Roiling Quotes & Sayings

His life is like your life and my life and all the lives of all the people who are reading these words right now. It's a roiling stew of fear and need and desire and love and the hunger to be loved. And mostly, it's the latter. — Cheryl Strayed

Most of the January firsts in recent memory have involved splitting headaches and roiling stomachs and often being
surprised about where I was waking up. ("No, Officer, I have no idea why I'm wearing this possum costume. I called you what? Oh. My bad.") — Cate Tiernan

I was sitting in a plastic desk-chair contraption in an English classroom in Minnesota, tapping out the meter of lines from Pound's Cantos, wearing a baseball shirt with a small hole in the armpit. But I was also roiling with feelings and thoughts and doubts and conjectures and worries and layers of complication ... If so much happened in my head, didn't I have to conclude that it was the same way with everyone else? I had to look down again. The world was too big. — Kate Hattemer

We were a roiling mass of opinion, most of it mean. Here we sat at civilization's technological peak, and what we chose to do on that shining pinnacle was hate each other's guts. — Lydia Millet

The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea. — Patricia A. McKillip

Like a bellowing beast, he howled her name, his raspy wails riding the gales like a ship on a roiling sea. — Fawn Bonning

And then, suddenly, we broke free from the trees. The rolling plain beyond was almost overwhelming in its openness, especially lit by a brilliant, almost awful sunset, the sky never redder, every cloud seemingly blazing from within, suffused with fire and vengeance, roiling, churning, nothing but fury in every direction. Some poets spoke of red sunsets as things of sublime beauty, prefacing good fortune or romance, but they always seemed to be foretelling some bloodletting, murder, or tragedy writ large for all the world to see, and never more so than now. — Jeff Salyards

I looked up into the glittering depths of his mahagony irises. A soft line had formed between his brows as he studied me, and I realized for the thousandth time I could not read him. Not like I could most people. I felt emotion roiling within him, but i was jumbled, chaotic, a mixture of desire and concern and regret. — Darynda Jones

The fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags. Nothing — Emma Cline

He kissed her soundly, stealing her breath, before saying, "Tell me what you want, my lovely."
"I-" She stopped, too many words coming at once. 'I want you to touch me. I want you to love me. I want you to show me the life that I have been missing.' She shook her head, uncertain.
He smiled, pressing firmly with his hand against her, watching the wave of pleasure course through her. "Incredible," he whispered against the side of her neck. "So responsive. Go on..."
"I want-" She sighed as he set his lips to the hardened peak of one breast again. "I want... I want you," she said, and, in that moment, the words, so utterly simple in the face of the roiling emotions that coursed through her, seemed enough.
He moved his fingers firmly, deftly against her, and she gasped. "Do you want me here, Empress?"
She closed her eyes in embarrassment, biting her lower lip.
"Are you aching for me here?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"Poor, sweet love. — Sarah MacLean

Addiction is the hallmark of every infatuation-based love story. It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose of something you never even dared to admit that you wanted - an emotional speedball, perhaps, of thunderous love and roiling excitement. Soon you start craving that intense attention, with the hungry obsession of any junkie. When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore - despite ... — Elizabeth Gilbert

And the skies: in one day the sky could travel from green at dawn to a noon-time blue so severe it was almost black to hot silver in the afternoon to roiling burgundy at sunset. Just before night it flowered in yawning, imperial violets. Wedges of mauve, cauldrons of peach - skies more like drugs than colors. — Anthony Doerr

despair

sometimes
hope leads us on
teases us with
its shiny baubles
its stunning horizons

it can carry us over
the roiling turmoil
the raging storm
then as easily
with its cornucopia of lies
drop us into the waves

to flounder against its loss — Barry DeCarli

And so, a never-ending, rather edgy conversation between them, an undercurrent of roiling sound that reminded them they were married, they had two sons, they were living a life, they had preparations to make and disasters to avert and a world to interpret, sign by sign, symbol by symbol, to each other, and that at this point the only fate worse than staying together would be trying, each of them, to live alone. — Michael Cunningham

Even the sky a hybrid - here clean and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock. — Stanley Elkin

Plume"

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure - dusky flutter - trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who've engraved on her locket phrases in script: "glide on a blade" and "rustling precedes the shuck." This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it's morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded. — Aaron Shurin

Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven. — Flannery O'Connor

Music is the worst of them - roiling and boiling - overly emotionalized on the one hand, overly intellectuallized on the other. Bach and Mozart indeed! Bach inevitably makes me think of fish in a barrel! round and round and round they go and nothing ever happens. Nothing ! Tum -de-dum-dum. Tum -de-dum-dum and that's all! Tum -de-dum-de-bloody-dum-dum! As for Mozart, his emotions did not mature beyond the age of twelve. never achieved adolescence, let alone puberty. his music merely combines a popular talent for slapstick and a commercial talent for tears. No - not tears. For sobs. Beethoven, pompous. Chopin - sickly sweet and given to tantrums - Tum -de-dum-dum- Bang! and Wagner - a self -centred bore. and Stravinsky - discordant, rude and blows his music through his nose — Timothy Findley

How much more interior can you get, after all, than the interior of bones? It's the center of the center of things. If marrow were a geological formation, it would be magma roiling under the earth's mantle. If it were a plant, it would be a delicate moss that grows only in the highest crags of Mount Everest, blooming with tiny white flowers for three days in the Nepalese spring. If it were a memory, it would be your first one, your most painful and repressed one, the one that has made you who you are. — Julie Powell

