Scuffed Quotes & Sayings

How are you doing, Harper?" Trent hadn't touched her yet, but he was standing right behind her. She could feel his warm breath on her skin. "A bit light-headed, to be honest." "Put your head down between your knees. It's either the presence of my greatness-which happens all the time, so don't feel bad-or the adrenaline. Take some slow, deep breaths. What you're doing tonight is a huge step." She did as he said. His scuffed black boots disappeared from her line of sight and reappeared a minute later. "Please don't pass out and fall off the bed-my insurance doesn't cover dental."

- Trent & Harper — Scarlett Cole

Good manners forced her to say, somewhat grudgingly, "Your boots are very nice."
He grinned and regarded his footwear, which, though old, appeared very well-made. "Yes, they are, aren't they?"
"If a bit scuffed," she added.
"I shall polish them tomorrow," he promised, his somewhat superior look telling her that he refused to rise to her bait.
"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "That was uncalled for. Compliments should be freely given, without restrictions or qualifications. — Julia Quinn

Now, the tourist hot spots of the city were the very parts that made it like everywhere else. Was it possible to imagine those buildings without inhaling the animal-fat stink of McDonald's or KFC? He never thought London would cease to appeal to him, but the little faded glory it still possessed was being scuffed away by the dead hand of globalization. On his down days he saw London as a crumbling ancient house, slowly collapsing under the weight of its own past. — Christopher Fowler

So I said, "Hey, Joe," and hoped it was a start. He was startled. He opened and closed his mouth a few times. He made a growling noise deep in his chest, a low rumble that made my skin itch. It was pleased, that sound, like even just me saying his name was enough to make him happy. For all I knew, it was. It cut off as quickly as it started. He looked faintly embarrassed. I scuffed my foot in the dirt, waiting. He said, "Hey, Ox." He cleared his throat and looked down. "Hi." It was weird, that disconnect between the boy I'd known and the man before me. His voice was deeper and he was bigger than he'd ever been. He radiated power that had never been there before. It fit him well. I remembered that day that I'd really seen him for the first time, wearing those running shorts and little else. I pushed those thoughts away. I didn't want him sniffing me out. Not yet. Because attraction wasn't the problem right now. Especially not right now. I — T.J. Klune

Tallkit backed away as their dark brown pelts scuffed the snow. It must be fun to have a littermate to play fight with. If only Finchkit hadn't died. — Erin Hunter

It was a sort of loser luck, I guess, the luck of the cigarette-smoking ghost-grannies who shuffled the scuffed linoleum, but I'd take it over no luck at all. — Michelle Tea

Once when I visited her, she scuffed around the house in pink pile-lined slippers you'd wear only while waiting for the police to discover you many days dead. — Melissa Bank

Justice Rehnquist was friendly and unpretentious. He wore scuffed Hush Puppy shoes. That was my first lesson. Clothes do not make the man. The Justice sported long sideburns and Buddy Holly glasses long after they were fashionable. And he wore loud ties that I am confident were never fashionable. — John Roberts

I waved but couldn't answer, because I was finally letting myself grin as wide as I'd wanted all afternoon, all evening, every sec of every minute with you, Ed. Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it'll get dropped someday, shoes that'll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you'll soon enough muck up filthy. — Daniel Handler

I don't want to collect anything for myself right now. I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something - I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it. " He shook his head and scuffed up some gravel. "You know, I'll see something, just anything, and I can't help but thinking to myself, Well, Jesus Christ, now that's interesting! Jesus, I'll bet you could find a lot of those. — Susan Orlean

So you don't fancy meeting up again?' Max persisted, though Neve didn't know why, because she thought she'd made her position perfectly clear. 'Swap war stories?'
'I don't have any war stories,' Neve said, and in that moment she felt that she never would. That every night would be spent creeping round her flat in her socks with the telly turned down so low that she could barely hear it, so in the end she'd have no other option but to escape into the pages of books where there were other girls falling in and out of love but not her. Never her. She stared down at the scuffed toes of her faux Ugg boots in sudden and tired defeat.
'If you don't have any war stories, then at least you don't have any war wounds,' Max said, so quietly that Neve had to strain her ears to catch his words. 'Take my number. — Sarra Manning

Settling into a new country is like getting used to a new pair of shoes. At first they pinch a little, but you like the way they look, so you carry on. The longer you have them, the more comfortable they become. Until one day without realizing it you reach a glorious plateau. Wearing those shoes is like wearing no shoes at all. The more scuffed they get, the more you love them and the more you can't imagine life without them. — Tahir Shah

of Weedpatch Camp were working in the fields. Perhaps as many as fifty children were playing baseball at the school or swimming in the pool when three cars driven by teenage boys began to circle the playground. The teenage boys got out of the cars and squared off in front of Eddie and a line of other sixteen-year-old boys from the camp. When the intruders hurled rocks into the swimming pool, the Okie boys charged forward and the Fight was on. Some men from the camp rushed over to the playground to restore order, but by then the invaders were in retreat with bloody noses and scuffed faces. That — Jerry Stanley

