Quotes & Sayings About Spirals

Even if, at the moment, you can't sit down and do the gruntwork of stringing verbs and nouns together, you are writing. It is a way of seeing, a way of being. The world is not only the world, but your personal filing cabinet. You lodge details of the world in your sparkling nerve-library that spirals through your brain and coils down your arms and legs, collects in your belly and your sex. You write, even if you can't always "write."
However, writers write. Active, not passive. — Luis Alberto Urrea

Another person, more or less, thinking I'm crazy wasn't going to make me lose sleep. But the look I got from Mr. Shaw wasn't "she's a whack-job," it was more like "hmmm."
"What else can you do?"
Now it was my turn to stare. "Uh, well, I have a freakshow ability to fall through spirals into other times. Is that what you mean?"
"Must be a little disconcerting, that."
"A little. The puking's fun though." Mr. Shaw laughed. I'd made the man laugh. Score one for the Clocker. — April White

I can feel her hunger, can see the want in her eyes. Her teeth grow sharp - sharp enough to eat me. And she wants to. She lets me see it, lets me feel the churning hunger that is so like rage. It gasps and begs in her stomach, the way my frenzy cuts and spirals in my chest. — Tessa Gratton

And when you look along the way we've come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling. — Bruce Chatwin

The children watch
a distant point.
Lamps go out.
Some blind girls
question the moon
and spirals of grief
rise in the air.
The mountains survey
a distant point.

- After Passing By — Federico Garcia Lorca

Things don't spiral out of control when we surrender them; they spiral out of control when we try to control them! — Marianne Williamson

No, my favorite scene was Brienne finding Arya and The Hound. I thought that the writing and the dialogue and the confusion that spirals into the fight was such a cool scene. I knew I was gonna film it in Iceland and I did a lot of - I really scouted and climbed around Iceland to find those locations and I just couldn't wait to do that. — Alex Graves

And I think of Emily Dickinson, and my favorite poem about death, and the line that reads "I could not see to see." This is the line Ms. Sylvia copied onto the board in her beautiful cursive, which spirals away like blindweed tendrils, and then she asked the class what it might mean. I didn't even have to think about it. I just knew. To see to see, which is not exactly what Dickinson wrote, means knowing how to look. How to look to understand. How to look without your eyes. And to die, is not to see at all. Of course, I didn't actually say this out loud. — Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

Behind my eyelids, I saw him dancing in spirals of coloured light, emerald, blue, and brilliant purple, enfolding him like the wings of an electric angel. — Alexis Hall

lazy spirals overhead, — C.J. Redwine

Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it. — Rex Stout

The streets of Aqaba are shell spirals and, on summer nights, crowded and complicated as a woman's heart. — Diana Abu-Jaber

It's funny to think that the wind has a shape but it does. It becomes visible every once in a while - in rain being driven to the ground in sheets, or in the snow on the fields behind our house. I remember looking out the window of my room in the winter, watching the wind blow on the surface of the white fields, lifting and whipping the snow into spirals, and in a flash you could see the force that was always there come to life and reveal itself. I think it is this way with children and parents. They are always there and then suddenly through some shock or disappointment or great gesture or obscene the child sees this person who was there all the while - invisible to them beyond their function to provide. — Bill Clegg

The hoop dancer dances within what encircles him, demonstrating how the people live in motion within the circling spirals of time and space. They are no more limited than water and sky. At green corn dance time, water and sky come together, in Indian time, to make rain. — Paula Gunn Allen

Mixed with the resinous scent of the firs there came another smell, strong and fragrant, yet sharp - the perfume of flowers, but of some kind unknown to Hazel. He followed it to its source at the edge of the wood. It came from several thick patches of soapwort growing along the edge of the pasture. Some of the plants were not yet in bloom, their buds curled in pink, pointed spirals held in the pale green calices, but most were already star-flowering and giving off their strong scent. The bats were hunting among the flies and moths attracted to the soapwort. — Richard Adams

Being bold and adventurous and being sad and cautious seem like opposite personality types. However, these two paths to addiction are actually not mutually exclusive. The third way involves having both kinds of traits, where people alternatively fear and desire novelty and behavior swings from being impulsive and rash to being compulsive, fear driven, and stuck in rigid patterns. This is where some of the contradictions that have long confounded the study of addiction come into play - namely, some aspects seem precisely planned out, while others are obviously related to lack of restraint. My own story spirals around this paradoxical situation: I was driven enough to excel academically and fundamentally scared of change and of other people - yet I was also reckless enough to sell cocaine and shoot heroin. — Maia Szalavitz