By speaking the truth, we learn the difference between our authentic self and our facade. If we put our little masked self out there, the horror is that other people might accept and end up making love to it, while we starve and die of neglect behind it. It's much richer to interact genuinely with the world. When you speak the truth, it feeds and brightens your Spirit. When you don't, it dims your Spirit. Don't you want to live in a way that brightens your Spirit? To take a deep breath and feel what's rocketing and roiling around in your core? What a delight! — Ana T. Forrest

The oaks along the ridge were writhing like tortured epileptics in the winds, and she could make out through the thick rain a cascade of water like a cataract come roiling down the inside slope toward her; a vast arching spray exploded bright against the dark sky as the Gulf slammed over the chenier. — Samuel Snoek-Brown

I like music," she said slowly, "because when I hear it, I ... I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play. I'm not ... for once, I'm not destroying, I'm creating. — Sarah J. Maas

Beckendorf closed eyes tight and brought his hand up to his watch.
from that distance, the explosion shook the world. Heat seared the back of my head. The Princess Andromeda blew up from both sides, a massive fireball of
green flame roiling into the dark sky, consuming everything ... I stared out the window into deep blue water. Beckendorf was supposed to go to college in the fall. He had a girlfriend, lots of friends, his whole life ahead of him. He couldn't be gone. — Rick Riordan

Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority. — Eric Fischl

The conversations of men had always been muddy rivers, the surface's roiling a reflection of what's buried, but the bottom some mysterious thing that would always be hidden. — David Joy

Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts (this is myticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial-at once full of hope and full of fear-of the vastitude of human ignorance. — Sam Harris

He fell
from the sinking ship
to the roiling sea
of uncertainty,
into the hands
of the one mermaid
who knew exactly
how to save him. — Kirk Diedrich

She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had simply happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. (On Diana Wynne Jones) — Neil Gaiman

We are the owls of the weather chaw. We take it blistering, We take it all. Roiling boiling gusts, We're the owls with the guts. For blizzards our gizzards Dr tremble with joy. An ice storm, a gale, how we love blinding hail. We fly forward and backward, Upside down and flat. Do we flinch? Do we wail? Do we skitter or scutter? No, we yarp one more pellet And fly straight for the gutter! Do we screech? Do we scream? Do we gurgle? Take pause? Not on your life! For we are the best Of the best of the chaws! — Kathryn Lasky

No we talked about matter- most notably quarks, those tiniest possible components of everything.They come in six flavors, you know: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange. I'll admit those talks helped me, and when i read about the sea quarks, I understood why. They contained particles of matter and antimatter, and where the two touch exists this constant stream of creation and annihilation. Scientist call this place "the sea," and it's what pitches inside of me as I hurry away from Mr. Byles, ignoring his furrowed brow, his worried frown.
I am of the sea.
I am of instability.
I am of harsh, choppy waves roiling with all the up-ness, down-ness, top-ness, bottom-ness contained within my being.
I am of charm and strange.
Annihilation.
Creation.
Annihilation. — Stephanie Kuehn

Nevertheless, this anger was inside him - I believe constantly. Like the house that was well ordered and yet falling apart from within, the man himself was calm, almost supernatural in his imperturbability, and yet prey to a roiling, unstoppable force of fury within. All his life he strove to avoid a confrontation with this force, nurturing a kind of automatic behavior that would allow him to pass to the side of it. Reliance on fixed routines freed him from the necessity of looking into himself when decisions had to be made; the cliche was always quick to come to his lips ("A beautiful baby. Good luck with it") instead of words he had gone out and looked for. All this tended to flatten him out as a personality. But at the same time, it was also what saved him, the thing that allowed him to live. To the extent that he was able to live — Paul Auster

Without lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas. All around her Tally felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode. — Scott Westerfeld

A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling. — Laura Hillenbrand

Smooth and ordered on the outside; roiling and chaotic and desperately secretive underneath, but not noticeably so, never noticeably so. — Caroline Knapp

Nothing's ever the same," she said. "Be it a second later or a hundred years. It's always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans. — Neil Gaiman

the fog was fog and yet was not fog. it was liquid and solid, then gas, then a roiling putrescence expanding like a balloon blown with filth. — Tim Curran

Bloody hell, what did he hit me with? An anvil?"
"His fist."
"You should put that fool in a bear-baiting pit. You'd make a fortune." Dougal struggled to rise.
Sophia helped him on one side, Mary slipping under his other arm.
The wind swirled a bit harder, sending dust into the air.
"Heavens!" Mary said, glancing over their heads at the sky. "That's the third thunderhead as has passed this way today."
Sophia turned. A huge bank of thunderclouds hung overhead, roiling as if alive.
"We should get inside," she said uneasily.
Dougal didn't even glance at the clouds as he held a hand over his bruised eye and cheek. "Bloody hell, I can barely see. — Karen Hawkins

Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest. — Elizabeth Hand

The cycle repeated itself at inconsistent intervals, creating invisible eddies that brushed against him like fountains of roiling water. — Christopher Paolini

Having been gathered in stages by an immense array of coupled collectors located on the other side of the planet, a tremendously compact volume of a type of dark energy known as quintessence had been accumulated at the center of the planet. Held in place inside a roiling molten metal core by the frozen world's powerful magnetic field, — Alan Dean Foster