Needled Quotes & Sayings

Morality, said Jesus, is kindness to the weak; morality, said Nietzsche, is the bravery of the strong; morality, says Plato, is the effective harmony of the whole. — Will Durant

I am not, as you will have observed, a man greatly enamored of his fellow human beings. I do not enter lightly into the foibles and whimsicalities of others, I do not suffer fools gladly, I seem able, in conversation, only to needle or be needled. My relationships, as a result, are few, and those few are tenuous, prickly sorts of arrangements, altogether lacking in the spontaneity and intimacy for which humans, I'm told, have an instinctive need. I am aware of no such instincts myself. — Patrick McGrath

He no longer felt anything for that person, but not feeling anything for that person had been a conscious act of will, like turning away from someone in the street even though you saw them constantly, and pretending you couldn't see them day after day until one day, you actually couldn't - or so you could make yourself believe. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

You saying you can't handle that? Kelly needled, grinning. Nick could see that grin in the moonlight, had seen that grin a thousand times before. Now, though, he wanted to wipe it away with another kiss. Jesus, if they didn't do something about this now, it was going to linger. — Abigail Roux

Why did you do that?" she asked, weakly, but, hey, the fact that she could talk at all was a minor miracle.
"You needed to be kissed."
For some reason, the tone of masculine satisfaction in his voice needled her. "I needed it? Really?"
"Fine, I needed it. — Dana Marton

And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain's million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night? — Jack Kerouac

Which is heavier: a soldier's pack or a slave's chains? — Napoleon Bonaparte

Werner shyly. "Oh, come on, you didn't already know?" With his glasses on, Frederick's expression seems to ease; his face makes more sense - this, Werner thinks, is who he is. A soft-skinned boy in glasses with taffy-colored hair and the finest trace of a mustache needled across his lip. Bird lover. Rich kid. "I barely hit anything in marksmanship. You really didn't know?" "Maybe," says Werner. "Maybe I knew. How did you pass the eye exams?" "Memorized the charts." "Don't they have different ones?" "I memorized all four. Father got them ahead of time. Mother helped me study." "What about your binoculars?" "They're prescription. Cost a fortune." They sit in a big kitchen at a butcher's block with a marble cap. The maid named Fanni emerges with a dark loaf and a round of — Anthony Doerr

The daimonic is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both. — Rollo May

Eisenhower had run the Army; he knew all the ways decision making can go off the rails, and insisted on collective debate precisely to prevent senior officials from freelancing, or putting their departmental interests first. For all the formal machinery, Eisenhower was very literally the commander in chief, making the key decisions himself and monitoring closely how they were carried out. Even years after D-Day, when critics needled him for not being on the front lines with the invading forces, he retorted, I planned it and took responsibility for it. Did you want me to unload a truck? — Nancy Gibbs

Time hangs off me like molting skin. — Lionel Shriver

fact our shoes filled with mud and our clothes turned to slime, and it was the farthest thing from pleasant. Mosquitoes that had lain dormant through the long drought now hatched and rose from the forest floor in clouds so thick they filled our mouths and nostrils. I learned to draw back my lips and breathe slowly through my teeth, so I wouldn't choke on mosquitoes. When they'd covered our hands and faces with red welts they flew up our sleeves and needled our armpits. We scratched ourselves — Barbara Kingsolver

Olgun! Wake up!"
Her mind was filled with a sense of self-righteous and
vaguely drowsy protest.
"Sure you weren't, she needled at him. You were just
practicing snoring, so you'd be sure to get it right later on,
yes?"
Olgun's response very strongly resembled an indignant
snort. — Ari Marmell

As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves - the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon - perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. ... Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. ... They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements. — Donald C. Peattie

Anyway," continued Mr. Miller, "when I was a kid, people used to sit under the stars at night and look up into the sky and talk about things. They got to know each other. People Today is too busy staring at the television, what I call the idiot box, to talk about anything. That's why there are so many divorces these days. People don't talk — K. Martin Beckner

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. — Ernest Hemingway,

Nicholas broke the seal and scanned the contents. He looked up at Marcus with a chuckle. "Why, it appears you may get your wish for perpetual bachelorhood after all. She wants to end your engagement."
Marcus started from his chair. "The hell she does! What's possessed her?"
"Perhaps she realizes your extreme reluctance to tie the knot after waiting ... what is it? Five years since your betrothal announcement?"
"Six," Marcus snapped. "But who's counting."
"Perhaps Miss Trent?" Nick needled with a quirk of his lips.
- A BREACH OF PROMISE — Victoria Vane

I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect-in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition-I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR. — Edgar Allan Poe

In the middle of the night, I was startled awake by the sharp smell of tequila. My eyes snapped open. The heath bush I'd transplanted from an alley off Divisadero stretched its needled arms over my head. Between the new growth and glowing bell-shaped blossoms, I saw the outline of a man bend over and snap a stem of my helenium. His tequila bottle leaned over as he did, alcohol splashing out of the top and landing on the shrub concealing my body. A girl behind him reached for the bottle. She sat down on the ground with her back to me and tilted her face to the sky. — Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Raffe's legs tremble violently and he's losing consciousness, but he stays up out of sheer stubbornness and fury. — Susan Ee

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER) — Cornell Woolrich