Loose Tooth Quotes & Sayings

Your job isn't to know the how, it's to know the what and to be open to discovering, and receiving, the how. — Jen Sincero

The matted straw cover of the latrine was yanked away. The sun blinded me as I looked up at the dark outline of two young soldiers in tattered camouflage, their uniforms made for men bigger than they were. They each held an automatic weapon, an AK-47, and were leering down at me. I could see the two gold teeth of one of them as he grinned.
Gold-tooth reached down and grabbed my hair, yanking me up by it until he could get the other hand under my arm and pull me the rest of the way. I screamed in terror. He pulled me away from the pit as he and the others held their noses and laughed hysterically. One held each arm and dragged me to the river's edge. They tore off my loose cotton dress; I had no underwear on. After howling with laughter and firing guns in the air, they crudely touched my body. — Nick Hahn

Idleness would have seemed not only a sign of moral decay, but an affront to the natural order of things. — Diana Gabaldon

Beside Mama, in my own folding chair, with my feet sticking out in front of me, I thought about my own innards. Just a few months before I'd had no idea whether my reproductive equipment worked. There was no evidence. But that week I had become a full-fledged bleeder and was still absorbed by this first change in myself that I had ever noticed. The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth. — Katherine Dunn

And yet still the question was there, and my mind went to it like a tongue probing the tender spot of a loose tooth: it hurt but I wanted to know — Nicole Krauss

I try to stay real calm and careful — Lisa Jones

There's nothing that allays an angry mind So soon as a sweet beauty. — Francis Beaumont

Why do I love the thought of you old? That first twinge of arthiritis in your knee is a thing I imagine with all the tenderness I felt when you showed me your loose tooth. I wish I could help you carry the weight of many years. But the Lord will have that fatherly satisfaction. — Marilynne Robinson

Sent to the Monk"

Night falls
and the empty intimacy of the whole world
fills my heart to frothing.
The past has trudged to this one spot
and falls into the stream,
its flashlight in its mouth.
Ancient tears beneath the surface
rise and scatter like carp,
while an ivory hairpin floats away
like a loose tooth going back in time.

Columbia Poetry Review. Spring 2014 — Mary Ruefle

As a kid, I can't remember having anything to play with except a loose tooth. And that wasn't mine. It was my brother's. — S. Truett Cathy

This table is a pigeon trap. A dozen different forks and knives and spoons. Four different goblets. All of them just waiting to be knocked over or misapplied and mishandled. It's a wonder anyone is ever tempted to eat. — Siri Mitchell

Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I've been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there's no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I'm bloated with language I can't afford to forget. — Warsan Shire

For loose teeth the tooth fairy recommends tying your tooth to a brick and throwing said brick down the stairs. — Nicole McKay

I like to disappear in my roles because I don't have an assistant. — Taraji P. Henson