Shriveled Up Quotes & Sayings

Then she was there in the doorway of the ambulance at his feet. She jumped up like a lion, then stood up on two feet like a human. Her hair was thick and full. She had a mouthful of giant teeth. He could see four pronounced canines in the front and strong claws where her fingernails had been. Her strong body was shriveled and emaciated with her ribs and hip bones sticking out prominently like a concentration camp victim. Her stench was overpowering, like a deer carcass left to rot on the side of the road. — Joseph M. Chiron

You realize the only way he'll stop trying to keep you alive is if you make him hate you, right?" Her heart shriveled in her chest. "I don't want him to hate me. — Annette Marie

Listen," she said in a fierce voice, barely controlled below a shout, "you sanctimonious, know-nothing, backward, shriveled son-of-a-bitch. It's attitudes like yours that screw up the world! You talk about your religion and culture, but you're just a self-serving, patriarchal, fanatic. You wouldn't know Satan if she bit you on the ass! — J. Craig Wheeler

He couldn't understand at all why he had let himself risk his skin for a dead shriveled-up part-nigger dwarf that had never done anything but get himself embalmed and then lain stinking in a museum the rest of his life. — Flannery O'Connor

Old age is the most precious time of life, the one nearest eternity. There are two ways of growing old. There are old people who are anxious and bitter, living in the past and illusion, who criticize everything that goes on around them. Young people are repulsed by them; they are shut away in their sadness and loneliness, shriveled up in themselves. But there are also old people with a child's heart, who have used their freedom from function and responsibility to find a new youth. They have the wonder of a child, but the wisdom of maturity as well. They have integrated their years of activity and so can live without being attached to power. Their freedom of heart and their acceptance of their limitations and weakness makes them people whose radiance illuminates the whole community. They are gentle and merciful, symbols of compassion and forgiveness. They become a community's hidden treasures, sources of unity and life. They are true contemplatives at the heart of community. — Jean Vanier

The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark. Then it fell out of the sky. They climbed into it, left land behind, and floated out to sea. — Patricia A. McKillip

The old men from the charity hospital next door would come jerking past our rooms, making useless, disjointed leaps. They'd go from room to room, spitting out gossip between their decayed teeth, purveying scraps of malignant worn-out slander. Cloistered in their official misery as in an oozing dungeon, those aged workers ruminated the layer of shit that long years of servitude deposit on men's souls. Impotent hatreds grown rancid in the pissy idleness of dormitories. They employed their last quavering energies in hurting each other a little more. In destroying what little pleasure they had left.
Their last remaining pleasure! Their shriveled carcasses contained not one solitary atom that was not absolutely vicious! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

When you've tired of me," she said softly, precisely, "Apollo will still be my brother. Will still be there for me."
"I'll never tire of you," he said, knowing with every thread of his soul that he spoke the absolute truth.
"Then prove it."
He knew what she asked with such an open and vulnerable face. Something within him shriveled and died ... he'd been on the rack too long for a penance he wasn't sure he could ever entirely pay.
"You know ... " His voice was hoarse, the croaking of a dying man. He licked his lips. "You know why I cannot. — Elizabeth Hoyt

I see no advantages in aging whatsoever. You become shriveled. You become decrepit. You lose your faculties. Your peer group passes away. You sit in a room gumming your porridge. I don't see any advantage in this whatsoever. — Woody Allen

The Crone tires quickly and reaches out for the velvet draperies, sits on the divan, breathing heavily. She's too ancient to have a name any longer. When she coughs you can hear the ages rattling inside her shrunken frame. No human names can cling to her any more- they slip from her dusty shriveled flesh like a young girl's whimsies. — Tom Piccirilli

Dr. Edward Clarke, a Harvard professor, said it was possible for a girl to study hard and do well in everything, but it would damage her health for the rest of her life, and her children would be shriveled. — Jacky Fleming

