Quotes & Sayings About Stretching

The great fear I've had to overcome is the fear of failure. It can be safer to stay in a comfort zone that's not stretching yourself. — Carmen Ejogo

6If I want to write, I write. So just do it. If you think that making time for writing is a problem, just wait until you finish a book, and find a great aching desert of emptiness stretching before you. — Thorne Moore

There can be many opinions on a thing, but there is only one truth."

Vashet smiled lazily. "And if the pursuit of the truth was my goal, that would concern me." She gave a long yawn, stretching like a happy cat. "Instead I will focus on the joy in my heart, [...} — Patrick Rothfuss

Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. — Louis D. Brandeis

I, myself, have had many failures and I've learned that if you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be -you aren't stretching your imagination. — John Backus

If eating out, order your meal and ask the server to wrap up half of the portion to take home with your for the next day, keeping your portion size in check, and stretching your dollar into two meals. — Cat Cora

The limo pulled up to two crescent-shaped gold-plated buildings standing side by side, stretching high into the sky. The farther building said The Diamond Hotel, and the closer one The Diamond Residences. — Michelle Madow

And they see, for a moment,
Stretching out, like the desert
In its weary, unprofitable length,
Their faded ignoble lives.

While the locks are yet brown on thy head,
While the soul still looks through thine eyes,
While the heart still pours
The mantling blood to thy cheek,
Sink, O Youth, in thy soul!
Yearn to the greatness of Nature!
Rally the good in the depths of thyself. — Matthew Arnold

But the artist began to have misgivings as the wall underwent its transformation. Bigger than any pavement project he had yet undertaken, it made him restless. Over the years, a precise cycle had entered the rhythm of his life, the cycle of arrival, creation, and obliteration. Like sleeping, waking and stretching, or eating, digesting and excreting, the cycle sang in harmony with the blood in his veins and the breath in his lungs. He learned to disdain the overlong sojourn and the procrastinated departure, for they were the progenitors of complacent routine, to be shunned at all costs. The journey
chanced, unplanned, solitary
was the thing to relish.
Now, however, his old way of life was being threatened. The agreeable neighborhood and the solidity of the long, black wall were reawakening in him the usual sources of human sorrow: a yearning for permanence, for roots, for something he could call his own ... — Rohinton Mistry

It was the desolate terror of a man who knows that fate has abandoned him, and death's already inside, stretching and swelling and filling up the life-space that used to be his. It — Gregory David Roberts

We learned that the body of Christ grows by the Word of Christ, flexing its muscles to serve, stretching out its hands to heal, and dreaming up creative ways to bless one another using the gifts God has given. — Gloria Furman

To call Keegan a superstar is stretching a point. — George Best

We put too much on contemporary dancers. A lot of them cannot change styles; a lot of them can't do anything else other than run around the stage reaching and stretching in anguish to somebody off camera that I never understand who it is. But it's the teenage angst they have to live with. — Nigel Lythgoe

Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair ... I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ [as] crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair ... The crowds had streamed after Einstein [on Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922] as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later ... They showed exquisite choice in their heroes ... Somehow they understood that Einstein and Hawking were not just great scientists, but great human beings. — Freeman Dyson

Oh." I flushed. Stretching over, I placed it on the table. Then I addressed Archer. "We owe you a thank-you for ... for everything." I waited for Daemon to chime in. When he didn't, I kicked his leg. "Thank you," Daemon muttered. Archer's mouth curved in amusement, and I think it was the first time I saw him really smile. I was blown away by how young it made him look. "You have no idea how gleeful that makes me feel to hear you say that, Daemon." "I can imagine. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. Playtime - especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play - is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development. — Richard Louv

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. — Rose Macaulay

I like everything in my room has to be in order. If there's a wrinkle in the comforter, I'm stretching it out. But this is only when it comes to my room. Outside of there, I'm not as intense. — Jacob Latimore

Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identiy, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of the ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before. — Herman Wouk

A lot of times, the press guys ask why I take an hour and a half to come to the interview room, but if you don't do the massage and the ice baths and the stretching and the cooling down and the eating, and your opponent is doing that stuff, they already have an advantage. — Andy Murray

In fact, for a period stretching over seven hundred years, the international language of science was Arabic. For this was the language of the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, and thus the official language of the vast Islamic Empire that, by the early eighth century CE, stretched from India to Spain. — Jim Al-Khalili

In some ways, I feel like I've been such a dilettante for so many years, just picking up instruments and stretching myself so thin. — Zach Condon

I'm a big believer in pushing yourself outside your comfort zone and stretching yourself artistically, but not at the expense of foolishness. — Nichole Nordeman

