Quotes & Sayings About Stains

If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. — Bill Bryson

Once, my writing-avoidance behavior involved me mixing up a cleaning concoction and getting some ancient stains out of the carpet. My wife liked that one. — Tim Pratt

Squinting in the darkness Anya could just make out a strange curving symbol scratched into the bark. Baba Zosia scored a line through it, disfiguring the symbol. Anya felt something in the air change and give, like the forest had let out a breath it had been holding around them. Something like static pricked the back of her neck as Baba Zosia cut her finger and smeared blood on the tree. The strange symbol melted into the bark, healing the tree to appear like nothing had been carved on it to begin with. Lifting her hands towards the campsite Baba Zosia started to chant softly in the complicated language of the tribe. Magic thrummed through the air, making Anya's own flare and itch under her skin. She rubbed her arms to stop it. Around her a breeze picked up and the campground, with its tracks in the mud and stains from the fires all melted away until there was nothing but autumn leaf litter and debris in its place. It looked like it hadn't been disturbed for years. — Amy Kuivalainen

The simple child again, free from all stains. — Lao-Tzu

I'm innocent still -inside me are stained glass windows that have never been broken- and when I see your light it stains my soul with color ... — John Geddes

Stick to the script like paper clips and coffee stains
Never let a seed of doubt deter you from your lofty aims
The will is much stronger than the flesh
And it only gets stronger when you going through duress
Imagination is the factory that makes legends
Close your eyes and dream B.I.G. like Faith Evans — Jay Electronica

We're not out of the woods yet, people," I said, and grimaced, my eyes cheating toward the trees growing on all sides. "No pun intended. Sloane, were you being serious when you said that most of that was Demi's blood? Because I'm not quite ready to condone beating her to death." "She got a nosebleed," said Sloane, reaching forward and taking my hand in hers. Her fingers left red stains on my skin. "Sure, I had to punch her four or five times to make that happen, but nosebleeds are a normal part of being a traitorous bitch who goes over to the dark side at the first sign of trouble. — Seanan McGuire

People want it to be red, like blood. It's kind of funny. When I used to throw meat into the audience, I'd get letters from kids' mothers saying, "What's the best way to get blood stains out of my son's shirt?" — Ozzy Osbourne

Allegorical stories of saints battling with giants, monsters and demons may be interpreted as symbolizing the Christian's fight against paganism. At Bwlch Rhiwfelen (Denbigh) St Collen fought and killed a cannibal giantess, afterwards washing away the blood-stains in a well later known as Ffynnon Gollen. In Ireland, the tales of saints slaying giant serpents may have the same meaning; alternatively they (or some of them) may refer to early sightings of genuine water monsters. St Barry banished a serpent from a mountain into Lough Lagan (Roscommon), and a holy well sprang up where the saint's knee touched the ground. — Colin Bord

Varnish and gilding hide many stains. — Jane Austen

The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night is thinking. it's thinking of love.
it's thinking of stabbing us to death and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.
that's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey and kisses for everyone. — Richard Siken

The real dirt is not outside, but inside, in our hearts.
We can wash all stains with water. The only one we can't remove is the grudge and the bad intentions sticking to our hearts. — Shams-i Tabrizi

And when you meet someone and fall in love, and they fall in love with you, you ask them "Will you take my heart
stains and all?" and they say "I will," and they ask you the same question and you say, "I will," too. — Douglas Coupland

Stains tell a story," Zac said, waving his arms as he spoke. "My car is full of random stains. — Shana Norris

I adore Smashbox lip stains. I carry a natural color for daytime and a berry shade for going out at night. — Jennifer Morrison

Such is my relationship with God: on my gigantic canvass of life, I am the one throwing all of the brightly-colored paints, creating genuine splatters, authentic whirlpools of color, beautiful patterns, wonderful streaks and stains and wild accents; God is the one with the paintbrush who stands beside my canvass filling all the intricate and amazing details in between the whirlpools and the streaks! We're happy together! — C. JoyBell C.

