Shielding Yourself Quotes & Sayings

Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He stayed right where he was, shielding Lily with his body, accepting her violent emotions, and running his hands over skin that was too precious to be marred with so many bruises. — Stephanie Rowe

I sit, smoking, my head against the cool comfort of the fighter plane's wheel, its wing shielding but never embracing me. I'm a cold nestling tonight. — Aleksandr Voinov

Without (my wife) Laurie, I would never be here right now, I know that. I would either be in a coffin, or stashed away doing a life sentence some place. Or running and hiding some place, if I was still alive. I'm certain I wouldn't be playing music. She's just been perfect for me. And she's a protector also; she protects me from myself, from temptations, and bad associations. She's constantly shielding me from walking the red hot coals of existing as a game. — Art Pepper

If you couldn't sense heat, you'd not be alive. And if that heat never grew uncomfortable, you would never move. And if you were stagnant - unchallenged by unpredictable flares - you would never grow capable of shielding yourself from harsher flames. So yes, life was meant to drag you straight through the fire. — Richelle E. Goodrich

When I need it, I can call bitterness around me like mail armor, every thought a knot of steel, shielding the tenderness I have learned to hide as a daughter, mother, wife, and queen among warriors. — Susan Fraser King

Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life
and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we're sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion
to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it. — Gretchen Rubin

But the problem was that I had retreated so far into myself - shielding myself from the ghosts and memories of this place - that I had become reliant upon the comfort and rituals and plans. — Jeremy Jackson

Derek stopped short. I smacked into his back - not for the first time, since he insisted on walking in front of me. I'd been tripping on his heels and mumbling apologies the whole way. When I'd slow down to let him get farther ahead, he'd snap at me to keep up.
"We're almost there," Simon said.
He was behind me - sticking to the curbside, walking as close as Derek. While normally I wouldn't complain about Simon being so close, I had the weird sensation of being blocked in.
As we started forward again, I tried dropping back with Tori, who lagged behind, but Simon put his finger on my elbow and steered me back into place.
"Okay," I said. "Something's up. What's with the walking blockade?"
"They're protecting you," Tori said. "Shielding you from the big bad world." — Kelley Armstrong

Harry had been picturing his parents' deaths over and over again for three years now, ever since he'd found out they had been murdered, ever since he'd found out what had happened that night: Wormtail had betrayed his parents' whereabouts to Voldemort, who had come to find them at their cottage. How Voldemort had killed Harry's father first. How James Potter had tried to hold him off, while he shouted at his wife to take Harry and run ... Voldemort had advanced on Lily Potter, told her to move aside so that he could kill Harry ... how she had begged him to kill her instead, refused to stop shielding her son ... and so Voldemort had murdered her too, before turning his wand on Harry. — J.K. Rowling

For ourselves, Mighty Father, I pray you keep us from the sin of hatred, keep us from the sin of vengeance, keep us from the sin of despair, but protect us from the wicked schemes of our enemies. Walk with us now on this uncertain road. Send angels to go before us, angels to go behind, angels on either side, angels above and below - guarding, shielding, encompassing." He paused for a moment and then added, "May the Holy One give us the courage of righteousness and grant us strength for this day and through all things whatsoever shall befall us. Amen. — Stephen R. Lawhead

Our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity but preparing them to meet it well. — Aimee Mullins

What's it like feeling the smooth heat of that arm, tracing the supernatural muscles bunched in his arms and chest, teasing anyone with a pulse and hormones to lick their way down the divots and planes of that skin, to unbutton the leather shielding his body and taste all the way down to that silver buckle on his belt. — Poppet

A little boy was tugging on his pant leg.
'Teacher, I have to pee.'
Avila woke from his skating dreams and looked around, pointed to some trees by the shore that grew out over the water; the bare network of branches fell like a shielding curtain toward the ice.
'You can pee there.'
The boy squinted at the trees.
'On the ice?'
'Yes? What is wrong with that? Makes new ice. Yellow. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

A sharp ringing of a bell suddenly split the air, signaling that the quadrille was soon to begin. Realizing that the ladies shielding her from view were going to have to take their seats, Wilhelmina began backing as quickly as she could underneath the chair behind her, her only thought being to make an escape as quietly as possible. She'd gotten halfway underneath the chair before her bustle, dratted contraption that it was, snagged on the underside of the chair. Before she could get herself free, a loud clearing of a throat sent a sense of dread flowing through her veins. Lifting her head, she refused a sigh when her gaze was caught and held by none other than the gentleman she'd been hoping to avoid. Mr. Edgar Wanamaker. — Jen Turano

