Starkly Quotes & Sayings

The crucial task of old age is balance: keeping just well enough, just brave enough, just gay and interested and starkly honest enough to remain a sentient human being. — Florida Scott-Maxwell

He grabbed something off the floor and held it in front of his hips as he stood up. She drank in the sight of him: The tattooed slave bands around his wrists and neck, the plug in his left earlobe, his black eyes, his skull-trimmed hair. His body was as starkly lean as she remembered, all striated muscles and hard cut veins. And he threw off raw power like a scent. — J.R. Ward

, It'd taken her several seconds to react to the sight of them together. She'd been almost hypnotized by the scene as Lothaire drank. Chase's masculine face had been tense, his gray eyes focused on the ground. Lothaire's face had been starkly beautiful, his pale blond hair brushing Chase's shoulder.
Light and dark. One terrible, one tragic.
And Lothaire had been ... hard. "Oh, gods!" She cried as she ran back along the trail. Hot poker for my eyes! Hot poker! — Kresley Cole

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury. — Alain De Botton

It is always a starkly private moment when a governor first apprehends his subject as a man - perhaps not as an equal, but at least as a being, irreducible, possessed of frailties, enthusiasms, a real past, and an uncertain future. — Eleanor Catton

Whereas the structural trend toward increased inequality was gradual and went for a long time unobserved, the crises in the lives of the urban poor were public and dramatic. The new armies of the homeless that seemed suddenly to materialize in every major city in the early 1980s, sleeping in doorways, camped under elevated highways, spreading their temporary cardboard shelters over office tower heating grates, were a startling and disturbing sight. Not since the Depression had the least-advantaged Americans been so starkly visible to the rest. — Daniel T. Rodgers

Aberjhani's writing blows the mind and frees the psyche of any rigid assumptions about ancestral heritage. Here, our collective experience is starkly rendered. The transparency of one culture overlays another, and another, to form the daguerreotype of possibilities that is homo sapiens, interacting, almost like the elements themselves, with the created world and modified only by context and its imperatives. — Rosy Cole

When the tribal groups of december trade
Seated in the figure of crocodile
And songs are sung and deals discussed, are made
Real. All ... For more than one reason they smile.
These codes are writ in secret, feeling fine
To keep what's private to my self since we
All must face our maker in our own ryhme
And reasons for being ( from regrets) free
So let the memory of your glory
Be the tenderness heartfelt love starkly
In the sky of my mind vast and pretty
Evermore glittering simplicity
Where in the truth of country grows sober
And sunshines through fog to radiate wonder — John Armstrong

I'm sorry about the trouble, Karen," he said, loud and clear, so everyone could hear how reasonable he was being.
She scowled up at him, eyes narrowed. Her arm flew almost faster than I could see. The smack of flesh against flesh was loud in the silence, and a small red handprint stood out starkly on his left cheek. "You have no idea how sorry you're going to be. — Rachel Vincent

In perhaps the strangest statement published on the issue of arming slaves, the Mercury charged Robert E. Lee (who had not yet made his views public but was privately known to be a supporter) with being a Federalist-like Alexander Hamilton-someone who had always evidenced a "profound
disbelief in the institution of slavery." This comparison was drawn in contrast to South Carolina's great Democratic/states' rights standard-bearer John C. Calhoun, and the paper put the question starkly as "JOHN C. CALHOUN VS. DANIEL WEBSTER and ROBERT E. LEE. — Anne Sarah Rubin

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know
without ever having constructed one ourselves
that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209) — Alain De Botton

I perhaps could have been somewhat better. One of the interesting things about playing competitive sports as a child is that you confront your own limitations rather starkly at a certain point. — David Foster Wallace

She walked to work every day feeling starkly, conspicuously alone. It seemed that everyone else on the street had someone to keep them company, someone to laugh with and confide in and nudge in the ribs. All those packs of young girls who'd already figured everything out. — Anne Tyler

U.S. society, after all, continues to be starkly segregated along class and race lines, never allowing people to have the sort of interactions necessary to undo prejudices, stereotypes, and oppressions. — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising from the winter cold. The rock walls that protect it meet in points around it, one giving way to another, for days on end. But the dungeons into which you'll fall as you work through the pathways to its gates number in the low hundreds, and if you actually get into the entry hall, there are a few hundred more sub-dungeons before you'll actually reach somewhere that's truly safe. Technically, it's possible to get to the last room in the final chamber of the Trace Italian, but no one will ever do it. No one will ever live that long. — John Darnielle

I like writing fiction better than anything, because just being a writer of fiction gives you an absolutely unassailable protection against reality; nothing is ever seen clearly or starkly, but always through a thin veil of words. — Shirley Jackson

I am all for titillating trivialities. I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in Time, should be either titillating or epic or starkly, supercurtly factual. — Henry R. Luce

Imposition stands starkly at odds with the basic character of the Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving - God's self-giving and human self-giving - and not about self-imposing. — Philip Yancey

There aren't many sources of money in San Diego, apart from local partnerships and local investors. It's pretty starkly polarized to Silicon Valley. — Steve Jurvetson

She fails to see who I am, even, for her eyes do not, will not, take me in. Instead they transmit a powerful message. She is like a billboard flashing, starkly: 'Keep Out'. — Carol Lee

It's easy to be with someone who is completely different from you, but difficult when that person holds starkly different opinions from you. — Tarang Sinha

When she first saw him, she took him for a ghost. His jet-black hair fluttered in the breeze as he walked, letting her see his eyes. They seemed haunted, lost in some way. He was tall and gaunt, starkly pale in his black clothes. He was the very picture of Anton, even sharing his world-weary eyes of deepest blue. She could hardly look away from this apparition, an echo of all the memories and dreams that had haunted her these many years. — Amanda M. Lyons