Many authors, as Hanck in particular had noted, were basically little people, spiritually shriveled, atrophied and care-worn personalities. Petty. Vulnerable and frightened. They needed help in their daily lives in order to seem bigger, or at least like everyone else. They sought compensation in poetry, resorted to words because words seemed harmless and free of prejudice; they didn't bite, they didn't provoke, they didn't infect. And besides, they didn't cost a thing. They were a suitable material for revenge-seeking cretins. — Klas Ostergren

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in "It's a nice day," or "You're very tall," or "So this is it, we're going to die."
His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably shriveled up.
After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this
"If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working. — Douglas Adams

As Roran watched, the man's arms, neck, and chest shriveled, and his bones appeared in sharp relief-from the bowlike curve of his collarbones to the hollow saddle of his hips, where his stomach hung like an empty waterskin. His lips puckered and drew back farther than they were intended to over his yellow teeth, baring them in a grisly snarl, while his eyeballs deflated as if they were engorged ticks being squished empty of blood, and the surrounding flesh sank inward. — Christopher Paolini

Hopes were high. But just like a balloon pushed past its breaking point, hope is fragile. One lungful of air too many and the balloon bursts leaving ugly, shriveled fragments behind, impossible to piece back together. — Adriane Leigh

This shriveled conception of democracy has solid roots. The founding fathers were much concerned about the hazards of democracy. In the debates of the Constitutional Convention, the main framer, James Madison, warned of these hazards. Naturally taking England as his model, he observed that "in England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place," undermining the right to property. To ward off such injustice, "our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation," arranging voting patterns and checks and balances so as "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," a prime task of decent government.19 — Noam Chomsky

Oh, fuck. He loved Mischa? Since fucking when did he fall in love on twenty-four hour's notice? His heart shrugged, his dick applauded and his brain shriveled up and ran for a darker corner. That made his choice all the clearer, didn't it — Lee Brazil

Bloated!" he cried. The corresponding hieroglyph flew through the air, bursting against a demon's chest in a spray of light. Instantly, the demon swelled like a water balloon and rolled screaming down the pyramid.
"Flat!" Thoth blasted another demon, who collapsed and shriveled into a monster-shaped doormat.
"Intestinal problems!" Thoth yelled. The poor demon who got zapped with that one turned green and doubled over. — Rick Riordan

He'd stepped on something. He took a step back and knelt and parted the grass with his hands. It was an apple. He picked it up and held it to the light. Hard and brown and shriveled. He wiped it with the cloth and bit into it. Dry and almost tasteless. But an apple. He ate it entire, seeds and all. He held the stem between his thumb and forefinger and let it drop. Then he went treading softly through the grass. His feet still wrapped in the remnants of the coat and the shreds of tarp and he sat and untied them and stuffed the wrappings in his pocket and went down the rows barefoot. By the time he got to the bottom of the orchard he had four more apples and he put them in his pocket and came back. — Cormac McCarthy

He tolerated his fellow Englishmen, but the Welsh were cabbage-farting dwarves, the Scots were scabby arse-suckers, and the French were shriveled turds. — Bernard Cornwell

Ancient and shriveled, many people said he hadn't noticed he was dead. He had simply got up to teach one day and left his body behind him in an armchair in front of the staffroom fire; his routine had not varied in the slightest since. Today — J.K. Rowling

Souls shriveled by public sins, each holding office like a bird in its cage — Giorgos Seferis

The Soul is shriveled up and buried in a grave that does not love. — Thomas Traherne

In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London's mall for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on earth. Seventy years later ... Let's not go there. — Mark Steyn

Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries - "without counting India"? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale. — Christopher Hitchens

I am shrunken and shriveled inside, a rotten chestnut hidden beneath a deceptively smooth shell — Laura Wiess

The bloom shriveled. No matter. Pride was dangerous, — Max Gladstone

You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts. — Hilary Mantel

Can you sacrifice a few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top
and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shriveled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe [Andrei] your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can't trust them as if they were. — Ayn Rand