Luke and I stay nestled together until he nudges me.
We'd better get going, he says gently.
I guess I dozed off. I'm not letting you fall asleep without a note again. Why not? I ask, stretching. I kiss him on the cheek and add, with a sly smile, you don't have to worry, Luke. I'll remember you in the morning. — Cat Patrick

I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible. — Mark Rothko

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world. — William H Gass

European nation with highest politician/lover ratio: Few European states can hope to compete with France and Italy in this department, and the two nations have been battling for European political lothario supremacy for over thirty years. The contest has been increasingly acrimonious since 1998, when France was initially the clear winner but somehow "lost" sixty-eight illicit lovers in the recount and had to concede defeat. The following year was no less rocked in scandal, when the Italians were disqualified for "stretching the boundaries" of their elected representatives to include senior civil servants - and the crown was tossed back to France. No one was quite prepared for the disgraceful scandal the following year when it was discovered that one French minister had no mistress at all and "loved his wife," a shocking revelation that led to his resignation and ultimately to the fall of the government. — Jasper Fforde

The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon. — Rick Yancey

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide. — Jean Genet

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He was talking. I tried not to think of how he looked and instead of what he was telling me. Once I accomplished that, my brain couldn't get past the 'running' part.
"I don't run." I walked the mile run at school. True story.
I abhorred any kind of physical exercise. I wasn't good at it. I was skinny, but I was soft; had absolutely no muscle mass at all. That's the way I liked it. Who was he to try to change that, change me? I wouldn't let him. No way, no how.
One half of his mouth lifted. He seemed to be enjoying this a little too much. "You do now. You have to be fit, you have to be strong, Taryn, if you're to stand any chance of surviving this. Come on, we'll start with stretching."
He forced me to twist my body into unimaginable positions. I even had to touch my toes. The agony. Luke took pleasure from my pain; even laughing as I moaned and groaned through it all.
Then, the worst came about. He. Made. Me. Run. — Lindy Zart

If you look up at the sky after falling down the blue sky is also today stretching limitlessly and smiles at me ... I'm alive. — Aya Kito

I leaned back in my chair, stretching luxuriantly, delibrately letting my jacket fall open. Predictably, his eyes moved down my body-some things outlast even the change. I grinned and he looked away, a rueful smile twitching at his lips. I finished breakfast in peace. — Karen Chance

A bow has no conscience: it is a prolongation of the hand and desire of the archer. It can serve to kill or to meditate. Therefore, always be clear about your intentions. A bow is flexible, but it has its limits. Stretching it beyond its capacity will break it or exhaust the hand holding it. Therefore, try to be in harmony with your instrument and never ask more than it can give. — Paulo Coelho

Below her, fall was just starting to work its magic on the foliage, creating a blaze of rust and amber stretching into the foothills and up the mountains. It was her favorite time of the year and normally she loved this view. Today, it only reminded her of how much she had to lose. — Kate Fargo

The best part of learning any profession, when you're really going through those huge stretching escalated times of learning and energy, is when you want to do it so much. — Diane Cilento

The first trip of the Pony Express was made in ten days - an average of two hundred miles a day. But we soon began stretching our riders and making better time. — Buffalo Bill

Don't Keep reaching for the stars because you'll just look like an idiot stretching that way for no reason — Jimmy Fallon

Is that why joy hurts
God stretching us open to receive more of Himself? — Ann Voskamp

Uncle Mort glanced at Pandora, then back at the Juniors. "Okay, kids. Brace yourselves. And try not to yell too much."
Elysia's hand tensed on Lex's arm. "I hate it when he says that," she whispered.
Uncle Mort gave them a sympathetic smile. "Remember that old chestnut about the wickedest Grim of all time?"
He pounded on the roof. Grotton's head popped down through the ceiling, a snaky grin stretching from ear to ear.
The screams were so loud, Dora nearly drove into a tree — Gina Damico

I can't keep doing this to myself, getting my hopes up so high, only to have them come crashing down. I can't keep waiting for him to come to his senses, having my whole emotional state rest on what he decides. What if he never wakes up to how perfect we'd be together? What if I spend another year pining for him - or longer even? In a terrible flash, I see my future stretching out before me: waiting for his calls, rearranging my life around college visits, and decoding texts and instant messages like they could be something real, something true.
This isn't love; this is pure torment. — Abby McDonald

But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve. — Arthur Miller

His voice reminded me of the slow stretching descent of honey from a highly placed silver spoon. — J.A. George

Smell is a long-distance sense, a way of stretching time and finding out in advance what lies ahead. — Lyall Watson

I was the type of guy that used to get up in the morning and go out and just out run everybody on the field without stretching or warming up or anything. — Bo Jackson

