Knotted Quotes & Sayings

The person who betrayed you is sunning themselves on a beach in Hawaii and you're knotted up in hatred. Who is suffering? — Jack Kornfield

I had less control over my thoughts than I'd have liked. The little ring hung around my neck, under my gown, where nobody could see it. When I was alone, I took it out sometimes, wondering how he had judged the size, with nothing but my swollen, knotted fingers to go by. Wondering if my hands would ever be as they once were, small, white, and fine. By the time that happened, if it ever did, I would be long gone from here. I would have left behind both husband and wedding ring. It mattered little whether the size were right or no. Yet, when I thought this, I found my hand closing around the ring as if I did not want to let it go. It's mine, something inside me would say. — Juliet Marillier

Taut, merry, nervous, expertly mounted, exquisitely clothed, haughty in their bright youth, the chevaliers of France poured from the disheveled clearing. Sunlit, all that morning, they spanned the glittering woods: diamond on diamond, grey on grey, riches on riches; bough and limb indistinguishable; skirts and meadows sewn in the same silks; skulls in antique fantasy knotted with rhizome and leafy with fern frond. Webs, manes, beards, spun the same smokelike filament; rime flashed; jewels sparked, red and fat, on rosebush and ring. Earth and animals wore the same livery. Jazerained in its berries, the oak tree matched their pearls, and paired their brilliant-sewn housings with low mosses underfoot, freshets winking half-ice in the pile. — Dorothy Dunnett

INTROSPECTION: LOOKING WITHIN
What is there to say about the inner life? It is as complex as the watery byways of Venice, Delicate as the hands of an infant child, Curious and compact as the wisdom of an acorn. It is as magnificent as the profile of an African queen.
It eludes comprehension and yet it is ever present, Enveloping every moment of life.
One lives from the inside out. A gnarl of emotion, biography, memory, and spirit. Each blending and bending into the other Like knotted strands of crocheted comforter. It is a world I will never truly understand, And yet the only reality I can ever know.
What — Karyn D. Kedar

He sighed, his hands tangling themselves in my already-knotted hair. Violet, don't ever leave me. Whatever happens; however things get, just don't go. Please. — Abigail Gibbs

I met a solid rowing friend and asked about the Race. "How fared it with the wind," I said, "When stroke increased the pace? You swung it forward mightily, you heaved it greatly back. "Your muscles rose in knotted lumps, I almost heard the crack. "And while we roared and rattled too, your eyes were fixed like glue. "What thoughtwent flying through your mind, how fared it, Five, with you?" But Five made answer solemnly, "I heard them fire a gun, "No other mortal thing I heard until the Race was done." — R. C. Lehmann

Go softly by that river side Or when you would depart, You'll find its every winding tied; And knotted round your heart. — Rudyard Kipling

He threw her a crooked grin as he removed his shirt completely, revealing a torso that seemed too perfectly muscular and finely honed to be real. Unbearable tension knotted inside her, and she struggled with inhibition and modesty as he bent over her. "Shall I stop now?" he asked, cuddling her against his long body. "I don't want to frighten you."
Her cheek pressed against his shoulder, and she relished the exhilarating sensation of pressing her bare skin against his. She had never felt so vulnerable, so willing to be vulnerable. "I'm not afraid," she said, her voice dazed and wondering, and she withdrew her hands from between their bodies, so that her breasts pushed directly against his chest.
An aching sound came from his throat, and he buried his face against her throat, kissing her, working his way downward. — Lisa Kleypas

Jace," she said. "Why are you doing this to me?"
"Because you're lying to me. And you're lying to yourself." Jace's eyes were blazing, and even though his hands were stuffed into his pockets, she could see that they were knotted into fists. — Cassandra Clare

Victory won't come
to me unless I go
to it; a grape tendril
ties a knot in knots till
knotted thirty times — Marianne Moore

Wilder offers this as his
explanation of why good people have to suffer in this life. God has a pattern into which all of our lives fit. His pattern requires that some
lives be twisted, knotted, or cut short, while others extend to impressive lengths, not because one thread is more deserving than
another, but simply because the pattern requires it. — Harold S. Kushner

