Stroke With Quotes & Sayings

What is your name, my pet?"
"Kitty," she replied.
DeVere threw back his head with a guffaw. "Kitty? How delightfully apropos!" His erstwhile companions forgotten, he patted a muscular thigh. "Come then, Kitty, my sweet, little puss. Sit on your master's lap, and I'll stroke you 'till you purr."
-A WILD NIGHT'S BRIDE — Victoria Vane

But the connection between us was in the air, growing stronger with each stroke of his brush and with every cadenza of my piano performance as we struggled to find our unique voices. He by bringing musical tonality to his painting; me by unlocking my inner sluices, letting the palette of emotions spill freely into the art of my music. — Ella Leya

Oh shit, oh shit, stupid shower present!"
Now she did pull her hair as she made the dash to her office.
Roarke sat in her visitor's chair, comfortably involved with his PPC. He glanced up, let loose a regretful sigh. "You changed. And I didn't have any time to ogle you in uniform."
"I have to go shopping!"
Staring at her, Roarke pressed his fingertips to his temple. "I'm sorry, I believe I must have had a small stroke. What did you say?"
"This isn't funny." She bent down, gripped him by the lapels. "I forgot to get a thing for the thing, and I don't even know what the thing is supposed to be. Now I have to go out and hunt something down. Except - " Her eyes went from slightly mad to speculative. "We have all kinds of things around the house. Couldn't I just wrap something up and - "
"No."
"Crap! — J.D. Robb

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored. — Stephen King

Gil sat baking in the sun for at least 45 minutes before one of the tour guides noticed him looking listless and leaning to his left side. As she approached him, she noticed that he had a stupid grin on his face.
"Are you all right, Mr. Cohen?" she asked as she tried to slowly help him to his feet.
His shirt was drenched with sweat and his skin was mostly clammy, signally that he was suffering from the middle stages of heat stroke.
"It's not so bad?" he muttered as he struggled to stand straight up. "What not so bad, Mr. Cohen?" one of the tour guides asked.
"Death," Gil stated in a glazed response.
The guide looked at the heat-stricken man who appeared to have amoment of clarity amidst all of the sweat and dehydration. "Why is death not so bad?" she pressed on. Gil took a big swig of Gatorade and replied, "Because life wasn't so great. — Phil Wohl

Blake waited for her to look at him with a smile, but her shoes were still too captivating. He held a hand up to stop Cole from beginning the ceremony. He knelt on one knee, close to the hem of her dress, and looked up at her. She watched him as he kissed her hand.
"Beautiful, enchanting Livia, will you marry me today?"
Livia's disobedient tears emerged, gravity bathing his smiling face with their small, splashy wishes. She took her hand from his and covered her mouth. She nodded over and over as she cried.
Blake stood and gathered her. Livia dissolved into him, leaving the guests alternately tearing up or looking in other directions.
Blake tried to stroke her hair through the veil, but he was afraid he would pull it out. "Shhh. It's okay. I'm not that terrible, am I?"
Livia shook her head.
"I'm making you my wife right now, even if you cry through the whole damn thing." Blake switched to wiping her tears. — Debra Anastasia

In Washington, as we learned from the White House transcripts, a president may speak of kicking butts, call a problem a can of worms, decide not to be in the position of basically hunkering down, anticipate something hitting the fan, propose to tough it through, sight minefields down the road, see somebody playing hard ball, claim political savvy, and wonder what stroke some of his associates have with others. — Edwin Newman

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.
Kizzy wanted. — Laini Taylor

I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells. Father would generally return — Amos Oz

I make a pussy purr with the stroke of my hand. — Ted Nugent

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as it spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood. — Robert Frost

With backyard eggs, you can serve homemade eggnog at a holiday party with almost complete confidence that you won't make anyone sick
from Salmonella, anyway. Because drink enough homemade eggnog, and the race is on between heart failure and liver disease, unless a stroke fells you first. But life is short. Especially if you drink eggnog. — Jennifer Reese

