Tangle Quotes & Sayings

It's I politics that men are always aggravating the hopeless tangle of their laws, obscuring the simplest principles and making a mockery of liberty. — Joseph Sobran

She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and torturous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mournful notes without promise, devoid even of hope. — Kate Chopin

I never see you now,' she said. 'I never seem to see anyone I like. I don't know why.'
But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. — Evelyn Waugh

Jesper and Kaz swung around, crashed into the mechanism of the clock, righted themselves. It wasn't a fight, it was a brawl - graceless, a tangle of elbows and fists.
"Ghezen and his works, someone stop them!" Wylan said desperately.
"Jesper hasn't shot him," Nina said.
"Kaz isn't using his cane," said Inej.
"You think they can't kill each other with their bare hands?"
They were both bleeding - Jesper from a cut on his lip and Kaz from somewhere near his brow. Jesper's shirt was halfway over his head and Kaz's sleeve was tearing at the seam. — Leigh Bardugo

I couldn't afford to tangle myself up in other people's expectations and inevitable disappointment. It would be awful. An ever-expanding cycle of everyone feeling bad, like a bulimic serpent eating its own tail. — Alexis Hall

The storm had come out of nowhere, tossing the ship like a toy on the waves. The sea had played along until it had tired of the game, and dragged their boat under in a tangle of rope and sail and screaming men. — Leigh Bardugo

Zara." He sighs. The wind bellows outside. "How can I make you understand this? I need your mom. If I don't get her, more boys will die."
"That's ridiculous."
"No, it's just how it is."
I think for a second. "If that's true, then why did Ian try to turn me?"
He loses his composure. His face shifts into something worried, something almost human. "Did he kiss you?"
"Almost. Betty killed him first."
He almost smiles. He pulls his hand through his hair. "Betty is fierce."
"Is that why you stay away when she's here?"
"Not even a pixie wants to tangle with a tiger."
He blows on the ember in his hand. It turns to dust.
"You seem like you could handle almost anything," I say.
"This?" He smirks. "Parlor tricks. — Carrie Jones

It's just like unraveling a tangle when you don't know where the knots are, and you don't know what the web looks like. But as you work on one section, it is connected to everything. — Kamailelauli'I Rafaelovich

She didn't know if she cried for what she'd lost as a teenager, or for the confused tangle of emotions inside her now. Either way, Mike telling her that he was sorry against the top of her head was the only answer that made any sense. — Lauren Gilley

After several trips across the Andes, the pattern of the flora was gradually coming into focus. This to me was the great revelation of botany. When I knew nothing of plants, I experienced a forest only as a tangle of forms, shapes, and colors without meaning or depth, beautiful when taken as a whole but ultimately incomprehensible and exotic. Now the components of the mosaic had names, the names implied relationships, and the relationships resonated with significance. — Wade Davis

Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That's progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers. — Odysseus Elytis

In movies you get to do that. Sometimes with the vigilante justice movie he has to also tangle with police, which are traditional or security people. Is there going to be any of that in this? — Antoine Fuqua

The insecure people enjoy bad mouthing the others. They indulge in the continuous havoc and they tangle themselves in this spider web of plots and conflicts. I really wonder what it is about their inner life that make them so insecure. #Justmyobservation. — Euginia Herlihy

Hon, falling in love is easy. Staying in love is the tough part." ~Faith Barnett from Texas Tangle — Leah Braemel

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it
but this in turn seems then a moral treason. — Czeslaw Milosz

A tangle of sea smell and of weeds and damp, new-plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfumes of white blossoms somewhere near, but the night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. there was no weight of darkness, there were no shadows. the white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep. — Kate Chopin

she thinks about lying in here with alex, of the tangle of arms and rope, or lips. — Emily Franklin

It is important to note that multiculturalism does not share the postmodernist stance. Its passions are political; its assumptionsempirical; its conception of identities visceral. For it, there is no doubting that history is something that happened and that those happenings have left their mark within our collective consciousness. History for multiculturalists is not a succession of dissolving texts, but a tense tangle of past actions that have reshaped the landscape, distributed the nation's wealth, established boundaries, engendered prejudices, and unleashed energies. — Joyce Appleby

Facing the only gas-lamp yawned the cavern of a second-hand furniture dealer, where, deep in the gloom of a sort of narrow avenue winding through a bizarre forest of wardrobes, with an undergrowth tangle of table legs, a tall pier-glass glimmered like a pool of water in a wood. An unhappy, homeless couch, accompanied by two unrelated chairs, stood in the open. — Joseph Conrad

So it is with life. Those thorns, the prickly problems of life, cause us to strive to rise above them and then, as we do, we learn. We learn to exercise true compassion, true kindness - or the thorns, if we let them, cause us to brood, to mourn over our trials. Then we plant the seeds of bitterness, hate, and ruin - weeds. We may reach up for the rose or down to the weeds ... the weeds in life that tangle us, strangle us, and cause us to lose hope. — James Michael Pratt