Neuroscientists have a biological explanation for why those downward negative-thought spirals happen in the first place. MRIs have shown that every time people think angry thoughts or imagine worst-case scenarios, they send a surge of blood flowing into the brain regions associated with depression and anger - which refuels their depression and anger in a destructive feedback loop. — Karen Salmansohn

The greatest gift of all time is that you can make creation infectious because people spend less time being negative ... If you log all the time with negativity in the while world, I wonder how much better the world would be if people sat down and did something positive. It spirals. — Skrillex

How can the heart and mind work together? The mind wants logic and to travel in straight lines, while the heart wants to be free and travel upward in spirals to dizzying heights. — Gillian Duce

The fact of the matter is that when I drink, I am 100 percent certifiably insane. Hopelessly, utterly, undeniably bat shit crazy. I do things that are abhorrent to me; anathema to my nature, my morals, and my upbringing. And once I start, I cannot stop the craziness. It just spirals on and on, ever downward, until I die or hit rock bottom. And even at rock bottom, despite all evidence that I should stop, I will grab a cold beer and a pick ax and keep digging deeper. It's insane. The only way I know to not be crazy is just not to drink. — D. Randall Blythe

Time, as we see it framing biblical narrative, is neither linear nor cyclical but perhaps more like a helix, and what it spirals around is the risen Christ. — Ellen F. Davis

At Girl Scouts, we are committed to raising awareness about the terrible effects of cyber bullying, and to teaching girls how to recognize the signs of bullying of any sort and extricate themselves or another from a bad situation before it spirals out of control and ends in tragedy. — Anna Maria Chavez

The great spirals ... apparently lie outside our stellar system. — Edwin Powell Hubble

Annabel," I whispered in her ear, making sure not to touch her. Her heartbeat accelerated, her skin got the chills, and her pupils dilated, not to mention how delicious she smelled and how the excitement only increased the scent. My own body got tense and aroused. "Let your guard down and trust me. Nothing will happen that you don't want to happen. I'm not trying to get you drunk or trick you. I just want to get to know you better."
"Shane," she replied with her sexy, hot, and alluring voice that sent spirals of lust down my spine. "I have nothing against sleeping with you. I'm fully dressed for that. — Anna Santos

The farther we get from God, the more the world spirals out of control. — Billy Graham

When the peace in not inside, we seek it outside. When the peace is not outside, we turn inside. Whether there is internal peace or an internal storm, it spirals outward to everyone you see and everything you touch. — Franklin Gillette

And we must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc. — Giacomo Balla

Thus nature provides a system for proportioning the growth of plants that satisfies the three canons of architecture. All modules are isotropic and they are related to the whole structure of the plant through self-similar spirals proportioned by the golden mean. — Jay Kappraff

This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see. — Diana Wynne Jones

I know you know, and you know that I know that you know. It spirals on from there, so let's just assume the dot dot dot. — Orson Scott Card

I closed my eyes , trying to pretend I lived in a universe that contained only my cock and his hand. And lazy pleasure that spilled eternally in silver spirals. — Alexis Hall

Do spirals end? Or just get so tiny your eyes can't follow any more? — David Mitchell

Look. Aren't they romantic?" Simon said, pointing out two "re!ies
dancing together, their glowing lights making spirals in the dark.
"Not necessarily," I replied. "there are "re!y species where the
females trick the males into thinking they want to mate, but they
eat them instead."
"Oh, yeah, I think I know a few of them." Simon laughed — Amanda Howells

Perhaps there will be a slight streak of green, a patch that will deepen and then grow. Then another patch on the horizon, like a green searchlight. And then shivering curtains of light can fill the sky, or looping spirals, or flickering flames of green and purple, and candy-apple red. It feels as if they should be accompanied by dramatic sounds, the bangs of fireworks or the roars of rockets. But these are utterly silent, almost solemn in their dancing. And yet they can be comforting in their own way; as if in this remote and frozen wilderness there's something else out there that is alive. — Gabrielle Walker

When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately 60 percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher. — Robert Scheer

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time. — Ezra Pound

They spent the next hour nibbling their way through the food stalls, sharing spiral-cut potatoes, pork sandwiches, and cream puffs. They found a table in one of the many shaded beer gardens, and Lou retrieved some ice-cold Summer Shandys to go with their food. The beer had a light lemon edge that offset the malt, making it an ideal hot-summer-day drink. The potato spirals, long twirls coated in bright orange cheese, combined the thin crispiness of a potato chip with a French fry. And the cream puffs... The size of a hamburger on steroids, the two pate a choux ends showcased almost two cups of whipped cream- light, fluffy, and fresh. — Amy E. Reichert

We want murderous throats
affairs that resemble bright birds
in death spirals. — Krysten Hill

The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness. — Elif Shafak

I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again, to sleep deeply again and to awaken refreshed again. I had to become a fool again in order to find Atman in myself. I had to sin in order to live again. Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it. He was aware of a great happiness mounting within him. — Hermann Hesse

On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh. — Aldo Leopold

The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out.

