Life Shell Quotes & Sayings

After 13 years of life on the half shell in Hollywood, I have made a trip where I wasn't a tourist. — Edgar Bergen

People are like that here. Strangers smile at you on the beach, come up and offer you a shell, for no reason, lightly, and then go by and leave you alone again. Nothing is demanded of you in payment, no social rite expected, no tie established. It was a gift, freely offered, freely taken, in mutual trust. People smile at you here, like children, sure that you will not rebuff them, that you will smile back. And you do, because you know it will involve nothing. The smile, the act, the relationship is hung in space, in the immediacy and purity of the present; suspended on the still point of here and now; balanced there, on a shaft of air, like a seagull.

The pure relationship, how beautiful it is! How easily it is damaged, or weighed down with irrelevancies - not even irrelevancies, just life itself, the accumulations of life and of time. For the first part of every relationship is pure, whether it be with friend or lover, husband or child. It is pure, simple and unencumbered. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

What you discover about life's shell game is that it's hardest to follow the pea when you're the pea. — Robert Breault

They slept little that night, making their newfound love like people for whom the world is running out. Fern did not think of her Task, not because she had abandoned it, but because she felt it would present itself for her attention when the moment was right, and until then she had an intermission, a suspension of hostilities, given by whatever gods there were. They lay in the cave while outside the tide rose and fell, and she thought that in this life and maybe in all lives she would remember that love sounded like the sea, and the beat of her heart was waves on a beach, and she would hear its echo in the nucleus of every shell. — Jan Siegel

When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once. — Sarah Bessey

I sleep for an entire day. And when I wake up I'm a new person. I'm empty. I've cried out everything I had in me. I'm an empty shell waiting to be filled with what comes next. Or I'm just being a total drama queen. I'm not empty. I'm still a person. I cried over a bad thing that happened in my life, but I probably shouldn't have. Compared to Mom's crisis, mine was small. Compared to a thousand other girls' around the world, mine is insignificant. It wasn't bad. Not compared to everyone else. It was just a couple seconds. It wasn't years. It wasn't months, like Mom. It wasn't a family member. Wasn't someone I see anymore. It didn't even hurt. There was no blood. It wasn't bad. Not compared to others'. So I should stop crying. — Sara Wolf

Welcome the small cracking of your hard-clodded shell,
Embrace the warm sting of tears,
Kiss the shadow which frightens you awake as you turn the corners of your day,
Love the whole of everything,
Smooth sunshine skies and
Jagged edges
Which all seek us out in
Constant whisper and touch
To say, 'hello, Beautiful. You're alive — Jacob Nordby

You have my heart, my soul, my life. I'm an empty shell without you. — Maria V. Snyder

Between the ink mage and the wizard, his mouth falling open at the sight. The hulk had nearly let her go after Talbun's shock attack, but he recovered quickly and took her head in his meaty hands. Don't. With appalling ease, the ink mage twisted. The snap was so loud, it made Brasley flinch even from across the chamber. His mouth fell open to scream. "No!" The brute's mouth twisted into a contemptuous grin as he let the limp body fall from his hands. Brasley watched it happen in slow motion, almost like she was floating, eyes closed, face peaceful, hair floating up around her. It was as if life had been some tremendous weight, and now that it was gone, her shell drifted down to the floor like a dry leaf. Talbun's body hit with a dull thud that brought Brasley back to reality. — Victor Gischler

Life is what our character makes it. We fashion it, as a snail does its shell. A man can say: I never made a fortune because it is not in my character to be rich. — Jules Renard

Pain is a spiritual wake-up call showing you that there are oceans you have not yet explored. Step beyond the world you know. Reach for heights that you never thought possible. Go to places you have deemed off limits. This is the time to take off the shell of your past and step into the rich possibilities of your future. God does not give us dreams that we cannot fulfill. If you want to do something great with your life-whether it's to fall madly in love, become a teacher, be a great parent-if you aspire to do something beyond what you are doing now, this is the time to begin. Trust yourself. — Debbie Ford