I come in here and you gotta be here; I'm thinkin' about football, and you gotta be here with your tits and your ass and this tight shrunken clothes and these shriveled jeans, so that's all I'm thinking about from the minute I see you is tits and ass. Football doesn't have a chance against it. It's like this invasion of tits and ass overwhelming my own measly individuality so I don't have a prayer to have my own thoughts about my own things except you and tits and ass and sucking and fucking and that's all I can think about. My privacy has been demolished. You think a person wants that kind of a thing to happen their heads - they are trying to give their problems some serious thought, the next thing they know there's nothing in their brains as far as they can see but your tits and ass? You think a person likes that? — David Rabe

IMAGINE YOU ARE Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. — Peter Watts

With two leftover husbands to account for, my wicked soul has just about shriveled and died. — Mercedes McCambridge

I don't want that love that is sparingly given
for it makes me to feel like a rose already shriveled. — Igwe Ginikachi Judith

A weathered cork sat inside the box lined with green velvet. It had turned a darker brown and was a little shriveled, but the name Moet & Chandon was still clearly visible.
Vivien reached inside and pulled out her mother's cork. The one she'd searched for in the bed of red impatiens. To anyone else, it was nothing. Just a weathered piece of nothing. To Vivien, it was everything. — Rachel Gibson

I wake up in the morning and I see that flower, with the dew on its petals, and at the way it's folding out, and it makes me happy, she said. It's important to focus on the things in the here and now, I think. In a month, the flower will be shriveled and you will miss its beauty if you don't make the effort to do it now. Your life, eventually, is the same way. — Dan Buettner

Judging from the spiderwebs clinging to it, the emergency stairway was hardly ever used. To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along. Not that the spiders had any awareness of being "patient". A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died. This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably. Unlike me.
I move,therefore I am. — Haruki Murakami

Paper Matches
My aunts washed dishes while the uncles
squirted each other on the lawn with
garden hoses. Why are we in here,
I said, and they are out there?
That's the way it is,
said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one.
I have the rages that small animals have,
being small, being animal.
Written on me was a message,
"At Your Service,"
like a book of paper matches.
One by one we were taken out
and struck.
We come bearing supper,
our heads on fire. — Paulette Jiles

I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thoughts. By the time I was five, the migraines began. I was so sensitive about myself and the world that I cried or shriveled up at the slightest hurt. People always told me, "You've got to get a thicker skin," like now they might say, jovially, "Let go and let God." Believe me, if I could, I would, and in the meantime I feel like stabbing you in the forehead. Teachers wrote on my report cards that I was too sensitive, excessively worried, as if this were an easily correctable condition, as if I were wearing too much of the violet toilet water little girls wore then. — Anne Lamott

Another piece of Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 ended up landing in a grape vineyard on planet Pinot. The Zygo-Gogozizzle 24 was quickly absorbed into the soil and was subsequently soaked up into the grapes. These grapes, which had until recently been harvested almost to extinction, suddenly became self-aware and super intelligent. They banded together in bunches and rose up to defeat their oppressors. The battle lasted one whole night, but sadly, it ended the next morning when the sun came up. The rebellion shriveled when the poor grapes ran out of juice. Apparently there's a raisin for everything. — Dav Pilkey

I glanced up at the trees too.
Dead. Every one of them gray and white, needles rusted, leaves shriveled at the tips of branches. All the life sucked out of them. Not just the trees. All the plants, ferns, grasses and brush were shriveled, brown, barren.
As if a month of winter had set down right here in my driveway and gone on a killing spree.
...
"Love what you've done with the landscape," Cody said. "You could open your own business, you know."
...
"The hell you talking about, Miller?" I asked Cody.
"Yard care. You're poison and weed whacker all in one. You can call it Death to All Shrubbery. — Devon Monk

Most of the matchbooks and little boxes were made of paper, and even if the matches dried out, the containers were split, torn, and shriveled. The damp cardboard dripped with water, discolored and broken. — Penelope Douglas

And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe. — Alan Lightman

Walter loves the sea, and I need it in some elemental way that I cannot even come close to verbalizing. I become dim and shriveled somehow at my very core if I am away from the sea too long. When I return to it I seem to fill up and overflow with it, soaking in the vast, sighing wetness of it like a parched vine in a long, soft spring rain. — Anne Rivers Siddons