If, adhering closely to the absolute, we try to avoid all difficulties by a stroke of the pen, and insist with logical strictness that in every case the extreme must be the object, and the utmost effort must be exerted in that direction, such a stroke of the pen would be a mere paper law, not by any means adapted to the real world. — Carl Von Clausewitz

They were all content - like pirates - to go around demanding favours as if this were their right; and all of them of course claimed to have the blood of the Goths flowing in their veins; and all were in pursuit of the dream nurtured by every Spaniard: to live without doing a stroke of work, to pay no taxes and to swagger about with a sword at their belt and a cross embroidered on their doublet. — Arturo Perez-Reverte

I think the question is, how do we live with change? Change in our friends, change in our lovers? Change in me and change in my body, from the stroke. Things have changed this plane of consciousness. We've tried to keep things the same. It causes suffering. This suffering is another step in your spiritual life, in your spiritual journey. — Ram Dass

These are human beings with real lives and the uncertainty and the fear that any of them face right now could be ended at a stroke if we had all the candidates for prime minister simply say that the right to remain here is not in question and I call again upon Theresa May and on the current prime minster to do that. That would be the humane thing to do and I even at this stage hope that that's a direction they will take. — Nicola Sturgeon

Greet everyone you meet with a warm smile. No matter how busy you are, don't rush encounters with coworkers, family, and friends. Speak softly. Listen attentively. Act as if every conversation you have is the most important thing on your mind today. Look your children and your partner in the eyes when they talk to you. Stroke the cat, caress the dog. Lavish love on every living being you meet. See how different you feel at the end of the day ... — Sarah Ban Breathnach

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice! — Marquis De Sade

Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a stroke better. — Harlan Ellison

Never! Never, Marge. I can't live the button-down life like you. I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. Sure, I might offend a few of the bluenoses with my cocky stride and musky odors -- oh, I'll never be the darling of the so-called 'City Fathers' who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards, and talk about "What's to be done with this Homer Simpson? — Matt Groening

Of course it's also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness. — Michael Pollan

All these massive executive-power-consolidating, pound-you-up-the-fanny-whenever-the-urge-so-takes-me directives could simply be ordered not to exist anymore by me, as your next president, with the simple stroke of my pen. So — Cintra Wilson

I realise now that the pain Kevin felt - that night, and for nearly eighteen months beforehand, since his suicide attempt - was no less real, no less urgent, than a heart attach, a stroke, a seizure. Than the sensation of running too hard or running too fast, keeling over, grasping for air. Wishing for something to fill your lungs - to rush in and then revive you - except nothing ever does, and maybe nothing ever can.

It is unpleasant, of course, to sympathise with suicide. It is unpleasant to believe in a reality in which death is the only option. And it is problematic, certainly, to compare suicide to running, to cardiac arrest, to terminal cancer. But this is precisely the problem: There is no fair parallel that can be drawn between those who felt the dark pull of suicide and those who never have. — Amy E. Butcher

Ruxs moaned a slutty sound, his hips speeding up and Green eagerly matched him. "Soon I'm going to put that pretty cock in my mouth and suck you until you explode down my throat," he said, licking the shell of Ruxs' ear. "Chris," Ruxs hissed. "I'm not gonna last." Green could feel his own balls tightening. It'd been too long since he'd had something besides his toys and his hand to pleasure him. Ruxs' cock was hot and heavy against his. Pulsing greedily. "You like me talking to you like that?" Green squeezed his fist tighter, making sure to flick the cap of Ruxs' bulging head with every stroke. "Answer me." He bent down and bit Ruxs' nipple, making him jerk so hard he almost fell off of him. "Shit!" Ruxs yelled. Green slowed his movement and raised his head. "Well, look what I found." "You talk too damn much." Ruxs gripped his head and lowered him back to his nipple. Green — A.E. Via