Hear this now. Nothing, not even death, will keep me from loving you. Though this body may wither and become a dry shell, my spirit will pursue you until the end of time. We will never be apart." He covered her mouth with his and tasted her blood. Trailing tender kisses across her cheek and jawline, he nestled against her neck. "Eternally yours," he whispered. She clutched his head and offered her throat. "Together forever," she responded. Broderick hesitated, her erratic pulse beating against his tongue. "Give me peace," she whispered in a tortured breath. "Do this for me." "I will love you forever, Davina." His fangs pierced her cool skin and Broderick drank the life from his wife, granting her wish ... and tormenting his already damned soul. — Arial Burnz

Gaia is a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior; it begins where the crustal rocks meet the magma of the Earth's hot interior, about 100 miles below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles outwards through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. It includes the biosphere and is a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years. I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. Its goals are not set points but adjustable for whatever is the current environment and adaptable to whatever forms of life it carries. — James E. Lovelock

I've never been so empty in my life. You took my soul with you. You took my heart. I'm this empty shell who goes through the motions every day, waiting for you to call me. Waiting until you answer my calls. — Abbi Glines

It has nothing to do with age, it's not our languages, religion, gender, coulour of our skin; It's a soul within a well, that echoes deep beneath the ego's shell. True life can't ever start, until we offer up our heart . — Dawud Wharnsby Ali

He thinks of that ocean house and wishes he were back in his former life or that one could take one moment and remain inside it like an egg inside its shell, instead of constantly being hurried into the future by good luck or bad. — Stephen Dobyns

Death is the worst kind of thief. It takes whatever soul it chooses, and then out of sheer spite or mean-spiritedness strips the humanity from the shell it leaves behind so that it's impossible to believe life ever dwelt within something so — Eyre Price

It feels as though Tony's a ghost, a wisp of someone I once loved, or never loved at all and thought was someone else. I don't feel anything, not even when he fucks me. I wonder if he knows. I wonder if he believes I still want him. I always tell myself it's the last time, but I don't leave. i exist instead inside this shell of a life we've created. — Sandy DeLuca

It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: the heart cannot actually break, it can only break open. When we feel both our love for this world and the pain of this world-together, at the same time-the heart breaks out of its shell. To live with an open heart is to experience life full-strength. — John Welwood

A thorough inspection of someone you believed to be loveable will send you back into your shell if all you saw in their life was all bullshit. — Michael Bassey Johnson

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps. — Peter Straub

She lays her tired head on my shoulder and looks through the shell with me, into the great mystery. I think again that heaven must be like this place, and I say that to Isabelle. I wonder, When she is in heaven and I am not, how far away will she be? "It's just another journey," she whispers. . . I thought of my mother, of how desperately I wanted her to be here a little longer, a lot longer, forever. Sometimes it seemed that I should be able to change things, to alter the course of events, just by wanting it badly enough. But I couldn't. Iola's observations said as much. We, in our humanness, cannot help but foolishly desire eternity in this life. — Lisa Wingate

Now that I know that each star has its path, each bird is finally feathered and grown in the unbroken shell, each tree in the seed, each song in the life laid down - is the night sky any less strange; should my glance less follow the flight; should the pen shake less in my hand. — Judith Wright

I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad didn't see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments. — Gemma Files

We are empty shells if we do not possess, if we do not fill our life with furniture, with music, with knowledge, with this or that. And that shell makes a lot of noise, and that noise we call living; and with that we are satisfied. When there is a disruption, a breaking away of that, then there is sorrow, because you suddenly discover yourself as you are-an empty shell, without much meaning. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Beneath this crust, hundreds of fathoms down, there teems a world of checkered life in all its changing forms, a world of the same composition as ours, with the same instincts, the same sorrows, and also, no doubt, the same joys; everywhere the same struggle for existence. So it ever is. If we penetrate within even the hardest shell we come upon the pulsations of life, however thick the crust may be. — Fridtjof Nansen

I could live here, I think. Live where gravity does not know my name. Here I am unbound, untethered by the chains of this life. I am a different body, a different shell, and my weight is carried by the hands of friends. So many nights I've wished I could fall asleep under this sheet. — Tahereh Mafi

Consider precious your fundamental questions about life. Love that heart that holds doubt: Is this really all there is? Continue to dig into that mind. When your thirst for the Tao grows sharper and sharper and, like an arrow, pierces your soul, your eyes for seeing the Tao will start to open, like a chick breaking through its shell to emerge from its egg. — Ilchi Lee