Old age must have endless avenues, stretching away and away down its darkness, she supposed, and now one door opened and then another. — Virginia Woolf

California, Reacher thought. There was a sedan at the curb. It had been waiting there for them. A big car, black, expensive. The driver was leaning across and behind the front passenger seat. He was stretching over to pop the rear door. The guy opposite Reacher motioned with his gun again. Reacher didn't move. He glanced left and right. He figured he had about another second and a half to make some kind — Lee Child

Take adultery or theft.
Merely sins.
It is evil who dines on the soul,
stretching out its long bone tongue.
It is evil who tweezers my heart,
picking out its atomic worms. — Anne Sexton

Heaven's Way is like stretching a bow. The high is lowered and the low is raised. Excess is reduced and deficiency is replenished. Heaven's Way reduces excess and replenishes deficiency. People's Way is not so. They reduce the deficient and supply the excessive. — Laozi

P. and J. did not like books set in large type with wide margins, such as pleased readers of more refined tastes, but rather pages set in small type stretching all the way across tightly justified lines, filled to the brim with words and sentences, like those enormous rustic dishes you can eat at long and heartily without every emptying them, and are all that can satisfy some gigantic appetites. — Albert Camus

I train my muscles, and I do a lot of stretching, and try to kick higher. But for me, practicing kung-fu is a way to relax myself. — Stephen Chow

It was sad leaving the BBC; not quite like being divorced, but you don't leave after a period stretching from 1960 to 1999 without feeling a certain number of pangs. — Richie Benaud

The artist is now giving a first coat of paint to that tautly stretched canvas which the scientist has been so busy stretching that he has forgotten the use he intended to put it to. — Henry Miller

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history. — Chuck Palahniuk

Now listen to me. I will not walk on one-way streets any longer. Your wound is my wound, (though you don't know that mine is yours), and I do what I can, but the well will run dry. You will use us up. There are women whose first stretching across borders was into your lives. When they discover how you make use of their compassion, they will turn away heartsick, stricken, withering in the freshness of their hope. There are women who were leaders, who worked night and day, defeated not by foreign policy, but by the sexual politics of solidarity, bitter now, unable to work anywhere near you. How dare you speak of the New Woman! We are your richest resource besides your endurance, and you use us like rags to wrap around your pain. — Aurora Levins Morales

I once heard somebody express surprise that instead of following it onward one should not take a cut across Time to secure a moment which, stretching out in line with oneself, would last indefinitely. — Mina Loy

People just ... disappear," he says.
"The Earth just opens up and swallows people," I say, some what sadly, checking my Rolex.
"Eerie." Kimball yawns, stretching. "Really eerie."
"Ominous." I nod my agreement.
"It's just"- he sights, exasperated- "futile. — Bret Easton Ellis

I try to be fussy about the parts I play. I think that's quite prudent, it means you're stretching different muscles, and you're scaring yourself by doing something which is out of your comfort zone. — Matthew Macfadyen

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business. — Teju Cole

I need to start using a hurricane naming system for my hangovers," he mumbles, stretching out on the couch. "I'm calling this one Abby. She's a total whore. — Christina Lauren

Fear stretching out ... is how you live 'forever'. You torture the seconds with worry, you anticipate everything that awaits you, you trouble time, and it becomes an agony of isolated, unconnected moments. — M.J. Rose

Sometimes you are working and you feel like walking out into the terrace, stretching, looking out and feeling the night air on your face. — Kleber Mendonca Filho

Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier
dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading
sparkled in the dim.
There was a piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another. A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair. — Donna Tartt

The problem (as I'd learned, repeatedly) was that thirty-six hours in, with your body in full revolt, and the remainder of your un-opiated life stretching out bleakly ahead of you like a prison corridor, you needed some fairly compelling reason to keep moving forward into darkness, rather than falling straight back into the gorgeous feather mattress you'd so foolishly abandoned. — Donna Tartt

If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you. — Timothy Garton Ash

Ah, all these thoughts, all this peculiar yearning, this seeking, this stretching out of hands toward a meaning. Let it all dream, let it all sleep. I'll simply let it come. Let it come. — Robert Walser

My life was wailing like a beautiful prayer, the moments stretching into hours, the days to years. I could see now that it was possible to live a long life poorly, or a short life well, and that at any moment one might shift their position and, after years of hibernation, decide to crawl out of the den and live. — Kim Dinan

