Limbed Quotes & Sayings

Oh, Constellations of the early night
That sparkled brighter as the twilight died,
And made the darkness glorious! I have seen
Your rays grow dim upon the horizon's edge
And sink behind the mountains. I have seen
The great Orion, with his jewelled belt,
That large-limbed warrior of the skies, go down
Into the gloom. Beside him sank a crowd
Of shining ones. — William C. Bryant

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land? — W.E.B. Du Bois

His smile banished my loneliness and limbed the hollows of my anema with starlight, pure and bright...his touch hummed in my bones like an aria -- a song to my dance, a beginning of a promise. — Roshani Chokshi

Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures - such was our course and the surroundings of it. — Mark Twain

The twins were nineteen, soon to be twenty, but one could be excused for thinking they were younger than their actual age. Raised in an atmosphere largely devoid of authority, they had run free on a country estate with few diversions other than those they created for themselves. Their parents had spent much of their time in London society, leaving their daughters in the care of servants, governesses, and tutors. None of them had been able or willing to take a firm hand with them.
To be certain, Pandora and Cassandra were high-spirited but also affectionate, intelligent, and endearing. And they were as beautiful as a pair of pagan goddesses, both of them long-limbed and glowing with health. Pandora was perpetually disheveled and full of energy, her dark hair falling from its pins as if she'd just been running through the woods. Cassandra, the golden-haired twin, was more compliant and romantic in nature, more willing to abide by rules. — Lisa Kleypas

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow. — Thomas Hardy

Sunrise over the mountain-forest was gorgeous - Aurora brushing out her golden tresses with a comb of dark-needled pine and bare-limbed oak. — J. Aleksandr Wootton

One of its sources [Leaf by Niggle] was a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it might have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls. — J.R.R. Tolkien

He didn't have the loose-limbed cockiness of a man her age, springing to attention with the desire to impress everyone with his agility and form. No, the stranger moved with a languorous arrogance of a man more settled into his skin. A sort of graceful conceit that suggested entitlement. — Vivienne Lorret

He's going to get us all killed," she said.
Jesper stretched his long arms overhead and grinned, his teeth white against his dark skin. He had yet to give up his rifle, and the silhouette of it across his back made him resemble a gawky, long-limbed bird. "Statistically, he'll probably only get some of us killed. — Leigh Bardugo

Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It's nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they're running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever. — Martin Amis

Watching him walk over, Alex mused that Eli Cooper was the sort of man who knew how to use his physicality. Beneath his handmade shirts and tailored suits, a street fighter hummed through every loose-limbed motion. But that impression did not extend to his face, which was structurally perfect. Skyscraper-high cheekbones. Superhero jaw. A mouth that should have a government warning. There were no signs of past trouble with a jealous husband or an abandoned girlfriend. No one had ever broken his nose. No one had busted his lip.
Strange, because her first instinct on seeing him was to roundhouse kick him into the next millennium. — Kate Meader

Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. — Joseph Heller

A mimosa tree, green and thin limbed, pushes up through the snow. My grandmother brought the seeds with her
from back home.
Sometimes, she pulls a chair to the window, looks
down over the yard.
The promise of glittering sidewalks feels a long time
behind us now, no diamonds anywhere to be found.
But some days, just after snow falls,
the sun comes out, shines down on the promise
of that tree from back home joining us here.
Shines down over the bright white ground.
And on those days, so much light and warmth fills
the room that it's hard not to believe
in a little bit
of everything. — Jacqueline Woodson

Leila. Schoolgirls are like sports cars. They're nice to look at, but they're impractical. In the end, they don't do what you need them to do."
I had to stifle my smile, he looked so serious. Then I stole a glance back at the lithe-limbed shadows beneath the tress. "Is that so?"
"It's true. They won't let you take them up the arse. They're rubbish at sucking you. You want to ride them at a hundred miles a hour, but you end up doing forty in the sixty zone because you're too fucking scared of damaging them. — Lucy V. Morgan

The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. — John Updike

Directly he was alone, he was assailed by her simulacra, in all states of acute sorrow, or smiling, of complete abstraction or painful animation, of dress and undress, as he had seen her these last few days: directly he was alone, the images came to mock everything he had seen. Her sadness became shrieking grief, and her animation riotous, immodest in dress and licentious in nakedness, many-limbed as some wild avatar of the Hindu cosmology assaulting the days he spent copying his work on clean scores, and the nights he passed alone in his chair where, instantly the lights went out, everything was transformed, and the body he had seen a moment before with no more surprise than its simple lines and modest unself-conscious movement permitted, rose up on him full-breasted and vaunting the belly, limbs undistinguishable until he was brought down between them and stifled in moist collapse. — William Gaddis

Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe.
The visible carries all the invisible on its back.
Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses,
what touches me
As though I didn't exist?
What is it that keeps on moving,
a tiny pillar of smoke
Erect on its hind legs,
loose in the hollow grasses?
A word I don't know yet, a little word, containing infinity,
Noiseless and unrepentant, in sift through the dry grass. — Charles Wright

With a little hum of pleasure, he strokes my leg, his expression content, his body loose-limbed and lazy. Give the man a blow job and a little unexpected ass play, and he's practically purring. — Kristen Callihan

The wedding ended, hurriedly, on a surge of masculine bonhomie and relief. Five minutes later, followed by the red-eyed glares of their womenfolk, Buccleuch and his friends and his new-married son had plunged off to join Lord Culter, head of the Crawfords, and Francis Crawford his brother, to fight the English once more. * Sentimentally, Will Scott thought, it made his wedding-day perfect. Cantering, easy and big-limbed, through the bracken of Ettrick-side, with leaves stuck, lime-green and scarlet on his wet sleeves, blue eyes narrowed and fair, red-blooded Scott face misted with rain, he was borne on a vast, angry joy. — Dorothy Dunnett

Their horses were of great stature, strong and clean-limbed; their gray coats glistened, their long tails flowed in the wind, their manes were braided on their proud necks. — J.R.R. Tolkien

He has no interest in comics. He doesn't understand the difference between serious graphic novels and Saturday-morning cartoons with wide-eyed tweetybirds and floppy-limbed cats. — Emily St. John Mandel

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. — Robinson Jeffers

Pure-limbed, white-canopied, one-wheeled, the cart roles on. See him that cometh: faultless, stream-cutter, bondless he. — Gautama Buddha

Pride filled him. He'd put that soft look in her eye, the purr in her voice, and given her loose limbed ease. — Avery Flynn

Once upon a time, Aristophanes relates, there were gods in the heavens and humans down on earth. But we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms - a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. We came in three different possible gender or sexual variations: male/female meldings, male/male meldings, and female/female meldings, depending on what suited each creature the best. Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy. Thus, all of us double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented creatures moved across the earth much the same way that the planets travel through the heavens - dreamily, orderly, smoothly. We lacked for nothing; we had no unmet needs; we wanted nobody. — Elizabeth Gilbert

but she was damn sure he should be in love with her - not some spindly-limbed, slant-eyed, pointy-eared elf bitch. — Anonymous

Bronze-limbed and well-knit, like a statue wrought by a Grecian, he stood on the sand with his back to the moon, and out of the foam came white arms that beckoned to him, and out of the waves rose dim forms that did him homage. Before him lay his shadow, which was the body of his Soul, and behind him hung the moon in the honey-coloured air. — Oscar Wilde

Let the straight-limbed laugh at the club-footed, the white skinned at the blackamoor. — Juvenal

I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. — Alice Oswald

For the long-limbed trees and watery landscape of Vancouver Island, read Hundreds and Thousands. Setting aside, who can resist a woman who lived in a caravan in Goldstream Park with a pack of dogs and a monkey and shunned the human race except to attend her own art openings? Only a genius could both paint and write my/her home. — Marjorie Celona

Oh yes," said Randolph stretching his legs , lighting a mentholated cigarette, "do not take it seriously, what you see here: it's only a joke played on myself by myself ... it amuses and horrifies ... a rather gaudy grave, you might say. There is no daytime in this room, or night, the seasons are changeless here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven't already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as in my mother's womb, in the warm blood of darkness. Wouldn't that be an ironic finale for one who, deep in his goddamned soul, sought sweetly the clean-limbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to share with some beloved, nothing more. — Truman Capote

They are white, four-limbed, about the size of a full-grown human, but that's where the comparisons stop. Naked, with long reptilian tails, arched backs, and heads that jut forward. — Suzanne Collins

Hardy was every loose-limbed cowboy in warn denim, every pair of blue eyes, every battered pickup, every hot cloudless day. -Liberty — Lisa Kleypas

A dirty, joyous, bare-limbed freedom, which rose in his imagination like a vast airy cathedral, ruined perhaps, roofless, fan-vaulted to the skies, where they would weightlessly drift upward in a powerful embrace ... — Ian McEwan

She wasn't crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he'd seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn't that big a girl to hold all of it - to hold her brother's life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that. — Francesca Lia Block

Todd and Larry were Quinn's people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful. — John Le Carre

Living in Olympia, we had lost perspective on what a traditional group looked or sounded like; band configurations were abnormal, either multi-limbed or conspicuously amputated. — Carrie Brownstein