The drought had persisted for over a month. — S. Rajaratnam

Energy moves in cycles, circles, spirals, vortexes, whirls, pulsations, waves, and rhythms - rarely if ever in simple straight lines. — Starhawk

The landscape here was strange. It was some type of forest, with giant vines that grew into spirals, round and round, growing up fifty metres toward the sky. They were massive. Some were fifteen metres across, narrowing as they rose. — Stephan Von Clinkerhoffen

Execution halts your breath, helter skelter spiral death. — Ozzy Osbourne

The moon waxes and wanes. The tides ebb and flow. The seasons turn, each in their own time. Ever changing, never changing. Of course you'll change. The dance of life spirals, remember? Even when you return to a point, you're not in the same place. The dance would have changed you, whether you'd come here or stayed home. — Anne Bishop

Strong winds buffet the sea oats and tall dune grasses, tossing sand and seabirds where it will, winding my sister's golden hair into sunlit spirals of silk until it becomes the only good memory I have of her
the only memory I allowed myself to keep. — Karen White

The Night Dances A smile fell in the grass. Irretrievable! And how will your night dances Lose themselves. In mathematics? Such pure leaps and spirals - - Surely they travel The world forever, I shall not entirely Sit emptied of beauties, the gift Of your small breath, the drenched grass Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies. Their flesh bears no relation. Cold folds of ego, the calla, And the tiger, embellishing itself - - — Sylvia Plath

Why is networking not working? My answer is simple. Many business owners don't have a system in place to leverage their networking. Their time, effort and money spirals down the drain because they lack follow up. Instead of returning to your office, checking the email, and losing that business card in a graveyard box of business cards, continue connecting with your new acquaintance. One basic tip: Connect on social media within two days of meeting them. Personalize your message to them reminding them where you met. When you add this step, watch as your network expands exponentially. — Lisa A. Mininni

And he believed it too, believed, in that moment, that the arrow he had made for himself would continue its long upward motion. As if there was no possibility of return, no aphelion or perihelion to chart the long spiral of his orbit around whatever false burning center he had made.
Know this. That the things that go into the fire are forever changed. That all you have ever done can be measured not by distance but by circumference. That these twin spirals of smoke: they are your life, rising in curls. — Christian Kiefer

Music spirals out of the radios, and it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else. — Anthony Doerr

I let my eyes drift into the maze of leaves that only trees understand. Hatred has its gravitational web, locking stray specks of confusion into spirals of violence. — Gregory David Roberts

I think great artists have no time to waste with having disproportionate egos and irrational requests. They're too focused on their work to actually lose themselves in hysterical spirals where they become monsters or tyrants. — Xavier Dolan

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch. — Ken Follett

Until that hungry black god eats me up. Now I spend the centuries circling into it like a penny in one of those coin spirals at an arcade; — Exurb1a

Their conversation is like a gently wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires. Another sound enters but is upstaged by still another: the two circle each other and stop. Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other times they take strident leaps, and all of it is punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter - like the throb of a heart made of jelly. The edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre. — Toni Morrison

When you're stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing. — Christina Baldwin

The leader sets the tone for his followers. If something goes wrong and the leader acts worried or angry, then everyone picks up on that attitude and it spirals larger and larger. — Jim Korkis

Matter would have the universe a uniform dispersion, motionless, complete. Spirit would have an earth, a heaven and a hell, whirl and conflict, an incandescent sun to drive away the dark, to illuminate good and evil, would have thought, memory, desire, would build a stairway of forms increasing in complexity, inclusiveness, to a heaven ever receding above, changing always in configuration, becoming when reached but the way to more distant heavens, the last ... but there is no last, for spirit tends upward without end, wanders, spirals, dips, but tends ever upward, ruthlessly using lower forms to create higher forms, moving toward ever greater inwardness, consciousness, spontaneity, to an ever greater freedom. — Allen Wheelis