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. — Adam Smith

I want to hear you say it, I say, pushing her hair from her eyes. She sighs and I can't hold back any longer. I stroke her cheek with my hand and lean in to kiss her soft lips. I half expect her to push me back, but I can't stop myself right now. I have to do it. I have to kiss her. I need to kiss her. — Melissa Brown

No." I pulled away just enough to lock my eyes with his. His crooked smile sent shivers down my spine. His eyes were a deep blue darkening more as the minutes passing between us were getting hotter. "I will be the one using you, and you'll love every second, every breath, every stroke and every fucking inch of me," he said, his lips ghosting above mine. — Stephanie Witter

The younger, certainly, had to the full that charm
of a constitutional freshness of aspect which may
defy for a long time extravagant or erring habits of
life; a physiognomy healthy-looking, cleanly, and
firm, which seemed unassociable with any form of
self-tormenting, and made one think of the nozzle of
some young hound or roe, such as human beings
invariably like to stroke - with all the goodliness, that
is, of the finer sort of animalism, though still wholly
animal. It was the charm of the blond head, the
unshrinking gaze, the warm tints: - neither more
nor less than one may see every English summer, in
youth, manly enough, and with the stuff in it which
makes brave soldiers, in spite of the natural kinship
it seems to have with playthings and gay flowers. — Walter Pater

All it takes is six cuts," he said near her ear. She nodded, relaxing against him as he guided her hands with precision. One deep stroke of the blade neatly removed an angled section of wood. They rotated the pencil and made another cut, and then a third, creating a precise triangular prism. "Now trim the sharp edges." They concentrated on the task with his hands still bracketed over hers, using the blade to chamfer each corner of wood until they had created a clean, satisfying point. Done. — Lisa Kleypas

Well used are those cruelties (if it is permitted to speak well of evil) that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which. although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men; the others cannot possibly survive. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Don't stop," she whispered. "I want to feel you inside me."
"I couldn't stop now, even if I wanted." He kissed her, marking her with all the passion and yearning she had felt for so long. "I need this. Damn it, I need you."
And then he plunged into her with one deep stroke. — J. Lynn

You dont get your black ass away from this fire I'll kill you graveyard dead. He looked to where Glanton sat. Glanton watched him. He put the pipe in his mouth and rose and took up the apishamore and folded it over his arm. Is that your final say? Final as the judgement of God. The black looked once more across the flames at Glanton and then he moved away in the dark. The white man uncocked the revolver and placed it on the ground before him. Two of the others came back to the fire and stood uneasily. Jackson sat with his legs crossed. One hand lay in his lap and the other was outstretched on his knee holding a slender black cigarillo. The nearest man to him was Tobin and when the black stepped out of the darkness bearing the bowieknife in both hands like some instrument of ceremony Tobin started to rise. The white man looked up drunkenly and the black stepped forward and with a single stroke swapt off his head. — Cormac McCarthy

Its very pulse, if I may use the word, was like no other clock. It did not mark the flight of every moment with a gentle second stroke, as though it would check old Time, and have him stay his pace in pity, but measured it with one sledge-hammer beat, as if its business were to crush the seconds as they came trooping on, and remorselessly to clear a path before the Day of Judgment. — Charles Dickens

I saw him playing on television and was struck by his technique, so I asked my wife to come look at him. Now I never saw myself play, but I felt that this player is playing with a style similar to mine, and she looked at him on Television and said yes, there is a similarity between the two ... his compactness, technique, stroke production - it all seemed to gel! — Donald Bradman

As it usually happened after an engagement, a heavy sadness was coming down over his spirits. To some degree it was the prodigious contrastbetween two modes of life: in violent hand-to-hand fighting threr was no room for time, reflexion, enmity or even pain unless it was disabling; everything moved with extreme speed, cut and parry with a reflex as fast as a sword-thrust, eyes automatically keeping watch on three or four men within reach, arm lunging at the first hint of a lowered guard, a cry to warn a friend, a roar to put an enemy off his stroke; and all this in an extraordinarily vivid state of mind, a kind of fierce exaltation, an intense living in the most immediate present. — Patrick O'Brian