I felt that my life was permanently damaged, that I could never be normal again, that the rest of my life would just be a shell. — John Marsden

Beautiful, fragile, fleeting, the sunrise shell; but not, for all that, illusory. Because it is not lasting, let us not fall into the cynic's trap and call it an illusion. Duration is not a test of true or false. The day of the dragon-fly or the night of the Saturnid moth is not invalid simply because that phase in its life cycle is brief. Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. "And what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place." The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

From the place by the railing at the edge of the tracks on the summer evening I return across the city to my own room. I am vividly aware of my own life that escaped the winter on the boat. How many such lives I have lived. Then I only made a dollar and a half a day and now I sometimes make more than that in a few minutes. How wonderful to be able to write words ... Again I begin the endless game of reconstructing my own life, jerking it out of the shell that dies, striving to breathe into it beauty and meaning ... I wonder why my life, why all lives, are not more beautiful. — Sherwood Anderson

The first egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it's now in the watery sunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning, brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon. It's a barren landscape, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure. The sun goes and the egg fades. I — Margaret Atwood

The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse. — Asti Hustvedt

If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them? — Stephen King

My first child, I think I was completely shell shocked. I was ecstatic but in shock that I was now responsible completely for another life and it was my co-creation and how did I manage that?! I was in awe that I had actually done what millions of other women had done, given birth and now an added responsibility of 'mommy' in my life ahead! — Kylie Bax

Fear grid-irons your broken, suffering heart with strength, encasing it with a protective, tough shell. One that soon becomes a prison that will emaciate the unused, enclosed heart inside if left to its own accord. But renewed hope gently unwraps the hard cast, and replaces it with a more resilient, pliable layer, protective, strong, but permeable so as to let love soak in and nurture the malnourished, dying heart inside. — Connie Kerbs

Tried living in the real world instead of a shell, but I was bored before I even began. — Morrissey

A good shell has to have life and resiliency to get in harmony with the swing of the crew. — Daniel James Brown

When a baby chick hatches, it often struggles for a long, long time, and you can get impatient watching the little guy struggle. You might be tempted to help him out and break a little bit of the shell away and make it easier for him to escape, but if you do, he will die. You will rob him of a process specifically designed to make him strong. It is only through this struggle that he can gain the strength to survive his life. It is crucial (if you love him) that you let him struggle his way out of this challenge on his own.
Your life works the same way. The challenges you currently face are there to help you become stronger and smarter too. They are probably forcing you to learn and grow. If you were rescued from this situation, it might rob you of a process you need to become the person you are meant to be. — Kimberly Giles

I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind. — Haruki Murakami

But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge. — Margaret Atwood

Shattered dreams, worthless years, here I am encased in a hollow shell. Life began, then was done, now I stare into a cold and empty well. — Stevie Wonder

I once watched a small hermit crab crawl out of its shell and into a larger one nearby. Maybe we are no different. There were those before us and there will be some after us. All we can do is cultivate what is given to us. Maybe our lot in this life is to leave our shells better than when we found them so that the next soul will flourish here. — Jennifer Arnett

It's one thing for a person to live his life as a vacuous shell without fully comprehending the extent of his transgressions, but I was guilty of the greater sin; I knew what was right, and I chose to reject it. — Tarek Saab

Within this restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.
Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.
But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell. — Oscar Wilde

Life
luscious wet life bereft of
death, loss of empty shell
minus absent of nothing
exploding star cell
amoeba sweet algae
oxygen,
hydrogen flowering
in the vacuum of
space and magnetic motion. — H. Raven Rose

An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind ... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence — Haruki Murakami

The State became the master. The national element moved from the realm of form to the realm of content; it became what was most central and essential, turning the socialist element into a mere wrapping, a verbal husk, an empty shell. Thus was made manifest, with tragic clarity, a sacred law of life: Human freedom stands above everything. There is no end in the world for the sake of which it is permissible to sacrifice human freedom. — Vasily Grossman

Human beings have become so afraid of the unknown, themselves, and each other that they deprive themselves of that innate ecstasy and love of life which comes with a human body, mind and spirit, by hiding behind the empty shell of their ego. — Frederick Lenz