She quickly realized she had an affinity for the older books and their muted scents of past dinners and foreign countries, the tea and chocolate stains coloring the phrases. You could never be certain what you would find in a book that has spent time with someone else. As she has rifled through the pages looking for defects, she had discovered an entrance ticket to Giverny, a receipt for thirteen bottles of champagne, a to-do list that included, along with groceries and dry cleaning, the simple reminder, 'buy a gun.' Bits of life tucked like stowaways in between the chapters. Sometimes she couldn't decide which story she was most drawn to. — Erica Bauermeister

It isn't the smallness of this place that bothers me. It's the grey that's worked its way into the walls. It's the stains on the carpet from some other life that came and left before ours. Bert always said he'd give me a good deal on paint but some places take burning down and rebuilding to make them shiny."
-Ed, page 10 — Cath Crowley

He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn't want to sound too French about it. — Kevin Barry

Clearing his throat, Kai murmured, "You have no idea how to dance, do you?"
Cinder fixed her gaze on him, mind still reeling. "I'm a mechanic."
His eyebrows raised mockingly. "Believe me, I noticed. Are those grease stains on the gloves I gave you? — Marissa Meyer

Nothing takes the romance and grandeur out of life than scrubbing stains out of sheets. — Susan Ee

Give me wine to wash me clean of the weather-stains of cares — Ralph Waldo Emerson

He who kills from afar knows nothing at all about act of killing. He who kills from afar derives no lesson from life or from death; he neither risks nor stains his hands with blood, nor hears the breathing of his adversary, nor reads the fear, courage, or indifference in his eyes. He who kills from afar tests neither his arm, his heart, nor his conscience, nor does he create ghosts that will later haunt him every single night for the rest of his life. He who kills from afar is a knave who commends to others the dirty and terrible task that is his own. — Arturo Perez-Reverte

What is your name?' she asked.

The youth ignored her, lowering his eyelids against the sun. She repeated her question. Again he ignored her, so she touched his arm, and he turned his head and looked at her, suddenly back from his own world, his eyes wary, half afraid. But he saw no anger in her; only the stains of tears, and an awful despair. His face changed, and a look of profound sorrow and compassion came over him. Very slowly he lifted his hand and wiped the tears from her cheeks. No other man could have touched her that morning; but the mad youth, with his extraordinary tenderness, gave such a depth of consolation that she found herself leaning her cheek against his hand, and sobbing. He wept with her, and there wove between them an understanding, a unity deep and poignant and powerful. — Sherryl Jordan

A question repeated in the back of Theresa's mind as she washed the purple stains from her hands. How did they finally break you? — Blake Crouch

That's the worst part about the walking dead ... the stains. — Jim Butcher

Mental stains can not be removed by time, nor washed away by any waters.
[Lat., Animi labes nec diuturnitate vanescere nec omnibus ullis elui potest.] — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Okay, so how, exactly, did I get into this mess - up onstage at a comedy club, baking like a bag of French fries under a hot spotlight that shows off my sweat stains( including one that sort of looks like Jabba the Hutt), with about a thousand beady eyeballs drilling into me? — James Patterson

In the beautiful words of Staton Kirkham Davis, 'You may be keeping accounts, and presently you shall walk out of the door that for so long has seemed to you the barrier of your ideals, and shall find yourself before an audience - the pen still behind your ear, the ink-stains on you fingers - and then and there shall pour out the torrent of your inspiration. You may be driving sheep, and you shall wander to the city - bucolic and open-mouthed; shall wander under the intrepid guidance of a spirit into the studio of the master, and after a time he shall say, 'I have nothing more to teach you.' And now you have become the master, who did so recently dream of great things while driving sheep. You shall lay down the saw and the plane to take upon yourself the regeneration of the world. — James Allen