I don't want a knight in shining armor.
I don't want a knight in scuffed armor.
I want his helmet to have dents. I want my knight to be real, and dark and savage. I want my knight to be a survivor. Someone who's been tested and got through his trails. Not some pussy in gleaming metal. — Belle Aurora

I watched the edges of the leaves slowly unfold, fluttering in the breeze. "How long did you wait?" It would've been unbearably romantic if he'd had he courage to look into my face and say it, but instead, he dropped his eyes to the ground and scuffed his boot in the leaves- countless possibilities for happy days- on the ground. "I haven't stopped. — Maggie Stiefvater

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends and spirit - are made of glass. If you drop these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it. — Brian Dyson

Houses need humans," Red said. "You all should know that. Oh, sure, humans cause wear and tear - scuffed floors and stopped-up toilets and such - but that's nothing compared to what happens when a house is left on its own. It's like the heart goes out of it. It sags, it slumps, it starts to lean toward the ground. — Anne Tyler

What do you like to do?"
She scuffed a toe amongst the rushes. "Needlework."
"Very restful, isn't it?"
"Well," said Arya, "not the way I do it. — George R R Martin

Confessing I didn't, I scribbled the directions on the notepad I always kept by the phone. I hung up and my feet were already on the floor as adrenaline hit my nerves like espresso. The house was quiet. I grabbed my black medical bag, scuffed and worn from years of use. The — Patricia Cornwell

How did you get into the castle, Alexandre, son of Gilles Smith?"
Sand shrugged. "A saint kidnapped me from his shrine and put me into a fireplace here. So I guess the answer is, a miracle of Saint Melor. Or so I think. He has not told me."
"If you are trying to antagonize him, you are doing a good job," Perrotte whispered.
Sand scuffed his shoe at her. "I'm just telling the truth!"
"You're very good at telling it in the most maddening way possible."
"Thank you? — Merrie Haskell

Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five
balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends,
and integrity. And you're keeping all of them in the air.
But one day you finally come to understand that work is a
rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other
four balls-family, health, friends, integrity-are made of
glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably
scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly
understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the
beginnings of balance in your life. — James Patterson

I've been scuffed up a little, but I just hope and pray that I keep my youthful looks for as long as possible. I grew up in a musical family
my mom sings and my father plays the piano. They were both very active in the church. — Cyrus Chestnut

A scuffed up shoe on the red carpet or at a big premiere is never okay! It can really alter the vibe of a trendy look. — Brad Goreski

After the storm the city lies becalmed. It is a sunny morning, still and cold. Branches litter the streets like broken limbs. People clear away the wreckage. They swarm around like ants whose anthill has been scuffed; how doggedly they rebuild their lives. — Deborah Moggach

He's tall, taller than Kyol, but not as thickly muscled, and his silver eyes, while intense, have a lighter, livelier hue to them. He's wearing a poorly made, dark jaedric cuirass over a once-white tunic, loose gray pants, and scuffed black boots. His golden-blond hair looks like it's been chopped off with a knife or, perhaps, the sword in his hand. Despite his haphazard appearance, he's confident, he's alert, and he's completely focused on me, his prey. — Sandy Williams

Dew. Their feet scuffed the dark sidewalks. Raymond had two moods now. Despair came with no warning, rogue waves of helplessness that sucked him out on a rippling tide. When it receded, he was left with a dry and — Edward W. Robertson

Annie Wilkes had her own interior set of rules; in her way she was strangely prim. She had made him drink water from a floor-bucket; had withheld his medication until he was in agony; had made him burn the only copy of his new novel; had hand-cuffed him and stuck a rag reeking of furniture polish in his mouth; but she would not take the money from his wallet. She brought it to him, the old scuffed Lord Buxton he'd had since college, and put it in his hands. All — Stephen King

That was a heroic deed." Embarrassed, Eragon scuffed his boots against the ground. "I wouldn't have survived if not for Arya." "You are too modest, Argetlam," she admonished. "It was you who struck the final blow. — Christopher Paolini

I've been waiting for you," he says in his low, ragged voice.
All of him is ragged: his patched cloak; his shabby gloves, the fingertips thin and worn; his scuffed boots. His words always seem to catch on my insides, like a goose grass burr, or a torn fingernail dragged across silk. His voice sticks. — Melinda Salisbury

See. I touched the loose peg gently, running my hands over the warm wood of the lute. The varnish was scraped and scuffed in places. It had been treated unkindly in the past, but that didn't make it less lovely underneath. So yes. It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because.That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect. Stanchion made a sweeping gesture — Patrick Rothfuss

As she descended below the floor level of the loft, her former partner in juvenile crime was revealed to her from scuffed paniolo boots, up a long, muscled body that appeared to go on forever, to a venerable black Stetson. His cowboy look was new to her and it suited him. When she backtracked to his Hawaiian-sky blue eyes, she swayed under the impact and abruptly sat down. Any stair step would do." Noelani Beecham, Pele's Tears — Sharon K. Garner

Your slippers last a lot longer in your bedroom. On a film set, they do get very scuffed up. — Martin Freeman