The greatness of common sense, and its title to reverence, appear in this, that it deals with vast complexity, that is, with the innumerable elements of a situation. Common sense discerns and judges a path through this knotted and tangled maze. — James Vila Blake

Jem knotted his fingers in the material of Will's sleeve. "You are my parabatai," he said, "You said once I could ask anything of you. — Cassandra Clare

She's touching me, George complained as he and Martha slithered around the pole.
'She's always touching you,' Hermes said. 'You are intertwined. And if you don't stop that, you'll get knotted again! — Rick Riordan

My life is hard. No one would rob me of that. The clothes I am wearing came out of a knotted up black plastic trash bag from a resale shop downtown. And not the downtown where shiny cars wink at you in the sunlight. If a car winks at you in this area it's being driven by a person you would be best to avoid.
My side of downtown is crumbling and skirted by chain link fences.
Rocky Evans — Gwenn Wright

Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"
I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full.
"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. — Charlotte Bronte

To her amazement, she realized that the way of life of these people was nothing more than an indeterminate fiction, casually knotted together at particular points that were used again and again. With four or five remarks, and a couple of facial expressions, she had mastered it with no problem at all. — Gerhard Amanshauser

How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turnec the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, bus as long as Em was with him, he was at home? — Jodi Picoult

The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed on another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me." "That I never should, sir: you know - " Impossible to proceed. — Charlotte Bronte

And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city's uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and duck's bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams; creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their maws, all chewed up except for their helpless paddling feet; limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs. — Hilary Mantel

You spoke about things they couldn't see and so they laughed. Yet to row up the dark river against the current, to take the unknown road blindly, stubbornly, and to search for words rooted like the knotted olive tree- let them laugh. And to yearn for the other world to inhabit today's suffocating loneliness, this ravaged present- let them be. — Giorgos Seferis

At the end of that week, Navin arrived to marry me. I was repulsed by the sight of him, not because I had betrayed him but because he still breathed, because he was there for me and had countless more days to live. And yet without his even realizing it, firmly but without force, Navin pulled me away from you, as the final gust of autumn wind pulls the last leaves from the trees. We were married, we were blessed, my hand was placed on top of his, and the ends of our clothing were knotted together. I felt the weight of each ritual, felt the ground once more underfoot. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Around them small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum. — Gregory Benford

The task of the teacher of the Bible is to open up what's closed, to make plain what is obscure, to unravel what is knotted and to unfold what is tightly packed. — Alistair Begg

Resting on the roots of this old oak I lean back against his knotted trunk, shine my granny smith on my sleeve And ponder the days ... — Kellie Elmore

Memory did not let go; it remained the net dragged in one's wake, with all sorts of strange things snarled in the knotted strands. — Steven Erikson

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones. — William Faulkner

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

Beneath my eyes opens
a book; I see to the bottom; the heart
I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart. — Virginia Woolf

Is there anything you won't do?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"I've never done anything like this."
"Well, when you've had sex, was there anything that you didn't like doing?"
For the first time in what seems to be ages, I blush.
"You can tell me, Anastasia. We have to be honest with each other or this isn't going to work."
I squirm uncomfortably again and stare at my knotted fingers.
"Tell me," he commands.
"Well ... I haven't had sex before, so I don't know." My voice is small. I peek up at him, and he's gaping at me, frozen, and pale-really pale.
"Never?" he whispers. T shake my head.
"You're a virgin?" he breathes. I nod, flushing again. He closed his eyes and looks to be counting to ten. When he opens them again, he's angry, glaring at me.
"Why the fuck didn't you tell me?" he growls — E.L. James

Death watched me, amusement once again lifting to his dark eyes. Unlike me with my bedraggled clothes and knotted hair, he looked good in the morning light streaming into my apartment. Okay, actually, he looked exactly the same as when I'd first seen him when I was five years old, but recently I'd come to appreciate the way his black T-shirt pulled tight over the expanse of his shoulders and his faded jeans hugged his ass. Not that I was looking, of course. I mean, he was Death. — Kalayna Price

