Quotes & Sayings About Raking

He makes a face and tosses the flower at me. It lands on my cheek, and I pick it up and twirl it between my fingers. I could lie out here all day, not moving an inch, feeling the sun above and the grass below. With a contented sigh, I stretch my arms wide, raking the grass with my fingers - and find myself brushing Aladdin's hand with my own. I pull it away quickly, my cheeks warming. He laughs a little.
"Sometimes," he says, "I forget you're supposed to be four thousand years old. You act as shy as a girl of sixteen."
"I do not!" I sit up and glare at him.
He grins and shrugs, sliding his hands under his head. There are bits of grass stuck in his hair, and after a moment's hesitation, I reach over and flick them away.
Aladdin watches me silently, his throat bobbing as he swallows. I drop my gaze. — Jessica Khoury

Of a new-era'd nation that looked out for Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire and have its blue uniform deep-dry-cleaned and placed in storage in triple-thick plastic dry-cleaning bags and hang up its cuffs to spend some quality domestic time raking its lawn and cleaning its refrigerator and dandling its freshly bathed kids on its neatly pressed mufti-pants' knee. — David Foster Wallace

Their culture is narrowly interbred, and some personal relations border on the incestuous, so they float each other's boat and write almost identical muck-raking stories. Everyone in China knows why they are, and their China-bashing is green-lighting all of us to join the onslaught. — Thorsten J. Pattberg

The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on. — Stephen King

You can't be just a scribe, or a wizard. Nameless God," he cried, raking a hand through his hair. "I wish they had never found you, never made you think you were the princess. Nothing else, will ever be good enough, not now. You'll never be happy. You'll throw yourself into danger, take it all on yourself, just to prove that they were all wrong about you. And I just-I just-"
And without warning, he stepped on front of me, grabbed my shoulders to stop my pacing, and kissed me. — Eilis O'Neal

Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood, just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves. — Marcelene Cox

Paul straightened, raking Elijah with a sweeping glance. "I've never seen a lycan shift so fast." "Betcha never seen a lycan who's nailing a vampress either," Vash said. "Syre's second, no less. It's a whole new world. — Sylvia Day

I stopped trying to figure out American juries around the same time Adam Sandler movies started raking in millions at the box office
people just don't act predictably. — Jodi Picoult

What a couple. I'm consumed into ashes. And he's always raking up the ashes and setting them on fire again. — Agnes Smedley

Sacredness and profanity and prayers and wishes: they're all held together by the broken limbs of this dead tree, raking the night sky with its blackened branches. We are so small, the two of us. The tree and sky are so large and grand. We could fail so easily, fall before we've begun to rise. — Elora Bishop

An Autobiography is the truest of all books,for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell (though I didn't use that figure)
the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences. — Mark Twain

Is that why you had to pin her wrists to the floor? Haven't I taught you better on how to treat a lady? You can't hold them against their will." She turned to me, her lips broadening her smile. "I didn't mean to scare you. Really. I thought ... well ... don't mind me." She stepped closer, her eyes raking over my body. "But I can see why he did. Holy shit." She looked me in the face again. "You are a girl, right? God, please say yes."
"Pam, this is Sang Sorenson. Sang, this is my stepmom, Pam. And yes, she's a fucking girl."
"Thank the lord," she said, and she stepped around Gabriel and wrapped her arms around my shoulders, pulling me into a hug. "Thank you, thank you." She smelled heavily of cigarettes and perfume that got caught in my throat, but her hug felt genuine.
"Jesus H. Christ," Gabriel breathed out, pressing a hand to his forehead. — C.L.Stone

Barrons Books and Baubles had been ransacked!

Tables were overturned, books torn from shelves and strewn everywhere, baubles broken. Even my little TV behind the counter had been destroyed.

"Barrons?" I called warily. It was night and the lights were on. My illusory Alina had told me more than an hour had passed. Was it the same night, nearly dawn? Or was it the night following our theft attempt? Had Barrons come back from Wales yet? Or was he still there, searching for me? When I'd been so rudely ripped from reality, who or what had come through those basement doors?

I heard footsteps, boots on hardwood, and turned expectantly toward the connecting doors.

