. (Our side meaning the lantern-jawed John Wayne Greatest Generation constantly canonized soldiers who strode in late to the graveyard that was Europe. Compared to Jewish, Russian, Roma, and other casualties, our losses were minimal.) We felt so strong. In some ways I think we're always trying to recapture that feeling of being a country of superheroes. With every war we invoke that one, we hope it will be that good.
-from her blog — Catherynne M Valente

A sharp character - no youth as I feared - a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all. — Walker Percy

She was a wonder junkie. In her mind, she was a hill tribesman standing slack-jawed before the real Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon; Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz; a small boy from darkest Brooklyn plunked down in the Corridor of Nations of the 1939 World's Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere beckoning in the distance; she was Pocahontas sailing up the Thames estuary with London spread out before her from horizon to horizon. been voyaging between the stars when the ancestors of humans were still brachiating from branch to branch in the dappled sunlight of the forest canopy. Drumlin, like many others she had known over the years, had called her an incurable romantic; and she found herself wondering again why so many people thought it some embarrassing disability. Her romanticism had been a driving force in her life and a fount of delights. Advocate and practitioner of romance, she was off to see the Wizard. — Carl Sagan

She feels so good and welcoming, like home. Reluctantly, I relinquish her, and Bob gives me an awkward one-armed hug. He seems unsteady on his feet, and I remember that he's hurt his leg. "Welcome back, Ana. Why you cryin'?" he asks. "Aw, Bob, I'm just pleased to see you, too." I stare up into his handsome square-jawed face and his twinkling blue eyes that gaze at me fondly. I like this husband, Mom. You can keep him. He takes my backpack. "Jeez, Ana, what have you got in here?" That would be the Mac, and they both put their arms around me as we head for the parking lot. I always forget how unbearably hot it is in Savannah. Leaving the cool air-conditioned confines of the arrival terminal, we step into the Georgia heat like we're wearing it. Whoa! It saps everything. I have to struggle out of Mom and Bob's embrace so — E.L. James

You're afraid the other tabbies will start thinking like me. You're afraid they'll start thinking, period! You wouldn't know what to do with a woman who has ideas of her own, and your vacant, slack-jawed stare right now proves it. — Rachel Vincent

It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings. — Marisha Pessl

Tough, and square-jawed, J.C. is a cold-blooded killer. Or so he claims. I think it means he likes to murder amphibians. — Brandon Sanderson

I'm tired, my head hurts, and the last thing I want is to play referee between you two. Get over it. She storms off, unable to stop the smug smile stretching her face at their stunned silence. The way people respond to her demands - all flabbergasted and slack-jawed - will never get old. — Laura Kreitzer

Even looking at him now, bedraggled, scruffy-jawed, and sleep-deprived, she wanted to strip the man's clothes off and drag him back to her bed to do wild things to him. And she was stone-cold sober. She couldn't imagine what she might have said or done with her inhibitions dulled by who knows how much whiskey she'd actually put away last night. — T.J. Kline

The media's weird obsession with billing immigrant terrorists as apple-pie Americans leads to comical results, such as the panelists on MSNBC's The Cycle puzzling over how Aafia Siddiqui, a "U.S.-trained scientist" could have become radicalized.56 Here's a tip for MSNBC: When you can't pronounce the terrorist's name, the rest of America isn't sitting in slack-jawed amazement. Siddiqui wasn't an American by any definition. She wasn't even an anchor baby. Rather, Siddiqui was born and raised in Pakistan and came to the United States as an adult via our seditious universities. After an arranged marriage over the phone with another Pakistani, who - luckily for America! - joined her here, she divorced and married the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Who could have seen Siddiqui's radicalism coming? — Ann Coulter

He wasn't a pretty boy, his nose was crooked and his grin lopsided, but he had that square-jawed, salt-of-the-earth handsome look that made a girl think of loose-hipped cowboys and demanding Scottish Lairds. And speaking of Scottish Lairds, old mate was a redhead. Usually gingers weren't her scene but this guy's hair was the rich coppery-auburn of a fox's pelt. It gleamed like rose gold under the floodlights, his short beard the exact colour as the stuff on his head. Big Red was doing it for her. Big time. And apparently, the feeling was mutual. — Eve Dangerfield

People look at Marvel movies as epic in scope, but if you look back at the comics, you realise that Marvel heroes were often a reaction to the square-jawed DC characters like Superman, who were flawless and beyond reproach. — Jon Favreau

To tell you the truth, I prefer just your average, run-of-the-mill, everyday jackass with his glass-eyed, slack-jawed obliviousness to the guys who try to hijack my cool by reading poetry and listening to halfway-good music. I worked hard for my cool. I got my ass kicked in middle school for my cool. I came by this shit honestly. — John Green

Entitlement is a double- edged sword (or a double-jawed trap) for kids. On one edge it gives kids all that they don't need - indulgence, dullness, conceit, and laziness; and on the backswing, it takes from them everything they do need - motivation, inde- pendence, inventiveness, pride, responsibility, and a chance to really work for things and to build their own sense of fulfill- ment and self-esteem. — Richard Eyre

even the simplest technology has you staring slack-jawed in wonder at it, until the drool runs down your chin. Hell, if I gave you a jump drive, you'd probably just worship it, so — Craig Alanson

The Earl of Blackstone didn't seem particularly mysterious to Emily. In fact, as he stood there silently - except for that sneering laugh he'd tried to cover up - she could think of several other adjectives to add to the list next time Sarah was searching for one: rude, self-important, boorish. And, if one could judge by the slightly slack-jawed way he stared at her, perhaps even "simple. — Jenny Holiday

I ain't never heardin' of a place called Odin."