The wise man carefully, moment by moment, one by one, eliminates the stains of his mind. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: American Tribalism In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds - class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don't merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. Intermarriage is discouraged and on the rare occasion that it happens, is considered remarkable. Third, region. The North and the South. The two sides fought a civil war and tough stains from that war remain. The North looks down on the South while the South resents the North. Finally, race. There's a ladder of racial hierarchy in America. White is always on top, specifically White — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The mountain pine beetle is a tiny creature that chews through a lodgepole's bark, gouges out a hollow in the wood and lays its eggs. The larvae hatch hungry and feed on the cambium layer, a tree's most vital part, the annual layer of cells that makes up a growth ring. To prevent drowning in the tree's sap, the beetle larvae can eject a choking fungus that not only halts the life-giving flow of sap, but stains the wood a grey-blue color. — Annie Proulx

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning ... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on each one. His attention had only to lapse for a moment, between preposition and object, colophon and chapter heading, for dead spots to appear like gangrene that would rot the whole. Silkworms didn't work as finely or as patiently as he must, and yet boldness was all, the large stroke, the end contained in and prophesied by the beginning, the stains of his clouds infinitely various but all signifying sunrise. Unity in diversity, all that guff. An enormous weariness flew over him. The trouble with drink, he had long known, wasn't that it started up these large things but that it belittled the awful difficulties of their execution. ("Novelty") — John Crowley

In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. "I have been half in love with easeful death," said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then. — Rebecca Solnit

Tobacco put food on our tables, steeples on our churches, stains on our fingers, spots on our lungs, and contradictions in our hearts. — Timothy B. Tyson

I'm sorry. Were you just speaking to me? I apologize most profusely. I was distracted by the size of the sweat stains under your arms. Are you overly warm today? It seems unlikely given the cold, dead heart that surely beats in your chest. — T.J. Klune

He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards. — Thomas Hardy

If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance. — R. Scott Bakker

Irony cleans away all those secret stains. Irony is the path that leads safely back to official realities. — Geoffrey Wall

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather. — Carl Sandburg

I wonder what a soul ... a person's soul ... would look like,' said Priscilla dreamily.
'Like that, I should think,' answered Anne, pointing to a radiance of sifted sunlight streaming through a birch tree. 'Only with shape and features of course. I like to fancy souls as being made of light. And some are all shot through with rosy stains and quivers ... and some have a soft glitter like moonlight on the sea ... and some are pale and transparent like mist at dawn. — L.M. Montgomery

God can take the ugly stains in our lives, those scars that run deep, and transform them into masterpieces of His grace and mercy that will bless others. It's time for a makeover. Even now God can turn the ugliness of sin into beauty marks. Just come to Him and ask. Surrender your scars to His gentle touch. — Anne Graham Lotz

How can he be killed most easily? With the fewest stains? — Donald Barthelme

In the streets we occasionally glimpsed familiar T-shirts within our circles of friends, though we had an unspoken agreement not to mention it. On the weekends we spent our mornings scrubbing the stains from our new old clothes, wringing out each other's memories. — Sara Novic

Did you really think I wouldn't recognize my college futon, with its trademark absence of sex stains? — LIZ

No matter the darkness in his eyes. No matter the secret sins in his heart. No matter the stains on his soul. I vowed one day I would save him too. — Juliette Cross

Words have a force far beyond that of ink stains on pages or spoken sounds... Whether written or spoken, language found in forbidden books can warp space-time and tear the fabric of reality. — Daniel Harms

A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. — Anne Carson

It's the stickiness of earth that makes it problematic - the way it stains your straps and ingrains your hands so you can't quite tell where you start and stop. — Alice Oswald

Such is the grace and power of baptism; not an overwhelming of the world as of old, but a purification of the sins of each individual, and a complete cleansing from all the bruises and stains of sin. And since we are double-made, I mean of body and soul, and the one part is visible, the other invisible, so the cleansing also is twofold, by water and the Spirit; the one received visibly in the body, the other concurring with it invisibly and apart from the body; the one typical, the other real and cleansing the depths. — Gregory Of Nazianzus