The moon! It smiled at her with all its might, she could see it! through the broken wood beams of a crude ceiling, nearly touch its cratered surface, stroke its circumference; oh, moon! bulbous and benevolent, guiding herds across planes on forlorn journeys; elucidating wisps of mist to lovers at midnight; absent to her for years but treasured still. — K.I. Hope

Further, democratic negotiators, or foreign negotiation specialists accepted to assist in the negotiations, may in a single stroke provide the dictators with the domestic and international legitimacy that they had been previously denied because of their seizure of the state, human rights violations, and brutalities. Without that desperately needed legitimacy, the dictators cannot continue to rule indefinitely. — Gene Sharp

It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying. — Ted Hughes

I stroke a finger over my own top button, undo it, then let my hand drop with an exaggerated sigh. "It's not quite the same," I declare, "ripping my own clothes off. — Kate Tough

His heart was now beating rapidly. He wanted to embrace her, cover her with kisses, caress her hair, touch her breast, stroke her thighs: he wanted to sing songs for her, dance dances for her, write poems for her. — Andrew M. Greeley

There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at - that light, for example. — Virginia Woolf

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

You don't even like me, remember?" That's what I try to say. What actually comes out of my mouth is closer to a baby's first attempt at babbling.
"Shh." He runs his fingertips along my cheek, caressing my face. "Hush. I'm right here." He looks at me with deep anguish in his eyes. Like there's so much he wants to tell me but feel it's too late now.
I want to stroke his face and tell him that it will be okay. That everything will be all right.
And I wish so badly that it would be. — Susan Ee

Faith, is the road that goes straight past the gravel, and cloud-mesh dirt into a mirage, where still you believe to go straight, and when you finally catch up with it, it ends at a lake where you stretch your eyes across, but unable to glimpse the other side- so you jump in and swim, gliding each stroke with tiredness and swallow of water, you reach the end, put a hand out and pull yourself up on concrete, where the same road continues straight into another blue-white blur. — Anthony Liccione

Bernard Shaw phrased the experience very admirably: "When we learn something, it feels at first as if we have lost something." It is so, for instance, with a new stroke at tennis. Our old stroke had been a pretty incompetent affair, of the sort to make a professional laugh. But it had been ours, we were used to it, all our muscles were in the habit of it. The new stroke is doubtless better, but we are not in the way of it, we cannot do anything with it, and all the joy goes out of tennis - but only until we have mastered the new way. Then, quite suddenly, we find that the whole game is a new experience. — Frank Sheed

A few days into the illness, they'll get a rash. With Marburg and Ebola the throat and conjunctivae get inflamed and there are small transparent lesions like tapioca granules in the soft palate. Then they start to bleed with a paradoxical combination of blood clots and hemorrhaging. The clots lodge in the brain, liver, spleen, and the hemorrhaging accelerates until the body cavities fill up with blood. Death comes some six to seven days after the first symptom, either from a massive stroke, or from shock. — Patrick Lynch

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty. — Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

rhythmic drums were pumping waves of emotion into both of them. Her lusty eyes looked at him with a penetrating stare. Fionna's naked breasts pressed against Dick as they came together to dance. Dick faced Fionna and he held her tight. His naked rippling muscles pushed against her firm aroused female flesh. Dick danced with his wife Fionna. Then he grabbed the guitar to stroke a few chords of ecstasy. Another man was pounding the drums while Fionna danced naked in front of the live audience. Fionna made harmony with Dick as the throbbing beat made her explode with excitement and pleasure. He touched her deep inside with his music. He made love to her with his instrument. Each stroke of the guitar was like a motion of erotic love. Dick made her feel as if her body was quivering inside. — Fionna Free Man

I am aged with a sickness of the mind. — Parke Godwin

For the unified mind in accord with the Way all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power. — Sengcan