Barrons was framed in the doorway. His eyes were black ice. He stared at me a moment, raking me from head to toe. "Nice tan, Ms. Lane. So, where the fuck have you been for the past month? — Karen Marie Moning

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty. — Jessica Mitford

Raking over the past and sifting its dust is an occupation for the idle or the elderly retired. — Armand Hammer

I love the business of business; I love the risk raking. — Felix Dennis

There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden. — Chuck Close

What are you doi - " My words are swallowed up as his lips crash down on mine. It isn't a soft kiss - it's intense, furious, in a way I never knew a kiss could be, his lips hard and unforgiving against mine. It's a shut-up-I-hate-you kiss. A you-drive-me-crazy kiss. An if-I-don't-kiss-you-I'll-kill-you kiss. It's a battle - our mouths are opposite fronts, fighting for ground, warring for control. I shove his chest. He bites my lip. I nip his tongue. He tugs my hair. The kiss goes wild as my other arm winds around him, clutching the back of his shirt, my nails raking against the fabric. — Julie Johnson

You look exhausted," Logan says, his eyes raking over me. "Why don't you try and catch some sleep."
"All your nocturnal activities must be taking a toll," Haydn mutters not too discreetly under his breath.
"The same could be said for you," I retort, in no mood to ignore his renewed mean streak.
"That's rich coming from you."
"Haydn." How Logan can manage to convey such potent meaning with one word is sheer talent. And I'm eternally grateful, because it shuts Haydn up. — Siobhan Davis

The mothers in my neighborhood were screamers and yellers, silent fuming carpet-raking speed cleaners or detached unkempt anticleaners, all-day-luncheon martini drinkers, chain smokers prostrate on the couch with bookcases filled with accounts of JFK and Camelot. — Laurie Lindeen

How happy I might be, if only she was less greedy, better tempered, not addicted to raking up old grudges, more affectionate, with slightly yellower hair, slimmer, and about twenty years younger! But what is the good of expecting such a woman to reform? — John Collier

There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake. — Theodore Roosevelt

Goddamn it," Zane murmured, raking a hand through his hair. What had happened was his fault - he had failed to be the dominant that the submissive obviously wanted and most certainly needed. Instead of taking control he had relinquished it and thus had probably ruined any chance with her. — Sharon Davis

Blood oozed from deep puncture wounds at his neck and shoulder. His right arm flopped unnaturally. From the middle of his back to his waist, the bear's raking claws left deep, parallel cuts. It reminded Harris of tree trunks he had seen where bears mark their territory, only these marks were etched in flesh instead of wood. On the back of Glass's thigh, blood seeped through his buckskin breeches. Harris — Michael Punke

I prefer not to elaborate on the various stages of our dealings over the next few days - disbelief, anger, recrimination, the raking up of old sores, bitter silence and so on - but I can say that they gave lasting strength to our relationship, like a thick scar is stronger than the skin around it. — John Mole

Between this half-wooded half-naked hill, and the vague still horizon that its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of fathomless shade - the sounds from which suggested that what it concealed bore some reduced resemblance to features here. The thin grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes of differing powers, and almost of differing natures - one rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them like a soft broom. The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no more. The — Thomas Hardy

He gave her everything. Everything but the promise of a future. And she met his dark strokes with a plunder of her own, holding his gaze, raking his soul of its secrets. She knew just what she meant to him. — Monica McCarty

How did the Blonde break her leg raking leaves? She fell out of the tree. — Al Abama

He turned back to Lara, his alert gaze raking over her tearful face. Somehow the solid reality of his presence eased her panic. He folded her in his arms, anchoring her against his chest, murmuring quietly into her hair.
Sniffling, Lara reached inside his waistcoat until her palm rested over the steady beat of his heart. The sensation of his warm breath sinking down to her scalp me her quiver. It was so terribly intimate, crying in his arms ... even more personal than making love. But he had never felt so much like a husband to her as he did in this moment. Quieting, she inhaled his familiar scent and let out a shaky sigh. — Lisa Kleypas

Star had Comet haltered and out of his corral, his lead rope tied to the top rail of the fence, and she was raking out the manure and small stones with amazing care, so that no square inch of dirt was left ungroomed. She had just led him out and tied him to the rail. She made it look so easy. Was it really so easy? Every time she had been here working, I'd stayed close and watched — Catherine Ryan Hyde

For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chain-saw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of the labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep beside his wife. — Matthew Neill Null

The President needs me at the White House. It's autumn, you know, and the leaves need raking. — Spiro T. Agnew

Julian's skin was cold, as if he'd been leaning out the window into the night air. She turned his hand and drew with her finger on his bare forearm. It was something they'd done since they were small children and didn't want to get caught talking during lessons. Over the years they'd gotten so good at it that they could map out detailed messages on each other's hands, arms, even their shoulders through their T-shirts.
D-I-D Y-O-U E-A-T? she spelled out.
Julian shook his head, still staring at Livvy and Ty. His curls were sticking up in tufts as if he'd been raking his hands through his hair. She felt his fingers, light on her upper arm. N-O-T H-U-N-G-R-Y. — Cassandra Clare

Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They're as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you've ceased to wear it. — Hector Hugh Munro

Raking a hand through his hair, he forced his attention to the text she'd left on the coffee table, refusing to dwell on the disconcerting fact that a part of him had taken one look at the lass in such proximity to his bed and said simply: Mine — Karen Marie Moning

Good. I would hate to have you eaten before we even started," he purred, raking his claws across the wood. "You appear to have the same recklessness as your sister, always rushing into things without thinking them through."
"Don't compare me to Meghan," I said, narrowing my eyes. "I'm not like her."
"Indeed. She, at least, had a pleasant personality. — Julie Kagawa

Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck. — Theodore Roosevelt

Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 - twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. — Jeff Goodell

Memory is a funny thing. It tricks you into believing that you've forgotten important moments, and then when you're raking your brain for a bit of information that might make sense of something else, it taps you on the head and says, Remember when you told me to put that memory in the green rubbish bin? Well, I didn't, I put it in the black recycling tub, and it's coming your way again. — Melina Marchetta

...[M]oral instruction, although containing much that is convincing for the reason, ...accomplishes... little... [because] the teachers themselves have not got their own notions clear, and when they endeavor to make up for this by raking up motives of moral goodness from every quarter, trying to make their physic right strong, they spoil it. — Immanuel Kant

So there's an ... an etiquette to raking. Some seducer's code of honor. Is this what you're telling me? — Tessa Dare

It's promising and seductive, that huge Italian family, sitting around the dinner table, surrounded by olive trees. But it's not my family and I am not their family, and no amount of birthing sons, and cooking dinner and raking leaves or planting the gardens or paying for the plane tickets is going to change that. If I don't come back in eleven months, I will not be missed, and no one will write me or call me to acknowledge my absence. Which is not an accusation, just a small truth about clan and bloodline. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I don't have what German directors call 'a concept' - a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete. — Simon McBurney

Balance is not a passive resting place - it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

You look good to me," he said, his eyes raking appreciatively over her. "I think ranch life must suit you."
"Thanks. You look good to me too." He was dressed in his customary faded jeans and a worn denim jacket, but Keith would look good in a burlap sack. — Victoria Vane

She woke to Terak's claws raking through her hair and her body deliciously sore, well-used in the best sense. — Danielle Monsch

He opened his eyes again, raking his gaze up and down my body before coming to rest on my crotch. "Quite simply," he said, "I'd like to lick your cunt. I'd like to hear you scream my name."

The world seemed to sway. "Don't... don't you have groupies for that sort of thing?" I asked breathlessly.

"I'd rather have you."

I swallowed. "I don't know what to say."

"You can start by saying yes, please, Kent. Eat my pussy."

My skin tingled with his words. I wondered why he wasn't the one singing, front and center. That voice could carry me away, anywhere he wanted me to go...

Oh, this was a problem. This was a huge problem, and I wasn't about to make it any better. My mouth was dry, but the words came out clear enough:

"Yes, please, Kent. Eat my pussy."

"I thought you'd never ask," he said. — Ava Lore

It's like raking leaves in the wind. — Charlie Raymond

Shane smirked and straddled the bike
showing his back to me, end of discussion.
I was speechless anyway. I couldn't even
think right. Well ... mentally he was about eight
inches deep in me and I was screaming his name
raking my nails down his back. — Christine Zolendz

I'd like to sing you a song now about my old girlfriend. It's called "They'll Find Her When the Leaves Blow Away 'Cause I'm Not Raking 'Til Spring." — Steven Wright

Nobody's going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you're rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things befall you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out. — Cheryl Strayed

This was screwing. One hundred percent pissed-off, nail-raking, neck-biting, wall-fucking screwing. — Amy Andrews

The country listened to thousands of speeches and read thousands of newspaper columns raking over every argument for and against imperialism and every aspect of the war in the Philippines. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Do you understand the plan?"
They all stared for a few silent moments. Then Simon pointed. "What's that wobbly thing?" he said. "Is it a tree?"
"Those are the gates," Jace said.
"Ohh," said Isabelle, pleased. "So what are the swirly bits? Is there a moat?
"Those are trajectory lines - Honestly, am I the only person who's ever seen a strategy map?", Jace demanded, throwing his stele down and raking his hand through his blond hair. "Do you understand anything I just said."
"No," Clary said. "Your strategy is probably awesome, but your drawing skills are terrible; all the Endarkened look like trees, and the fortress looks like a frog. — Cassandra Clare

