Pinprick Quotes & Sayings

On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds. — Julio Cortazar

The Witch's knife like nails drummed the crystal of the windowsill, chipping and scoring it. They sounded like death beatles clicking in the walls.'Taste it,' the pearl was telling her, 'That I may know my daughter's heart.' Almost without a thought, Ariel touched a few grains of the Witch's dust to her tongue, and a sharp sensation went through her like a pinprick. It was the bitterest thing she has ever known. it tasted like despair. — Meredith Ann Pierce

Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. — Diane Setterfield

European languages and a Google app can now turn your words into a foreign language, either in text form or as an electronic voice. Skype, an internet-telephony service, said recently that it would offer much the same (in English and Spanish only). But claims that such technological marvels will spell the end of old-fashioned translation businesses are premature. Software can give the gist of a foreign tongue, but for business use (if executives are sensible), rough is not enough. And polyglot programs are a pinprick in a vast industry. The business of translation, interpreting and software localisation (revising websites, apps and the like for use in a foreign language) generates revenues of $37 billion a year, reckons Common Sense Advisory (CSA), a consulting firm. — Anonymous

For the first time in ages I felt a tiny pinprick in my heart
not like it was breaking, but like something small and unseen had begun sewing it closed again. — Leslea Tash

You can't hurt a man with a pinprick when he's already got a spear in his chest. — Anonymous

There comes a point when you're so far down in the pit that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, not a pinprick or a soft glow. There is black and more black pressing into you, choking out the world. And asking how you got there and why you can't get out is a pointless exercise because you're too deep to do anything about it — Cora Carmack

For six days I didn't get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn't usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me. — Lloyd Jones

A nine-year-old girl, just a kid, and yet there was something ageless in her eyes - not a child, not an adult - just an ongoing everness, that same pinprick of absolute lasting light that I see today in my own eyes as Timmy smiles at Tim from the graying photographs of that time. — Tim O'Brien

Have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: — Julian Barnes

I would almost plead for a pinprick of salvation, to pierce the burden, the damned skin of words wrapped around me. — David Grossman

Another ship. It's the best news I could ever have imagined.

Who are they going to send? Who's coming?

I stare out of the helm window, straining my eyes against the infinite blackness, pressing my fingernails into my palms so hard they sting. I can't see anything except the silver pinprick stars.

How long until I'll be able to see The Eternity?

How long until it will be able to see me? — Lauren James

Emma shook her head. Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft. — Ransom Riggs

I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences? — Jill Talbot

Every instant of time ... is a pinprick of eternity. — Marcus Aurelius

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire. — Margaret Atwood

Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft." She stepped close and we hugged. I could feel her trembling ever so slightly. She wasn't bulletproof. I knew then that my shaky faith in myself was starting to dig a hole in hers, and Emma's confidence was what held everything together. It was the life raft. — Ransom Riggs

And everyday I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? — Diane Setterfield

The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us. The mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering son, and the artist when he or she is drawing attention to grace, by showing the pinprick of light overcoming the darkness in the painting, or the story, or the song. The world knows darkness. Christ came into the world to show us light. I have seen it, have been blinded by it, invaded by it. I will tell its story. — Andrew Peterson

Because whatever was going on between him and Rachel and Cruz hurt like hell, but the pain was a pinprick compared to the satisfaction when Cruz growled his name or Rachel whimpered it. If he could just figure out a way for both of them to do it at the same time, they could tear his heart out of his chest and burn it to ash, and he'd still go to hell happy. — Kit Rocha

He felt a chill on the back of his neck. It was self-doubt, the black beetle that had pursued him all his life, pinching at him, poisoning his every success, whispering in his ear about his flaws and his failures and his unworthiness. He hadn't felt it in months, but the pinprick of its claws was instantly familiar. They informed him with their tiny tattoo that he had almost certainly done something immensely, irrevocably, and unforgivably stupid. — Megan Whalen Turner

Pity moment, blah! Let's turn it around! We do not even need to go into the story of it. We acknowledge this moment and release it. We love and accept and forgive ourselves. And we acknowledge that this is a tiny stitch, a brief pinprick in the needlepoints we are creating of our lives. And we also acknowledge that this lifetime of ours is but a tiny little stitch in the ever-expanding, infinite needlepoint of the Universe. Self-pity is not a reason good enough for us to be out of alignment with peace. — Alaric Hutchinson

Most of the time, lies are like having a needle dragged across the skin. If it only grazes the surface, and never leaves a mark, it doesn't faze the person that is being lied to. Other times, it's like a tiny pinprick on your finger. It draws a little blood to the surface, but stings like hell. You might be sore for a while, but you eventually heal and move on. Then, there are the other times, when the cut feels like it came from a machete, slicing so deeply that healing feels impossible.
Max's lie cut me right to the bone. — Loni Flowers

This is my favorite time of day. When the sun is setting and the last of its fiery fingers caress the water line before relinquishing their hold to the darkness of the night. And I can watch as the stars pop out, one by one, to pinprick the sky with their silvery light. — J.A. Souders

We all live in a kind of continuous dream," I told him. "When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we've taken as reality. — Jeff VanderMeer

The habit of ubiquitous interventionism, combining pinprick strikes by precision weapons with pious invocations of high principle, would lead us into endless difficulties. Interventions must be limited in number and overwhelming in their impact. — Margaret Thatcher

Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man?

Edgerton asks me with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris.

It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price. — Nick Cutter

It's a quiet thing when your heart breaks. I thought it would be loud, ... I thought it would drown everything else out. But it happened like a whisper. A small, clean split. It broke in a second, and the pain was little more than a pinprick. It's the echo that kills you ... that tiny little sound kept bouncing around the cavern of my ribs, getting louder and louder. It multiplied until I heard a hundred hearts breaking, a thousand, more. All of them mine. — Cora Carmack

But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill ... — Ian McEwan

The caterpillars are coming. They're coming. As they passed a blunt rolled with marijuana shake around the bonfire, filled plastic cups with beer from a keg in the back of John Anderson's Bronco, snuck cigarettes at the red doors that led to the make-out woods behind school. As they waited on line at the cafeteria for pizza and Tater Tots, warmed up during choral practice, and changed for gym in the locker room. Until Maddie felt something titanic rushing toward the island, gathering steam like a nor'easter barreling toward shore, and the waiting filled with a tingling urgency she knew they all felt. She felt it. Car engines revved harder, highs soared higher, buzzes and crushes burned brighter. "Look." She lifted her palm as the insect inched across. The two lines of blue and red dots on its back glimmered like spots of blood rising after a pinprick. "They're here. — Julia Fierro

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession. — Iris Murdoch

I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life. — Julian Barnes

I can practically smell the darkness on others. I'll know right away if this girl, will work for me. I don't judge the women on their physical features, but on the way they present themselves. I look for signs that there's something in them besides a desperate need for kink. If there's even a pinprick of this same blackness I carry around on their soul, then I take them. — C.M. Stunich

It is true the Shining Isle is smoke and ashes and that darkness is wide over the land. But your long memories have failed you. Of all creatures, you should know that the darkness is seldom complete, and even when it is, the pinprick of light is not long in coming
and finer for the great shroud that surrounds it. — Andrew Peterson

Do you think I am a fool, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you never think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for more than their color alone? I am a student of their lore, and it is arcane and hermetic beyond the dreams of alchemists. Did you never wonder why I gave you so many pots, so many creams, so much perfume? — Catherynne M Valente

Lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. And what star is that, Poldy? says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. That one, is it? says Chris Callinan, sure that's only what you might call a pinprick. — James Joyce