Looking Rough Quotes & Sayings

He also said that I would never get an apology out of you." There was a long pause. "I want one. Now."
Xcor put aside his soup and found himself searching the wounds he had given himself, recalling all that pain, all that blood - which had dried brown on the floorboards beneath him.
"And then what," he said in a rough voice.
"You'll have to find out."
Fair enough, Xcor thought.
Without grace - not that he had any, anyway - he rose to his feet. At his full height, he was unsteady for too many reasons to count, and the off-balance feeling got even worse as he met the eyes of his ... friend.
Looking Throe in the face, he stepped up and put out his palm. "I am sorry."
Three simple words spoken loud and clear. And they didn't go nearly far enough.
"I was wrong to treat you as I did. I am ... not as much of the Bloodletter as I thought - as I have e'er wanted to be. — J.R. Ward

I very early caught on that the editor of Cincinnati Post had something specific in mind that he was looking for, and I tried to accommodate him in order to get published. I would turn out rough idea after rough idea, and he would veto eighty percent of them. I pretty much prostituted myself for six months but I couldn't please him, so he sent me packing. — Bill Watterson

From Kari Gregg's "What Rough Beast"

{Elliot} blinked when a blade speared neatly through the master's chest from the rear. "Got him," Garrick shouted over the master's shoulder. "Set, Elliot."
Set what?
He didn't care.
He channeled his rage and pierced the dark master through, impaling him on his blade.
Garrick slid his free.
Malachi yanked him down a split second before Garrick's sword severed his head as well as the dark master's. Chest heaving, he sprawled in the dust, blinking at the fuzzy image of the head bouncing across the floor. It came to rest at the bottom spoke of a crumbling ladder, the vampyr's teeth still gnashing.
His new partner dragged him upright and, looking in his eyes, squeezed his shoulder. "Set means your blade will set the enemy for your partner's killing blow" Malachi grinned at him, chuckled. "It also means duck. — Kari Gregg

I'm over a thousand years old. I've seen it all. You, sweetcheeks, are nothing new." At what must have been an outraged expression on her face, he laughed again. "Come on. Surely you can't think you are the only female out there who's had a rough life, had her heart walked on, been kept in a dungeon for three centuries, blah, blah, pick your trauma, and are now stomping around with all this pent-up anger you spill like acid on everyone who gets to know you." He narrowed his gaze at her. "How close am I?"
Sin's mouth worked, but nothing came out. She finally snapped it shut to avoid looking like a fish gasping on the bank of a river.
"That's what I thought." He made a shooing gesture with his hand. "No, run along and go be caustic with someone who cares. Oh, wait, no one cares, do they? Because you won't let them
— Larissa Ione

She's kind of funny looking. Her face is out of balance
broad forehead, button
nose, freckled cheeks, and pointy ears. A slammed-together, rough sort of face you can't ignore. Still, the whole package isn't so bad. For all I know maybe she's not so wild
about her own looks, but she seems comfortable with who she is, and that's the important thing. — Haruki Murakami

Major General Anders later reflected: I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus ... We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we'd come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at. — Julian Barnes

Two peanuts walk into a rather rough bar, not looking for any trouble. Unfortunately, one was a salted. — Tommy Cooper

It is enough to have been created, to have embodied for a moment the infinite and tumultuously creative spirit. It is infinitely more than enough to have been used, to have been the rough sketch for some perfected creation. Looking into the future, I saw without sorrow, rather with quiet interest, my own decline and fall. — Olaf Stapledon

It's rough to go through life with your contents looking as if they settled during shipping. — Milton Berle

Picker studied Quick Ben as they trudged up yet another grass-backed hillside. 'You want us to get someone to carry you, Mage?'
Quick Ben wiped the sweat from his brow, shook his head. 'No, it's getting better. The Barghast spirits are thick here, and getting thicker. They're resisting the infection. I'll be all right, Corporal.'
'If you say so, only you're looking pretty rough to me.' And ain't that an understatement.
'Hood's warren is never a fun place.'
'That's bad news, Mage. What have we all got to look forward to, then?'
Quick Ben said nothing.
Picker scowled. 'That bad, huh? Well, that's just great. Wait till Antsy hears.'
The wizard managed a smile. 'You tell him news only to see him squirm, don't you?'
'Sure. The squad needs its entertainment, right? — Steven Erikson

My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she'd learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother's hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free. — Patricia Engel

Fairway: a narrow strip of mown grass that separates two groups of golfers looking for lost balls in the rough. — Henry Beard

He came in looking so rough on the outside, but there was a real sadness in his eyes. I just wanted to comfort him. Then he looked at me and - I was on fire. I've never felt that way before. It doesn't matter that I don't even know him. — Ruth Cardello

