Quaking Quotes & Sayings

Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist,
and let my obedience align itself with such iron
conditions
that the quaking of deaths and of births doesn't shake
the deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally. — Mark Eisner

I recalled that inward sensation I had experienced: for I could recall it, with all its unspeakable strangeness. I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in ME
not in the external world. I asked was it a mere nervous impression
a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration. The wondrous shock of feeling had come like the earthquake which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas's prison; it had opened the doors of the soul's cell and loosed its bands
it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it sprang trembling, listening, aghast; then vibrated thrice a cry on my startled ear, and in my quaking heart and through my spirit, which neither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the success of one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the cumbrous body. — Charlotte Bronte

The arts, instead of quaking along the periphery of our policy concerns, must push boldly into the core of policy. The arts are a response to our individuality and our nature and help to shape our identity. The arts are not a frill and should not be treated as such. They have the potential to become the driving force for healing division and divisiveness. — Barbara Jordan

Sounding hoarse, Dare whispered, "Tell me what you want."
The feel of his broad, strong hand against her left her quaking inside - in a good way. The tremble sounded in her tone as she tried to explain. "I want to be whole again. I want to be me, the person I was before I was taken to Tijuana."
Dare said nothing. Molly felt his hesitation, his indecision. God love the man, he didn't want to take advantage of her.
"I know what I want, Dare." She covered his hand with her own, pressed him closer. "I want to replace the bad memories with new ones. Better ones."
His hand curved around her, but he said nothing.
Watching his face, Molly whispered, "I want to do that now, with you. — Lori Foster

One morning there was newly fallen snow in the mountains. It lay halfway down them, and a raw cold, naked and biting, set in from above. It arrived in the night and dug its claws into Alberta, gripping her from behind between her shoulder blades and buckling her tightly into the old enforced position with her legs drawn up and her arms crossed over her breast, keeping her awake for hours. Now she wrapped herself in a nightgown again, shivering and quaking, with the prospect of her own greyish-violet winter face in the mirror. — Cora Sandel

Here he lies like something melting away. His mother's blood comes quaking howling brassing bawling blacking down his mad little veins. — Aeschylus

If nothing else in this long and short life, let me be true to my conscience, to the dignity of my own heart. Let me act in a way that says, I have honored my spirit as truly as I have honored others'. Let me stand tall and rooted as a mountain in the face of a quaking world. — Jennifer DeLucy

What crushed my soul was hanging out with bitter, desperate comics backstage. They're a different breed than the bitter yet eager psyches in the wings of an improv theatre. Struggling stand-ups have externalized self-loathing into an art form. They're a hunching, quaking, unshaven lot. — Scott Adsit

Shura," she whispered. "I'm going to have a baby."
At first she didn't think Alexander heard her, he was mute so long. "You what?" he said in horror.
"I'm going to have a baby," she mouthed, her shoulders quaking, her swollen lips quivering. — Paullina Simons

What matters is the face you show the world, not the quaking mess behind it. — Rachel Vincent

You really are a scary man,no really! If I had boots I would be quaking in them. — James Patterson

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as it spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood. — Robert Frost

Everyone thought I was bold and fearless and even arrogant, but inside I was always quaking. — Katharine Hepburn

Mark's words crash on me like a tsunami. I am quaking inside, but my face is the epitome of peace. If I ever get that angry, I might rip something or someone into pieces and not sit seething like him. — A.A. Gupte

Autumn in the Highlands would be brief - a glorious riot of color blazing red across the moors and gleaming every shade of gold in the forests of sheltered glens. Those achingly beautiful images would be painted again and again across the hills and in the shivering waters of the mountain tarns until the harsh winds of winter sent the last quaking leaf to its death on the frozen ground. — Elizabeth Stuart

She was the type who chased, who danced into your life like a spring storm, and left you battered and quaking in the wake. — Katherine McIntyre

He can kick as hard as he wants but he cannot destroy what is inside. I have a strong spirit and the Rat will never take that away from me, no matter what he does.
-Matt — Kathryn Erskine

Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss. — Barbara Kingsolver

But none of these treatments have fundamentally reduced the underlying anxiety that seems woven into my soul and hardwired into my body and that at times makes my life a misery. As the years pass, the hope of being cured of my anxiety has faded into a resigned desire to come to terms with it, to find some redemptive quality or mitigating benefit to my being, too often, a quivering, quaking, neurotic wreck. — Scott Stossel

Oh, there are plenty of people," the Duc used to observe, "who never misbehave save when passion spurs them to ill; later, the fire gone out of them, their now calm spirit peacefully returns to the path of virtue and, thus passing their life going from strife to error and from error to remorse, they end their days in such a way there is no telling just what roles they have enacted on earth. Such persons," he would continue, "must surely be miserable: forever drifting, continually undecided, their entire life is spent detesting in the morning what they did the evening before. Certain to repent of the pleasures they taste, they take their delight in quaking, in such sort they become at once virtuous in crime and criminal in virtue. — Marquis De Sade