Darona's face bore the pinched, taut look and shadowed eyes of someone constantly in pain, but the lack of lines suggested she was younger than Jesral had first thought; middle-aged, fifty at the very most.
'You make an uncommonly fine looking noblewoman, for a Mhrydaineg commoner.'
'Thank you.' Jesral was careful to keep all tone out of her voice. Darona gave her a shrewd stare, then a slight smile.
'Self-control. Good. You must ignore me when I offend you unintentionally. They say that pain can make one waspish, but my brothers and son tell me there's been no change in my manner. I was acid-tongued long before this set in,' she held up a knotted hand, 'and taking devil's claw root has no effect on that. Rest assured, young woman, when I intend offence people are in no doubt about it. — Helen Bell

I swallowed down all the words, until they knotted up in my throat, and now I'm choking on I love you's and please don't go's. — Jessica Katoff

It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"
I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still.
"Because, he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me. — Charlotte Bronte

Comics ... are sometimes four-legged and sometimes two-legged and sometimes fly and sometimes don't ... to employ a metaphor as mixed as the medium itself, defining comics entails cutting a Gordian-knotted enigma wrapped in a mystery ... — Robert C. Harvey

In the construction of houses, choice of woods is made. Straight un-knotted timber of good appearance is used for the revealed pillars, straight timber with small defects is used for the inner pillars. Timbers of the finest appearance, even if a little weak, is used for the thresholds, lintels, doors, and sliding doors, and so on. Good strong timber, though it be gnarled and knotted, can always be used discreetly in construction. — Miyamoto Musashi

Devin was the most gorgeous, unique creature Kate had ever known. She'd come out of the womb an individual, refusing to be defined by anyone. She didn't even look like anyone on either side of their families. Matt's family was so proud of their dark hair, a blue-black that had been the envy of generations, the way it caught the sun like a spiderweb. From Kate's own side of the family, there was a gene that made their eyes so green that they could trick people into thinking that even the most unattractive Morris woman was pretty. And yet here was Devin, with fine cotton-yellow hair and light blue eyes, the left of which was a lazy eye. She'd had to wear an eye patch when she was three. And she'd loved it. She loved her knotted yellow hair. She loved wearing stripes with polka dots, and tutus, and pink and green socks with orange patent-leather shoes. Devin could care less what other people thought about her. — Sarah Addison Allen

I assemble monsters with my mind. I build them of broken glass, and forgotten words, and knotted yarn, I forget as they gobble up my memories, and I crawl as they pull upon my strings, but even when I write that they've trapped me in a tiny box wrapped with twisted burgundy bows addressed to return-to-sender, and I dream of wanting to dream... — Brandon Plaster

I looked up to see the sailing ship above me, the prow dipped low and Mircea hanging off the end of the wooden figurehead. His fist was knotted in my waistband, which explained why I couldn't breathe. Considering the alternative, I really didn't mind so much.
Even so, I was surprised his reflexes had been good enough to catch me. He looked kind of shocked himself. For a second, the reserved demeanor cracked open on something wild and fierce and compelling. Then he dragged me up, put a hand on either side of my face and kissed me full on the lips. From somewhere above, I heard Pritkin swear. — Karen Chance

In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things - perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We love what we love and who
we love who we love and why
we love why we love and find
a falling shoelace knotted and strung
between the fingers of strangers — Kami Garcia

I miss him," she whispered, her voice cracking.
His heart constricted at the grief on her face. "I know, honey." He lifted a hand to stroke the soft waves of her hair. A soothing, reassuring gesture, but to him it meant so much more. His muscles knotted with the need to cup her face between his hands and kiss her the way he'd been dying to for so long. He wanted to kiss away the sadness and the grief, replace it with the heat and tenderness burning inside him. — Kaylea Cross

Not nature, but the "genius of mankind," has knotted the hangman's noose with which it can execute itself at any moment. — Carl Jung

If you're the cook," he said between mouthfuls, "I'm your captain. You can't continue speaking to me that way."
"You aren't dressed like a captain."
Gray looked down at his homespun tunic and the loose-fitting trousers cinched with a knotted cord. The clothes of a common seaman,, borrowed from a sailor now dead. He hadn't the luxury of fine attire on the Kestrel. With the ship so undermanned, he had to be everywhere-climbing the rigging, down in the hold.
"Don't look apologetic. They suit you." Her gaze glanced off his shoulders, then dropped to the floor. "But I see you've kept the detested boots."
He shrugged, spooning up another bite of chowder. "I've broken them in now."
"And here I hoped you were keeping them for sentimental reasons. — Tessa Dare