When we are out of alignment with Christ we forget that we are children of God with divine destinies. We think with shriveled minds and operate with shriveled spirits. We settle for less than God wants to give us. We take a job that feels wrong. We enter a relationship that doesn't' feel right. We get stressed and anxious when reality doesn't match the images we have of the way things are supposed to be. We see failure as dead-ends instead of turn-around roads. There is no ease, no anointing as we move from one uneasy choice to another. That's when it's time to stop, breathe, and trust that our Highest Power is willing and able to set us right again. No matter what that voice inside your head says, you can always, always start again. — Toni Sorenson

Words drop from my lips spiraling downward; they land scattered on your ears. I spoke them green and golden, but you turned them shriveled brown. — Patricia Robin Woodruff

It is precisely women's experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart. — Joan D. Chittister

It is much more exquisite to be blown from the tree as a flower than to be shaken down as a shriveled and bitter fruit. — Zoe Akins

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly. — Virginia Woolf

So, he's okay."
"He's doing everything else on his own but ... "
"What?"
"Part of him is still missing." The hope growing inside me shriveled. "Personally, I think its because he's been waiting for that part to come home. — Adrienne Wilder

Leaves that rustled, twigs that scraped and rattled. But the thin shapes weren't falling, they were scurrying head first down the tree-trunks at a speed that seemed to leave time behind. Some of them had no shape they could have lived with, and some might never have had any skin. She saw their shriveled eyes glimmer eagerly and their toothless mouths gape with an identical infantile hunger. Their combined weight bowed the lowest branches while they extended arms like withered sticks to snatch the child. ("With The Angels") — Ramsey Campbell

Then your heart is a black, shriveled thing, because you absolutely betray me. — P.C. Cast

What did they do to you, to make you withdraw so far into yourself? (Sin doesn't answer.) You've left me again, haven't you? I can always tell. Your eyes turn dull, cold. Very well, I shall leave you in peace. But know this: One day I am going to find the heart you have buried away from the world. (Callie)
And what would you do with it if you found it? (Sin)
I would hold it safe and keep it from the hurt that has shriveled it. (Callie) — Kinley MacGregor

So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I have a hat for it, actually." Elliott made a vague gesture with one hand. "Well, it's more of a full-body suit, really."
"Is that a euphemism for a condom?"
"No." He marched past me and lay down on the bed. "My mother knitted me a willy-warmer a few years back when we were having a cold stretch. She felt I wasn't like to produce the grandchildren she desires if I had as she put it, frost-shriveled parts. — Katie MacAlister

His [(Rumpelstiltskin)] feeling that his name, which is his identity, must be kept secret, or else he'll be revealed to the world as the hunchbacked, shriveled, ridiculous creature he knows himself to be. And if that happens, he'll disappear. — Joan Gould

I get worried for young girls sometimes; I want them to feel that they can be sassy and full and weird and geeky and smart and independent, and not so withered and shriveled. — Amy Poehler

But the strangest of all sensations is the moment after you have been freed of the baby
and the baby of you
and you are handed this tiny shriveled creature to hold for the first time ... and you feel a mixture of unbelievable instant love and desperate fear. — Douglas Kennedy

Most people in the midst of disaster have yet one hope that lingers on some misty horizon - the possibility of love, money coming, the assurance that time cures all hurts, no matter how painful. But Loftis, gazing out at the meadow, had no such assurance; his deposit, it seemed, on all of life's happiness had been withdrawn in full and his heart had shriveled within him like a collapsed balloon. — William Styron

The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government's assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors' needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior. — Doug Bandow

It is a terrible and exquisitely human irony that children inadequately nurtured almost never give up on the breast. The thirst for love from a mother or father who cannot provide it is seemingly unquenchable. I have treated sixty- and seventy-year-old business executives, politicians, and physicians still desperate for approval from shriveled, emotionally barren men and women in their eighties and nineties. (257) — Keith Ablow

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes a burlesque. No — Neil Postman