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. — Henry David Thoreau

The perfection of her success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might have put off again and left her. The — Henry James

Now you bitches can stand here quaking in your boots about what your women might do to you. I'm going to get my woman. — Erin McCarthy

Then Pandora bade Epimetheus to touch her breasts,as her heart palpitated excitedly beneath her chest, & invited him to fondle her nipples which were firm & turgid.And she then held his quaking hand in hers & took it & placed it over her pubic hair.
And she set herself down & opened her thighs wide to allow him to examine her crotch.And she challenged him to find a little cup dripping with Nectar that she hid within the folds of her crotch. — Nicholas Chong

Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I though, I listened, I longed not to exist. but life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis. — Shan Sa

I was quaking in my boots. — Lynn Hill

There was nothing yet to fear, and so he passed it off as joy, as heart-pounding, pulse-quaking joy. Not as a premonition. Not as the moment to grab her hand and turn and run. — Laurie Frankel

Wakefield," she gasped, as her world began to tighten, as her hands fisted onto his jacket, her eyes grew wide open and looking at him.
They were still dark, still dangerous, so very full of passion, but she would have followed him, devil that he was, anywhere in that moment.
She was lost and he would show her the way.
"Pierson," he whispered back, his finger delving into her, sliding over her sex and sliding back inside her. Deeper. Harder.
She rocked against him, rode his touch, his strokes.
And when she said his name again, called it, gasped it, it was because he'd taken her over that edge, carried her into a world she couldn't have imagined.
"Pierson!" she cried out, her body quaking, falling, rising all at once. "Oh, Pierson, yes!"
For now she knew the way. — Elizabeth Boyle

We should probably head back. You and Fi aren't too close yet, and I don't want you facing her wrath."
"Yeah she terrifies me. Quaking in fear over here."
He smirks at me. "I think that's truer of a statement than you'd like it to be."
I roll my eyes and punch his arm as he walks by, but I'm smiling anyway. Unfortunately he's kind of right. The girl is violent, what do you want from me? — Melissa Simmons

I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time. — Bill McKibben

White as a winding sheet, Masks blowing down the street: Moscow, Paris London, Vienna all are undone. The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, The world's floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking. — Edith Sitwell

With pilot season, you have to jump through so many hoops, there are so many people in the room, you end up doing four or five auditions. You're just quaking by the end of it. — Ryan Cartwright

The world might be sunny-side up today.
The big ball of yellow might be spilling into the clouds, runny and yolky and blurring into the bluest sky, bright with cold hope and false promises about fond memories, real families, hearty breakfasts, stacks of pancakes drizzled in maple syrup sitting on a plate in a world that doesn't exist anymore.
Or maybe not.
Maybe it's dark and wet today, whistling wind so sharp it stings the skin off the knuckles of grown men. Maybe it's snowing, maybe it's raining, I don't know maybe it's freezing it's hailing it's a hurricane slip slipping into a tornado and the earth is quaking apart to make room for our mistakes. — Tahereh Mafi

After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fe; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking. — Voltaire

It's been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma. — Richard Paul Evans

For those who think religious people live in a constant state of fear and quaking, compare Ps 111:10 to Ps 112:7. There, you will find that the person who fears God will not fear anyone, or anything else. This is not living in fear. By choosing one fear, they are liberated from the many fears. — Michael Ben Zehabe

You ask yourself: where are your dreams now? And you shake your head and say how swiftly the years fly by! And you ask yourself again: what have you done with your best years, then? Where have you buried the best days of your life? Have you lived or not? Look, you tell yourself, look how cold the world is becoming. The years will pass and after them will come grim loneliness, and old age, quaking on its stick, and after them misery and despair. Your fantasy world will grow pale, your dreams will fade and die, falling away like the yellow leaves from the trees ... Ah, Nastenka! Will it not be miserable to be left alone, utterly alone, and have nothing even to regret - nothing, not a single thing ... because everything I have lost was nothing, stupid, a round zero, all dreaming and no more! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I am an Ultimate," she vowed, the walls of her heart quaking with ferocity and determination. "And I have the
power to do the impossible. — Sheeza Iqbal

Of the quaking recruit, three pitched battles make a grim grenadier; and he who shrank from the muzzle of a cannon, is now ready to yield his mustache for a sponge. — Herman Melville

I think that you are the liar!" I say, my voice quaking. "You tell me you love me, you trust me, you think I'm more perceptive than the avarge person. And the first second that belief in my perceptiveness, that trust, that love is put to the test, it all falls apart." I am crying now, nut I am not ashamed of the tears shining on my cheeks or the thickness of my voice. "So you must have lied when you told me all those things ... you must have, because I can't believe your love really is that feeble."
I step closer to him, so that there are only inches between us, and none of the others can hear me.
"I am still the person who would have died rather than kill you," I say, remembering the attack simulation and the feel of his heartbeat under my hand. "I am exactly who you think I am. — Veronica Roth