As we approached the shop, a dog began to bark. Seconds later, a furry drool-bedecked face pressed against the lower portion of the glass door, his whole butt shaking from how hard he wagged his tail.
"What's gotten into you, Dexter?" Tyler muttered. Then he came closer and saw Bones and me on the other side of the glass.
Oh HELL no, bolted across his mind.
"Is that any way to greet old friends?" Bones asked dryly.
Tyler drew his shoulders back, further stretching ther strained fabric of his shirt.
"That's not a greeting, sugar. It's my answer to whatever you've come here to ask me to do. — Jeaniene Frost

...but just to be sitting there meditating and praying for the world with another earnest young man- 'twere good enough to have been born just to die, as we all are. Something will come of it in the Milky Ways of eternity stretching in from of all our phantom unjuandiced eyes, friends. — Jack Kerouac

He had already been so long in the world: he had seen it change and seem to spin faster with every passing year, and he felt like a remnant from some long-buried time, a thorny weed still stretching up, for as long as it possibly could, towards the sun. — Robert Seethaler

I felt how important the simplest things were, like feeling proud, finding something funny, stretching yourself, retreating into yourself. — Banana Yoshimoto

God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses. When God looks at a painful or wicked event through his narrow lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin for what it is in itself and he is angered and grieved. "I do not delight in the death of anyone, says the Lord God" (Ezek. 18:32). But when God looks at a painful or wicked event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy or the sin in relation to everything leading up to it and everything flowing out from it. He sees it in all the connections and effects that form a pattern or mosaic stretching into eternity. This mosaic, with all its (good and evil) parts he does delight in (Ps. 115:3). — John Piper

When you run in the morning, you gain time. It's like stretching 24 hours into 25. You may need less sleep and get up earlier, but if you can get by that, running early seems to expand the day. — Fred Lebow

I am lucky, I don't have aches and pains. I do Pilates regularly, which is a series of stretching exercises, and I recommend it to anyone of my age because the temptation is not to exercise when you get older. Well, you should. — Ian McKellen

He promised all those things men promise when they are far away and can feel the phone lines stretching too tight, the wires and cables rapidly unraveling from their braids, snapping, recoiling, collapsing the poles along the way. — Salvador Plascencia

In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

But as much as we like the familiar, as leaders we must be willing to learn, and learning many times requires stretching, growing, and becoming a bit uncomfortable in the process. — Teresa Hampton

When she fell asleep, she dreamed of death
not just for her, not just for her species, but for every living thing she had ever known. The earth was flat and brown, a field of dirt as barren as the moon, a single road stretching in the distance. the last to fall were the buildings, distant and solemn, the gravestones for an entire world. Then they disappeared, and there was nothing left but nothing. — Dan Wells

It is the purpose of life that each of us strives to become actually what he or she is potentially. Each photographer, then, should be obsessed with stretching towards that goal through an understanding of others and the world we inhabit. When that happens, the results, like photographs, are really the expressions of the life of the maker. — David Hurn

And I refuse to be governed by fear. The life stretching before me is that of a queen. It's a life I chose. Fought for, even. I cannot - will not - squander it on dread. — Rae Carson

The stretching, yearning stalks hiss against the boat's bottom, making a white noise that sounds like pollen coming out of a piss-blizzard. — Chuck Wendig

Hey, we live each day, start each day, as if we had an endless number stretching out ahead of us. We don't, but that's how one has to face the day, right? I see an analogy with writing fiction: the story at hand probably won't come off well, and even if it does, it probably won't get published, but if it does there won't be any payment for it - and even if there is, almost nobody will read it, and most who do won't understand or like it. But you go ahead and write the story. What choices do you have? There's always silence, but that won't do for me." - Gordon Weaver (who is suddenly my hero, even though I don't know who he is). — Gordon Weaver

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Advising Mrs. Harris was the least I could do," David said smoothly. "After all, she was the one who brought me and my late wife together."
That was stretching it a bit, since all Charlotte had done was give Sarah lessons in how to avoid fortune hunters, thus ensuring that the recalcitrant girl went right out and married the first one who approached her. — Sabrina Jeffries

This time his voice comes from the left and I hear his footfall moving around my body as I obey. Suddenly I am all limbs, stretching out to please him. I am absurdly vulnerable and beyond aroused. I want him now. — Felicity Brandon

What is the difference, Potter, between monkshood and wolfsbane?"
At this, Hermione stood up, her hand stretching towards the dungeon ceiling.
I don't know," said Harry quietly. "I think Hermione does, though, why don't you try asking her?"
A few people laughed; Harry caught sight of Seamus's eye and Seamus winked. Snape, however, was not pleased.
Sit down," he snapped at Hermione. "For your information, Potter, asphodel and wormwood make a sleeping potion so powerful it is known as the Draught of Living Death. A bezoar is a stone taken from the stomach of a goat and it will save you from most poisons. As for monkshood and wolfsbane, they are the same plant, which also goes by the name of aconite. Well? Why aren't you all copying that down?"
There was a sudden rummaging for quills and parchment. Over the noise, Snape said, "And a point will be taken from Gryffindor house for your cheek, Potter. — J.K. Rowling