The store is also lit to the point of painfulness by a ceiling loaded with more fluorescent bulbs than a landing mothership. Shielding my headachey eyes, I make my consumer choices, then head to the counter, where the clerk is wearing sunglasses. I pay the clerk with a five-dollar bill on which I have felt-penned the words:
I AM AFRAID OF THE DARK AGES. — Douglas Coupland

Tonglen means "taking in and sending out". This meditation practice is designed to help ordinary people like ourselves connect with the openness and softness of our hearts. Instead of shielding and protecting our soft spot, with tonglen we could let ourselves feel what it is to be human. — Pema Chodron

Don't build yourself an ivory tower" the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain - shielding it from the blows of 'reality' so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding 'me' from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don't they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom? — Nanamoli Thera

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, "the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly." Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another. — Phil Klay

Has given it life? Why do you allow some of the earliest images to which your child is exposed to be images of violence? Who told you this was good for your children? And why do you hide images of love? Why do you teach your children to be ashamed and embarrassed of their own bodies and their functions by shielding your own body from them, and telling them not to ever touch themselves in ways which pleasure them? What message do you send them about pleasure? And what lessons about the body? Why do you place your children in schools where competition is allowed and encouraged, where being the "best" and learning the "most" is rewarded, where "performance" is graded, and moving at one's own pace is barely tolerated? What does your child understand from this? — Neale Donald Walsch

The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears - though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence - still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military "aid" helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly. — Edwidge Danticat

Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man's work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes. — Neal Stephenson

I was banished from that world forever, I knew. I couldn't go back now. One day soon I would go away from here entirely; I would leave this house, perhaps never to return.
I hugged myself, comforting my fear. Very well then, I thought, I will be my own house. I will build myself a house out of my own flesh and bones where my frightened child-self can find shelter. After all, isn't that one of the things that women do? We are houses for our children, shielding them from harm within the stronghold of our bodies, until they are strong enough to breathe and walk alone. So surely I must be able to give myself shelter now. — Patrice Kindl

Hanna Krall's book Shielding the Flame drew on the experience of Dr. Marek Edelman, who before he died in 2009 was the sole survivor of the five-person command that led the April 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. — Chris Hedges

Loss of cell phone reception inside of a building generally indicates that the following two issues may be present: 1. High electromagnetic interference (EMI) environment from dirty electricity that is being generated by electronic products. 2. Shielding and Faraday cage effects from metalwork in the building. — Steven Magee

Look," Six snaps, "we can't just stand around gabbing. They could be co - "
Six is cut off by the sudden roar of a noise overhead. It's a sound made by no earthly machinery. We all look up just as the silver Mogadorian ship throws on its floodlights, momentarily blinding us. Five, shielding his eyes, turns to look at me.
"Is that your ship?" he asks.
"Mogadorians!" I shout at him. Already, dark shapes are descending from the ship, the first wave of Mogadorian warriors on their way to attack.
"Oh," says Five, blinking confusedly at the ship. "So that's what they look like. — Pittacus Lore

Laser cooling opened a new route to ultralow temperature physics. Laser cooling experiments, with room temperature vacuum chambers and easy optical access, look very different from cryogenic cells with multi-layer thermal shielding around them. — Wolfgang Ketterle

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. — Herbert Spencer

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all? — Werner Herzog

I realized at that moment - observing his form move further away without once turning back - that I'd already begun to rebuild the imaginary wall between us. I was shielding my heart with stone cold feelings again, the only way I knew to protect it. I still planned to try my hand at prayer. If God would grant me this one request, if I could keep my only friend, I would give anything in return, even the treasured books trapped beneath my arm. I'd tasted enough of a dismal life to know that a real, true friend was of greater worth than the collection of every imagined fairytale in the world. — Richelle E. Goodrich

What sort of exploring?" Shielding his eyes, Adam lifted his eyes to the sky. He thought he could hear Gansey coming. "Mountains. How do you feel about helicopters?" There was a long pause. "How do you mean? Ethically? — Maggie Stiefvater

IN THE LIGHT OF eternity, time casts no shadow. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. But what is it that the old women see? We see necessity, and we do the things that must be done. Young women don't see - they are, and the spring of life runs through them. Ours is the guarding of the spring, ours the shielding of the light we have lit, the flame that we are. What have I seen? You are the vision of my youth, the constant dream of all my ages. — Diana Gabaldon

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world. — William H Gass

Cassia had a feeling Kane might not follow her instructions to the letter, but she never expected him to come barreling into the docking lot with Arabelle hoisted over one shoulder, shielding his head with his free arm and yelling like his pants were on fire. Behind him, Doran and Solara ran through the open doorway, each armed with a stolen pulse pistol and firing indiscriminately at someone out of view.
So much for smooth negotiating. — Melissa Landers