No. There were men there from all over the Highlands - from every clan, almost. Only a few men from each clan - remnants and ragtag. But the more in need of a chief, for all that." "And that's what you were to them?" I spoke gently, restraining the urge to smooth the line away with my fingers. "For lack of any better," he said, with the flicker of a smile. He had come from the bosom of family and tenants, from a strength that had sustained him for seven years, to find a lack of hope and a loneliness that would kill a man faster than the damp and the filth and the quaking ague of the prison. And so, quite simply, he had taken the ragtag and remnants, the castoff survivors of the field of Culloden, and made them his own, that they and he might — Diana Gabaldon

One year as his wife, and id have become one of those abject, quaking women who look at their husbands when someone asks them a question. I've always despised that type, but I see how it happens now — Mary Ann Shaffer

At first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blonde; black dresses, white. She's a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl. — Francesca Lia Block

Her fingers crawled upwards and touched the outer curve of her breast, and the fingers paused, quaking in fear; but after the moment, despite the panic trying to break out of its shadows and seize her mind, she told her fingers, go on. This is my body. I reclaim my body for myself: for my use, for my understanding, for my kindness and care. Go on. And the fingers walked cautiously on, over the curiously muscleless, faintly ridged flesh, cooler than the rest of the body, across the tender nipple, into the deep cleft between, and out onto the breast that lay limp and helpless and hardly recognizable as round, lying like a hunting trophy over her other arm. Mine, she thought. My body. It lives on the breaths I breathe and the food I eat; the blood my heart pumps reaches all of me, into all my hidden crevices, from my scalp to my heels. — Robin McKinley

Then she got up, went to Monty's mirror, and began combing her hair, while little cadenzas absentmindedly cascaded out of her throat, and cold drops cascaded over Mildred's heart. For Veda was stark naked. From the massive, singer's torso, with the Dairy quaking in front, to the slim hips, to the lovely legs, there wasn't so much as a garter to hide a path of skin. — James M. Cain

Every night in my dreams, a man appeared from the darkest recesses of my mind, as if he'd been waiting for me to fall asleep. His mouth, full, masculine, would sear my flesh. His tongue, like flames across my skin, would send tiny sparks quaking through my body. Then he would dip south, and the heavens would open and a chorus singing hallelujah would ring out in perfect harmony. — Darynda Jones

Singing at the Edge of Need by Susan Laughter Meyers (fragment)
Three things I turned my back to: light,
the past, the trunk of an old tree.
One by one each unfastened itself.
To sit is to present when the roll is called.
I knew that. I wore my hat of straw, fringed
like fingers sifting a breeze. My hat
collecting a thousand thoughts ...
... I had no map
and few lessons yet to guide me.
I was a study of questions. O Grandmother,
I was small, sitting in the midst of wildness,
a child thrilling at the boss of thunder.
A rustle of leaves, moss tipping at me-
I was small, I was hunger, I was thirst-
wings flitting in a brush pile. O Grandmother,
I was small, kneeling in the midst of wonder,
quaking and singing at the edge of need. — Susan Laughter Meyers

I come shackled with shadow, consumed with rage and fire, I'm close to breaking, the urge is quaking, raping, I'm the devil, and there's no hope. — Pepper Winters

By the time the last of these relationships ended I was such a quaking mass of colliding, exploding neurotransmitter malfunctions that the only coherent sentence I could form in my native tongue went: Never again. — Merrill Markoe

I had great plans to surgically excise the quaking, complaining teenager within someday. If I could just get rid of her and her thousands upon thousands of issues - Do I look fat? Am I ugly? Will anyone ever love me? Will I always be alone? Is she fatter than me? How ugly am I? Are they making fun of me? - I was convinced I would immediately become the sort of casual and laid back adult person who was forever smiling and was genuinely unconcerned with the size and/or shape of her body.
I wasn't holding my breath. — Megan Crane

Many nights, I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness - only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety. — Scott Stossel

He is a part of me, always will be, and I am a part of him, too. I don't belong to Abnegation, or Dauntless, or even the Divergent. I don't belong to the Bureau or the experiment or the firnge. I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me- they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could. I love my brother. I love him, and he is quaking with terror at the though of death. I love him and all I can think, all I can hear in my mind, are the words I said to him a few days ago : I would never deliver you to your own execution — Veronica Roth

I look down past the stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving towards it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death. — John Gardner

His rough-pad fingers travel down my throat, across my collarbone, down the swell of my chest, a simple caress which has me quaking inside. My flesh aches for him, burns for his touch. — Magda Alexander

Already up to his waist in the quaking bog, Pendergast stopped struggling and stared up at his assassin. The icy glitter in the pale gray eyes spoke more eloquently of his hatred and despair than any words he might have spoken, and it shook Esterhazy to the core. — Douglas Preston

The great systems that inform the world about the truth and life invariably claim to be absolutely truthful and well-balanced. In reality they are quaking bridges built out of yearning. — Peter Hoeg