When you're stretching yourself, as a role like 'Blue Jasmine' did for me, you risk falling flat on your face. — Cate Blanchett

To me, summer has always been about potential. This was especially true when I was in high school. Those 3 or so months between 1 school year and the next always meant change. People got taller or wider or smaller. They broke up or came together, lost friends or gained them, had life experiences that you could tell had transformed them even if you didn't know what they were. In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible. As a teenager, I was always hoping to change, to become someone other than who I was. Each summer, I felt I had the chance to do that. All I had to do was wait and see what happened. — Sarah Dessen

Los Angeles County is one of the most park-poor urban areas in the nation, and the San Gabriel Valley - stretching from Pasadena to Pomona - is especially starved for open space. — Frances Beinecke

You can close your eyes and think of England, if you like."
"I've never even been to England," she said, but she shut her eyelids. She could feel the dank heaviness of her clothes, cold and itchy against her skin, and the cloying sweet air of the cave, colder yet, and the weight of Jace's hands on her shoulders, the only things that were warm. And then he kissed her.
She felt the brush of his lips, light at first, and her own opened automatically beneath the pressure. Almost against her will she felt herself go fluid and pliant, stretching upward to twine her arms around his neck the way that a sunflower twists toward light. His arms slid around her, his hands knotting in her hair, and the kiss stopped being gentle and became fierce, all in a single moment like tinder flaring into a blaze. — Cassandra Clare

I moaned. "Gonna make this fast and hard," he murmured against my skin. He lifted up my leg and pushed inside of me, stretching and filling me in two hard long thrusts. He started pumping into me before my body was ready for him and the bite of pain made each stroke torturously erotic. "Never felt nothing like this, Ti. Wanna fuck you and smack the living shit out of you all at the same time. Don't know what this is, but it makes me want to keep you filled with my cock all day long and dripping with my cum. I want to mark you. I want to fucking own you." He grunted as his thrusts became harder, more frantic, more erratic. Just more. "What the fuck are you doing to me?" he asked on a ragged exhale. Sparks — T.M. Frazier

THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses - sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. — Mark Twain

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? — Mary Oliver

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything. — Robert Cormier

You're not a good one, mind you. Your technique needs work. You're overeager." Ryan smirked a little. "I get it - who wouldn't be overeager to kiss me?"

Finally, he got the reaction he wanted: Jamie rolled his eyes, though his face was still red from embarrassment. "Fuck off."

Still smirking lazily, Ryan leaned back against the couch, stretching his arm along the back. "Is that how you talk to your best mate who's about to offer you to practice on him?"

Jamie blinked a few times, looking adorably bewildered. "You're joking."

Ryan met his gaze steadily. "Nope. I promise not to laugh at you and just tell you if you're doing something wrong."

Jamie just stared at him.

"Hurry up before I change my mind," Ryan said. — Alessandra Hazard

The Forest of Dean. Here we lived in one of a row of small stone cottages with trees stretching over us like children doing ghost impressions with their hands, surrounded by closed coal mines slowly getting zipped back up into the earth. — Kate Hamer

His dark eyes were hot.

"Drink the coffee," he growled.

Coffee. Right. She had to hold the cup with both hands, otherwise she'd spill the hot coffee all over herself and all over this beautiful bed. She tipped her head back against the headboard and sipped.

God, it was delicious. Sharp, yet with a smooth smoky taste. Some outrageously expensive blend, no doubt. She took another sip. Perfect.

His hand continued stroking her breast, movements lazy. "Good?" he asked.

"Wonderful."

"Give me a taste," he said suddenly, stretching over to cover her mouth with is. Oh lord, she could simply sink into his kisses. This one was long, languid, the strokes of his hand on her breast echoed by his tongue in her mouth. He lifted his head for a second, then moved in more closely, tongue deeper in her mouth. He lifted his head again and smiled down at her. "It is delicious. — Lisa Marie Rice

Crashing into the trembling void
Stretching my hand to you
Losing myself to frigid regret
Is this fragile love
A way
To say
Good-bye — Maggie Stiefvater

Law Number XXIV: The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an established project is accelerating it, which is itself the most costly action known to man. — Norman Ralph Augustine

In a flash of wonderment she saw firm, continuous ground under her feet, stretching from back then to right now and on and on as far as her eyes could take her. — Ann Brashares