Scraping Quotes & Sayings

I had a brief experience in the food industry. I was a bus boy in a Mexican restaurant in Arizona, scraping re-fried beans off people's plates. It teaches you a bit of humility and the importance of a good deodorant. — Wentworth Miller

It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping laugh. She had forgotten how deep and down it could be. So different from the miscellaneous giggles and smiles she had learned to be content with these past few years. — Toni Morrison

I felt the back of my neck crawl. The crawling reached around to the corners of my jaw, then up to my temple, and across my cheeks.

I reached up to touch it. Splinters, small fingers, hooks. Scraping at my fingertips, gouging. Slowly reaching for my eyes, reaching for my remaining flesh.

Tiny, like the legs of spiders, pincers, fish hooks, they stabbed and set themselves into the flesh that remained, around my mouth, near my eyes, at my forehead. Then they stopped. Waited.

Asking. Offering. A deal with the devil, metaphorically speaking.

Give up your face if you truly want wings. Give up your eyes.

I could hear the dragon screech, not all that far away. This crisis I faced was removed from a very large, very real crisis that threatened people and Others I cared a great deal about.

Do it, and you can fly. Fly, and you might be able to do something to save them. — Wildbow

You mean,' Captain Penderton said, 'that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping around the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit?' ... 'I don't agree — Carson McCullers

Her sigh was a benediction - an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal - then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside. Up — F Scott Fitzgerald

He just has to step away from the moment to see it. Which isn't surprising. Lots of parents will tell you that when they aren't fighting with their teenagers about homework or scraping up raisins their toddlers have expertly ground into the kitchen floor, they're quite happy, upon reflection. — Jennifer Senior

she acknowledges Thomas only by bending down and scraping a handful of dirt into her hands, her fingernails filling with the cold moist earth and making them brown at the edges. And then she tosses it onto his coffin, where bits and pieces of torn grass and weeds have mixed with the tender soil and are sliding in a small pile down the sides of the domed casket. — Tiffani Burnett-Velez

I gladly gave my aunt the privilege of scraping off all gum so my job wasn't as interesting or horrifying. I did find a few more menu drawings--a baby's scribble, an elaborate tic-tac-toe board, and some stretched out stick figures that made me miss Addie again. — Kate Willis

With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on. — Nick Cave

I heard the telltale sound of scales scraping against metal
a light swoosh, a tongue flickering out to taste the stale and humid air. Whatever it was, my prey was tasting for me. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

And you practically raped that biker guy, which, by the way, what the fuck was that about? Scraping the bottom of the barrel there, Charles."
"And that barrel is hot." I looked down at Artemis. "And Donovan's genuine. He would sell me to the highest bidder for a carburetor, and we both know it. — Darynda Jones

Fear of success is one of the new fears I've heard about lately. And I think its definitely a sign that we're running out of fears. A person suffering from fear of success is scraping the bottom of the fear barrel. — Jerry Seinfeld

Do me the kindness of at least scraping me from the bottom of your shoes. — Kels Adeline Sapp

I always felt I was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to get a song together. — Leonard Cohen

When a reporter is quoting Sid Blumenthal on president Bush, you know he's scraping the barrel. — Andrew Sullivan

I see her body as an arousing work of architecture. A sky-scraping building that I wouldn't mind laying over a mountain to inject my whale-sized shank through its front entrance, knocking the doorman out of the way and flooding the lobby once I am finished with her. — Carlton Mellick III

It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We've spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it - scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.
And what of the rest of the world that's already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star's just dying and we'll never know about it. Somewhere another's being born whose light we'll never see.
The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothing ness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything-all of us-will simply cease to be. — Carrie Ryan

all authentic prayer is a scraping of the heart whereby the dregs of the soul are offered up to God. — Richard J. Foster

night, I think I can hear the stars scraping against the sky. That's how quiet it is. After a while it's almost more than I can stand. I want to scream at the top of my lungs. I want to sing, shout, stamp my feet, clap my hands, anything to declare my presence. My conversation with the soldier had been the first words I'd said aloud in weeks. The Hum died on the tenth day after the Arrival. I was sitting in third period texting Lizbeth the last text I — Rick Yancey

Who cares what a man's style is, so it is intelligible,
as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock's feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts. — Henry David Thoreau