I take the seashell from my jeans pocket and rub my fingers across its silken, indented surface, shallow as my own open hand. This chalice, subtly shaped by some divine intelligence to allow water to flow in and out with ease, is what I aspire to become: a vessel through which feelings can pour in and spill right out again, without all the grasping and holding that obstructs the flow. Can I be as serene and simple as this bleached shell, rubbed smooth by wind and water, receiving and releasing, filling and emptying and filling again, eternally receptive to the currents of life? — Katrina Kenison

I don't know a thing about cats.
I know everything else, life and its archipelago,
seas and unpredictable cities,
botany,
the pistil and its scandals,
the pluses and minuses of math.
I know the earth's volcanic funnels
and the crocodile's unreal shell,
the fireman's unseen kindness
and the priest's blue atavism.
cat leave
But a cat I can't figure out.
My mind slipped on its indifference.
Its eyes hold ciphers of gold. — Pablo Neruda

I see all this and I feel no amazement because making the shell implied also making the honey in the wax comb and the coal and the telescopes and the reign of Cleopatra and the films about Cleopatra and the Pyramids and the design of the zodiac of the Chaldean astrologers and the wars and empires Herodotus speaks of and the words written by Herodotus and the works written in all languages, including those of Spinoza in Dutch, and the fourteen-line summary of Spinoza's life and works in the instalment of the encyclopedia in the truck passed by the ice-cream van, and so I feel as if, in making the shell, I had also made the rest. — Anonymous

He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take. — Laini Taylor

Eggs possess an elemental power. Their outer shell is earth. Their white is water. The membrane that lines the shell is air, and the yolk at the core is fire. The core of the egg preserves life and being, and therefore represents heaven and earth, while the white represents chaos. — Joanne Owen

My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.
Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry.
... The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life.
It wasn't comforting. — Arthur Nersesian

I brought a coconut cream pie, Mom's favorite. Coconut's hard, dirty, shaggy exterior didn't promise much. But when you cracked it open and then cleaned it up, it surprised you with the smooth white riches inside. In a coconut shell, this was my mother's mission in life- to tackle the litter, the dust, the stains, the residue of life and tidy them all up. Her sweet reward was that exotic state of everything-in-its-clean-place, always a mirage in the distance while she was living with Helen. Coconut cream pie fed her soul. — Judith Fertig

First, I have culled evidence that physical death is not the end of the road for any of us. I know this message is critical because I've seen people consumed by fear of death or suffering unbearable grief after losing a loved one. Some can draw into a shell, ceasing all efforts to reach their potential, or even give up on life. — Mark Ireland

Considering Lymond, flat now on the bed in wordless communion with the ceiling, Richard spoke. "My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you."

On the tortoise-shell bed, his brother did not move. But there was no irony for once in his voice when he answered. "Oh, yes, I know. The popular question is, For what? — Dorothy Dunnett

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding ... And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy — Kahlil Gibran

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

Pearl comes over, to a shell ... so beautiful, that hard to spell ... even seems, like an angel eye ... relation with whom, gonna tie ... with Sun, it gets its reflection ... explained all without words neither any action ... such a day, as here has risen ... by heart wanna love, not by vision ... Samar Sudha — Samar Sudha

It is more magnificent than what I thought heaven might be, and yet it is all of its wonder, as well."
...
"Iris, we are shut off from it in this life because if any knew its magnificence, life itself would end, for all who are living would seek death. But as the egg must be in the nest for the bird to fly from it, so the living must live and die when nature intends so that the shell may be broken at the point when the living have wings to fly. It is as if in life we are blind, and in death we see. In life we think in error, but in death we know and love and understand. — Douglas Clegg

Most of the things that remain tied to earth do not know that they have hidden wings under the hard shell of life" - The Monk in the book "Songs of the Mist — Shashi

There is no true joy in a life lived closed up in the little shell of the self. When you take one step to reach out to people, when you meet with others and share their thoughts and sufferings, infinite compassion and wisdom well up within your heart. Your life is transformed. — Daisaku Ikeda

We're [as parents] striving for an unattainable, inauthentic shell, and ignoring the real nut, the gooey inside: love, laughter, and fulfillment from simple things. — Julie Lythcott-Haims

Ask of Her, the mighty Mother.
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?-
Growth in every thing -
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and green world all together,
Star-eyed strawberry breasted
Throstle above Her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within,
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