Kestrel took Arin's battered hand in hers, the rough heat of it, the fingernails still ringed with carbon from the smith's coal fire. His skin was raw-looking: scrubbed clean and scrubbed often. But the black grime was too ingrained.
She twined her fingers with his. Kestrel and Arin walked together through the passageway and the ghost of its old door, which her people had smashed through ten years before. — Marie Rutkoski

There's this unbelievable bias and prejudice against quote-unquote good-looking people, that they can't be in pain or they can't have rough lives or be deep or interesting. — Rob Lowe

I went through a really good-looking phase from birth to 9. And then things went crazy. I don't know what happened, but between 9 and 14 it was really, really rough. I didn't have a lot of friends. The only ones who were nice to me were the theater kids. And they were like, 'You can come and join us. No one likes us.' — Cristin Milioti

It's a marvelous thing, the ocean. For some reason when two people sit together looking out at it, they stop caring whether they talk or stay silent. You never get tired of watching it. And no matter how rough the waves get, you're never bothered by the noise the water makes by the commotion of the surface - it never seems too loud, or too wild. — Banana Yoshimoto

She reached out and touched the king's face, cupping his cheek in her hand.
"Just a nightmare," he said, his voice still rough.
The queen's voice was cool. "How embarrassing," she said, looking at his maimed arm.
The king looked up then, and followed her gaze. If it was embarrassing to wake like a child screaming from a nightmare, how much more embarrassing to be the reason your husband woke screaming. A quick smile visited the king's face. "Ouch," he said, referring to more than the pain in his side. "Ouch," he said again as the queen gathered him into her arms. — Megan Whalen Turner

I was looking at a bottle of water; they have nutritional facts printed on the side. You know, I'm no chemist, but I have a rough idea what's in water. — Jim Gaffigan

Lora ... Her name was a tormented whisper as he kissed her harder, fiercer than before, as if he was starving for the taste of her mouth. She twisted in his arms, not trying to get away but to work her arms free ... She managed to push them up through his crushing hold and lock them around his neck. He groaned deep in his throat, and she groaned too in protest as his mouth suddenly left hers. He was looking down at her, his breathing heavy, a wild glitter in his eyes. Lora lifted one hand from the corded nape of his neck and lightly stroked the rough, wet edges of his hair. — Karen Robards

So I got desperate. I was really panicking. Then I got this idea. I figured if I looked at people hitching rides, I might find somebody. One of them might turn out to be the right type of person, and willing to help me. I tried to choose pretty carefully. I only stopped for rough-looking men. — Lee Child

(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods. — Truman Capote

A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones and no mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: it collapses if any one stone is removed. How, then, was it built in the first place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully remove stones one by one. More generally, there are many structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive the subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid of scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer visible. Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution, too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed. 'Irreducible — Richard Dawkins

A man comes walking north. He carries a sack, the first sack, containing provisions for the road and some implements. The man is strong and rough-hewn, with a red lion beard and little scars on face and hands, sites of old wounds
were they gotten at work or in a fight? Maybe he has been in jail and wants to go into hiding, or perhaps he is a philosopher looking for peace; in any case, here he comes, a human being in the midst of this immense solitude. He walks and walks, in a silence broken by neither bird nor beast. — Knut Hamsun

That's too bad, because you're going to get me," I say hoarsely, and her struggles abruptly cease. "You're going to get these rough hands that need to touch you. These eyes that will never tire of looking at you. These arms that will hold you steady or lift you up whenever you need their strength. This head that's crazy about every little thing you do." My voice deepens. "And you're going to get this heart that's already falling in love with you. — Kati Wilde

The traveler that resolutely follows a rough and winding path will sooner reach the end of his journey than he that is always changing his direction, and wastes the hour of daylight in looking for smoother ground and shorter passages. — Samuel Johnson

Lucy was kinda like the Ravens - rough-looking on the outside but full of awesome. — Laura Kaye

I won't let anyone talk to my wife that way, Gray said, his voice with a steely edge. I know that underneath that expensive tux you're nothing but a mama's boy sucking off your father's money and looking for a wealthy woman to keep you doing nothing for the rest of your life. I just want you to understand that beneath my tux is a rough and tumble cowboy who will kick your ever-loving ass to hell and back if you ever talk about my wife in derogatory terms again. — Carla Cassidy

I have a hunger,
for more than food.
I have a hunger
bigger than Joyce City.
I want tongues to tie, and
eyes to shine at me
like they do at Mad Dog Craddock.
Course they never will,
not with my hands all scarred up,
looking like the earth itself,
all parched and rough and cracking,
but if I played right enough,
maybe they would see past my hands.
Maybe they could feel at ease with me again,
and maybe then,
I could feel at east with myself. — Karen Hesse