It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. — John Green

After a few seconds of scraping, I realize what he has isn't a trail, it's a whole forest! Ack! Weren't all men supposed to shave their chest and stuff nowadays? Whatever happened to having fuzz-free Hollywood heroes as role models? At least my embarrassment is completely foregone by the irritation at his lack of upkeep. The only thing distracting me now is that heady mix of musk, shaving cream and a distinctly ... male scent. And God knows that is one seriously jeopardizing distraction. Especially with a whizzing needle in one's hand. — Rucy Ban

Think not of yourself as the architect of your career but as the sculptor. Expect to have to do a lot of hard hammering and chiselingand scraping and polishing. — B.C. Forbes

How is faith to endure, O God, when you allow all this scraping and tearing on us? You have allowed rivers of blood to flow, mountains of suffering to pile up, sobs to become humanity's song
all without lifting a finger that we could see. You have allowed bonds of love beyond number to be painfully snapped. If you have not abandoned us, explain yourself.
We strain to hear. But instead of hearing an answer we catch sight of God himself scraped and torn. Through our tears we see the tears of God. — Nicholas Wolterstorff

Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way ... What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent. — John Cage

Before I take a step, someone starts to clap. Without a word, every person in the courtyard gazes up at the north tower scraping the gray sky. The applause stops, and a deep, firm voice shouts from above, "Let her stay." Barbs of terror dig under my skin. The courtyard goes as still as a sky burial. This is the first time many of these girls have heard a man speak. — Emily R. King

Well, he's scraping up what there is. Reckon we'll need every ready hand when it comes to a battle. Yours too, maybe.'
'Oh, you'll have to hold me back!' Calder slapped the hilt of his sword. 'Can't wait to get started!'
'You ever even drawn the fucking thing?' sneered Tenways, stretching his neck out to spit again.
'Just the once. I had to trim your daughter's hairy cunt before I could get at it. — Joe Abercrombie

The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel. — Michael Montoure

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative. — Alexandra Kleeman

I don't believe in the scraping of stuff. Take the existing condition, offer up a diagnosis for what's wrong, and a prescription for making it work. — Tim Gunn

Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long. I have to think my mother felt something like that. — Leif Enger

Things are very rudimentary as far as women's rights really go here, and it seems fine, but once you start scraping the surface, you start to see the ripple effect of how not having equal rights is so detrimental and how many mothers are single parents trying to raise their families. — Patricia Arquette

He rolled her to her back and used his hands, mouth, and tongue on her, all over her, and she was greedy for that too. Arching against him, her hands coaxing and demanding, her nails scraping or diving into his hair to hold him to her. — Kristen Ashley

Do you often wonder," she continued, desperately hoping her questions would win Vasily over, "what might have been had his gaze fallen upon some other miserable wretch? Yes, you would have been destitute, starving in the streets, scraping for your next meal ... but even beggars are free. — Melika Dannese Lux

They cowered in a corner as far away as they could from the sound of ripping, tearing and banging. The creature above was frantically trying to find a way through the floor to them.
The terrifying scraping noise signaled that the thing had torn its way through the clean, white woolen carpet that had neatly covered the hard wood floorboards. Now it scraped its claws along the wood trying to find a hold.
In frustration, and after many attempts, it thumped the floor in anger. Screaming a long high-pitched whistle, it smashed itself hard and heavily against the floor.
Dust drifted towards them as they looked to each other for any suggestions to the one impending question upon all of their minds.
How are we going to get out of here alive? — Robert E. Kreig

History teaches us no race, no people, no nation has ever been freed through cowardice, through cringing, through bowing and scraping, but all that has been achieved to the glory of mankind, to the glory and honour of races and nations was through the manly determination and effort of those who lead and those who are led. — Marcus Garvey

Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. — Evelyn Waugh

The Christian fact is very straightforward: To be a student is a calling. Your parents are setting up accounts to pay the bills, or you are scraping together your own resources and taking out loans, or a scholarship is making college possible. — Stanley Hauerwas

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in — Iain M. Banks

My grandmother spent her whole life working as a maid, a cook and a babysitter, barely scraping by, but still working hard to give my mother, her only child, a chance in life, so that my mother could give my brother and me an even better one. — Julian Castro

I think of myself as being perfectly photoshopped. If I started scraping at the layers of what I'm suppressing - what I've put a pretty picture over - things would start looking pretty ugly. — Tarryn Fisher

I was happy, I wasn't beaten, and I lacked nothing. But it wasn't what people expect - it was very much sort of pinching and scraping. I don't know how my mother did it. — Kristin Scott Thomas