As an enlisted sailor, I don't feel that the Navy is advancing me in rank fast enough, so I'm going to change my last name to Stains. My guess is they would rather promote me than to have to refer to me as Seaman Stains. — Brad Wilkerson

I think of religion as something that stains the person. It's a mindset you can never get free from, it's always in the back of your head. — Angel Haze

And I will trust that He who heeds
The life that hides in mead and wold,
Who hangs you alder's crimson beads,
And stains these mosses green and gold,
Will still, as He hath done, incline
His gracious care to me and mine. — John Greenleaf Whittier

Man can never be more perfect than the sun. The sun burns us with the same light that warms us. The sun has spots (stains). The ungrateful only talk about the spots (stains). The grateful talk about the light. — Jose Marti

Strange how close the darkness is, even when things seem brightest. Even in the glare of a summer noon, when the sidewalk bakes and iron fences are hot to the touch, the shadows are still with us. They congregate in doorways and porches, and under bridges, and beneath the brims of gentlemen's hats so you cannot see their eyes. There is darkness in our mouths and ears; in our bags and wallets; within the swing of men's jackets and beneath the flare of women's skirts. We carry it around with us, the dark, and its influence stains us deep. — Jonathan Stroud

You may be keeping accounts, and presently you shall walk out of the door that for so long has seemed to you the barrier of your ideals, and shall find yourself before an audience - the pen still behind your ear, the ink stains on your fingers and then and there shall pour out the torrent of your inspiration. — James Allen

She will at least be decently clothed as she waits. Tomorrow I shall find her a brush and powder and whatever else a woman of her dignity requires."

Fin rolled her eyes. "Is 'dignity' what you call it?"

Jeannot offered her his hand. Fin took it and pulled herself up from the deck. She was barefoot and her pants and shirt were stained with everything from blood to oakum to lampblack. She stretched her shirt out between her hands and considered its mottle of stains. "I'm not dignified?" she asked.

When Fin looked up, Jeannot had an eyebrow cocked high and one side of his mouth was curled in amusement. "Where you are concerned, much requires redefinition. — A.S. Peterson

Beneath the stains of time the feeling disappears, you are someone else I am still right here. — Johnny Cash

Personal sympathy has helped me on very much. My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause. This habit of running into the dining-room with my wet pictures has stained such an immense quantity of table linen with nitrate of silver, indelible stains, that I should have been banished from any less indulgent household. — Julia Margaret Cameron

I see TV ads about detergents that can get blood stains out of your cloths. I say if you have blood stains on your cloths you should be thinking about something other than laundry. — Jerry Seinfeld

The reason why women think men should spend a lot of money on an engagement ring is because women are the ones who get to clean up all the poop (stains and toilet bowl swirls included) that is provided by every family member living in the house until they die. — Heather Chapple

Invisibility
there are things we can't see now, that are there, that are embedded, that it really takes time in order to be able to see. There are many ghosts that are lurking around and lingering through us that takes the technology of another generation or so in order to uncover and show what those stains and strains and perceived flaws really we're building towards — Lynn Hershman Leeson

dazed mind. Early morning rays highlighted the water stains shining through the slap-dash — Dale Mayer

When you have discovered a stain in yourself, you eagerly seek for and gladly find stains in others. — Berthold Auerbach

They warned of taints lingering from the Builders' war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the Day of a Thousand Suns. — Mark Lawrence

The pastor should always be pure in thought ... no impurity ought to pollute him who has undertaken the office of wiping away the stains in the hearts of others ... for the hand that would cleanse from dirt must be clean, lest, being itself sordid with clinging mire, it soil whatever it touches all the more. — Pope Gregory I

