Scab Quotes & Sayings

One finds fortunes built on slave labor, indentured labor, prison labor, immigrant labor, female labor, child labor, and scab labor - backed by the lethal force of gun thugs and militia. 'Old money' is often little more than dirty money laundered by several generations of possession. — Michael Parenti

I bring my hand to my face and pull away tiny pieces of the jagged scab. My face reflects in the rounded airplane window, and I see it is now a tiny Massachusetts, with Cape Cod curling toward my ear. In only a few more days it will be gone. I feel the fresh, smooth parts and marvel at how soft they are. New skin amazes me. New skin is a miracle. It is proof that we can heal. — A.S. King

I guess we all can't help peeking at our own imperfections, just like we can't help scratching a scab that keeps itching. When those imperfections are pasted across your face like that, exaggerated and magnified, it's hard to find all those good thoughts you have about yourself. If you believe those distorted reflections too deeply, you'll never get out of the maze. — Neal Shusterman

Ah-there's our boy!" Bill pointed at the head of the crowd as they neared the stadium.
A lean,muscular boy was running, faster than the others,his back to Luce. His hair was dark brown and shiny, his shoulders deeply tanned and painted with intersecting red-and-black bands. When he turned his head slightly to the left,Luce caught a quick glimpse of his profile.He was nothing like the Daniel she had left in her parents' backyard. And yet-
"Daniel!" Luce said. "He looks-"
"Different and also precisely the same?" Bill asked.
"Yes."
"That's his soul you recognize. Regardless of how you two may look on the outside,you'll always know each other's souls."
It hadn't occured to Luce until now how remarkable it was that the recognized Daniel in every life. Her soul found his. "That's ... beautiful."
Bill scratched at a scab on his arm with a gnarly claw. "If you say so. — Lauren Kate

At the core of love is validation. It is what gives love power.
For when love is given away, validation seeps in and expands in the heart of the recipient, filling up every empty, dark corner. It is a wonderful, light, consuming feeling we long for, and once found, we hope - even expect - it will forever remain. But there are times when that most precious love is revoked, and a hard scab forms over the empty hole. Though this scab is both healing and protective, it is the reason why validation from future love may not seep in so easily, no matter how wanting the heart. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I think now that if all eight billion of us had just shut off the lights and gone to bed that night and left it alone we'd have all slept and the chalice would have passed us by. But let's be real. Whoever leaves anything alone? Life's a scab, and it's our nature to pick at it until it bleeds. — Adrian Barnes

Beneath this mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivilous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit ridden, I let it reform. — Cyril Connolly

I think we're all wounded, but some of us, when we experience the healing of those wounds, that they scar and scab over. — LeCrae

I had started trying - it for the first time, really - it to remember what had happened in that wood. I prodded tentatively around the edges of it, barely acknowledging even to myself what I was doing, like a kid picking at a scab but afraid to look. — Tana French

I attribute a scab to the present state of society. The way the scab looks in its worst state is gross and chaotic and horrible, that's now, but when it breaks away, there's a brand new piece of skin that's stronger than before. It's like creation out of chaos. — Brandon Boyd

In the space beyond was Hedra Ka. A cracking scab of a planet, choked with storms and veins of lava. A mist of rocks floated in orbit, a reminder of its recent formation. It was a young world, unwelcoming, resentful of its existence. 'That is the angriest looking thing I've ever seen,' Ashby said. — Becky Chambers

I dropped back onto Dad's stool with my mouth open. Gerald Whipplethorn? I wanted to babysit, but Gerald wasn't worth it. The kid annoyed me like an itchy scab you couldn't pick off. He was the worst. The absolute worst. I — A.W. Hartoin

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than it was to repeatedly try and fail. Failure-disappointment-was a poison in my blood. Despair was the antidote. — Norah Vincent

Forgiving yourself can prove as difficult as licking a scab off your elbow. — Richelle E. Goodrich

You broke my wrist, you bitch."

"She's not the one crying on the ground, son. So who's the bitch? — Ellis Leigh

Time heals all wounds, or at least it causes them to scab. — Karina Halle

Another world. Another life. And for me it was much longer than five measly years. A world with more darkness and less hope than I care to remember. Bleak and starless, full of diseased men. It's inside them there. In some ways it makes it worse. You don't know who's diseased and who isn't. You don't know when you've become a Scab. — Ted Dekker

The whole world is a scab. The point is to pick it constructively. — Peter Beard

It was love, and it hit me so hard I leaned against the screen door that still stood between us, just to stay vertical. The universe was good because he was in it. I loved the hole in his jeans and the dirt on his bare feet and the scab on his elbow and the scar that laces through one eyebrow. Gat, my Gat. — E. Lockhart