There seemed to be a purpose in everything - a winding, swaying, knotted, jumbled road that led back to the same door as many times as you needed it to. Until you remembered ... (Lily, from Seers of Light) — Jennifer DeLucy

While the bodies of young children are usually relaxed and flexible, if experiences of fear are continuous over the years, chronic tightening happens. Our shoulders may become permanently knotted and raised, our head thrust forward, our back hunched, our chest sunken. Rather than a temporary reaction to danger, we develop a permanent suit of armor. We become, as Chogyam Trungpa puts it, "a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence." We often don't even recognize this armor because it feels like such a familiar part of who we are. But we can see it in others. And when we are meditating, we can feel it in ourselves - the tightness, the areas where we feel nothing. — Tara Brach

In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this.
I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away.
I can't say goodbye. — China Mieville

It's a scarf," said Horace. "Miss P was able to smuggle me a pair of needles, and I knitted it while I was in my cell. I reckon that making it kept me from going mad in there." I thanked him and unfolded it. The scarf was simple and gray with knotted tassels on the ends, but it was well made and even had my initials monogrammed in one corner. JP. — Ransom Riggs

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up. — Margaret Atwood

Just the way he said her name undid her, loosened something tight and knotted underneath her rib cage, making her breathless. — Cassandra Clare

They arrived home again to a most peculiar sight. The small garden at the front of the Banana House had been transformed. A tidal wave of cushions, beanbags, quilts, hearth rugs, and sleeping bags appeared to have swept up the lawn and broken at the wall. From Indigo's window a multicolored rope of knotted bedsheets came snaking out and ended among the cushions. As Micheal and Caddy watched, a mattress emerged and fell to the ground, followed by a rain of pillows.
"Indigo!" shouted Caddy, jumping out of the car.
Indigo's and Rose's heads appeared in the window above.
"It's all right, Caddy!" Indigo called cheerfully. "We've been doing it all the time you've been gone."
"We keep finding more stuff to land on!" added Rose. "Look! — Hilary McKay

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. — William Congreve

I've prayed night and day for God to lead me, guide me, to make me stronger and prepare me. Yet, I am tormented with memories, suffer debilitating flashbacks, and now-now my father is killed. And you're gong to stand there and tell me it's God's will? Why should I pray? It hasn't done me much good." Yitshak drew back, he brow again knotted. "What? You think praying is supposed to make life easier? If the great I Am answers your prayers, it is not to make life easier, but to prepare you to handle more! — Ronie Kendig

Kyle, I was so afraid." Cole lifted his head from the comfort of her bosom to see her face again.
She smoothed back his wild, knotted hair. "It's you. It's you. It's you."
A crowd in the doorway interrupted their loving revelation. Nurse Susan stormed into the room.
Cole ignored them all and kissed Kyle's sleepy lips. "I love you, Kyle. Thank you for being alive. They didn't hurt you, did they?"
Kyle sighed. "They hurt me so much when they took you, Cole. That's the worst pain on earth. The worst." Kyle kissed his forehead and ran her hands over his back. "I'm your shadow. I love you too. — Debra Anastasia

Her soft voice played over his senses like it always had, her English accent more pronounced than ever. Or was that because his ears had become acclimatized to the Australian accents around him again?
He didn't know.
He pulled in a slow breath, headache forgotten, the subtle scent of Emily's perfume filtering into his body. His stomach knotted, his balls grew harder, that delicate fragrance flooding him with memories too haunting to bear. She'd cured him of anaplastic astrocytoma, and in the process inflicted him with something else. Something powerful and - he was discovering all too quickly - inescapable. — Lexxie Couper

What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods. — Raymond Chandler

This was real life cocoa. The kind you gave someone you loved because you couldn't think of anything else to do and both of you were a mess. It was the kind you stirred while your gut was knotted and your mouth was dry and you were thinking seriously of crying, but you were too much of a male for that kind of display.
It was the kind you made with all the love you hadn't expressed and might well not have the voice or the chance to speak of. — J.R. Ward