My real dad would never be this rude, I just know it. Even if he was angry, he would hold up his hand to apologise. I would hold up my hand to apologise, and he would hold up his hand even higher to take more of the blame, but I would hold up my hand highest of all to show that it was actually my fault. And with our fingers almost scraping the sky we would smile identical smiles then he would gasp, "It's you!" "Yes!" I would reply, and then we would embrace...' - ppg 10 — Annabel Pitcher

In a lot of ways home improvement is like marriage. It's not glamorous. It can take a lot of hard work and effort. There are days it feels like it might be easier to burn the whole thing to the ground and start all over again. Then you remember how much you love the house or your husband and you recommit yourself to what it takes to see the whole thing through. Even when it might involve paintbrushes and compromise and sanding and scraping all the rough edges. And when you look back on a tough patch a few months after the worst has passed, you don't remember all the hard work and the tears. You just have the satisfaction of knowing you've made something beautiful. — Melanie Shankle

You are a rose bush left out in the wild, scraping for survival. You have fought for everything you have, and you thrive on the struggle. You're called to it. The harder things are, the better you get. — Denise Grover Swank

- it was only then that I understood how longing for a place can take you over so that you can do nothing except return, as I did, return and pick at the city, scraping together bits of the place you once knew. But what do you do if you can never return? — Ahdaf Soueif

I was able to support myself by acting alone about six years ago. Until then, I was just scraping by. — Edie Falco

I do smaller films, I'm not getting big paydays. I feel like we're just kind of scraping together here. — Hope Davis

she walked into her bathroom, stripped, and entered the shower.
The door opened a minute later to expose Riley standing there, beer in hand.
Scraping damp strands of red off her face, she glared at him. "I don't remember giving you an invitation."
"You said to amuse myself while you shower." A slow, slow, deliciously slow smile.
It said gotcha — Nalini Singh

He looked at the Mexican man and saw him scraping the hamburger grill. He thought, "When Heidegger first read Aristotle, he had no idea what any of it meant, he just kept reading the words even though he had no idea. You're not Heidegger. Neither was Heidegger. Heidegger read and read and then he became 'Heidegger. — Timothy Willis Sanders

Noah's eyes held my face. I swallowed hard. The juxtaposition of him sitting in a room full of people while staring at no one but me was overwhelming. Something shifted inside of me at the intimacy of us, eyes locked amid the scraping of twenty graphite pencils on paper.
I shaded his face out of nothingness. I smudged the slope of his neck and darkened his delinquent mouth, while the lights accented the right angle of his jaw against the cloudy sky outside. I did not hear the bell. I did not hear the other students rise and leave the room. I did not even notice that Noah no longer sat at the stool. — Michelle Hodkin

Tlaloci's head exploded in a shower of brains and bone. The pieces rained down on me, and the body fell to one side, obsidian blade scraping along the stone floor as the hand convulsed around the hilt. I stared across the cave and saw Olaf standing at the foot of the stone steps. He was still standing in his shooting stance, one-handed, gun still pointed at where the priest had been standing. He blinked, and I watched the concentration leave his face, watched something close to human spill across his face. He started walking towards me, gun at his side. The other hand held a knife, bloody to the hilt. I was wiping Tlaloci's brains off my face when Olaf came to stand in front of me. "I never thought I'd say this, but damn I'm glad to see you." He actually smiled. "I saved your life." That made me smile. "I know." Ramirez — Laurell K. Hamilton

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility. — Robert Wilson Lynd

With a jolt, Lance realized Melissa was pretty. No, not the type that would make him stop in the middle of his morning runs on Iloilo River Esplanade, his gray running shoes scraping against the pavement as he skid to a halt. He realized Melissa was pretty the same way he sometimes caught himself singing along to a song he didn't even like on the radio. The knowledge sneaked up on him. — Clarisse David

The usual icing period (where the doctor doesn't come right away but leaves you there to freeze in your paper gown while scraping at the files on the outside of your door making you THINK he is going to come in but he doesn't) ... — Claudine Wolk

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....

Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows'
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....

Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora.... — Russell Edson

Is the scraping off of a barnacle the destruction of a ship? — H. P. Blavatsky

The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by debriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. they brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I've never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin. — Andrew Davidson

My favorite moments are when the bass falls in the pocket with the drums, the guitar is on top just slicing it, and the melody is scraping across like a sidewinder shattering through the monitor. It's just, ahhh, I love it! That's the jones, the hit, the buzz right there. It gets me off. — Nikki Sixx

The faintest scraping-ticking arose as the knuckles of the hinge leafs turned against pivot pins in need of oil, and the door swung ever so slowly into the kitchen, — Dean Koontz

God and religion before every thing!' Dante cried. 'God and religion before the world.'
Mr Casey raised his clenched fist and brought it down on the table with a crash.
'Very well then,' he shouted hoarsely, 'if it comes to that, no God for Ireland!'
'John! John!' cried Mr Dedalus, seizing his guest by the coat sleeve.
Dante stared across the table, her cheeks shaking. Mr Casey struggled up from his chair and bent across the table towards her, scraping the air from before his eyes with one hand as though he were tearing aside a cobweb.
'No God for Ireland!' he cried, 'We have had too much God in Ireland. Away with God! — James Joyce

Then a sound came. It was like the grinding of gears on a colossal ship engine. The sound was like mountains of iron scraping and rubbing against each other, forced together by some godlike impulse. Uselessly, I covered my ears. It went on and on, and I felt as though I would never again know peace. My senses were consumed by the light and heat and sound, their power interrupted only by the tactile sensation of my heart pounding against my chest. It will be very difficult for you to really grasp what happened next. I warn you that my description will inevitably fall far from conveying the astonishing sight I witnessed. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to convey some sense of what happened. — Alec Merta

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble 'came' from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American. — James Caskey

I haven't been approached to do a 'Doctor Who' movie. I think they would be scraping the bottom of the barrel if they asked me to do it. — Colin Baker

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel. — Gore Vidal

What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour - landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard ... — Virginia Woolf

One day I caught sight of my son. He was striding along with a briefcase under his arm. He took off his hat and bowed and I saw he was as bald as a coot. I was almost certain it was he. I turned round to gaze after him. He went bustling along on his duck feet, bowing and scraping and flourishing his hat left and right. The insufferable son of a bitch. — Samuel Beckett

I need to smell its smells, to hear its sounds, to see food in a pot that simmers, bubbles, sizzles. I enjoy the physical involvement of stirring, turning, poking, mashing, scraping. — Marcella Hazan

Celaena," Chaol said gently. And then she heard the scraping noise as his hand came into view, sliding across the flagstones. His fingertips stopped just at the edge of the white line. "Celaena," he breathed, his voice laced with pain - and hope. This was all she had left - his outstretched hand, and the promise of hope, of something better waiting on the other side of the line. — Sarah J. Maas

Remember that there is something else in the world even more important than making money. Your health, your family, your friendships should mean a thousand times more to you than dollarchasing. Life was given us for enjoyment, not for one long, strenuous, straining struggle in the dreary drudgery of scraping dollars together. — Orison Swett Marden

I've had four hundred years. Four hundred years of scraping by, and trying not to eat people. Four hundred years, and it's still not enough. — T.W. Brown

The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we'd never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I'll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and I love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night. — Daniel Handler

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. — Charles Dickens

They want me to kill him because he didn't do well on their tests. This is a mismatch. I am Darwin's scythe. Nature scraping away the chaff. — Pierce Brown

Are we, intellectual sirs, not actively or passively 'producing' more and more words, more books, more articles, ceaselessly refilling the pot-boiler of speech, gorging ourselves on it rather, seizing books and 'experiences', to metamorphose them as quickly as possible into other words, plugging us in here, being plugged in there, just like Mina on her blue squared oilcloth, extending the market and the trade in words of course, but also multiplying the chances of jouissance, scraping up intensities wherever possible, and never being sufficiently dead, for we too are required to go from forty to the hundred a day, and we will never play the whore enough, we will never be dead enough — Jean-Francois Lyotard

The sting and pain of my Mark was nothing compared to the pain I'm feeling now. It's a scraping deep down, a dull blade being used to dig out my heart. — RaeLynn Fry

There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but what a marvelous one. Better than G.B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore, scraping the mind and the sensibilities. It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless. — Charles Bukowski

Say my name with hints of longing and hunger. I'd like to hear the desire in your voice scraping against the walls, messing up the sheets of my bed, scratching on my skin. Caress every single letter of me like you're making love to me. I want to be owned by you. — Nessie Q.