Why was she always so craven, so apologetic? He had always seen Ruth as separate, good and untainted. As a child, his parents had appeared to him as starkly black and white, the one bad and frightening, the other good and kind. Yet as he had grown older, he kept coming up hard in his mind against Ruth's willing blindness, to her constant apologia for his father, to the unshakeable allegiance to her false idol. — J.K. Rowling

In what may as well be starkly labelled smug satisfaction, an amazing 94% [of college instructors] rate themselves as above average teachers, and 68% rank themselves in the top quarter of teaching performances. — K. Patricia Cross

I took a deep breath, 'I took the nahlrout because I didn't want to faint. I needed to let them know they couldn't hurt me. I've learned that the best way to stay safe is to make your enemies think you can't be hurt.' It sounded ugly to say it so starkly, but it was the truth. I looked at him defiantly. — Patrick Rothfuss

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion. — Paul Russell

Will Christians turn once again toward an approach that imposes its will on the rest of society? By doing so we would betray our founder, who resisted a temptation to authority over "all the kingdoms of the world," and who died a martyr at the hands of a powerful state. In the words of Miroslav Volf, "Imposition stands starkly at odds with the basic character of the Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving - God's self-giving and human self-giving - and not about self-imposing." Even — Philip Yancey

It has become starkly apparent to me that we lack any sort of strategic foreign policy view, and when I say 'we,' I mean the country in general, but in particular, the Republican Party. — Marco Rubio

So much of the theatrical can leave you with a yearning for the real. The real is suddenly and starkly there right at the city's edge and extends for thousands of square miles of desert and mountain and canyon with which human beings can do almost nothing profitable other than to leave it be and just look at it. — Timothy O'Grady

Lifting her head, she joined in as the others in the group began to howl in response to Brace's triumph. The sound was ... It touched the soul, the music haunting, starkly pure and yet so very earthy. — Nalini Singh

Rising up starkly over the snowy plain, and that the plebs were flocking out — Robert Harris

This is why the Christian life is about Christ. Or to say it more starkly, "to live is Christ" (Phil. 1:21). — Tony Reinke

She starkly sees her inanimate future blocked out before her right through to her own end - without him ...
... and worst of all, she knows she will be asked about him and be called upon to talk about him and tell the story again and again ... her jaws will work without end with all that talking her jaws will chew up the ravel of all her remaining life, telling the same story until it becomes bare and alien and something blunt to her; more the belonging of other people, and no longer hers.
Now she has to live ordinarily ... she's going to have to numb herself if she's going to go on - no going on from this point without getting numb. — Michael Cisco

Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents
these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures
are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals. — Louise J. Kaplan

He looked, well, sturdier than he used to. His shoulders were square and, naturally, broader than before. His neck, a bit thicker. He probably had an Adam's apple now too, like any man did. If he turned, would she see it starkly in profile, protruding awkwardly? And, then, he did turn, just a smidge, as he stifled a yawn, and there was nothing awkward about him. — Victoria Kahler

The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind. — H.L. Mencken

I am sorry," I whispered to Reyes.
He wrapped his long fingers around my neck and buried his face in my hair. He smelled like a lightening storm. His emotions electricity. His body the desert after a rain. Fresh. Starkly beautiful. Dangerous.
"Are you okay?" he asked, his breath on my neck.
"I am now. — Darynda Jones

The crags of the mountain were ruthless in the moon; cold, deadly and shining. Distance had no meaning. The tangled glittering of the forest roof rolled away, but its furthermost reaches were brought suddenly nearer in a bound by the terrifying effect of proximity in the mountain that they swarmed. The mountain was neither far away nor was it close at hand. It arose starkly, enormously, across the lens of the eye. The hollow itself was a cup of light. Every blade of the grass was of consequence, and the few scattered stones held an authority that made their solid, separate marks upon the brain - each one with its own unduplicated shape: each rising brightly from the ink of its own spilling. — Mervyn Peake

No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe. — Paul Davies

Then the night lessened, the clouds ashened slightly, and the men became starkly black and brown against the gray of the snow. — Ron Hansen

There are so many works of the mind, so much humanity, that to disburden ourselves of ourselves is an understandable temptation. Open a book and a voice speaks. A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader's store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood. As with scientific hypotheses, even failure is meaningful, a test of the boundaries of credibility. So many voices, so many worlds, we can weary of them. If there were only one human query to be heard in the universe, and it was only the sort of thing we were always inclined to wonder about
Where did all this come from? or, Why could we never refrain from war?
we would hear in it a beauty that would overwhelm us. So frail a sound, so brave, so deeply inflected by the burden of thought, that we would ask, Whose voice is this? We would feel a barely tolerable loneliness, hers and ours. And if there were another hearer, not one of us, how starkly that hearer would apprehend what we are and were. — Marilynne Robinson

I want you," he said starkly, the barest quiver in his hoarse voice. "Me and you. Together." He drew in a deep breath, his broad chest lifting. "But I can't chase you forever. — Sophie Jordan

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy
even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery. — Jean Rhys

My center does not come from my mind - it feels in me like a plot of warm moist well tilled earth with the sun shining hot on it ... It seems I would rather feel starkly empty than let any thing be planted that cannot be tended to the fullest possibility of its growth ... — Georgia O'Keeffe

Don't stay away from me anymore."
I stop myself, just barely, from telling him I won't. I can't promise that. Can't lie.
He opens his eyes. Stares starkly, bleakly. "I need you. — Sophie Jordan