Piteously Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes you laughed, and then my glove puppet would weep piteously. When you took the glove puppet he alternated between flirtatious and suicidal, hell-bent on flinging himself from great heights and out of the windows. I noticed that you didn't make a voice or a history for the puppet, but you became its voice and history. I'd have liked to admire that but felt I was watching a distressing form of theft, since the puppet could do nothing but suffer being forced open like an oyster. — Helen Oyeyemi

It is alone that part of the external universe which we call material which acts on man through his senses - that part of which we ordinarily feel our knowledge to be the surest; but in reality, strangely enough, as will soon appear, this is one of the aspects of the external world, of which we can know nothing. — Richard Maurice Bucke

The last thing I would have ever expected to happen to me in my life would be that, in fact, I would be accused of doing something wrong and maybe even something criminal. — Kenneth Lay

At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave. — Oswald Spengler

There's something about studying body language and non-spoken emotion - I know the innate response. But to really study it like a science would be fun. — Shia Labeouf

Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. — J.M. Barrie

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever — Charles Dickens

I will look for a candidate, Republican or Democrat, who seems to be on the way or understands how to resolve the economic difficulties we're having, how to do something about unemployment, how to make sure that we free up our businesses and we don't over-regulate ourselves. — Colin Powell

Abner Larrabee's wife, who is a social leader in town, wailed piteously in a letter to the editor of the Mammoth Falls Gazette that her prize peonies had been stoned to death just before they reached the full glory of their bloom. She complained bitterly about "wanton boys who create mischief with their teen-age pranks" and wondered when the mayor was going to do something about the problem of juvenile delinquency. — Bertrand R. Brinley

His head was thrown back, his chest
heaving, and the look on his face was more indicative of pain than
pleasure.
Rosemary snatched her fingers back, certain she'd
misunderstood the technique somehow.
But he whimpered piteously and she realized, no, she couldn't
have misunderstood. Because (a) she was a genius, and (b) it just
wasn't that complicated — Louisa Edwards

It was the kind of love you read in the books and watched in the movies. Instant. Epic. Glorious. And I know there's nothing perfect in this world, but I swear, at that time, it was a perfect love. — Paige Gray

Are you still as angry as you used to be?' Julia, the World War II resistance fighter, asked Lillian Hellman in the biographical [movie] Julia. I like your anger ... . Don't you let anyone talk you out of it. — Susan Faludi

If you don't write with the reader in mind, you are not a writer, period. — Tom Grimes

It has always amazed me that these people who are trying to learn and understand the world around us before it is bulldozed out of existence, have to work on piteously low salaries or on minuscule and precarious grants, while they do one of the most important jobs in the world. For it is only by learning how the planet works that we will see what we are doing wrong and have a chance to save it and ourselves as well. — Gerald Durrell

Still - if I have read religious history aright - faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible - thank Heaven! - to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour's child to "stop the fits," may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost. — George Eliot

After you reach the number impossible, there's no point in counting. — Rick Riordan

Great critics, of whom there are piteously few, build a home for the truth. — Raymond Chandler

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation
and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. — Cornel West

The Hemulen, moaning piteously, thrust his nose into the sand. "This has gone too far!" he said. "Why can't a poor innocent botanist live his life in peace and quiet?"
"Life is not peaceful," said Snufkin, contentedly. — Tove Jansson

Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources. — Zadie Smith

The demon blood inside me burned my soul to ashes long ago.
I am a monster who once dreamed he was a man. Never mistake
me again. — Carol Oates

My mom has this great skiing event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, every year for a local charity. — Joely Fisher

Grade school was perilous ... I can see how I must have worried them. I was the kind of kid who, for no apparent reason, wept piteously or threw up on myself. On an especially scary day, I sometimes did both. — Sue Grafton

Haven't you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?" Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can't tell which. "Don't you think of anything except of how many drinks you're going to have? — Malcolm Lowry

Love hath so long possess'd me for his own
And made his lordship so familiar
That he, who at first irk'd me, is now grown
Unto my heart as its best secrets are.
And thus, when he in such sore wise doth mar
My life that all its strength seems gone from it.
Mine inmost being then feels thoroughly quit
Of anguish, and all evil keeps afar.
Love also gathers to such power in me
That my sighs speak, each one a grievous thing.
Always soliciting
My Gabriel's salutation piteously.
Whenever he beholds me, it is so,
Who is more sweet than any words can show. — Sylvain Reynard

Francis stared down at the Duchess of York's letter. He swallowed, then read aloud in a husky voice, "It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City."
As Margaret listened, the embittered grey eyes had softened, misted with sudden tears.
"My brother may lie in an untended grave," she said, "but he does not lack for an epitaph. — Sharon Kay Penman

You have to learn to play with what you've got. — Don Meyer

I have erected amonument more lasting than bronze. — Horace

The idea that everything happens for a reason comes from people who've been lucky all their lives. — T. Baggins

I feel ill," he announced. "I'm going to bed, where I may die." He tottered piteously to the stairs. "Bury me beside Mrs. Pentstemmon," he croaked as he went up then to bed. — Diana Wynne Jones