The man called Gareth was laughing into his mobile phone as the door opened. There were gold rings on each of his fingers, chains dangling from his neck and wrists. He wasn't tall but he was wide. Rebus got the impression much of it was fat. A gut hung over his waistband. He was balding badly, and had allowed what hair he had to grow uncut, so that it hung down to the back of his collar and beyond. He wore a black leather trenchcoat and black T-shirt, with baggy denims and scuffed trainers. He already had his free hand out for the cash, wasn't expecting another hand to grab it and haul him inside the flat. He dropped the phone, swearing and finally taking note of Rebus. — Ian Rankin

Aleister Crowley told a friend he could make any random fall over without touching them. To illustrate, he walked behind a stranger for a block or so, matching his footsteps precisely to the stranger's. He then scuffed his heels, as if stumbling and falling. And the stranger fell over. The stranger had heard himself fall, and so he fell. If Facebook tells you that everything around you is sad and depressing often enough, you get sad and depressed. All hail the Great Beast 666 of black marketing. — Warren Ellis

School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite - all the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It's funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it's normal to be happy there when it isn't. — Dara Horn

Ronan wasn't exactly sure why he was angry. Although Gansey had done nothing to invoke his ire, he was definitely part of the problem. Currently, he propped his cell between ear and shoulder as he eyed a pair of plastic plates printed with smiling tomatoes. His unbuttoned collar revealed a good bit of his collarbone. No one could deny that Gansey was a glorious portrait of youth, the well-tended product of a fortunate and moneyed pairing. Ordinarily, he was so polished that it was bearable, though, because he was clearly not the same species as Ronan's rough-and-ready family. But tonight, under the fluorescent lights of Dollar City, Gansey's hair was scuffed and his cargo shorts were a greasy ruin from mucking over the Pig. He was barelegged and sockless in his Top-Siders and very clearly a real human, an attainable human, and this, somehow, made Ronan want to smash his fist through a wall. — Maggie Stiefvater

Kiernan. I had a sudden memory of the small, scuffed-up shoe I'd seen just before I fell. He must have snatched the bracelet when the crowd gathered around me. If I managed to get out, I resolved to give him every last penny I had and cover his little face with kisses. — Rysa Walker

THE OLD ARE LIKE BOOKS

The old are like books, crack-spined,
Their foxed pages dogeared at favorite paragraphs
While whole chapters have been forgotten.
Each cover scuffed, dust-jackets lost,
Titles alluding to something long out of style,
Prose suffering from an overuse of footnotes,
Occasional longueurs, over-repetitions of the main theme,
But overall, unique and idiosyncratic tales.
Of another era, but preface to this. — David Andrew Westwood

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them - work, family, health, friends and spirit - and you're keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends and spirit - are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life. — Brian Dyson

Women and men in scrubs swept into the room and checked the monitors and the bags. They strode out, nodded at the quartet slumped in chairs against the wall, and scuffed down the hall. Nurses changed shifts, moved the life of the place along while patients and visitors waited frozen, locked into little boxes of concern and fear.
The strange hours of the pre-dawn arrived, when the hospital hushed even as the business of sickness and death ground on. — Scott Archer Jones

Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls
family, health, friends, integrity
are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. — Gary Keller

Her lips full and inviting, she has an infectious laugh and glassy cackle in her eyes, and a 2000 volt sexual charisma that beckons me like a fluff girl on scuffed knees. — Brett Tate

Modern barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50 cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia' on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches me delicate, suffering child that grows hard and greedy with puberty. — Jack Kerouac

Is it anything to do with this?" she said. The thing she took out of her bag was battered and travel-worn as if it had been hurled into prehistoric rivers, baked under the sun that shines so redly on the deserts of Kakrafoon, half buried in the marbled sands that fringe the heady vapored oceans of Santraginus V, frozen on the glaciers of the moon of Jaglan Beta, sat on, kicked around spaceships, scuffed and generally abused, and since its makers had thought that these were exactly the sorts of things that might happen to it, they had thoughtfully encased it in a sturdy plastic cover and written on it, in large friendly letters, the words "Don't Panic. — Douglas Adams

she'd been given to wear were worn and scuffed. Her dress was too big, her hair unevenly chopped and she still had bruises on the side of her face. Now, he expected her to — Diana L. Douglas

Wear your new boots." He passed her the clothes. "They'll work well with that, and with the coat as well."
"What new boots?" Her eyebrows drew together as he took them off a shelf. "And where did they come from?"
"The boot elves, I assume."
"The boot elves are going to be pissed when they're dinged and scuffed inside a week."
"Oh, I think they're more tolerant than that."
"Those elves keep this up I'm going to need a bigger closet."
But she dressed as advised, then sat to pull on the boots while Roarke programmed breakfast for two.
They slid on like
as Peabody might say
butter. "Okay." She stood, took some strides. "They're great. Sturdy
I could definitely kick some teeth in with these."
"The elves had that as top priority. — J.D. Robb

Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother's Englishness, that ability to equalize problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were born with aplomb. — Laura L. Sullivan