Shelling Out Quotes & Sayings

Though plucking artichoke leaves doesn't mend all cracked spirits as firmly as pea shelling, it has its own curative power. There is a Dutch saying: "Bitter in the mouth cures the heart." If you happen to have a friend shaken by heartache, hand over a bag of raw artichokes. Once she has relieved them of their leaves, encourage one brave bite. Between the meditative peeling and the bitter taste, she should be completely healed. If there are no artichokes around, raw dandelion greens are a good substitute. — Tamar Adler

Three years of changes, moves, uncertainties, upheavals; the war, the revolution; scenes of destruction, scenes of death, shelling, blown-up bridges, fires, ruins - all this turned suddenly into a huge, empty, waste space. The first real event since the long interruption was this vertiginous home-coming by train, in the knowledge that his home was still safe, still existing somewhere, with every smallest stone in it dear to him. This was the point of life, this was experience, this was the quest of adventure seekers and what artists had in mind - this coming home to your family, to yourself, this renewal of life. — Boris Pasternak

There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed. Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes on with what he was doing...Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm. — John Steinbeck

Shelling is like relationships," Ness says. He turns away from me and scans the beach, makes an adjustment with the wheel. "I can see that." He nods to himself. "Yeah, I can totally see that. — Hugh Howey

I saw houses burned by the Mujahadeen, as well as disfigured bodies of prisoners they'd taken. But I saw other things too: villages destroyed by our shelling and bodies of women, killed by mistake. When you shoot at every rustling in the bushes, there's no time to think about who's there. But for an Afghan, it didn't matter if his wife had been killed intentionally or accidentally. He went into the mountains to see revenge. — Vladislav Tamarov

And some cease feeling
Even themselves or for themselves.
Dullness best solves
The tease and doubt of shelling — Wilfred Owen

The whole premise of Joe's struggle to stay in school was the prospect of a more promising future afterward. It had not occurred to him that doors wouldn't just open for a man with a college degree. And once again it was pounded home to him how many of his classmates apparently did not even have to think about money, how many had people watching out for them, shelling out thousands of dollars they never expected to see again. It stirred up the old anxiety and self-doubt that always threatened to bubble to the surface. And it added something new to the mix - a toxic dash of jealousy. PART THREE 1935 The Parts That Really Matter — Daniel James Brown

Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen's Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. Philip's, lawyers moving out of their offices to lunch on Broad Street, the darkness of reveille on cold winter mornings, regattas, the flash of bagpipers' tartans passing in review, blue herons on the marshes, the pressure of the chinstrap on my shako, brotherhood, shad roe at Henry's, camellias floating above water in a porcelain bowl, the scowl of Mark Santoro, and brotherhood again. — Pat Conroy

You never hear in the news, 'Two hundred killed today when atheist rebels took heavy shelling from the agnostic stronghold in the north.' — Doug Stanhope

Boredom!!! Shooting!!! Shelling!!! People being killed!!! Despair!!! Hunger!!! Misery!!! Fear!!! That's my life! The life of an innocent eleven-year-old schoolgirl!! A schoolgirl without a school, without the fun and excitement of school. A child without games, without friends, without the sun, without birds, without nature, without fruit, without chocolate or sweets, with just a little powdered milk. In short, a child without a childhood. — Zlata Filipovic

Just the wrong perspective," he said. "We're squaring them up to be the enemy, but mostly because we need an enemy." "So you're saying you're wrong about the cyberthreat?" "No, but . . ." Chuck left his fork in the fries and picked up a shrimp with his fingers. "But what?" "Maybe we're blinding ourselves to the real enemy." "What enemy is that, my conspiracy-loving friend?" I asked, rolling my eyes, expecting some rhetoric about the CIA or NSA. Chuck finished shelling his shrimp and pointed it at me. "Fear. Fear is the real enemy." He looked up at the ceiling. "Fear and ignorance." I laughed. "With all this stuff you're stockpiling, aren't you the one that's afraid?" "Not afraid," he said deliberately, looking straight into my eyes. "Prepared." — Matthew Mather

Well, I thought, climbing slowly out of the slit trench, the shells will catch us above ground now. But if you have to go, you have to go. F Company's in trouble, and we have to help them. We're in reserve, so we have to go. And if we're shelled, we're shelled. There is absolutely nothing we can do about it. — David Kenyon Webster