The scrape of the skates on the ice. The smell of musty old equipment. The black puck stains on the boards. To the uninitiated they're nothing, but to a hockey player they're home. — Jeff Lemire

I sail through life with great trust in my heart. Whoever stains and breaks that trust will be in a cold water best left behind.
I felt the cold breeze of monetary means through the low ethics of money driven minds.
I securely docked in a shore I call home without the cloaks of dead winter I saw on people who have used me. — Angelica Hopes

Now that they were in the light, they were transparent
fully transparent when they stood between me and it, smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of some tree. They were in fact ghosts: man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air. One could attend to them or ignore them at will as you do with the dirt on a window pane. I noticed that the grass did not bend under their feet: even the dew drops were not disturbed.
then some re-adjustment of the mind or some focussing of my eyes took place, and I saw the whole phenomenon the other way round. The men were as they always had been; as all the men I had known had been perhaps. It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men are ghosts by comparison. — C.S. Lewis

The thing I like most in my kitchen is my marble counters. Everybody said not to use marble because it's fragile, it stains, it cracks, and it doesn't remain beautiful. But I love marble. — Ruth Reichl

The minds of stone lovers had colonised stones as lichens clung to them with golden or grey-green florid stains. The human world of stones is caught in organic metaphors like flies in amber. Words came from flesh and hair and plants. Reniform, mammilated, botryoidal, dendrite, haematite. Carnelian is from carnal, from flesh. Serpentine and lizardite are stone reptiles ; phyllite is leafy-green. — A.S. Byatt

How can I wear a leather suit that does not carry the stains of wine and blood?" asks CT, and Gustav does not answer; of course it was rhetorical — Alissa Nutting

And the stains would never wash out. That's what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. — Hugh Howey

Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other. — John D. MacDonald

If you saw a bullet
hit a Bird - and he told you
he wasn't shot - you might weep
at his courtesy, but you would
certainly doubt his word -
One drop more from the gash
that stains your Daisy's
bosom - then would you believe? — Emily Dickinson

Water stains like liver spots dotted the floors, ceiling, and walls while the smell of warm wood rot hung in the air thick like an old whore's perfume. — Matt Abraham

Plate after plate sparkled under Glenda's hands. Nothing cleans stubborn stains like suppressed anger. — Terry Pratchett

Truly, this vice is never to be compared with any other vice because it surpasses the enormity of all vices ... It defiles everything, stains everything, pollutes everything. And as for itself, it permits nothing pure, nothing clean, nothing other than filth ... — Peter Damian

But if there was one thing she knew from years as a mechanic, it was that some stains never came out. — Marissa Meyer

Some stains are left unwashed. — Abdul Manan

She says to me, but were we ever intimate? How intimate were we really? Sure, there were the ordinary familiarity-type things - our bodies, our bodily discharges and stains and seepages, an encyclopedic knowledge of each other's family grudges, knowledge of each other's early school yard slights, our dietary peccadilloes, our tv remote control channel-changing styles. And yet ...
And yet?
And yet in the end did we ever really give each other completely to the other? Do either of us even know how to really share ourselves? Imagine the house is on fire and I reach to save one thing - what is it? Do you know? Imagine that I am drowning and I reach within myself to save that one memory which is me - what is it? Do you know? What things would either of us reach for? Neither of us know. After all these years we just wouldn't know. — Douglas Coupland

I sort through piles of sheets with gloved hands. The dirties are brought down by orderlies, morenas mostly. I never see the sick; they visit me through the stains and marks they leave on the sheets, the alphabet of the sick and dying. A lot of the time the stains are too deep and I have to throw these linens in the special hamper. One of the girls from Baitoa tells me she's heard that everything in the hamper gets incinerated. Because of the sida, she whispers. Sometimes the stains are rusty and old and sometimes the blood smells sharp as rain. You'd think, given the blood we see, that there's a great war going on out in the world. Just — Junot Diaz

