Rougher Than Quotes & Sayings

Her mum was talking like the Queen. Well, the Queen's slightly rougher sister from Salford. — Vicky Pattison

The spectacle shop was old, long, and narrow, with a glass front and a small thin door that opened onto a somewhat busy avenue in the antiques district on the South side of Lovat. It was a quiet enough area, away from the rougher warrens, but not particularly elevated. Across the cramped street hawkers sold vases, while up the road outside a rug merchant's shop a man sold antique suits. There was also Dubois' new storefront to the East; he dealt in religious artifacts and trinkets. The shopkeep hadn't liked when he had moved in; it had somehow changed the feel of the warren. Odd folks had started showing up shortly after Saint Olmstead Religious Antiques opened: black-clad priests, Hasturians in yellow robes, and a few Deeper cultists dressed in their gray sackcloth rags. It had set the entire warren on edge. — K.M. Alexander

I come from the rougher side of Sydney. I don't know whether you can compare them to the projects, but in Australia, it definitely is the rougher side. — Rebel Wilson

A surprising number of teens I meet in rougher schools around the country find refuge in novels and creative writing. It's not always the usual suspects either, the high achievers. — Matt De La Pena

We are the wining fighters we are today because we are the products of rougher times that, didn't break 'self-respect' during tested periods. — Darmie Orem

The Working Song
by Breton Braley

Oh, we're sick to death of the style of song
That's only a sort of a simpering song,
A kissy song and a sissy song
Or a weepy, creepy, whimpering song.
So give us a lift of a lusty song,
A boisterous, bubbling, boiling song,
Or a smashing song and a dashing song,
Oh, give us the tang of a toiling song,
The chanty loud of the working crowd,
The thunderous thrall of a toiling song!

Ay, sing us a joyous daring song,
Not a moaning, groaning, fretting song,
But a ringing song, and a swinging song,
A rigorous, vigorous, sweating song.
We have had enough of the gypsy song,
Which is only a lazy, shirking song,
So toughen your throat to a rougher note
And give us the tune of a working song,
A tune of strife and the joy of life,
The beat and throb of a working song! — Berton Braley

Poor manners on my part. What is your name?"
"Ria."
"Ria, is that short for Rian?"
"Yes, it is," she smiled.
"Rian, would you please cross your legs?"
The request was made with such an earnest tone that not even a titter escaped the class. Looking puzzled, Rian crossed her legs.
"Now that the gates of hell are closed," Hemme said in his normal rougher tones. "We can begin. — Patrick Rothfuss

But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. — Virginia Woolf

I was used to paying a great deal of attention to my hands, one way and another. They were my tools, my channel of touch, mingling the delicacy and strength by which I healed. They had a certain beauty, which I admired in a detached sort of way, but it was the beauty of strength and competence, the assurance of power that made its form admirable. It was the same hand now, pale and long-fingered, the knuckles slightly bony - oddly bare without my ring, but recognizably my hand. Yet it lay in a hand so much larger and rougher that it seemed small, and fragile by comparison. His — Diana Gabaldon

The music business is rougher than the movie business. In film you get noticed in a small role, even in a movie that bombs. But in records you better have that hit or else it's 'See you later.' — Amy Madigan

Are you purring at me?"
"I might be," Rune said. His deep voice was rougher, and lazy with intimacy. "Unless you've done something wrong. Then I'm growling at you again. — Thea Harrison

He put his hand on my waist, and my heart began to pound, a rougher rhythm than the music. I held my skirt. Our free hands met. His felt warm and comforting and unsettling and bewildering
all at once. — Gail Carson Levine

A diet of violence or pornography dulls the senses, and future exposures need to be rougher and more extreme. Soon the person is desensitized and is unable to react in a sensitive, caring, responsible manner, especially to those in his own home and family. Good people can become infested with this material and it can have terrifying, destructive consequences. — Marvin J. Ashton