The important things in life always happened by accident. At fifteen she didn't know much, in fact, with each passing year she was a lot less clear about most things. But this much she did know. You could worry yourself sick trying to be a better person, spend a thousand sleepless nights figuring out how to live clean and decent and honest, you could make a plan and bolt it in place, kneel by your bed every night and swear to God you'd stick to it, hell, you could go to church and promise properly. You could cross your heart seven times with your eyes tight shut, cut your thumb and squeeze it and pen solemn vows on a rock with your own blood then throw it in the river at the stroke of midnight. And then, out of the black beyond, like a hawk on a rat, some nameless catastrophe would swoop into your life and turn everything upside down and inside out forever. — Nicholas Evans

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only possible for a Christian ... All technologies and all cultures, ancient and modern, are part of our immediate expanse. There is hope in this diversity since it creates vast new possibilities of detachment and amusement at human gullibility and self-deception. There is no harm in reminding ourselves from time to time that the "Prince of this World" is a great P.R. man, a great salesman of new hardware and software, a great electric engineer, and a great master of the media. It is his master stroke to be not only environmental but invisible for the environmental is invincibly persuasive when ignored. — Marshall McLuhan

At some point in my life I realized I knew only celebrities, I didn't know any real people. I think it was a master stroke of Fate that in researching the greatest celebrity of them all, I would at last be meeting real people, finding them more extraordinary than celebrities; fascinated by them all and enjoying enduring friendships with some. — Elaine Dundy

There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can't ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it's quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia's the sane realisation you just can't be doing with all that anymore. — Glen Duncan

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

You will stay with me. You will sleep here at my side and you will touch me. I am depressed but not when you stroke my chest. — Laurann Dohner

In a small Swiss city sits an international organization so obscure and secretive ... Control of the institution, the Bank for International Settlements, lies with some of the world's most powerful and least visible men: the heads of 32 central banks, officials able to shift billions of dollars and alter the course of economies at the stroke of a pen. — Keith Bradsher

Sometimes two people need to fall apart to realize how much they need to fall back together."
I take her hand and rest it between us, then stroke the back of it with my thumb. "Let's not fall apart again," I whisper.
She looks me in the eyes. "Never. — Colleen Hoover

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued. — David Eagleman

Since she seen Fortune head in that big pot Miss Lydia say that room make her feel ill, sick with the thought of boiling human broth. I wonder how she think it make me feel?
To dust the hands what use to stroke my breast; to dust the arms what hold me when I cried; to dust where his soft lips were and his chest what curved its warm against my back at night.
From the poem "Dinah's Lament" (15) — Marilyn Nelson

It was that surrender he needed. That complete feminine submission to every stroke, every caress, ever naughty act. Only in that submission would the subconscious trust, the bond he needed between them, come. He wanted her to trust, to know, to instinctively understand that he was more than just her lover; he was her other half. The one she told her secrets to. The one, she made secrets with. — Lora Leigh

Josie's house was near the edge of town, next to the used car lot. When a person was done with a car, and they didn't need to pawn it, they would park it in the used car lot, open the door, and run as fast they could for the fence, before the used car salesmen could catch them. No one ever came to buy one. The used car salesmen loped between the lines of cars, their hackles raised and their fur on end. They would stroke the hood of a Toyota Sienna, radiant with heat in the desert sun, or poke curiously at the bumper of a Volkswagen Golf, nearly dislodged by potholes and tied on with a few zip ties. The used car salesmen were fast and ravenous, and sometimes a person who meant only to leave their car would leave much more than that. — Joseph Fink

Be it human or animal, touch is a life-giving thing. Has anyone ever had a stroke or a heart attack while cozied up with a pet? I doubt it. — Robert Breault

It is impossible to study the works of the great mathematicians, or even those of the lesser, without noticing and distinguishing two opposite tendencies, or rather two entirely different kinds of minds. The one sort are above all preoccupied with logic; to read their works, one is tempted to believe they have advanced only step by step, after the manner of a Vauban who pushes on his trenches against the place besieged, leaving nothing to chance. The other sort are guided by intuition and at the first stroke make quick but sometimes precarious conquests, like bold cavalrymen of the advance guard.
[1913, p210] — Henri Poincare