The Tiny Wound. It is small but painful and irritating. You try all sorts of medicaments, you com- plain, you scratch and pick at the scab. Doctors only make it worse, transforming the tiny wound into a grave matter. If only you had left the wound alone, letting time heal it and freeing yourself of worry. — Robert Greene

I require of all my students ... that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom. I require that they wait in the corridor for ten minutes at least before each lesson, tenderly nursing their injustices, picking miserably at their own unworthiness as one might finger a scab or caress a scar. If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong. When she realizes that he body is a secret, a dark and yawning secret of which she becomes more and more ashamed, come back to me. You must understand me on this point. I cannot teach children. — Eleanor Catton

WHEN IT IS DONE, WE WILL FLY FAR FROM HERE. FAR FROM THIS SCAB AND ITS POISONED SKY.
WE WILL DANCE IN THE STORMS, YOU AND I. — Jay Kristoff

If you keep picking at that scab on your heart, it won't heal. — Antonia Perdu

There are few things more pleasurable than a cracking version of Hansel and Gretel and a good scab. — Lyn Gardner

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class. — Jack London

She had been tied to an incubus, the memory of a love that had been rejected and had had nowhere to go; she had been locked into a dead relationship and now the last dried skin of it had fallen away, like the scab on a wound, and she was free. — Alexander McCall Smith

My poems covered the bare places in my childhood like the fine, new skin under a scab that hasn't yet fallen off completely. — Tove Ditlevsen

Elvis Jr. watches you with considerable gravitas. He is a piercingly cute carajito. He has all these mosquito bites on his legs and an old scab on his head no one can explain to you. You are suddenly overcome with the urge to cover him with your arms, with your whole body. Later, Elvis Sr. fills you in on the Plan. I'll bring him over to the States in a few years. I'll tell the wife he was an accident, a one-time thing when I was drunk and I didn't find out about it until now. And that's going to work? It will work out, he says testily. Bro, your wife ain't going to buy that. And what the fuck do you know? Elvis says. It ain't like your shit ever works. — Junot Diaz

If you keep picking a scab it will bleed and never heal. If you keep dragging the pain of the past up, it will never heal. — Leon Brown

My grief had become a thick scab; I picked at it from time to time, but mostly I left it alone. I didn't want to know what was underneath. — Marshall Thornton

But even more than I wanted to check out and give my emotional wounds time to scab over, I wanted to live. — Mike Mullin

He referred to Pope Paul III as "His Hellishness." Were not the pope and his associates at least members of the church? Yes, as much as spit, snot, pus, feces, urine, stench, scab, smallpox, ulcers, and syphilis are members of the body. Luther was never one to mince words. — Timothy George

She is like a child picking at a scab, unable to stop herself even though she knows it will hurt. — Kristin Hannah

What ultimately did me in was the self-adhesive condom. Putting it on was no problem, but its removal qualified as what, in certain cultures, is known as a bris. Wear it once, and you'll need a solid month to fully recover. It will likely be a month in which you'll weigh the relative freedom of peeing in your pants against the unsightly discomfort of a scab-covered penis, ultimately realizing that, in terms of a convenient accessory, — David Sedaris

At some point during a celebrity tour of the ice fields, or first-growth forest - lately, the Amazon - he always phoned Holly in an agony of scab-picking, telling her that a respectable media would cover an issue on its merits, not because some overwrought self-involved actress had helicoptered in and aimed her affectations at the camera. — Lesley Krueger

My youth is like a scab: under it there is a wound that every day leaks blood. It disfigures me. — Gottfried Benn

Why do I do it, when it always hurts me? Why must we test the pain? Tongue the ulcer, rub the blister, pick the scab? — Joe Abercrombie

It doesn't get better," I said. "The pain. The wounds scab over and you don't always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind you you'll never be the same. — Katie McGarry

Time can turn a scab into a beauty mark. — Nia Vardalos

I've decided to trust him, but like somebody once said, you can't force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it. My problem is that buried box is like a scab I can't stop picking at. — Rick Yancey

To know a man properly, you must know the shape of his hurt - the specific wound around which his person has been formed like a scab. — Kei Miller

ed. now. picking at the scab that was starting to heal over. why did guys do that? too little too late? — Elizabeth Noble

It was a flaking scab on a fleshy field of neglect. — Hunter Shea

But time heals. Or at least it forms scabs. — Neil Gaiman

Pride is a wound, and vanity is the scab on it. One's life picks at the scab to open the wound again and again. In men, it seldom heals and often grows septic. — Michael Ayrton

Your heart is not a wound to be poked at to see if the scab is ready to come off. You can be healed of that very old pain, if you'll just let it happen. (Marianne) — Laurell K. Hamilton