I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species. — Umberto Eco

We will soon create intelligences greater than our own ... When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity, an intellectual transition as impenetrable as the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole, and the world will pass far beyond our understanding. — Vernor Vinge

Because it was enough for one of those favorites of His Distinguished Highness to issue a thoughtless decree. These young smart alecks see it, and they immediately imagine some fatal result and come running to the rescue. They start trying to mend things, straighten things out, patch things up and untangle them. And so instead of using their energy to build their own vision of the future, instead of trying to put their irresponsible, destructive fantasies into action, our malcontents had to roll up their sleeves and start untangling what the minsters had knotted up. And there's always a lot of work to untangling! So they untangle and untangle, drenched in sweat, wearing their nerves to shreds, running around, patching things up here and there, and in all this rush and overwork, in this whirlwind, their fantasies slowly evaporate from their hot heads. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

In her mind, Adam pressed that fist against her bedroom wall. So gently. Though every muscle was knotted, wanting to destroy it. — Maggie Stiefvater

unspoken bond existed between the residents of Chapel Isle. The island was the same as the nets its fishermen cast at sea, a tight lattice of people tied by lives lived closely, knotted by friendship. Being here meant Abigail could become a part of that net as well, which was — Ellen Block

Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring. — Carl Sandburg

Alpha. Cress leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees. "Like the star?" "What star?" She stiffened, instantly embarrassed, and scooted back from him again. "Oh. Um. In a constellation, the brightest star is called the alpha. I thought maybe you meant that she's ... like ... your brightest star." Looking away, she knotted her hands in her lap, aware that she was blushing furiously now and this beast of a man was about to realize what an over-romantic sap she was. But instead of sneering or laughing, Wolf sighed. "Yes," he said, his gaze climbing up to the full moon that had emerged over the city. "Exactly like that." With — Marissa Meyer

But once upon a time - that would be our time - a telephone cord seemed like nothing less than a lifeline.
It was your attachment to the outside world and, even more than that, your attachment to the people you loved, or wanted to love, or tried to love.
Everything about it was fitting - the way it curled in on itself, the way it got so easily tangled, the way you could pull it only so far before it kept you in place.
Twisted and knotted and essential. — David Levithan

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.
List, list, O list! — William Shakespeare

Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly. — Charlotte Bronte

[Richard Avedon's] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people's faces - on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment. — Janet Malcolm

His brows knotted just a bit. He knew that she knew. Because of course he did. Players at their level didn't deceive each other. They won even though their opponents knew exactly what was happening. Just like he was winning against her right now. — James S.A. Corey

With the caution of a gazelle I looked to the closed door ahead of it, and feeling a tickle of fear in my knotted stomach I entered this tube. — Steve Merrick

My first sight of the fabled warrior was a surprise. He was not a mighty-thewed giant, like Ajax. His body was not broad and powerful, as Odysseos'. He seemed small, almost boyish, his bare arms and legs slim and virtually hairless. His chin was shaved clean, and the ringlets of his long black hair were tied up in a silver chain. He wore a splendid white silk tunic, bordered with a purple key design, cinched at the waist with a belt of interlocking gold crescents ... His face was the greatest shock. Ugly, almost to the point of being grotesque. Narrow beady eyes, lips curled in a perpetual snarl, a sharp hook of a nose, skin pocked and cratered ... A small ugly boy born to be a king ... A young man possessed with fire to silence the laughter, to stifle the taunting. His slim arms and legs were iron-hard, knotted with muscle. His dark eyes were absolutely humourless. There was no doubt in my mind that he could outfight Odysseos or even powerful Ajax on sheer willpower alone. — Ben Bova

Despite the headmaster's romantic claims that the origin of the cravat went back to the silk fascalia worn by Roman orators to warm their vocal cords, Langdon knew that, etymologically, "cravat" actually derived from a ruthless band of Croat mercenaries who donned knotted neckerchiefs before they stormed into battle. To this day, this ancient battle garb was donned by modern office warriors hoping to intimidate their enemies in daily boardroom battles. — Dan Brown

My stomach knotted up as heat surged through me. Why did I feel like melting every time I saw him, or heard him talk? "Stop that right now." I blushed. "I know what you're doing, Jace, and it's not going to work."