I stroke her lightly, memorizing her body. I want her to melt into me, like butter on toast. I want to absorb her and walk around for the rest of my days with her encased in my skin. I lie motionless, savoring the feeling of her body against mine. I'm afraid to breathe in case I break the spell. — Sara Gruen

To my mind, every emergency room should have a low-intensity laser for people with stroke or head trauma. This therapy would be especially important for head injuries, because there is no effective drug therapy for traumatic brain injury. Uri Oron has also shown that low-intensity laser light can reduce scar formation in animals that have had heart attacks; perhaps lasers should be used in emergency rooms for cardiac — Norman Doidge

My God, whose son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest, thou canst not strike a stroke. My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise, and in Him is my trust, and though stripped and crushed by thee, -though naked, desolate, void of resource- I do not despair:where the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray: Jehovah, in His own time, will aid. — Charlotte Bronte

Writers are in many ways like demi-gods. With one stroke of a pen they can give life to a character, or strike them from existence, with nary a twinge of grief at their passing. — Steven Lake

She'd stutter all the reasons why she shouldn't, shaking her head adamantly. But her body..her body would grow hot with excitement. She'd get wet at the thrill of it. So fucking wet that i'd smell her, telling me she's not even wearing panties to smother her spicy scent.
When my hand touched hers, still clutched to her chest, she'd flinch but she wouldn't pull away. She'd let me guide it between her swollen breasts and down to her flat belly, brushing the bit of exposed skin where the hem of her shirt rides up. Then I'd let her fingers play with the jewel in her navel, manipulating each digit as if that diamond-studded barbell was her clit. Demonstrating how I would stroke it for her. — S.L. Jennings

Good news for orange lovers: citrus fruit intake has been associated with reduced stroke risk. — Michael Greger

Would you like to hold my sword?" He asked the question with a gleam in his eyes.
Lucy burst out laughing. At least she didn't giggle again. "You did not just say that. But, um, yeah, I'd like to hold your sword, Agent Riley."
Hunter grinned and unzipped his backpack, pulling out something surprisingly small. He held it out to her, and noticed the disappointed look on her face. "Expecting something bigger?"
She smirked at his continued play on words. She had a lifetime of training in verbal and physical sparring; he was no match for her. "They say size doesn't matter, but I disagree."
Hunter, who apparently hadn't expected her response, choked on his own comeback and unsheathed the sword, then placed it in her hand. "You have to stroke it a certain way to make it bigger. — Kimberly Kinrade

Life is better than death. But death comes eventually to everyone. It is something which many in their prime may prefer not to think about. But at 89, I see no point in avoiding the question. What concerns me is: How do I go? Will the end comes swiftly, with a stroke in one of the coronary arteries? Or will it be a stroke in the mind that lays me out in bed for months, semi-comatose? Of the two, I prefer the quick one. — Lee Kuan Yew

My litter sister looks up at me.
Mom was right. Her eyes are the same as they've always been. Brown eyes fringed with long lashes and steeped with the memory of sweetness and light, laughter and joy - trapped in this mangled corpse-like face.
"It's all right, baby girl," I whisper into her hair as I hug her. "I'm here. I came for you."
Her face crumples and her eyes shine. "You came for me."
I stroke her hair. It's as silky as ever. — Susan Ee

An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny. — G.K. Chesterton

Well, here we are. Let's change. Let's change the world. Together." "You sound like my father." "Your father wants the gods back on their pedestals. I want us working as one: humans with Craft, gods with divine power, priests with Applied Theology. But we need space to build that society. We need the time and the power to change, and we'll never have that time or power with Craftsmen crushing us. We need freedom, and I can win that freedom. Not in a decade or three. Today. In one stroke." "You want a moderate revolution. You just need to kill a few people first." "A few people. Yes. To free a city. To save a planet. Dresediel Lex will be a model for the world." "I kind of like it the way it is. — Max Gladstone

