Paring Quotes & Sayings

Watching, she had felt unusually and keenly alive, alive the way a knife is sharp, so that the humiliation she was enduring was perfect, like the paring of skin from a hard apple. — Sonya Hartnett

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored. — Stephen King

You were cut?" "Yeah, but I'm okay. Just a little sore." Devilishness shined in Malik's eyes. "What was the weapon again? Paring knife? Melon baller?" He squeezed his thumb and forefinger together. "One of those cinnamon-flavored toothpicks? — Chloe Neill

She wrapped her head in a towel and croaked." That sounded reasonable to me ... except for the paring knife with blood and pieces of hair stuck to it. Lula bent at the waist and examined the towel, wrapped turban style. "Must have been a good clonk she took. Lots of blood." Usually when people die their bodies evacuate and the smell gets bad fast. Mrs. Nowicki didn't smell dead. Mrs. Nowicki smelled like Jim Beam. Carl and I were both registering this oddity, looking at each other sideways when Mrs. Nowicki opened one eye and fixed it on Lula. "YOW!" Lula yelled, jumping back a foot, knocking into Sally. "Her eye popped open!" "The better — Janet Evanovich

So there were people who got up at noon, pared their toenails, and sat naked in hotel rooms without regarding each day as an apocalypse. Amazing! If someone had burst into my room and found me naked and paring my nails, I would have died of shock. Or would I? Maybe I was stronger than I thought. — Erica Jong

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber. — Gerard Manley Hopkins

The old truth that Calvin preached, that Augustine preached, that Paul preached, is the truth that I must preach to-day, or else be false to my conscience and my God. I cannot shape the truth; I know of no such thing as paring off the rough edges of a doctrine. John Knox's gospel is my gospel. That which thundered through Scotland must thunder through England again. — Charles Spurgeon

Like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring: when a' was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. — William Shakespeare

Zen, like life, defies exact definition, but its essence is the experience, moment by moment, of our own existence
a natural, spontaneous encounter, unclouded by the suppositions and expectations that come between us and reality. It is, if you like, a paring down of life until we see it as it really is, free from our illusions; it is merely a divestment of ourselves until we recognize our own true nature. — David Fontana

The sun, like a golden knife, was steadily paring away the edge of the shade beside the walls.The streets were enclosed between old, whitewashed walls. Everywhere were peace and stillness, as though all the elements were obeying the sacred law of calm and silence imposed by the blazing heat. It seemed as though mystery was everywhere and my lungs hardly dared to inhale the air. — Sadegh Hedayat

What looks to be a wisp of cloud is actually the moon, narrow and pale like a paring snipped from a snowman's toenail. — Tom Robbins

Let a man take time enough for the most trivial deed, though it be but the paring of his nails. The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion,
as if the short spring days were an eternity. — Henry David Thoreau

He that hangs himself is a virgin: virginity murders itself, and should be buried in highways, out of all sanctified limit, as a desperate offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese, consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach. Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the canon. Keep it not; you cannot choose but lose by't! Out with't! within the year it will make itself two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal itself not much the worse. Away with 't! — William Shakespeare

Greetings. There is a body buried on your property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady's name is Rita Jones. You've seen this missing school-teacher's face on the news, I'm sure. In her jeans pocket you'll find a slip of paper with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If I have not heard from you by 8:00 P.M. tomorrow (5/17), the Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call. I'll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas's lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don't have to make that call. I've placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property and you'll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police, as I am always watching you. A — Blake Crouch

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre. — F Scott Fitzgerald

For nurturing the mind, there's nothing like paring your desires away to a very few. If you have few desires, there may still be some capricious whims in your mind, but they'll be few. If you have many desires, there may be some enduring principles in your mind, but they'll be few indeed. — Mencius

I am not greedy of money myself, but the monotony of always screwing and paring is more tiresome than the monotony of riches. — Annie French Hector

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails — James Joyce

The last thin paring of the old moon hung over the distant mountains to the west. Venus had moved away. With dark a gauzy swarm of stars. He could not guess what they were for so many. — Cormac McCarthy

And after I told my six-year-old, grandma died in the accident, after tears and questions she suggested, maybe now is a good time to explain what the man has to do with babies. So i chose one perfect lily from that vase and with the tip of a paring knife slit open the pistil to trace the passage pollen makes to the egg cell- the eggs i then slipped out and dotted on her fingertips, their greenish-white translucent as the air in this blizzard that cannot cool the unbearable heart. — Kimiko Hahn

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form. — Julian Barnes

The God I do believe in is the God who doesn't care: James Joyce's God who stands back, paring his fingernails. — Roger Rosenblatt

You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do. — Rebecca Harding Davis

Throughout this book, we've been evangelizing simplicity, but ironically, the practice of simplicity is not simple. It is easy to build a bulky design by adding layer upon layer of navigation and features; it's much more difficult to create simple, graceful designs. Paring designs to essential elements while maintaining elegance and functionality requires courage and discipline. — Jakob Nielsen

With a paring knife she hacked off her waist-length hair just below the chin. Kit felt a shiver of misgiving. How would she net a talking fish now, or tether a dragon? How would she escape from her tower? — Marina Fiorato

Books provide context and allow you to think about things over time. Film is like writing haiku; there is an immense amount of pleasure in paring down and paring down. But it isn't the same. — Geoffrey Ward

She would be like that character in a novel she read once about the woman who rid herself of everything she owned, item by item. She kept paring down, paring down until all she had left could fit in her handbag. Then she walked out the door and left the house behind, too. — Rebecca Kelley

CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That's what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.
What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She's a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult. — William Gibson

I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect. — Debra Dean

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... — Virginia Woolf

Knock him on the head with the umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife? Scream. Die. Papa. — Anthony Doerr

If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life arouond the wheel of this longing like so much loose wire. — Kevin Brockmeier