Wouldn't it be easier," she clarified, "to do the work that you do, to walk into danger, if you didn't have a mate whose heart would break if you were hurt?" Judd took his time answering, his gaze on the wide concourse and the people walking and running to catch their airjets. "It would be more ... convenient," he said at last. "But it wouldn't be easier - Silence is based on the precept that emotion is a weakness, but what I feel for Brenna makes me stronger. I fight harder, dirtier, and rougher, because I know any injury to me will rebound on her. — Nalini Singh

I'd turned into a giant ball of questions and conflicts and desires. I'd pretty much become my biggest nightmare. I was a rougher version of Jesse Walker. But a better looking one. A far better looking one. — Nicole Williams

He's rougher than he's ever been, his anger and hurt driving them further in their pleasure. — Vivian Winslow

I like really uberfeminine, classic-looking things mixed with something rougher around the edges. I've been looking at Rihanna a lot, checking her out. She's got something going on that I am sort of craving a little bit. — Jessica Biel

The detour is always rougher than the main road — Vance Havner

I did not tell him my decision, that would have broken my will. I did not wait to have breakfast with him but only drank some coffee and made an excuse to go home. I knew the excuse did not fool Joey; but he did not know how to protest or insist; he did not know that this was all he needed to have done. Then I, who had seen him that summer nearly every day till then, no longer went to see him. He did not come to see me. I would have been very happy to see him if he had, but the manner of my leavetaking had begun a constriction which neither of us knew how to arrest. When I finally did see him, more or less by accident, near the end of the summer, I made up a long and totally untrue story about a girl I was going with and when school began again I picked up with a rougher, older crowd and was very nasty to Joey. And the sadder this made him, the nastier I became. He moved away at last, out of the neighborhood, away from our school, and I never saw him again. — James Baldwin

He strove to shelter her, as a fair exotic is sheltered by the gardener, from every rougher wind, and to surround her with all that could tend to excite pleasurable emotion in her soft and benevolent mind. — Mary Shelley

Lord, give to me who are old and rougher
The things that little children suffer,
And let keep bright and undefiled
The young years of the little child. — John Masefield

He stopped walking. I stopped walking. He moved his face to mine. I stayed there. He put his mouth on mine, soft. We kissed like that, lips on lips, and I could feel the softness of his mouth and the rougher line where his lip was chapped. The shiver in my stomach was there. The way I knew it would be, only more. It was real. — Adam Berlin Belmondo Style

We have had a good working relationship. He has got a tough job. We had different ideas sometimes and we got on pretty well. I have challenged him and he has challenged me. His form has been up and down and that can be tough. I suppose we've been lucky. Sourav and I complement each other. We are two different personalities. He is softer than me. I probably spoke my mind in the change rooms in a rougher way than him. Sourav and I formed an odd couple but it seems to have worked. — John Wright

Things were rather larger, more obvious and rougher on the American side, but the issues were essentially the same. The general public voted and demonstrated, but its voting seemed to lead to nothing. It felt that things were done behind its back and over its head but it could never understand clearly how. It never seemed able to get sound news out of its newspapers nor good faith out of its politicians. It resisted, it fumbled, it was becoming more and more suspicious and sceptical, but it was profoundly confused and ill-informed. — H.G.Wells

I had a very difficult childhood. I was surrounded by people who had both parents, which made me feel different. Having a bit of a rougher existence early on, it made me appreciate the work ethic that my grandparents instilled in me. — George Lopez

It's a hurtful place, the world, in and of itself. We don't need to add to it. And we're in a place now where we all need one another, and it's going to get rougher. — Prince

Okay. We need to be touching, right?" I reached over to Archer, then held my hand out for Elizabeth. Her skin was cool and so soft I wondered if she'd ever done anything rougher than hold a pen with that hand. Ringo completed the circle and I stifled a smirk. There should have been a Ouija board on the table in front of us. — April White

I fear me that the Christian church is far more likely to lose her integrity in these soft and silken days than in those rougher times. We must be awake now, for we traverse the enchanted ground, and are most likely to fall asleep to our own undoing, unless our faith in Jesus be a reality, and our love to Jesus a vehement flame. Many in these days of easy profession are likely to prove tares, and not wheat; hypocrites with fair masks on their faces, but not the true born children of the living God. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Though fervent was our vow,
Though ruddily ran our pleasure,
Bliss has fulfilled its measure,
And sees its sentence now.
Ache deep; but make no moans:
Smile out; but stilly suffer:
The paths of love are rougher
Than thoroughfares of stones. — Thomas Hardy

Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still. — Henry Adams

Politics is comparable to boxing. The only thing is that in politics there are basically no rules. In boxing, you can get a black eye, but in politics you can get poison in your food or a bullet in the head. It's definitely rougher and tougher than other sports. — Wladimir Klitschko

What is given away for free comes back wounded. Value is not always shared and some hands are rougher than others. — Steven Erikson

There's no money in Thomas More's Utopia, nor private property, either - these things are too ugly for the Utopians, who must be protected from life's rougher aspects. The Zapolets, a nearby tribe, fight some of their wars for them. Slaves butcher their meat. Thomas More worries that the Utopians would lose their delicate affections and merciful sympathies if they did those deeds themselves. The Zapolets, we are assured, delight in slaughter and rapine, but there's no discussion of the impact of butchery on the slaves. No Utopia is Utopia for everyone. — Karen Joy Fowler

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam. — Thomas Hardy

I was brought up in the north of England, which is probably no rougher than anywhere else, but I remember as a child being kind of mesmerized by girls fighting on the playground. — Sarah Hall

I feel like the world is super different now than it was in 2009. And to get at something that's somewhat darker, harsher, rougher, and a bit more challenging feels right. — David Longstreth

The total and universal want of manners, both in males and females, is ... remarkable ... that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of. — Frances Trollope

You can be a little bit darker and rougher on the stage, partly because when you're in the theater, people have come to see you, and so they kind of know what they're in for. In television, you are sort of sneaking into people's homes. So, I think you can be a little bit darker on stage. — Tina Fey

You go into marriage, you plow a road. You're going to hit rough patches, and some may be rougher and last longer than others, but you've got choices to make. You work to smooth them out, you hold until they do, or they don't. You stick with the road, or you get off. But you don't do something to make it worse, don't do something that maybe makes you feel better for the short term while it sucker punches the person you're married to. — J.D. Robb

I started here in Australia, playing a lot of roles but never the lead guy in shows here. I always tended to play the rougher guy, the criminal who gets caught or shot by the cops. Or the boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks. — Sullivan Stapleton

The rougher the world gets around me, the sweeter I seem to myself. — Tom Robbins

When all are undressed, one is somehow not ashamed, but when one's the only one undressed and everybody is looking, it's degrading,' he kept repeating to himself, again and again. 'It's like a dream, I've sometimes dreamed of being in such degrading positions.' It was a misery to him to take off his socks. They were very dirty, and so were his underclothes, and now everyone could see it. And what was worse, he disliked his feet. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one, and now they would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed made him, at once and intentionally, rougher. He pulled off his shirt, himself. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Now I'm in a rougher neighborhood. The kind of neighborhood where you keep your rover doors locked and never come to a complete stop at intersections. — Andy Weir

Years ago I sang on a track using that voice and someone asked, 'Who is that terribly depressed man' ... But Patrick loved it. He said, 'You sound like a young boy, like a child, like an old woman, like an old man,' and really, we all have all of those things inside of us. I don't do any vocal gymnastics to make the voice better as I age. If it comes out rougher, then it's true to what's happening. Singing is who I am. I didn't train for it, any more than I trained for anything else I did. I probably should take better care of myself physically, but it goes against the grain. — Lisa Gerrard

This is poetry, but it is not delicate and fragile, a placid ocean beneath a Bible vese on an inspirational poster. This poetry had testicles. It's rougher than a rodeo. Which is why the cliffs are crowded with spectators — N.D. Wilson

One of the most striking results of modern investigation has been the way in which several different and quite independent lines of evidence indicate that a very great event occurred about two thousand million years ago. The radio-active evidence for the age of meteorites; and the estimated time for the tidal evolution of the Moon's orbit (though this is much rougher), all agree in their testimony, and, what is far more important, the red-shift in the nebulae indicates that this date is fundamental, not merely in the history of our system, but in that of the material universe as a whole. — Henry Norris Russell