Jace and Charlie. — J.L. Clayton

I knew even before I had desire that it would be gnarled and knotted, black and hard, a tree that would never bear fruit, a fish that would never jump, a cat that would never meow. All my life, bitterness and regret, bitterness, and regret. "And yet," he said, briefly closing his eyes, "I was able to imagine the softness and sweetness of love, for a time." He rested his head upon his right hand, in a gesture worthy of a classical actor, and everyone in the Teatro Barbarossa heard his breathing. — Mark Helprin

He grips my shoulder. His fingers dig in the knotted muscles in a way that feels good. Brotherly. — Holly Black

A young girl, a freshman, I met in a bar in Cambridge my junior year at Harvard told me early one fall that "Life is full of endless possibilities." I tried valiantly nog to choke on the beer nuts I was chewing while she gushed this kidney stone of wisdom, and I calmly washed them down with the rest of a Heineken, smiled and concentrated on the dart game that was going on in the corner. Needless to say, she did not live to see her sophomore year.That winter, her body was found floating in the Charles River, decapitated, her head hung from a tree on the bank, her hair knotted around a low-hanging branch, three miles away. — Bret Easton Ellis

The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart. — Janet Fitch

Alex gazed at her. Her mouth was slightly open; she ran her fingernail against her lower teeth as she thought. She'd knotted her hair at the nape of her neck again, and a strand had slipped loose onto her shoulder, gleaming in the lantern light. Suddenly all of his objections seemed meaningless. Don't, he thought. You'll regret it.
He didn't care anymore.
Slowly, unable to stop himself, he reached out and cupped his hand around her foot. — L.A. Weatherly

Innocence is doomed to die a senseless death at our own hands, a casualty of the mistakes we can never undo. So we lay to rest the wide-eyed wonder we once thrived upon, replacing it with the scars of which we never speak, too knotted for any amount of technology to repair. — Neal Shusterman

Double-knotted to a bedpost, not that it's any of your business. That boy was always too trusting for his own good. You'd think by now he'd know better. But no. He's got to be stupid. Personally, I'd tie the bitch up, muzzle her, and ride her around the room with spurs on, but no one ever asks my opinion, do they? No. What do I know? I'm only omniscient. (Savitar) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

She'd started swimming early in the morning, when the kids were asleep, when she thought he was asleep. She didn't know her absence woke him, that the shift in the bed was an earthquake. When she climbed back in, she smelled like salt and seaweed. Sometimes her hair would still be knotted on top of her head. She tried to keep it dry. She didn't want him to know. The problem with marrying the mermaid girl from the carnival was knowing that one day she'd swim away. — Erika Swyler

...the Indian boy is the result of a curious convolution of branches in an old chestnut; there are two perfectly formed legs, a long slim body, a small knotted head, and two branching arms... The only drawback is that in order to [see him] you have to be lying in the bath. Unless you are in a prone position, gazing out of one particular window, he refuses to materialize.... Very few other people have seen him. You cannot ask people to come up to the bathroom and lie flat on their backs in order to see the little Indian boy. It would make them gloomy and suspicious, particularly if they were females. 'If you come up and lie down in the bathroom I will show you my little Indian boy....' No. Definitely not. Out. — Beverley Nichols

Water the fruit trees, and don't water the thorns. Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God's luminous reason-light. Don't honor what causes dysentry and knotted up tumors. — Coleman Barks

He had noticed my bandaged hand.
"An accident," Warthrop said tersely.
"Dr. Warthrop chopped off my finger with a butcher knife."
Von Helrung's brow knotted up in confusion. "By accident?"
"No," I answered. "That part was on purpose. — Rick Yancey

Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw him in the march. She hoped it had been him that raised his flag and knotted arm in anger. She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she raged against. — Arundhati Roy

Prettying you up for slaughter?" he suggests. "It's more complicated than that. I know them. They're not evil or cruel. They're not even smart. Hurting them, it's like hurting children. They don't see ... I mean, they don't know ... " I get knotted up in my words. "They don't know what, Katniss?" he says. "That tributes - who are the actual children involved — Suzanne Collins