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men. — H.G.Wells

The question for us, as we learn again and again the lessons of hope for ourselves, is how we can be for the world what Jesus was for Thomas: how we can show to the world the signs of love, how we can reach out our hands in love, wounded though they will be if the love has been true, how we can invite those whose hearts have grown shrunken and shriveled with sorrow and disbelief to come and see what love has done, what love is doing, in our communities, our neighborhoods: — N. T. Wright

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil. — Anne Lamott

She had not understood what it had been like for him to live his entire life underground, chained and beaten and crippled - until then. Until she heard that noise of undiluted, unyielding joy.
Until she echoed it, tipping her head back to the clouds around them.
They sailed over a sea of clouds, and Abraxos dipped his claws in them before tilting to race up a wind-carved column of cloud. Higher and higher, until they reached its peak and he flung out his wings in the freezing, thin sky, stopping the world entirely for a heartbeat.
And Manon, because no one was watching, because she did not care, flung out her arms as well and savored the freefall, the wind now a song in her ears, in her shriveled heart. — Sarah J. Maas

This explains so much," she said, clucking her tongue in mother-hen fashion. "You're compensating for this withered appendage."
Withered appendage? What the devil was she talking about? He shook his head, trying to clear it. Colin's dire predictions of shriveled twigs and dried currants rattled in his skull. Wide awake now, he fought to sit up, wrestling the sheets.
"Listen, you. I don't know what sort of liberties you've taken while I was insensible, or just what your spinster imagination prepared you to see. But I'll have you know, that water was damned cold."
She blinked at him. "I'm referring to your leg."
"Oh." His leg. That withered appendage — Tessa Dare

The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen. — Cormac McCarthy

No, it didn't hurt. He didn't want to lose any black hair, and he was careful to pull out the white hairs one by one. But when he had finished, the skin was drawn and shriveled. It hurt when you ran your hand over it, the doctor said. It didn't bleed, but it was raw and red. Finally he was put in a mental hospital ... He didn't want to be old, he wanted to be young again. No one seems to know whether he started pulling it out because he had lost his mind, or he lost his mind because he pulled out too much. — Yasunari Kawabata

Unless the soul is fed and exercised daily, it becomes weak and shriveled. It remains discontented, confused, restless. — Billy Graham

Each time a man leaves a woman, he takes a piece of her heart with him when he goes. The next man comes along, and takes another piece, this time a big one. And then, she meets another. And he takes a piece. One day we look up and we've got this shriveled little sliver of a heart left, and that's all we've got to offer. After that, the men we meet call us bitches and cunts, and man haters. They think we're hardened, but we're not. It's just that we're heartless. And we're heartless because of you. — Scott Hildreth

It's there. The white rose among the dried flowers in the vase. Shriveled and fragile, but holding on to that unnatural perfection cultivated in Snows greenhouse. I grab the vase, stumble down to the kitchen, and throw its contents into the embers. As the flowers flare up, a burst of blue flame envelops the rose and devours it. Fire beats roses again. — Suzanne Collins

I had dreams. And I had to pursue them; otherwise my soul would have shriveled. The hardest part was allowing myself to want something other than what was socially acceptable, telling myself to go after it, then actually doing it. — Connor Franta

All I have is me. Over-worked, under-appreciated, middle-aged, and shriveled up. — Henry Rollins

Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts. — Edwin Percy Whipple

Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless - a perfect part of a perfect tapestry. — Irvin S. Cobb

And then I see them. In the glow of the flashlight, I see the corses. Stacks of them. Some are shriveled. Some are putrid. Most still have their clothes on. Not one has its head on. No. No way. No way! This can't be. Fresh dead people? They said the bodies were two hundred years old. This is bad. Really bad. We've got to call someone. Frontline. Nightline. Anderson Cooper. — Jennifer Donnelly

I want a cigarette. I want a cigarette. I want to kill the woman my husband loves. This is all her fault. I got pregnant to secure the man that I had already married. A woman shouldn't have to do that. She should feel safe in her marriage. That's why you got married - to feel safe from all the men who were trying to siphon your soul. I'd yielded my soul to Caleb willingly. Offered it up like a sacrificial lamb. Now, I was not only going to have to compete with the memory of another woman, but a shriveled up baby. He was already staring into her eyes like he could see the Grand Canyon tucked away in her irises. I — Tarryn Fisher