It was a sunny day in early summer, and he could hear birdsong. In a nearby orchard that had so far escaped shelling, apple trees were blossoming bravely. Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best. — Ken Follett

Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht's heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. ( ... ) The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention. — Anna Reid

As Wilson mourned his wife, German forces in Belgium entered quiet towns and villages, took civilian hostages, and executed them to discourage resistances. In the town of Dinant, German soldiers shot 612 men, women, and children. The American press called such atrocities acts of "frightfulness," the word then used to describe what later generations would call terrorism. On August 25, German forces bean an assault on the Belgian city of Louvain, the "Oxford of Belgium," a university town that was home to an important library. Three days of shelling and murder left 209 civilians dead, 1,100 buildings incinerated, and the library destroyed, along with its 230,000 books, priceless manuscripts, and artifacts. The assault was deemed an affront to just to Belgium but to the world. Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, "felt deeply the destruction of Louvain," according to his friend, Colonel House; the president feared "the war would throw the world back three or four centuries. — Erik Larson

Take a look at the Supreme Court decision that just authorized an effort by U.S. claimants against Iran for terrorist acts. What are the terrorist acts? The terrorist acts are bombings of U.S. military installations in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, which Iran is claimed to have something to do with. Well suppose they did. That's not terrorism. I mean if we have a military base in Lebanon that while we're shelling Lebanese naval ships, the Navy is shelling Lebanese installations and somebody attacks [that's not terrorism]. — Noam Chomsky

Feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung — Joseph Conrad

Plain white T-shirts do it for me every time. You can spend anything from £3 to £50 on a T-shirt, but I've bought some great ones from H&M, as well as shelling out on Duffer Of St George and a Polish label I discovered while filming 'Robin Hood' in Hungary called Scotch And Soda. — Jonas Armstrong

Dear Jesus, please get me out. Christ, please, please, please, Christ. If you only keep me from being killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everybody in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please, please, dear Jesus' The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rosa about Jesus. And he never told anybody. — Ernest Hemingway,

Of the little less than a million eligibles roaming around, 5 percent don't know their sign and don't even care. Another 5 percent are tied to their mothers by a food fixation. That leaves only 20 percent who are searching for a girl who will pick up their clothes, run their baths, burn her fingers shelling their three-minute eggs, run their errands, bear them a child every year, look like a fashion model, tend their needs when they are sick, and hold down a full-time job outside the home to make payments on their boat. — Erma Bombeck

Which she had spent long and happy hours releasing from their shells, with crazy dedication, because the shelling of pine-kernels is a form of lunacy, you spend more energy getting the damn things out than they give you when you eat. — Salman Rushdie

Still, when the shooting and shelling stopped, they could sometimes -- not often, but sometimes -- see that they were just someone's son, or husband, or brother. — Craig Siegel

In dealing with Syria's dictator ... only force counts. No cease-fire was attainable in Lebanon until the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey started shelling Syria's proxies; suddenly, sweet reason prevailed in Damascus. — William Safire

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech - and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives - he called them enemies! - hidden out of sight somewhere. — Joseph Conrad

It screamed downward, splitting air and sky without effort. A target expanded in size, brought into focus by time and velocity. There was a moment before impact that was the last instant of things as they were. Then the visible world exploded. — Steven Galloway

Because I worked as a newspaper reporter for about 14 years before attempting my first novel, I learned to write under almost any circumstances- by candle light, in longhand, in African villages where there was no power, under shelling in Kurdistan. — Geraldine Brooks

We the People - shelling the Vietcong — Allen Ginsberg

In Gaza, in August 2014, I spent ten days in a community being systematically destroyed by drone strikes, shelling and sniper fire. Fifteen hundred civilians were killed, one third of them children. In February 2015, I saw the US Congress give twenty-five standing ovations to the man who ordered the attacks. — Paul Mason

In my family, we can't just sit and be together. We have to be shelling peas or husking corn or something. A larger task. Some way of being with people. — Chuck Palahniuk

Cats are the lap-dancers of the animal world. Soon as you stop shelling out, they move on, find another lap. They're furry little sociopaths. Pretty and slick
in love with themselves. When's the last time you saw a seeing-eye cat? — Andrew Vachss

There's more student debt than credit card debt! Everywhere I go, I run into young people trying to build careers while they keep shelling out money on their education loans. If the economy is looking for a new generation of home-buyers, I can't imagine they'll get it from these folks. — Gail Collins