I'm starting to understand that attempting to be perfect has been the goal of my life. Our lives. Attempting to be this fault-free, smiling person in this loving, happy family that fits so perfectly in this pretty, inoffensive little town. What was so bad about that goal after all? Only that I couldn't do it. That I let everybody down. I've been so down about it, so depressed thinking about all the balls I was trying to juggle that I've dropped, and now the cogs are turning toward total apathy toward it all, everything and all I can think about is that I am a shell of a human being. I'm a pushover. I'm to blame. — Abigail Tarttelin

A real man, the kind of man a woman wants to give her life to, is one who will respect her dignity, who will honor her like the valuable treasures she is. A real man will not attempt to rip her precious pearl from its protective shell, or persuade her with charm to give away her treasure prematurely, but he will wait patiently until she willingly gives him the prize of her heart. A real man will cherish and care for that precious prize forever. — Leslie Ludy

I am miserable now - not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me - resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, - the tenderness I never had. I don't want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I've carried around in me all my life. — Allen Ginsberg

This then will be the shape and the feel of the world: an abandoned shell, signs of old life, curious animals wandering in and out of ruins, the wilderness crowding in, overtaking all human structures and human things. — Ben H. Winters

Ivanov: You only qualified last year, my dear friend, you're still young and confident, but I am thirty-five. I have the right to give you some advice. Don't marry a Jew or a psychopath or a bluestocking but choose yourself someone ordinary, someone a shade of grey, with no bright colour and no superfluous noises. In general, construct your whole life on a conventional pattern. The greyer, the more monotonous the background, the better. My dear fellow, don't do
battle against thousands all on your own, don't tilt against windmills, don't beat your head against walls ... And may
God preserve you from all kinds of rational farming, newfangled schools, fiery speeches ... Shut yourself in your shell and do your little God-given business ... It's snugger, healthier and more honest. — Anton Chekhov

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span ... — Isabel Allende

Outside Styx's apartment was not the first time Rochester and I had met, or would it be the last. We first encountered each other at Haworth House in Yorkshire when my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-believe had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and, for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey
and returned. — Jasper Fforde

The inevitable tears began to fall. So like I said before, it wasn't the clothes, and it wasn't the humiliation that drove me to cry. It was something much worse. See, I cried because I should have known what had happened had been coming at me. None of it should have come as a surprise. This is what happened when I dared to be happy in my life. When I stuck my head out of my turtle shell and dared to smile, fate made sure to lay the smackdown to remind me I was not allowed a life like everyone else. — John Goode

In school, they would tell you that life wouldn't come to you; you had to go out and make it your own. But when it came to love, the message for girls seemed to be this: Don't. Don't go after what you want. Wait. Wait to be chosen, as if only in the eye of another could one truly find value. The message was confusing and infuriating. It was a shell game with no actual pea under the rapidly moving cups. — Libba Bray

Some form of suffering often brings about a readiness. One can say it cracks open the shell of the egoic mind with which many people identify as "me." Life cracks open that shell, and once that crack is there, then we are reached more easily by spiritual teaching. — Eckhart Tolle

Nothing prepared me for the loss of my mother. Even knowing that she would die did not prepare me. A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable. — Meghan O'Rourke

Children's Song
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven. — R.S. Thomas

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death. — Eleanor Roosevelt

There are always reasons for people's behaviour, and it's easy just to dismiss them and assume that we already know their story, especially if they're no good at showing their emotions. Life gives you all these knocks, it's so easy to form a shell to protect yourself. I've done it myself. — Kate Dickie

There's something about houses that intrigues me. I mean, they're the place where families spend all their time together, making the house filled with love, life, and laughter. I always look at houses and wonder what's going on inside. Without the people who lived in them, they're just a shell, but once they're filled, they become sacred ground, the place where memories are made. — Taylor Dean

We are married."
"We're about to get divorced." ...
"No." He licked up her ear to bite the shell.
She shivered in response. "Yes."
"Nope." His palm spread out across her bare midriff. "I may have screwed up, and we'll find out why, but I won't hurt you again. You're mine, angel. The only thing in life that matters. — Rebecca Zanetti

I don't know if I've come of age, but I'm certainly older now. I feel shrunken, as if there's a tiny ancient Oliver Tate inside me operating the levers of a life-size Oliver-shaped shell. A shell on which a decrepit picture show replays the same handful of images. Every night I come to the same place and wait till the sky catches up with my mood. The pattern is set. This is, no doubt, the end. — Joe Dunthorne

I've always found out that the most beautiful people, truly beautiful inside and out, are the ones who are quietly unaware of their effect. The one's who throw their beauty around, waste what they have? Their beauty is only passing. It's just a shell hiding nothing but shadows and emptiness.