Bush's life is that a fundamentally decent man presided over a moment when politics got meaner and rougher. '88 was the year of the handler, of bringing in political consultants who played very hard and very tough'. — Evan Thomas

Mags seemed to attract trouble wherever she went. The Raploch Estate in Stirling was a nice backdrop, a middleclass place to live and bring up your kids until the scourge of drugs took a grip of its sons and daughters, like any other quiet township. The more the people needed drugs, the rougher and more violent the place became. — Stephen Richards

I know people think erotica is just a romance novel with rougher sex. It's not. If it's a subgenre of anything, it's horror.
Horror? Really?
Romance is sex plus love. Erotica is sex plus fear. — Tiffany Reisz

The music industry is a very rough industry. Many years ago, I think it was even rougher in the sense that a lot of it was predicated on image. — Jennifer Holliday

Being a woman, I have found the road rougher than had I been born a man. Different defenses, different codes of ethics, different approaches to problems and personalities are a woman's lot. I have preferred to shun what is known as feminine wiles, the subterfuge of subtlety, reliance on tears and coquetry to shape my way. I am forthright, often blunt. I have learned to be a realist despite my romantic, emotional nature. I have no illusions that age, the rigors of my profession, disappointments, and unfulfilled dreams have not left their mark.

I am proud that I have carved my path on earth almost entirely by my own efforts, proud that I have compromised in my career only when I had no other recourse, when financial or contractual commitments dictated. Proud that I have never been involved in a physical liaison unless I was deeply attracted or in love. Proud that, whatever my worldly goods may be, they have been achieved by my own labors. — Joan Fontaine

I see marriage as an operation that sews two people together, and divorce is a kind of amputation that can take a long time to heal. The longer you were married, or the rougher the amputation, the harder it is to recover. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I've walked down the street with Madonna, and I've walked down the street with Colin Firth, and it was a little bit more ... with Madonna they were a little rougher, but they were all there for Colin. It was amazing. Women adore him. They swoon. — Beeban Kidron

My folks were drunks, and I had a rough childhood - really rough - in fact, rougher than I thought about. — Gary Paulsen

Wine is a living, breathing thing during its time in the bottle and in the glass. It is always changing, especially in the glass. A little oxygen can really open up and release the flavors in a complex wine, as well as mellow the rougher edge of immaturity. — Mireille Guiliano

Over time, Europeans have come to rely on governments to protect them from the rougher facets of private enterprise and to look after them in old age. — Sri Mulyani Indrawati

I know a lot of people fear the rougher types who might be at a state school, but surely it is better to know who they are and how to deal with them than for that kind of child to appear as a completely different species to yours. — Arabella Weir

The longer it takes me to get between your thighs, the rougher I'm going to be when I finally get there. Understand? — Tessa Bailey

It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate: and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get
when our will strains after a path we may not follow
we need neither starve from inanition, not stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden fruit it longed to taste
and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it. — Charlotte Bronte

Ink black hair, dark smoldering eyes with eyelashes so enviably long they cast shadows upon his cheekbones, a dimpled smile and broad shoulders and a height a little over six feet was all that comprised of Logan Jackson. Basically, he looked like he had just stepped out of the cover of GQ magazine and belonged in Milan and not Haven Falls.
He looked the same but completely different all at once. His pretty boyish features had hardened. He was still handsome but in a rougher more masculine way. Gone was the slightly mischievous innocent child. Now there only remained a devilishly handsome young man — Ali Harper

She felt his hands move to the fastening of his breeches, and then he swore under his breath as he was forced to roll off her in order to (in his words), "get the bloody things off." She couldn't help but chuckle at his profanity; he seemed to be having a much rougher time of it than she imagined was usual.
"You're laughing?" he asked, his brows rising into a daring arch.
"You should be glad I was already out of my gown," she told him. "Thirty-six cloth-covered buttons down the back."
He gave her a fearsome look. "It would not have survived. — Julia Quinn