It occurs to me if we kissed now, we'd be like a folded map of America. My Pennsylvania scab next to her New Jersey black eye. I wonder, then, how many other kids could join in. Where are the Montanas and the Colorados? Where is the Vermont? Florida? How many maps would we make? — A.S. King

Analysts keep having to pick away at the scab that the patient tries to form between himself and the analyst to cover over his wounds. The analyst keeps the surface raw, so that the wound will heal properly. — Janet Malcolm

It was, for the most part, your typical large city: a scab of nobles, wealthy merchants, and shipping tycoons crusted over a great messy wound of laborers and peons. — Edward W. Robertson

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture.
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

It was like picking a scab off a sore; he actually wanted scar tissue - it would be quite wrong to try and forget, to blank it all out. Every fraught memory that lurked here had played its role: everything he was today was an indirect result of the life he had led then. It confirmed the rightness of every step he had taken. — William Boyd

I don't remember a time when I wasn't waiting for a scab either to grow or to fall off my knee. — Carol Burnett

The physical healed quickly, but those of the spirit ran deep, and in most cases, could only be concealed. Wounds of the spirit may scab over, but they never fully heal. — J.K. Swift

If you sense that someone feels disconnected, reach out to them," the speaker urges. "buy them a soda. Compliment their new hairdo. It'll make them feel better, and you'll feel better knowing you've been a channel of grace."
Jolene leans over and whispers, "My pen is feeling disconnected. Will you be a channel of grave and get it for me?"
**********
Chelsea, quit picking at your scab," a girl in front of me says to her friend as we file out. "It's gross." Then she gasps in mock horror. "Or maybe it's a cry for help! Be strong, Chelsea! Stay with the living! — Lauren Myracle

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep. [ ... ]There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. [ ... ] His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar. — China Mieville

He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn't heard it yet. — David Duchovny

The itch of disputation will prove the scab of the Church. — Henry Wotton

I was betrayed, one more day, of my short life.
You were carried away, had no shame, to suffocate my being.

I was me, but you weren't you.
You were sticking to me like a scab.
So, I peeled you away...
Bled for days...
And stepped out of myself. — Pantera

Time was supposed to heal all wounds, but how could it when Jude kept picking the scab? — Michelle Hodkin

Roschach's Journal: October 12th, 1985
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown.
The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!" ... and I'll look down and whisper "No. — Alan Moore

Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they'd made it sting. Not Nell. — Lily King

Complexity and obscurity have professional value - they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery. — John Kenneth Galbraith

It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. The song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere. — Jonathan Lethem

I loved the hole in his jeans and the dirt on his bare feet and the scab on his elbow and the scar that laced through one eyebrow. — E. Lockhart

The memory was so vivid that, like a fresh scab, he was sure he would start to bleed if he picked at it. — Miyuki Miyabe

I have a big hole in my heart," I said. "But it'll close over."
I don't want to sound all Dr. Phil," she said. "But don't let the scab seal the pain in, okay?"
That's good advice," I said. "I hope I can manage it. — Charlaine Harris

Or else the cloud hovered, having barely left the lips, dense and slow, and suggested another vision: the exhalations that hang over the roofs of the metropolises, the opaque smoke that is not scattered, the hood of miasmata that weighs over the bituminous streets. Not the labile mists of memory nor the dry transparence, but the charring of burned lives that forms a scab on the city, the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey. — Italo Calvino

The rhythm of researching and querying holds all the fascination, endorphins, and residual scarring of picking a scab. It's a habit I easily fall into but without more than surface level ambition driving it can turn into a haphazard, oozing mess. — S. Kelley Harrell

She was the scab he couldn't stop picking, the split lip he couldn't stop biting at, the loose thread he couldn't stop tugging — Joe Abercrombie

Planted in apple orchards they are of benefit in preventing apple scab, — Louise Riotte

He has entertained the thought that his neighbours like having one of him in the district, having their own Englishman, although he will insist that he is as South African as they are. But perhaps his presence is more in the nature of a provocation, and his actions: he pretends ignorance but he knows what those spindly pink and white flowers mean to men who still punish themselves with every detail of their war, picking at it like the scab of the miniature Union Jack in the middle of the flag. — Claire Robertson

A scab'd horse cannot abide the comb. — George Herbert

The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

Ever since this day I have dreamt sometimes ... I, a street rat in my soul, dream even now ... that if it were possible to life this littered, paved Manhattan from the earth ... and all its torn and dripping pipes and conduits and tunnels and tracks and cables
all of it, like a scab from new skin underneath
how seedlings would sprout and freshets bubble up, and brush and grasses would grow over the rolling hills ... — E.L. Doctorow

Art is the blood that comes from a wound. You can't let it scab; let it keep bleeding. Let it bleed until you have enough blood to paint with. — Tarryn Fisher