Viewed from a distance, his character projected an impression of solidity and wholeness which was in fact as insubstantial as a hologram; up close, he was all motes and light, you could pass your hand right through him. If you stepped back far enough, however, the illusion would click in again and there he would be, bigger than life, squinting at you from behind his little glasses and raking back a dank lock of hair with one hand. — Donna Tartt

The two climbers looked at each other, a glance that bored all the way down to Medvetz's DNA - not desperate or pleading or frightened but resolved, almost at peace. Here were two men, united in their obsessive enterprise, their trajectories intersecting for just an instant, but an instant that contained some fundamental understanding: the long journey full of failures and setbacks, injuries and disfigurement and pain, propelled by a commitment beyond reason. Here were two men in this inhospitable place, the wind raking across the ridge, the shadows lengthening - one departing his life, the other walking back into it.
"God bless you," Medvetz murmured. "Good-bye."
And then he faced down the mountain and resumed lumbering along the route, toward Brice and Brett Merrell and Mogens Jensen and all the others waiting for him in the world below. — Nick Heil

If nobody can learn from the past,
then there's no point in raking it up. — Billie Holiday

He gave her body a raking gaze. "I doona give up my secrets that easily, lass. And it takes a lot more than honeyed words to persuade me. If ye must know, I prefer to be wooed first. — Victoria Roberts

Once when I'd been in a lot of bunkers, my caddie told me he was getting blisters from raking so much. — JoAnne Carner

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It's the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds. — Mortimer J. Adler

Roman Catholics have always been able to appeal to the traditions of holy Mother the Church. But the Church of England, as such, has nothing to appeal to. How can we [Anglicans] pretend to appeal to Church traditions, when we have cut ourselves off from the main stream of it and any exposition of it must needs be a raking up of old dead documents, instead of obedience to a living voice? And how can we pretend to appeal to the Bible, when the Bible is for everyman's private interpretation, and not expounded by authority? — Ronald Knox

Charming hour of the day, particularly when, as sometimes happens, it is also that of the setting sun whose last rays, raking the street from end to end, lend to my cenotaph an interminable shadow, astraddle of the gutter and the sidewalk. — Samuel Beckett

I am a man raking through ashes, a man struggling to find the embers of life in the bottom of a fireplace. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

If I had taken a proprietary control of the Web, then it would never have taken off. People only committed their time to it because they knew it was open, shared: that they could help decide what would happen to it next.. and I wouldn't be raking off 10%! — Tim Berners-Lee

For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I went to bed wearing my oldest, most faded flannel shirt, the bra that had looked all right in the catalog but was obviously an escapee from a downmarket nursing home when it arrived, white cotton panties that had had pansies on them about seven hundred washings ago and were now a kind of mottled gray, and the jeans I usually wore for housecleaning or raking Yolande's garden because they were too shabby for work even if I never came out of the bakery. Food inspector arrest-on-sight jeans. Oh, and fuzzy green plaid socks. It was a cool night for summer. Relatively. I lay down on top of the bedspread. And slept through till the alarm at three-forty-five. He hadn't come. T — Robin McKinley

On Yard Work
What are you doing with that rake? ... No, that is not raking ... What? Different styles of raking? No there is one style, and then there is bullshit. Guess which one you're doing. — Justin Halpern

Nico had proven himself in other ways. He'd kept the camps' secrets for the best of reasons, because he feared a war. He had plunged into Tartarus alone, voluntarily, to find the Doors of Death. He'd been captured and imprisoned by giants. He had led the crew of the Argo II into the House of Hades ... and now he had accepted yet another terrible quest: raking himself to haul the Athene Parthenos back to Camp Half-Blood. — Rick Riordan

Oh," Cretia said, raking her with a smug sneer. "She's your bodyguard. I get it now. Makes sense, since she has more testosterone than both of you combined." She drifted off. Zarya glared at him as he finally released her. "You should have let me rip her hair out by the dyed roots." Maris tsked at her. "Oh please. The last thing you want to do is get her acidic blood on your beautiful dress. Think of the poor designer who'd curse you for the affront to his hard work." "Yes, — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I would have rather had a dad with change jingling in his pocket; one who would have spent the last forty minutes of the world raking leaves for his kids to jump in, so that they perished in one loud, bright instant, giggles still bubbling up from their bellies, never suspecting a thing.
Yeah, well. Tough luck, rich boy. — S.A. Bodeen