Everyone will recognize that each sound carries with it a tangle of sensations, already well-known and exhausted, which predispose the listener to boredom, in spite of the efforts of all musical innovators. — Luigi Russolo

This club's no place for you, tibby," he had told her with gruff fondness. "You has to stay away from a milling cove like me, and find some rum cull to marry."
"Papa," she had begged, stammering desperately, "d-don't send me back there. Pl-please, please let me stay with you."
"Little tangle-tongue, you belong with the Maybricks. And no use to hop the twig and run back here. I'll only send you off again. — Lisa Kleypas

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. — Alfred North Whitehead

I keep my eyes down, looking now at my fingers as they twist the fabric into a knot."I'm sorry. About the way I acted yesterday." When I straighten up, Ky has already moved on.
"Don't be," Ky says, pulling a tangle of climbing green vines away from a shrub so that we can pass through. He throws the vines at me and I catch them in surprise. "It's good to see you jealous once in a while." He smiles, — Ally Condie

To give up a marriage - someone unmarried might imagine it's like giving up a seat in a theater, or sacrificing a trick in bridge for the possibility of better, later. But it is harsher than anyone could realize: a hot invisible fire, burning pieces of hope and fantasy, and charred bits of the past. It had to go, however, if something were to be built in its place. So I stood there and gave Buzz advice, and all I could think of were the automatons we had seen at Playland, moving beautifully in the wind, and the children who were taken behind the scenes on a tour and shown, to their surprise, the vast tangle of wires and switches that would be so hard to undo, and even worse, once undone, to bring to life again. — Andrew Sean Greer

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

'Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.'

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, 'What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?

'I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!

- "A Dream — William Blake

Our lives may seem a tangle; but as we commit ourselves to the wise Master Worker, He will bring out the pattern of life and character that will be to His own glory. — Ellen G. White

Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams. — Glenda Millard

May's haircuts were Marblehead's version of a magic show. The townie kids used to form lines up and down Front Street to watch as Mr. Dooling pulled the rattail comb through my mother's hair. With each pull, the comb would snag on something, then stop. As he reached into the mass to unwind the tangle, he would find and remove everything from sea glass to shells to smooth stones. In one particularly matted tangle, he found a sea horse. Once he even found a postcard sent from Tahiti to someone in Beverly Farms. — Brunonia Barry

Why did every human concern clog itself up in a tangle of routines, formalities, disciplines, imperatives? Why couldn't one be free? Really free? Guarding one's freedom, wasn't freedom at all. Why couldn't one win one's freedom for good and all, and get on with life? — H.G.Wells

Don't think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers ... Think if Tiffany's made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was! — Brenda Ueland

I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity. — Joy Harjo

Don't overthink things. Sometimes you can convince your head not to listen to your heart. Those are the decisions you regret for the rest of your life. Faith Barnett From Texas Tangle — Leah Braemel

Melancholy, amorous and barbaric, these tales exalted adulterous love as the only true kind, while in the real life of the same society adultery was a crime, not to mention a sin. If found out, it dishonored the lady and shamed the husband, a fellow knight. It was understood that he had the right to kill both unfaithful wife and lover. Nothing fits in this canon. The gay, the elevating, the ennobling pursuit is founded upon sin and invites the dishonor it is supposed to avert. Courtly love was a greater tangle of irreconcilables even than usury. It remained artificial, a literary convention, a fantasy (like modern pornography) more for purposes of — Barbara W. Tuchman

God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind. — Thomas More

When he's sliding down my body and planting greedy kisses on my inner thighs. "Better than ice cream," he rasps against my sensitive flesh, his tongue coming out to tickle my clit. "So much sweeter, baby." Then he captures the little bud between his lips and sucks hard enough to make me cry out. "Oh my God," I choke. My fingers tangle in his hair, keeping him trapped between my thighs. "Keep doing that." His laughter vibrates through my body. He continues to suckle me while one finger teases my folds, circling my opening until finally, slowly, slipping inside. I gasp in delight and rock against him. He's rocking, too, I realize. He's all but fucking the mattress as he licks and sucks and groans. — Sarina Bowen

All of us, regardless of how we identify, need a community in which to grow our faith. We require the tangle of other souls to enlarge our hearts, to perfect our relationships with one another and to help us understand more deeply our better Selves (big 'S'). — James Lecesne

His hands grasped her waist and lifted her until she could have sworn that his feet had come off the ground, too; that they were floating up above the creek, above the trees, above the burning hillside, into the dense tangle of stars, about to kiss the moon. — Lauren Kate

When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty. — Charles Horton Cooley

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appears, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds - the invisible shared out in endless abundance. — Denise Levertov

Her hair was a tangle. Her filthy clothes would make any self-respecting debutante shriek in horror. Dirt streaked her piquant face. And still he thought she was utterly irresistible. He was in a bad way indeed. Several — Anna Campbell