Flavius's foot catches on a metal grate over a circular opening in the floor, and my stomach contracts when I think of why a room would need a drain. The stains of human misery that must have been hosed off these white tiles ... — Suzanne Collins

The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigenia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world. — Oscar Wilde

His thumb smoothed over the tiny red marks the pins had made on her palm, and he brought her hand to his face to kiss the little sore spots.
His voice curled hotly inside her palm. "Your hand smells like lemons."
She opened her eyes and stared at him gravely. "I scrub my hands with lemon juice to remove the ink stains."
The information seemed to amuse him, and lights of humor mixed with the heat in his gaze. — Lisa Kleypas

Thrice damned she howls like Cerberus to the night
Guarding virtues that lie like forgotten stains
On oaken floors that pave the willow lined paths of the past
That lead to a meadow filled with the detritus of wasted love
Rotting under a forgotten sun that no longer shines
In a heart gone cold therein lies the haste of anger. — Neil Leckman

How do you know someone is a grandparent? They've got milk stains on every shirt from burping babies. Their pants are worn out at the knees from crawling around giving pony rides. They have 2,842 pictures of the grandkids on their smart phone and not one photo of their spouse. — Regina Brett

When you look at a wall spotted with stains ... you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautiful with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees. Or again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn figures. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I sat down on the sofa, surrounded by years of coffee rings and sandwich stains. If the police ever did a DNA test on this sofa, it would be ninety per cent disappointment. — Danny Wallace

I love working with my hands. My writing is rough, my paper bruised with ink stains. — Bauvard

Yes, some mistakes leave their mark, like the infidelity stains in the backseat. But in time they do fade. — Crystal Woods

I shake my head. I pick up the rake and start making the dead-leaf pile neater. A blister pops and stains the rake handle like a tear. Dad nods and walks to the Jeep, keys jangling in his fingers. A mockingbird lands on a low oak branch and scolds me. I rake the leaves out of my throat.
Me: Can you buy some seeds? Flower seeds? — Laurie Halse Anderson

My whole approach to wardrobe is, throw it in a suitcase and make sure they don't press it, for Pete's sake, so I can try to display some rumpled charm. Actually, I'm just a pig. I've got coffee stains on my pants. I think they're coffee stains, anyway. — Mel Gibson

I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains. — Jack Bowman

Knees and your shirt caught in your zipper." "I don't remember that part," Dickie said. "Did I used to do that?" "Yes." Dickie started laughing. "I wasn't making a lot of money back then. I couldn't afford a hotel room." "It's not funny!" I said. "Sure it is. Grass stains and rug burns are always funny." He looked over at Morelli. "She didn't like to do doggy." Morelli slid a look at me and smiled. There wasn't much I didn't like — Janet Evanovich

I look just like one of Brianna's UGLY finger paintings. Because now I'm completely covered with: 1. brown peanut-butter stains 2. purple jelly stains 3. white soap suds AND 4. bright fluorescent-green hand soap from the girls' bathroom. — Rachel Renee Russell

As we're leaving the King's Arms Hotel after Sunday lunch, I watch a beautiful white dove walking down the wet road. A car approaches and the bird accidentally turns into the wheel rather than away from it. A gentle crunch. The car passes. A shape like a discarded napkin left in the road. Still perfectly white, no red stains, but bearing no relation anymore to the shape of a bird. A trail of white feathers flutter down the road after the car. The suddeness is very upsetting. That gentle crunch. — Antony Sher

Stand by your own honorable convictions before the putrid stench of others permanently stains you. — Hank Bracker

I cannot for the life of me see why the umpires, the only two people on a cricket field who are not going to get grass stains on their knees, are the only two people allowed to wear dark trousers. — Katharine Whitehorn

If this were the fifties, she'd be checking Sam's collars for lipstick stains. (Did people do that anymore? Why did women kiss collars, anyway? Besides, Sam almost always wore T-shirts.) — Charlaine Harris