Now Mazda knew. Hillbilly. A fucking hillbilly. If there was one thing that Mazda disliked more than Greeks, it was hillbillies. He grabbed the slack-jawed yokel by the throat and lifted him off the ground, "Not a place. A who."

The man had a difficult time speaking, "Awho? Who's Awho? Is he at Odin? — Dylan Callens

The Fringes are the place of the slack-willed, slack-jawed and slack-hued, remarked Floyd Pinken, who could comfortably boast all three of those attributes, if truth be known. — Jasper Fforde

It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form. — Richard Matheson

I'm useless when I meet writers I love - I go slack-jawed and stupid with awe. — Katherine Boo

Everyone likes a bit of variety. I'm sure none of my readers only want to read about anti-heroes or villainous protagonists any more than they only want to read about square-jawed heroes doing the right thing. I just write characters than entertain me and hope they'll be ones that other people want to read about, too. — Mark Lawrence

I think there's this new kind of character; it's a sidekick-slash-leading man role. People like Zach Galifianakis and Seth Rogen have been really successful in those roles. You don't have to be this square-jawed, chiseled, deep-voiced Superman; you can be funny and normal and put in the leading man category. — Tyler Labine

This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost us the election, and yet if we were to have them killed, we would be the ones to go to jail. That's democracy for you! — Winston Churchill

The Balance, my boy, is the war that has been waged since before time was time, the battle within ourselves to do what is good and reject what is bad. It is a delicate line we all walk, a constant struggle of push and pull. — Nikolas Lee

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I'm a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know - what'll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there's nothing to be well adjusted to! — Terence McKenna

Then go to my room where solitude gaped whale-jawed wide to swallow me entire. — Maya Angelou

Come to the jacaranda tree at seven o'clock and you will hear something to your advantage. Destroy this note.'
No signature, no clue to the identity. Just what sort of heroine do you think I am? Phryne asked the air. Only a Gothic novel protagonist would receive that and say, 'Goodness, let me just slip into a low-cut white nightie and put on the highest heeled shoes I can find,' and, pausing only to burn the note, slip out of the hotel by a back exit and go forth to meet her doom in the den of the monster - to be rescued in the nick of time by the strong-jawed hero (he of the Byronic profile and the muscles rippling beneath the torn shirt). 'Oh, my dear,' Phryne spoke aloud as if to the letter-writer. 'You don't know a lot about me, do you? — Kerry Greenwood

The minister said, "Let us pray," but as everyone else bowed their head, I could only stare slack-jawed at the sight of Peter Van Houten. After a moment, he whispered, "We gotta fake pray," and bowed his head. — John Green

Birds and periodic blood.
Old recapitulations.
The fox, panting, fire-eyed,
gone to earth in my chest.
How beautiful we are,
he and I, with our auburn
pelts, our trails of blood,
our miracle escapes,
our whiplash panic flogging us on
to new miracles!
They've supplied us with pills
for bleeding, pills for panic.
Wash them down the sink.
This is truth, then:
dull needle groping for the spinal fluid,
weak acid in the bottom of the cup,
foreboding, foreboding.
No one tells the truth about truth,
that it's what the fox
sees from his scuffled burrow:
dull-jawed, onrushing
killer, being that
inanely single-minded
will have our skins at last. — Adrienne Rich

Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! - Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! - and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose! — Mark Twain

Yukiko stared back at him. Slurred words and a soft stare, that stupefied, slack-jawed look slinking over his face and turning his skin to gray. An anesthetic, numbing the pain of well deserved loss. — Jay Kristoff

It's easy to slide into believing you're the hypnotist here, the mirage master, the smart cookie who knows what's real and how all the tricks are done. The fact is you're still just another slack-jawed mark in the audience. No matter how good you are, this world is always going to be better at this game. It's more cunning than you are, it's faster and it's a whole lot more ruthless. All you can do is try to keep up, know your weak spots and never stop expecting the sucker punch. — Tana French

Centerless pop-culture country full of marginalized subnations that are themselves postmodern, looped, self-referential, self-obsessed, voyeuristic, passive, slack-jawed, debased. — D.T. Max

The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was. — John Updike

Stubbornness is surely just taut-jawed, clenched-fisted madness. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Nate stared, slack-jawed as the cab merged with the traffic and became impossible to spot. That was it.
They chose each other.
Just then, the dark sky lit up with fireworks. A cab sailing the street honked in celebration . In the night air , Nate thought he could hear Serena and Blairs' laughter, though he knew that was impossible; they were too far away by now.
But as we know, in this city anything is possible — Cecily Von Ziegesar