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with ever modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still. — Hope Mirrlees

Owen was so tiny, we loved to pick him up; in truth, we couldn't resist picking him up. We thought it was a miracle: how little he weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock. But the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times - especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon). — John Irving

As a believer, I know that Jesus Christ has a plan and it's not going to be my plan. It's not always succeeding and looking back it's amazing looking back to see how God works in mysterious ways, not always good ways, rough ways but those rough times, those rough patches, and those swamps and all those things that I went through are looking back, were such an incredible life lessons for me not only to shape and build me as an athlete but most importantly, my character as a person. — Jennie Finch

And thus they form a perfect group; he walks back two or three paces, selects his point of sight, and begins to sketch a hurried outline. He has finished it before they move; he hears their voices, though he cannot hear their words, and wonders what they can be talking of. Presently he walks on, and joins them.
'You have a corpse there, my friends?' he says.
'Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago.'
'Drowned?'
'Yes, drowned; - a young girl, very handsome.'
'Suicides are always handsome,' he says; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas covering.
Life is such a golden holiday to him young, ambitious, clever - that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny. ("The Cold Embrace") — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Well, I won't give up on us, Even if the skies get rough
I'm giving you all my love, I'm still looking up — Jason Mraz

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

I see. Is Jim with you now?"
"Yes, he is. We're having rough sex. You're interrupting.
"What are you doing here?"
"Looking for Jim in your bed."
"He isn't here."
"I see that. — Ilona Andrews

Proof had this ability to not only nurture my talent, but to see that diamond in the rough when a million people could be looking at the same thing... and just not see it. — Eminem

He walked back around and faced Prophet for a long moment, before putting a hand on his shoulder and pushing down. "On your knees." His voice sounded husky to his own ears. Rough too, and his throat was thick - with lust, with a million other emotions that only intensified when Prophet sank down as ordered and tugged at Tom's zipper with his teeth. Tom threaded his hand in Prophet's hair and pulled him back. Pulled his own zipper down with his free hand, slowly, exposing his piercings one by one as he freed his cock. "That what you're looking for?" "Yeah, Tommy," Prophet murmured. "Fucking let me." Tom — S.E. Jakes

He's rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he'll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums - hers alone - is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future. — Jennifer Egan

Her mouth was on his with such ferocity, it knocked him back a step. He managed to haul her back so he could gasp for air and answers. "Not that I'm complaining." "Then don't. Shut up and put out Savoie." "You are so romantic, detective." She chained rough kisses about his neck. "What if I can't perform under this unexpected pressure?" Her hand dropped below his belt for an assessing fondle. "Just my luck. Appears to be high performance all the way." He chuckled and began to nuzzle and nip at her rather roughly, his attention supercharged by her aggression. "And what kind of handling are you looking for?" "Fast and reckless — Nancy Gideon

On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. You're always being fooled, you're always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If you know enough mechanics to think of them as a group, and your observations coincide with mine, I think you'll agree that mechanics tend to be rather modest and quiet. There are exceptions, but generally if they're not quiet and modest at first, the works seems to make them that way. And skeptical. Attentive, but skeptical. But not egotistic. There's no way to bullshit your way into looking good on a mechanical repair job, except with someone who doesn't know what you're doing. — Robert M. Pirsig

That rough-looking diamond is put upon the wheel of the lapidary. He cuts it on all sides. It loses much
much that seemed costly to itself. The king is crowned; the diadem is put upon the monarch's head with trumpet's joyful sound. A glittering ray flashes from that coronet, and it beams from that very diamond which was just now so sorely vexed by the lapidary. You may venture to compare yourself to such a diamond, for you are one of God's people; and this is the time of the cutting process. Let faith and patience have their perfect work, for in the day when the crown shall be set upon the head of the King, Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, one ray of glory shall stream from you. "They shall be mine," saith the Lord, "in the day when I make up my jewels." "Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I just try to stay half way decent looking. Boxing's a rough sport and you get hit a lot. — Muhammad Ali

It's hard to get yourself into a position where someone will trust you to direct a film anyway, whatever sex you are. Certainly in England, the film set is a very male preserve. There's a lot of very rough looking men pushing equipment around that don't want the gaffer to be a girl. — Colin Firth

I'm forever being told that I'm an odd-looking actress, so it's great playing parts where there's no vanity. You just look as rough as you possibly can! — Anna Maxwell Martin

Sometimes things feel hopeless. Not always within my own life - but looking outward, it seems like rough times lie ahead of us. The world seems to be kind of caving in on itself in a lot of ways. But I try to look on the bright side. — Jenny Lewis