Stiffening Quotes & Sayings

So what's your name?" the stranger asked.
Tarrah pulled his shirt away from her head and held out her hand. "Tarrah. Tarrah Reid."
He slipped his hand into hers, his cheeks stiffening as he held back a smile.
Tarrah sighed, knowing exactly what he was thinking. She was completely aware of the fact that she held the name of a famous Hollywood actress. The association actually helped with her "Christmas floozy" persona during the holidays, so she'd never really minded. — Victoria H. Smith

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart. — Edward Abbey

A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion. — Victor Hugo

The war does not end when you come home. It lives on in memories of your fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who gave their lives. It endures in the wound that is slow to heal, the disability that isn't going away, the dream that wakes you at night, or the stiffening in your spine when a car backfires down the street. — Barack Obama

Rights are either God-given or evolve out of the democratic process. Most rights are based on the ability of people to agree on a social contract, the ability to make and keep agreements. — Rush Limbaugh

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. — E. M. Forster

My fingers memorized his face, the textures and lines, to the tempo of his rising urgency. I love you I trust you I love you I trust you. Warm pleasure spread over my body like spilled milk, until I was covered in it, toes curling, back arching, legs stiffening,. I held back a cry and came for him, only him. — C.D. Reiss

She then turned to Poseidon & with a large smile, asked him to undress her.Taken aback by such an unusual request, the young man baulked.She then begged him to undress her saying that the customers were now waiting to see her show.[MMT] — Nicholas Chong

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind. — Seamus Heaney

An eye for an eye, I tell myself. A beating for a beating. — Tarryn Fisher

A saint addicted to abnegation is a dangerous neighbor; he is very likely to infect you with an incurable poverty, a stiffening of the articulations necessary to advancement, and, in fact, more renunciation than you would like; and men flee from this contagious virtue. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu. We live in a sad society. Succeed
that is the advice which falls drop by drop from the overhanging corruption. — Victor Hugo

The tiny lines extending from the corners of his eyes were no illusion. He touched his cheek and felt a delicate dryness, a subtle stiffening. Weren't there also circles under his eyes, and even more lines around his mouth? — Whitley Strieber

I love you, Terese. I always will." Something changed. I could see it in her body language. A stiffening of the spine maybe. The best friend was slipping away. An adversary was coming to the surface. — Harlan Coben

When dealing with a depression the problem is not to bring the depressed person back to his/her normality, to reintegrate behavior in the universal standards of normal social language. The goal is to change the focus of his/her depressive attention, to re-focalize, to deterritorialize the mind and the flow of expression. Depression is based on the stiffening of existential refrain, on the obsessive repetition of the stiffened refrain. The depressed person is unable to go out, to leave the repetitive refrain and s/he goes and goes again in the labyrinth. The goal of the schizoanalyst is to give him/her the possibility to see other landscapes, and to change the focus, to open some new ways of imagination. — Franco Bifo Berardi

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered. — Garth Risk Hallberg

The vast interplanetary and vast interstellar regions will no longer be regarded as waste places in the universe. We shall find them to be already full of this wonderful medium; so full that no human power can remove it from the smallest portion of space or produce the slightest flaw in its infinite continuity. — James Clerk Maxwell

Everyone is naked equally when they're born. — Jung Ae-ri

Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargo
Congealed in the dark arteries,
Old veins
That hold Glamorgan's blood.
The midnight miner in the secret seams,
Limb, life, and bread.
- Rhondda Valley — Mervyn Peake

I'll try," he said, stretching his neck. "She's beautiful girl, Ryder. You're a lucky man."
"Don't tell me what I have like I don't know it," Jude said, his arms stiffening. — Nicole Williams

She stood, squared her shoulders. "We'll do it. Together." And then she did something that shocked them both. She rose on her tiptoes and pressed a swift kiss on his lips. "Thank you for returning to help me." When she tried to move away, he latched onto her forearms and held her in place. His eyes were gleaming. "Next time you decide to do that ... " What?" she said, stiffening. "Give you a little warning?" No." He grinned. "Linger. — Gena Showalter

In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone. — Susan Stewart

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. — Martijn Benders

I liked the idea of marking the place where a life ends as opposed to the place a corpse is buried. And also the idea of leaving remains uncollected. It's bad enough being dead, but it's worse to have people see you dead, and to have living hands feel a dead you, jostle and dress you, push your stiffening arms into clean sleeves and cry over your blood-drained body. — Hilary Thayer Hamann

Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality. — Winifred Holtby

Oh, do not pretend you are in love with me," she said, stiffening.
"Very well," he said, stopping. "I will not pretend. — Elena Greene

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again — Mary Stewart

We make the choices that are right for us. Sometimes, they aren't our first choices, because those have been taken from us, or perhaps, because they were never there to begin with, but they're the best we have. We try for better, but sometimes better is just a fleeting shadow, and it belongs to someone else. — Kimberly Kinrade

It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies, do a thing. — Elbert Hubbard

From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there
in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands. — Louise J. Kaplan

As I savored the meal, I struggled against the dark force that kept tugging at me, telling me I was never going to leave; adhering to my consciousness like sap, or tar, or glue; enveloping me in a sticky sickness that drained my vitality. I felt myself growing old as I sat there, the joints stiffening, the bones aching, the sense of identity melting away like a forgotten candle left to burn itself out. As I settled back into my cot for the evening hibernation, I understood I had been captured. I realized my spirit was ensnared. I knew what must be done. Whatever the cost, I told myself, I would be back on the road at dawn. — Steven Hubbell

For five hundred years after Walther's death - until Goethe - no German lyric poet was his equal. — Walther Von Der Vogelweide

Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a ques-tion he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insati-able." "Everyone strives to reach the Law," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admit-tance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it. — Franz Kafka