Jennifer Armentrout, Obsidian — Jennifer L. Armentrout

From time to time I try to imagine this world of which he spoke
a culture in whose mythology words might be that precious, in which words were conceived as vessels for communications from the heart; a society in which words are holy, and the challenge of life is based upon the quest for gentle words, holy words, gentle truths, holy truths.
I try to imagine for myself a world in which the words one gives one's children are the shell into which they shall grow, so one chooses one's words carefully, like precious gifts, like magnificent gifts, like magnificent inheritances, for they convey an excess of what we have imagined, they bear gifts beyond imagination, they reveal and revisit the wealth of history.
How carefully, how slowly, and how lovingly we might step into our expectations of each other in such a world. — Patricia J. Williams

Withdraw, like a turtle, into a hard yet harmless shell, ornamented with beautiful memories of the past.
from the book 'I Know Who You Are! — Mariam Masood

Jason knew his life would never be the same again. British intelligence now had an ace up their sleeve, and Jason had to overcome his fears and deal with the secret world he was now a part of.
He would have to grow a tough shell around himself. Despite his many friends, his grandparents and love of his father, he was painfully aware he was very much alone in this world. When it came down to it, there was only one person he could really rely on in the world,
and he was called Jason Steed. — Mark A. Cooper

I had drawn away into the salt,
myself, a shell
emptied of life. — Hilda Doolittle

music has, quite literally, saved my life and, I believe, the lives of countless others. It provides company when there is none, understanding where there is confusion, comfort where there is distress, and sheer, unpolluted energy where there is a hollow shell of brokenness and fatigue. And — James Rhodes

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person. — Jack Spicer

His eyes were bright, and, indeed, he scarcely knew whether they held dreams or realities ... and in five minutes she had filled the shell of the old dream with the flesh of life ... — Virginia Woolf

Often, your lessons will not come easily. Suffering has always been a vehicle for deep spiritual growth. Those who have endured great suffering are generally the ones who evolve into great beings. Those who have been deeply hurt by life are generally the ones who can feel the pain of others in a heartbeat. Those who have endured adversity become humbled by life, and as a result, are more open, compassionate and real. We may not like suffering when it visits us, but it serves us so very well: it cracks the shell that covers our hearts and empties us of the lies we have clung to about who we are, why we are here and how this remarkable world of ours really functions. Once emptied, we can be refilled with all that is good, noble and true. Troubles can transform, if we choose to allow them to do so. As Joseph Campbell — Robin S. Sharma

One learns first of all in beach living the art of sheding;how little one can get along with, not how much ... To say-is it necessary?-when I am tempted to add one more accumulation to my life, when I am pulled toward one more centrifugal activity. One is free, like the hermit crab, to change one's shell. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty-but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That's where life is; that's were all the good stuff is. — Loren Acton

Pocock paused and stepped back from the frame of the shell and put his hands on his hips, carefully studying the work he had so far done. He said for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn't enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. "Rowing," he said, "is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts that really matter anyway. Do you know what I mean, Joe? — Daniel James Brown

If you were lucky, very lucky indeed, there were one or two people in your life who you could tell the unvarnished truth too, shell and egg. And that these people held the essence of you inside them. The rest would be conversations that ended when night fell, or the dinner part ended. — Julia Gregson

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense - no - but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The emotion I'd held back for years assaulted me with staggering intensity. Everything. All of it. I cried for Clay, for the lost years with Courtney, but most of all for myself and the cowardly person I'd become. They were right. I was a shell of who I used to be and lived a lonely little life. I'd been certain that protecting my heart had been the right way to go. That Courtney and I didn't mix in the long term. That love was not for me. I'd been wrong on all counts. — Melissa Brayden