The kiss was everything she hadn't dared let herself think about. Slow. Hot. Hungry. His lips molded to hers, drinking up her small, breathless exhale before his tongue skimmed across hers. Bree reached out and gripped his shirt, tugging him until he was flush against her. The man knew how to kiss, and she felt her mind emptying of everything but how incredible his mouth felt working deeper into hers. Every nip, every silky stroke of his tongue, every breath dragged between their mouths made her hold on tighter. The second he stopped, the real world would slide back into place, and more than anything, she wanted this. Wanted Finn with an unexpected yearning that burrowed deeper with each second he continued to kiss her. He cupped the nape of her neck, tipping her head back as he deepened the kiss. She whimpered, catching his bottom lip between hers. His thumb trailed along her jawline, and she shuddered in its wake, wanting his mouth there. Wanting — Sydney Somers

To concentrate intensely for 4 and a half hours, that's too hard for me. Too tiring. I concentrate 'lo maximo' on the 'golpe,' the stroke, but between strokes I'm interacting with the crowd or laughing with my caddie, talking about the spectators, the cute girls. — Sergio Garcia

He longed for the years when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler's perfect knife edge. — Hanya Yanagihara

She reached forward and lifted her uncle up into her arms. He was still too weak to resist, and she comforted him with a stroke of her fingers through his greying hair, softly kissing his lips, tasting the blood with a shiver of anticipation, and moving her kisses to his cheek, the line of his jaw, the crook of his neck where his pulse thundered to push the shadowy blood to its destinations.
"Know that, when I do this, I'm doing it, to ease your suffering," she whispered, lips pressed to his skin, her fangs pressing behind them hungrily. — Carmen Dominique Taxer

The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson

God who doesn't know what is going to happen to him with language. And with names. In short, God doesn't yet know what he really wants: this is the finitude of a God who doesn't know what he wants with respect to the animal, that is to say, with respect to the life of the living as such, a God who sees something coming without seeing it coming, a God who will say "I am that I am" without knowing what he is going to see when a poet enters the scene to give his name to living things. This powerful yet deprived "in order to see" that is God's, the first stroke of time, before time, God's exposure to surprise, to the event of what is going to occur between man and animal, this time before time has always made me dizzy. — David Wills

Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with stars and cunningly wrought in myriad-coloured jewels. But more beautiful to me thy sword with its curve of lightning like the outspread wings of the divine bird of Vishnu, perfectly poised in the angry red light of the sunset.
It quivers like the one last response of life in ecstasy of pain at the final stroke of death; it shines like the pure flame of being burning up earthly sense with one fierce flash.
Beautiful is thy wristlet, decked with starry gems; but thy sword, O lord of thunder, is wrought with uttermost beauty, terrible to behold or think of. — Rabindranath Tagore

All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is
purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one
will ever make a tragedy-and that is as well, for one could not bear it-whose grief is that the principals
never met. — Mary Renault

the Eight Percent Rule to McCann. "It's really very simple," he said, using the same melodic voice he used to pet and stroke the jury. "I have to convince one juror out of twelve to vote with us. One of twelve is eight percent, give or take. Not that I need to convince him our client is innocent, understand. I just need to establish an intimate partnership with that one fellow or lady in a crowd who is contrary. The man or woman who has an ax to grind. My theory, and you saw it happen twice, is that in any group of people forced to be together, at least eight percent of them will go against the majority if for no other reason than to shove it up their ass - if they have an authority figure they can trust to be on their side. I am that leader in the courtroom. — C.J. Box

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness ... towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those fore hundred identical balconies is the one outside of Martha Mitchell's apartment ... Ah ... Nightmares, nightmares. But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would never act that weird. At least not during football season. — Hunter S. Thompson

She toyed with the top button of his shirt. "Do Apaches kiss?"
"The people believe the mouth is only for eating."
"Oh." She didn't try to hide her disappointment.
He shifted her against him a little and cupped her breast with one hand, his thumb rubbing across the nipple. "They also believe a woman's breast is only for nursing a child."
Lowering his mouth over hers, he ran his tongue between her lips, exploring her tongue, making her shiver with a stroke along the roof of her mouth.
When he raised his head at last, she whispered, "I'm glad you're an unbeliever. — Ellen O'Connell

But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover - I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her - but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate. — J.M. Coetzee

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance — Jawaharlal Nehru

We match each other stroke for stroke until I get a hit on her right arm.