It seems like he's keeping my foot within his grasp for longer than necessary when I see his eyes wander up my legs again. I tingle in every spot his gaze touches.
His voice sends shivers up my spine when he asks, "Have you ever been fucked, Eve?"
My eyelids flutter and I let out a small surprised gasp at his question, breath gushing from my lips. I'm not exactly a virgin, not too far off though, and I can safely say that I have never been fucked in the way that Phoenix is insinuating. Most of the sex I've had has been the fantasy kind. Our eyes lock and he moves his hand from the heel of my foot up along the back of my leg, massaging my shin.
I actually moan when his fingers press in, releasing the tension from a knotted muscle. His mouth opens as he watches me.
"I don't think that's a very appropriate question to ask of a friend," I finally manage to croak out.
He smiles darkly. "I told you I was bad news. — Raine Anthony

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him. — Dean Koontz

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with - except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection - is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households ... writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. — Clifford Geertz

After student years of flat-sharing and living with other people's taste, I went into decorating overdrive when I acquired my first apartment - its floor plan not much bigger than the vintage Hermes scarves I then wore side-knotted on my head, pirate-style. — Hamish Bowles

All at once the hard, cold earth seemed to explode. The brown surface of the world dissolved and in its place was an impossible, an inconceivable, an unbelievable profusion of color: green grass and purple and red flowers; sprays of lily; white baby's breath that covered the hills; nodding fields of bright yellow daffodils; rich purple moss. The trees burst forth with new leaves. The weeping willow tree was a mass of tiny pale green leaves, thousands of them, which whispered and sighed together as the wind moved through its branches. There were fat heads of lettuce in the fields, and cucumbers lying like jewels among them, and enormous red tomatoes surrounded by thick, knotted vines.

And for the first time in 1,728 days, the clouds broke apart and there was dazzling blue sky, and light beyond what anyone could remember.

The sun had come out at last. — Lauren Oliver

In the hall stood Richard Campbell Gansey III in his school uniform and overcoat and scarf and gloves, looking like someone from another world. Behind him was Ronan Lynch, his damn tie knotted right for once and his shirt tucked in.
Humiliation and joy warred furiously inside Adam.
Gansey strode between the pews as Adam's father stared at him. He went directly to the bench, straight up to the judge. Now that he stood directly beside Adam, not looking at him, Adam could see that he was a little out of breath. Ronan, behind him, was as well. they had run.
For him. — Maggie Stiefvater

You know it with startling clarity in that moment - how there's only a singular cord in this knotted mess of a world worth reaching for. It's dangling right there from our impossible tangle, and it's the one hope you need to reach for this Advent. That scarlet lifeline of Christ. — Ann Voskamp

Mosca felt something enormous swell within the knotted stomach that she hid behind her fists. It seemed it must surge out of her like a wild, black wave, sweeping away stalls and strollers alike and biting the plaster from the walls. — Frances Hardinge

He's not his immaculate self today. He's a little rough around the edges, probably from a few bad nights' sleep. His mustard shirt is the ugliest colour I have ever seen. His tie is badly knotted, his jaw is shadowed with stubble. His hair is a mess and has a devil's horn on one side. He's practically a Gamin today. He looks divine and he's looking at me with a memory in his eyes. — Sally Thorne

The priest looked puzzled also, as if at his own thoughts; he sat with knotted brow and then said abruptly: 'You see, it's so easy to be misunderstood. All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe. — G.K. Chesterton

A man will win one tourney, and fall quickly in the next. A slick spot in the grass may mean defeat, or what you ate for supper the night before. A change in the wind may bring the gift of victory." He glanced at Ser Jorah. "Or a lady's favor knotted round an arm." Mormont's face darkened. "Be careful what you say, old man. — George R R Martin

Adam miserably wondered which of the neighbors were coming to his father's defense.
In an hour, this will be over. You will never have to do it again. All you have to do is survive.
The door cracked open. Adam didn't want to look, but he did anyway. In the hall stood Richard Campbell Gansey III in his school uniform and overcoat and scarf and gloves, looking like someone from another world.
Behind him was Ronan Lynch, his damn tie knotted right for once and his shirt tucked in.
Humiliation and joy warred furiously inside Adam. — Maggie Stiefvater

I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide. — Kay Redfield Jamison