Slightly Single Quotes & Sayings

Eden will stay with you." I glanced up at the blue-haired woman who watched us. "She promises to take good care of you. Right, Eden?"
Eden nodded, curt and no-nonsense, a soldier to the bones.
I glanced back at Angelina. "You trust her, don't you?"
Angelina didn't turn her wide eyes away from me. I needed Angelina's answer. But then her eyes sparkled, ever so slightly, as she gave me her response, a barely perceptible nod.
No one else could have possibly known how much meaning that single gesture held.
Eden was honorable. Angelina had told me so. — Kimberly Derting

His father looked up at him, his mind straining to force his disobedient body into activity. Each movement of his mouth took incredible effort. Just breathing in and out enough to generate sound appeared nearly impossible. Still, his fingers gripped Henry's so slightly it was almost imperceptible And a single phrase slipped out. "Saang jan."
It meant "stranger". As in "You are a stranger to me. — Jamie Ford

If the book is finished - published and on the shelf - I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they will recur, either as themselves or as new, slightly altered manifestations, and their same issues will reappear. It's a matter of the subject and emotional investment and my own obsessive thinking about various issues It's an unconscious process. To say that a single story is not done isn't quite true. A story can be finished and judged successful or not by somebody else, but if the issue is not done for me, I can count on its reappearance. — Antonya Nelson

Now I'm searching for a slightly overweight, single, childless woman who doesn't have a date and isn't too depressing to be around. It's getting harder to find a girlfriend than a boyfriend. — Cathy Guisewite

it was always slightly off when everyone was in a couple except for one person. the entire group tended to single that person out, as if to try and make him feel better in his aloneness, as though it were an unnatural state. — Meg Wolitzer

The Silken Tent
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware. — Robert Frost

She was indeed beautiful, as if someone had taken the scientific measurements of perfection and used them to mold a single ideal specimen. Her face was slightly heart-shaped, with high cheekbones barely flushed. Auburn hair fell in silken ringlets to her waist and her unblemished ivory skin shimmered like mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. Her lips were red red red, looking like she'd just drunk a pint of blood. — Marissa Meyer

However, for all his affection and loyalty towards the animal, the dog would soon be leaving him - they would both be present at a celebratory dinner when they reached the roof, he reflected with a touch of gallows-humour, but the poodle would be in the pot. — J.G. Ballard

The media - and I'm not blaming them - obviously like to seize on the differences between people and, sure, there are some senior members of the government who are in a slightly different philosophical space to mine. But do not underestimate the substantial single-mindedness of this government. — Tony Abbott

His gaze locked with mine and a slow grin appeared on his face. He didn't look like he had last night. More like he did every day at school. Worn jeans. A black henley instead of a T-shirt and beat-up sneakers, but goodness, I couldn't think.
Okay. Not true. I could think, but I was thinking things I really had no concept of. I was thinking about those full, slightly curved lips and how they must feel in places...other than my forehead or cheek. I was thinking about his hands and how strong they were and the oddly pleasant calluses on his palms. I was thinking about...about a lot of things - things that now didn't feel so wrong since he was actually single.
Noticing my near-prone position, Ainsley looked over her shoulder. "Oh, my good God almighty," she murmured. "That's him?"
"Yes," I whispered. That was so him. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Five

The air across the valley is slightly hazy though thinning though patches
remain between the groves of trees that edge a clearing in which stands a
single house. A child in a white t-shirt has just walked out of the house and
is turning to walk down to the lake. — Cole Swensen

I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there. — J.D. Salinger

As the year goes on, certain deputies - and others, high in public life - will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours' manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke
to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.
While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just's cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker. — Hilary Mantel

Keep buggering on.... — Winston Churchill

It's hard to get recognition when your team is losing. — Gilbert Arenas

I can't look at a stranger's face and think, She's smiling just like Amy. When Amy smiles like that she's happy, so this person is probably happy, too. Instead, I watch and evaluate, with a slightly anxious feeling. It's as if I have to build a behavior database for every single person I meet in life. When I encounter someone for the first time, the slate is blank and I don't know what to expect. — John Elder Robison

Trevor cupped his hands around it, felt Zach's heartbeat throbbing between his palms. The skin of the shaft was textured, slightly rippled beneath the surface. The head was as smooth as satin, as rose petals. Trevor rubbed his thumb across it, squeezed gently, heard Zack suck air in through his teeth and moan as he let it out. He could see blood suffusing the tissue just beneath the translucent skin, a deep dusky rose delicately purpled at the edges, crowned with a single dewy pearl of come. It was as intimate, as raw as holding someone's heart in his hands. — Poppy Z. Brite