It started when we were little kids.
Free spirits, but already
tormented by our own hands
given to us by our parents.
We got together and wrote on desks
and slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountains
and slipped through whatever
cracks we could find,
minds altered, we didn't falter
in portraving hysterical and
tragic characters in a smog
filled universe.
we loved the dirty city
and the journeys away from it.
We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves,
chase tails round and round in downward spirals,
leaving trail of irretrievable,
vital life juice behind.
Still, the
brothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzz
was impenetrable
and we lived inside it
laughing with no clothes, and
everything experimental 'till
death was upon us.
In our face, mortality. — Anthony Kiedis

I understood that ideal conversations move in widening spirals, starting with the minute then building toward statements of greater importance. The problem, however, is that conversations too often stay flat. It is distressing how often we repeat ourselves. When we ask questions, we know the answers already. We've grown accustomed to horizontal communication, flatlining banalities and droning insignificance. — Louisa Hall

If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards. — Sam Altman

For Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that "night of the soul" the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace. — Roberto Bolano

Douady and Hubbard used a brilliant chain of new mathematics to prove that every floating molecule does indeed hang on a filigree that binds it to all the rest, a delicate web springing from tiny outcroppings on the main set, a "devil's polymer," in Mandelbrot's phrase. The mathematicians proved that any segment-no matter where, and no matter how small-would, when blown up by the computer microscope, reveal new molecules, each resembling the main set and yet not quite the same. Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame-like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturization in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire. — James Gleick

You're supposed to put your coin in the slot and let it go. It spins round and round the big yellow funnel for like a minute, making a rhythmic whirring sound that gets tighter and tighter, more intense, more desperate as it spirals closer to the hole. It keeps spinning faster - all that kinetic energy forced down the neck of the funnel until it's blaring like an alarm - then it falls silent as it drops into the black abyss of the funnel. I'm that coin on its way down, screaming in the neck of the funnel, with nothing but my own kinetic energy and centrifugal force keeping me from dropping into darkness. — Neal Shusterman

The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world. — Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Spirals.... this town is contaminated with spirals. — Junji Ito

Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time. — Constant Lambert

The stream of civilisation flows on like a river: it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals. — Sabine Baring-Gould

Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational. — James Gleick

A Book of Glass
On the table, a book of glass. In the book only a few pages with no words But scratched in a diamond-point pencil to pieces in diagonal Spirals, light triangles; and a French curve fractures lines to
elisions.

The last pages are simplest. They can be read backwards and
thoroughly. Each page bends a bit like ludicrous plastic. He who wrote it was very ambitious, fed up, and finished. He had been teaching the insides and outsides of things

To children, teaching the art of Rembrandt to them. His two wives were beautiful and Death begins As a beggar beside them. What is an abstract persona? A painter visits but he prefers to look at perfume in vials.

And I see a book in glass - the words go off In wild loops without words. I should Wake and render them! In bed, Mother says each child Will receive the book of etchings, but the book will be
incomplete, after all.
But I will make the book of glass. — David Shapiro

The columns of the Cathedral porch were still supported on featureless porphyry lions worn smooth by generations of loungers; and above the octagonal baptistery ran a fantastic basrelief wherein the spirals of the vine framed an allegory of men and monsters symbolising, in their mysterious conflicts, the ever-recurring Manicheism of the middle ages. Fresh from his talk with Crescenti, Odo lingered curiously — Edith Wharton

My sweet lemming," he murmured, nuzzling her neck and sending glorious spirals of pleasure ping-ponging throughout her body. "You've been quiet and that worries me."
"Why?" she asked, trailing her hand down his banded forearm to entwine her fingers within his.
"Because that means you're thinking, and a thinking woman is usually something to fear. — T.J. Shaw

Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe. — Daniel Pinchbeck

After Passing By
The children watch
a distant point.
Lamps go out.
Some blind girls
question the moon
and spirals of grief
rise in the air.
The mountains survey
a distant point. — Federico Garcia Lorca

If you bend a branch until it's horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot. — Alice Oswald

You will never find it," his ghost says. "What?" "What you are looking for. You want to go back to the start. You want to go back to where you began. You want to find the happiness you once had. But you can never get there, because even if you somehow found it, you yourself would be different. You would have changed, from your journey alone, from the passing of time, if nothing else. You can never make it back to where you began, you can only ever climb another turn of the spiral stair. Forever. — Marcus Sedgwick