Lloyd cut his eyes at Dior's dad and made a mental note to kill him good and slow, like maybe beat his ass with a hammer, cut his shriveled up balls off. Both — Leo Sullivan

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Morgan said that his mother said that Miss Kildaire is sitting on a shelf."
Zach had to think about that one for a few seconds. "He said she's on the shelf?"
"Uh-huh." An emphatic nod. "I don't know why Miss Kildaire would sit on a shelf, but that's what Morgan said."
"I'm guessing there's more."
"And then Morgan said that his mother said that Miss Kildaire was too fat to get a man."
What a load of horseshit, Zach thought. Morgan's mother was probably some shriveled-up jealous twit. "I see."
"And then Morgan said she was a cripple."
Zach had a sudden urge to punch out the little rat himself. — Nalini Singh

All of them were shriveled, desiccated, bone-thin and skeletal, every jaw cruelly broken, opening and closing in mute entreaty, the teeth clacking together like macabre wind chimes as they pendulated in the lurching trees. — Edward M. Erdelac

Darkness crept through. Shadows pried at doors, teased dull edges of recollections that never quite took hold. Memories that would have shriveled under the blinding sun of daylight. And reason. — Edward Fahey

A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died. — Haruki Murakami

The Lion King? It's just a kid's film.

Just a kid's film?!? Yeah, just a kid's film with an IMDB rating of 8.5, 2 Academy Awards and 2 Golden Globes, that's been adapted into THE most successful West-end musical of all time, generating a gross profit of 8 million pounds and counting. "But maybe it's just a kid's film because it doesn't deal with any mature films" said fucking nobody ever. The Lion King is the greatest anthropomorphic assault upon the theme of mortality that Western culture has ever produced. It is so complex that your tiny, shriveled, and scrotum of a brain wouldn't dare to fathom it. So no, it is not just a kid's film, it is Shakespear with fur! — Jack Whitehall

The metaphor of transformation deepens as we consider how a butterfly needs to struggle for its ability to fly. If the chrysalis is broken by someone in an attempt to help free the butterfly, its wings will be shriveled and immobile. — Gabriel Cousens M.D.

I want to know if you've touched the center of your own sorrow, if you've been opened by life's betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. — Oriah Mountain Dreamer

But is life really worth so much? Let us examine this; it's a different inquiry. We will offer no solace for so desolate a prison house; we will encourage no one to endure the overlordship of butchers. We shall rather show that in every kind of slavery, the road of freedom lies open. I will say to the man to whom it befell to have a king shoot arrows at his dear ones [Prexaspes], and to him whose master makes fathers banquet on their sons' guts [Harpagus]: 'What are you groaning for, fool?... Everywhere you look you find an end to your sufferings. You see that steep drop-off? It leads down to freedom. You see that ocean, that river, that well? Freedom lies at its bottom. You see that short, shriveled, bare tree? Freedom hangs from it.... You ask, what is the path to freedom? Any vein in your body. — Seneca.

He rolled her over, rising above her, cupping her cheek. "I wasn't lying, Loree. I've always heard the music in my heart ... but I lost the ability to do that when I went to prison. It was like the music just shriveled up and died. I thought I'd never hear it again. How could I play the violin if I couldn't hear the music? Then lately, I started going crazy because I'd hear snatches of music - when you'd look at me or smile at me. But I couldn't grab onto it, I couldn't hold it. Then last night, you told me that you loved me and I heard the music, so sweet, so soft. It scared me to hear it so clearly after I hadn't for so long.
"Tonight, I hurt you - again. I was going to let you go, Loree. I was gonna take you back to Austin. But I heard my heart break ... and I knew that's all I'd hear for the rest of my life. Don't leave me, Sugar."
Joy filled her and she brushed the locks of hair back off his brow. "I won't."
-Austin and Loree — Lorraine Heath