She tries to switch sword arms, but I jab my scim at her wrist faster than she can parry. Her scim goes flying, and I tackle her. Her white-blonde hair tumbles free of her bun.

"Surrender!" I pin her down at the wrists, but she trashes and rips one arm free, scrabbling for a dagger at her waist. Steel stabs at my ribs, and seconds later, I am on my back with a blade at my throat.

"Ha!" She leans down, her hair falling around us like a shimmering silver curtain. — Sabaa Tahir

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with ever modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still. — Hope Mirrlees

I'm just sorry your dragon is so hell bent on mating with someone as fucked up looking as me," he murmured, keeping his voice light even though he wasn't joking at all. God, everything about her was perfect. It was no surprise she was so resistant to mating with him....
To his surprise, she snorted and smacked his stomach.
"Bran Devlin, you're the sexiest male I've ever met. If you want me to stroke your ego you're out of luck."
Then, to his utter fucking surprise, she slid her hand lower and grasped his already hardening cock before looking up at him. Her smile was an erotic mix of uncertainty and wickedness.
"But I don't mind stroking this. — Katie Reus

Dads. Do you not realize that your child needs to feel your skin on his? Do you not realize the incredible and powerful bond that skin on skin contact with your daughter will give you? Do you not understand the permanent mental connections that are made when you stroke your son's bare back or rub your daughter's bare tummy while you tell bedtime stories? And if any idiot says anything about that being inappropriate, you're gonna get kicked in the face, first by me, and then by every other good dad out there. Touching your child is your duty as a father. — Dan Pearce

I simply state that I'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation-with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I've thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn't seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: I am not long for this world and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. — James Joyce

Disco is funky when you take one record at a time. It's just that they narrowed it down to one beat to try to corner the market on a particular music. And when you do that with rhythm - talk about something that will get on your nerves. Try to make love with one stroke. Somebody will tell you to fax it in. — George Clinton

Clear blue eyes settled on me. My body moved of its own accord. My fingers played with the ends of his hair, absently noting that it was longer and softer than any man should have, and then my hands moved to stroke the stubble on a chiseled chin, up to a pouty bottom lip. I grazed that lip with two fingers, and the end of his tongue poked out and licked my skin. Electricity flowed from the tips of my fingers down to the soles of my feet. — Michelle Jo Quinn

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. 'Ohe, Salad baba, it's you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.' At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater's face. 'Hey, Spoono,' Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, 'Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards down there won't know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. — Salman Rushdie

On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history. — Bill Bryson

Under the system of centralized control without constitutional checks and balances, the war spirit identifies dissent with treason, the pursuit of private happiness with slackerism and sabotage, and, on the other side, obedience with discipline, conformity with patriotism. Thus at one stroke war extinguishes the difficulties of planning, cutting out from under the individual any moral ground as well as any lawful ground on which he might resist the execution of the official plan. (Lippmann 1936: 67) — Anonymous

More than anything else a dying person needs to have someone with them. This used to be recognised in hospitals, and when I trained, no one every died alone. However busy the wards, or however short the staff, a nurse was always assigned to sit with a dying person to hold their hand, stroke their forehead, or whisper a few words. Peace and quietness, even reverence for the dying, were expected and assured.
I disagree wholly with the notion that there is no point in staying with an unconscious patient because he or she does not know you are there. I am perfectly certain, though years of experience and observation, that unconsciousness, as we define it, is not a state of knowing. Rather, it is a state of knowing and understanding on a different level that is beyond our immediate experience. — Jennifer Worth