He was out playing and heard Molly calling him. "Richard! Supper!" Instead of answering "Coming!" and running to her, he dodged under a hedge, scraping his knees. "Richard! Richard!" Molly sounded frantic this time, but he remained silent, crouched. "Richard! Where are you, Dicky?" A rabbit stopped and watched him, and he locked eyes with the rabbit and, for those short moments, only he and the rabbit knew where he was. Then the rabbit leaped out and Molly peered under the bushes and saw him. She smacked him. She told him to stay in his room for the rest of the day. She said she was very upset and would tell Mr. and Mrs. Churchill. But those short moments had made it all worthwhile, those moments of pure plenary abandon, when he felt as if he, and he alone, were in control of the universe of his childhood. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

...the whole universe is contagious if you look at it long enough. Just opening your eyes puts you in front of a mirror, psychologically speaking. Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather, garbage goes in, but you never get rid of it. It just lies there turning to dust and slowly wafting a thin layer of grime on to every other object in your brain. Scraping the gunk off is not only a major challenge, but the chief burden of human existence. that's why I keep things so clean. Otherwise I would see little flecks of [ ] shit everywhere I looked ... — Nell Zink

A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete.
"Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do."
Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?"
"To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors."
"Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects.
Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?"
"Bingo," said Pete. — Barbara Kingsolver

It is a bad thing to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom. — Karl Marx

A night spent scraping off the evidence of other people's fun is a wearisome thing. — Alex Marwood

Ok I'm not so smart I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running and it's the working class that get exploited. What kind revolution is it that just throws out big words that working class people can't understand.
Revolution or not the working class will just keep on scraping a living in the same old shitholes
I'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in.
Midori — Haruki Murakami

There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at the inside of my ribs. — Laurie Halse Anderson

When the hole was done they backed the machine up and turned it around and used the front bucket to push Keever into his grave, scraping him, rolling him, covering his body with dirt, until finally it fell over the lip and thumped down into the electric shadows. — Lee Child

There was a time when I liked a good riot. Put on some heavy old street clothes that could stand a bit of sidewalk-scraping, infect myself with something good and contagious, then go out and stamp on some cops. It was great, being nine years old. — Warren Ellis

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground. It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Intones its single emptiness, The savagest hollow of winter-sound. — Wallace Stevens

I've been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I've formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door
Isn't that what friends are for? — Bruce Cockburn

They slept with each other for the first time while waiting out a storm in an abandoned shepherd hut. The hours the storm granted them, surrounded by raw wool and rusty shears, felt like a month, a year, all the years they'd been waiting for this, full of fear of their kisses, of their too-familiar skins. So far from all their memories, it felt as if they were meeting each other for the first time all over again. The horse scraping around in the discarded fleece, the storm, the sound of rain, Jacob gathered it all, like jewelry he would put around Fox's neck whenever they would remember this first time. — Cornelia Funke

Flaky devotionalism, bowing and scraping and sucking up to the teacher is very phony. It is counterproductive to enlightenment and spiritual development. What is necessary is mutual respect. — Frederick Lenz

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it
a demand for people to reach a finer place!
... Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. — Douglas Coupland

I want to make you scream and claw and faint in my arms, he whispered, his masculine bristle scraping against her skin. — Lisa Kleypas

The work that I've gotten in the hiatuses seems to indicate that I will have a little more work after 'Mad Men' than I did when I was scraping by while I was temping in New York, but who knows? People very easily could be like, 'Meh, we're done with that. We've got Jon Hamm. We're good without the weird one with glasses.' — Rich Sommer

They all felt it at once - the ground under their feet rolled. The lamps hanging from the ceiling swayed and flickered. A tower of plastic cups fell from the counter and landed on the floor. The cups rolled in all directions. Everyone rushed outside, the chairs scraping the floor, food abandoned on the tables. — A.O. Peart

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description. — William James

As soon as I saw the three-bin stainless steel pot sink, exactly like ours, I felt instantly at home and fell into peeling potatoes and scraping plates for the dishwasher like it was my own skin. And that, just like that, is how a whole life can start. — Gabrielle Hamilton

In the back of the fridge I checked out some stewed apples destined to fester. I examined them closely and reckoned they had only a day to go, even by my standards. I spooned the apples into tiny bowls, tossed in some dried fruit and sprinkled them with crumble topping. Delicious, they said that night, scraping the bowls so clean they hardly needed to go in the dishwasher. The fools. — Helen Brown

I don't want to be treated like I came from another planet or something or was somehow born with some weird birthright or super power. I don't view myself that way. I am a normal guy, picking up the crap from the dog and scraping the BBQ and having a beer and fixing the shed out back. — Chris Hadfield

I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded? — Elizabeth Kostova