She had golden blazing sun kissed hair, which hung down in loose, lazy spirals, a heart shaped pouted mouth, which was pink tinged with violet blushing, wide, spangled blue eyes that glimmered sparks to flicker and ember in the vivid intelligence of the moon's love, and a yielding body, that seem to tangle in loose rhythm as I walked near to her. — Keira D. Skye

For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable "memory fragment" - often called a "trace" or an "engram" - or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new "trace" to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be "scribbles," "holograms," or "imprints"; they could live in "spirals," "rooms," or "storage units." Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars. — Maggie Nelson

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole — Jane Jacobs

According to Thoth, because of the placement of the Great Pyramid on the Earth connecting into the Earth's huge geometrical field - specifically the octahedral field of the Earth, which is equivalent to our own fields - and because of the pyramid's mass and the geometries used in it, the white-light energy field spirals upward and becomes extremely strong, stretching all the way out to the center of the galaxy. The dark-light energy comes in from above, spirals through zero point and connects with the center of the Earth. In this way the Great Pyramid connects the center of the Earth to the center of our galaxy. — Drunvalo Melchizedek

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world. — Cesar Aira

I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral. — Jerry Stahl

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words. — Tom Waits

When it happens it happens instantly. It's like diving into a pool of warm silky water, like flying through the air on invisible wings, like shedding an old skin and growing a new one. When you fall in love the spirals of your DNA unwind and rewind in the opposite direction. What was black becomes white. — Chloe Thurlow

The theory arrived neither full-blown, like an orphan on the doorstep, nor sharply defined, like a spike through a shoe; nor did it develop as would a photographic print, crisp images gradually emerging from a shadowy soup. Rather, it unwound like a turban, like a mummy bandage; started with the sudden loosening of a clasp, a scarab fastener, and then unraveled in awkward spirals from end to frazzled end. — Tom Robbins

You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing. — Ben Fountain

The holocaust rises in spirals

("Silver Clasp") — Paul Dermee

The most mortifying fact of my life is something that happened when I was fourteen and I have never admitted to anyone: not to friends nor therapists; not even in rehab when we were detailing our own personal spirals of shame did I confess. It is this: I am a graduate of the Barbizon School of Modeling. — Augusten Burroughs

The great spirals, with their enormous radial velocities and insensible proper motions, apparently lie outside our Solar system. — Edwin Powell Hubble

Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. — Donna J. Haraway

With these words of prayer he threw the barley-grains. The two heroes responsible for the oxen, might Ankaios and Herakles, girded themselves in preparation. The latter crashed his club down on the middle of the forehead of one ox; in one movement its heavy body fell to the ground. Ankaios cut the other's broad neck with his bronze axe, slicing through the tough tendons; it fell sprawling over its two horns. Their comrades quickly slaughtered and flayed the oxen, chopping and cutting them up and removing the thigh pieces for sacrifice These they covered all over with a thick layer of fat and burnt them on spits, while the son of Aison poured libations of unmixed wine. Idmon rejoiced as he gazed at the flame, which burnt brightly all around the sacrifices, and the favourable omen of the murky smoke, darting up in dark spirals. — Apollonius Of Rhodes

The evidence at present available points strongly to the conclusion that the spirals are individual galaxies, or island universes, comparable with our own galaxy in dimension and in number of component units. [Stating his conviction on the nature of nebulae during the Shapley-Curtis debate on 26 Apr 1920 to the National Academy of Sciences.] — Heber Doust Curtis

On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections which, like quasi-anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale-green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams. — Bruno Schulz

In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire; the flames twine about each other in fear and delight. The same sort of coiling, at a cooler, slower pace, is what the life of this planet looks like. The enormous spirals of typhoons, the twists and turns of mountain ranges and gorges, the waves and the deep ocean currents - a dragonlike writhing. — Gary Snyder

It seems to me that the evidence ... is opposed to the view that the spirals are individual galaxies comparable with our own. In fact, there appears as yet no reason for modifying the tentative hypothesis that the spirals are not composed of typical stars at all, but are truly nebulous objects. — Harlow Shapley

Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no color in anything except the posters that were plastered everywhere. — George Orwell

Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it. — Hermann Hesse

Sunflowers and seashells and logarithmic spirals (said Kerewin); sweep of galaxies and the singing curve of the universe (said Kerewin); the oscilating wave thrumming in the nothingness of every atom's heart (said Kerewin); did you think I could build a square house? So the round shell house holds them all in its spiralling embrace. Noise and riot, peace and quiet, all is music in this sphere. — Keri Hulme