What is the weight of a tear? The single tear falls when the buckets have stopped, when dry eyes and a slightly raised chin sometimes let it slip, like a prayer. It carries the weight of a lifetime. — Wendy Murray

If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings
excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men. — J.D. Salinger

I am not sure how a novel changes the world. I think it alters a reader's perspective by asking him or her to see the world through another consciousness. That can perhaps cause people to see their own lives differently. Or just give a single day, a single moment, a slightly different sheen. — Edan Lepucki

Plateau experiencing can be achieved, learned, earned by long hard work ... A transient glimpse is certainly possible in the peak experiences which may, after all, come sometimes to anyone. But, so to speak, to take up residence on the high plateau ... that is another matter altogether. That tends to be a lifelong effort. — Abraham Maslow

Win walked over to me. He held out his palm. In the middle of it was a single black sequin from the dress Scarlet had lent me. "You lost this," he said. I giggled, slightly embarrassed to be leaving bits of myself behind. "I'm shedding. — Gabrielle Zevin

Later Michel went up to the priest as he was packing away the tools of the trade. "I was very interested in what you were saying earlier ... " The man of God smiled urbanely, then Michel began to talk about the Aspect experiments and the EPR paradox: how two particle, once united, are forever and inseparable whole, "which seems pretty much in keeping with what you were saying about one flesh." The priest's smile froze slightly. "What I'm trying to say, "Michel went on enthusiastically, "is that from an ontological point of view, the pair can be assigned a single vector in Hilbert space. Do you see what I mean? — Michel Houellebecq

A school of porpoises broke the surface of the water twenty feet from where we had sat down[...]Each individual porpoise made a sound slightly different from that of any other, so that the school, all twelve of them, flaring and sliding and dancing so near us, formed a kind of woodwind section on the sea's surface or even a single instrument, something unknown and astonishing to man, a celebration of breath itself, of oxygen and sea water and sunlight. They had the eyes of large dogs and their skin was the loveliest, silkiest green imaginable. — Pat Conroy

The sense that just about anything goes with the collection of public revenues and the making of public expenditure has contributed mightily to the current malaise. — Richard A. Epstein

How am I supposed to live the single life vicariously if I don't get any details?
I shook my head and shrugged mournfully.
"I'm doing my part. I tell you everything."
"And don't think I don't appreciate it," she said, tearing up slightly. We gave each other a drunken hug. — Joanna Wylde

Taken slightly historically, the turning point in the E.U. was actually the Single European Act, the Thatcher/Maastricht-era stuff, which was turning the E.U. into very much a market system. — Jeremy Corbyn

And so our goal on health care is, if we can get, instead of health care costs going up 6 percent a year, it's going up at the level of inflation, maybe just slightly above inflation, we've made huge progress. And by the way, that is the single most important thing we could do in terms of reducing our deficit. That's why we did it. — Barack Obama

The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach? [...] Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn't all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn't accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it's time to consider whether there's something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away. — Thomas Frank

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of thing that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be ... — Wallace Stevens

I poisoned my skin," Genya said harshly, "my lips. So that every time he touched me-" She shuddered slightly and glanced at David. "Every time he kissed me, he took sickness into his body." She clenched her fists. "He brought this on himself."
"But the poison would have affected you too," Nikolai said.
"I had to purge it from my skin, then heal the burns the lye would leave. Every single time." Her fists clenched. "It was well worth it."
Nikolai rubbed a hand over his mouth. "Did he force you?"
Genya nodded once. A muscle in Nikolai's jaw ticked. — Leigh Bardugo

I'm no expert, no natural-born talent, definitely no guru. As you'll soon learn, only through a colossal experiment in trial and error did I reach the sexual summit. Although I own up to having worn a cape in a few intimate scenarios, I don't possess supernatural powers of any kind. Perhaps my IQ is slightly above average, but Mensa isn't busting down my door. If pressed to define myself, I'd say I'm Horatio Alger between the sheets: a self-made swinging single male. . . with a hefty dose of Buster Keaton mixed in. — Daniel Stern

The true magic of novels dwells within us individually. Each reader will interpret every single character, scene, and metaphor in a slightly different way — Carl Henegan