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog's coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse's fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep's wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man's trouser cuff or the hem of a woman's skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement. — John Steinbeck

We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys. — David Abram

Each October I walk into the woods
looking for bones: rabbit skulls,
a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deer
with the blood bleached out. What died
in the lush of roses and mint
shines out from the tangle of twigs
that bind it to the place
of its last leaping. The living lack
that kind of clarity. In late April,
when the water spreads out and out
till everything is lilies and seepage,
there is only the mystery of tracks,
a rustle receding in the many reeds.
And so the bones accumulate
across my windowsill: the flightless
wings and exaggerated grins,
the silent unmoving reminders
of where the glories of April lead. — Charles Rafferty

You know it with startling clarity in that moment - how there's only a singular cord in this knotted mess of a world worth reaching for. It's dangling right there from our impossible tangle, and it's the one hope you need to reach for this Advent. That scarlet lifeline of Christ. — Ann Voskamp

You haven't seen your father since you were eight?'
He shook his head.
'No word. No contact. No nothing?'
'Nothing.'
Daisy's eyes looked right and left before coming back to his. 'Is he alive?'
Erik turned looked into the blue-green eyes studying him so intently. He was surprised he had revealed this to someone he barely knew. Normally this was the card he kept closest to his chest. Yet something about Daisy looking at him, her expression calm and interested, sympathetic but not pitying, tactfully curious, seemed to be reaching into the tangle of emotions comprising the experience of being so cruelly deserted, and gently drawing out a thread. — Suanne Laqueur

Man ... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has ... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love ... — Lionel Trilling

at Dana. They both lay in a tangle of limbs and sheets, — Travis Hill

I reserve my greatest admiration for those who continue to struggle to embrace the whole impossible tangle of snakes that is our society; those who fight to identify and strengthen human connections, and defeat polarizing forces that strain to drive us apart. — Shana Alexander

Your hurt swallows ine, like space swallows time, and the two intertwine. We tangle together. — Ellen Hopkins

One great difference between good writing, that readers overlook, and bad writing, that they fail to notice, has to do with the number of rewrites and revisions usually required by the former. It isn't at all easy to write clear, declarative prose - transparency evolves from ruthless cutting and trimming and is hard work - while lumpy, tangle-footed writing flows from the pen as if inspired by the Muse. — Ira Levin

There was only one hope she didn't and wouldn't allow herself to hold on to: that if, in almost thirty years, she hadn't found a man, not a single one, who was exclusively significant for her, who had become inevitable to her, someone who was strong and brought her the mystery she had been waiting for, not a single one who was really a man and not an eccentric, a weakling or one of the needy the world was full of - then the man simply didn't exist, and as long as this New Man did not exist, one could only be friendly and kind to one another, for a while. There was nothing more to make of it, and it would be best if women and men kept their distance and had nothing to do with each other until both had found their way out of the tangle and confusion, the discrepancy inherent in all relationships. — Ingeborg Bachmann

Like a junkie, I was jonesing for a romance novel coupling. I needed a pulsing pillar of passion, a mammoth mail member, a cocky cobra ready to tangle with my vaginal mongoose.
I also needed to think about upgrading my reading. My imagery was actually starting to bother me. — Alice Clayton

Alexander's top generals were about to tangle with one of history's toughest teenage girls. — James Romm

Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. A mess of blood, pieces of bone, a woven tangle of nerves, veins, arteries. Consider what the spirit is: air, and never the same air, but vomited out and gulped in again every instant. Finally, the intelligence.
Think of it this way: You are an old man. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future. — Marcus Aurelius

As for the topsy-turvy tangle known as soixante-neuf, personally I have always felt it to be madly confusing, like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. — Helen Lawrenson

There are Four of Us

I have turned aside from everything,
from the whole earthly store.
The spirit and guardian of this place
is an old tree-stump in water.

We are brief guests of the earth, as it were,
and life is a habit we put on.
On paths of air I seem to overhear
two friendly voices, talking in turn.

Did I say two?...There
by the east wall's tangle of raspberry,
is a branch of elder, dark and fresh.
Why! It's a letter from Marina.


November 1962 (in delirium) — Anna Akhmatova

Lennie rolled off the bunk and stood up, and the two of them started for the door. Just as they reached it, Curley bounced in.
"You seen a girl around here?" he demanded angrily.
George said coldly, "'Bout half an hour ago maybe."
"Well, what the hell was she doin'?"
George stood still, watching the angry little man. He said insultingly, "She said
she was lookin' for you."
Curley seemed really to see George for the first time. His eyes flashed over George, took in his height, measured his reach, looked at his trim middle. "Well, which way'd she go?" he demanded at last.
"I dunno," said George. "I didn't watch her go."
Curley scowled at him, and turning, hurried out the door.
George said, "Ya know, Lennie, I'm scared I'm gonna tangle with that bastard myself. I hate his guts. Jesus Christ! Come on. There won't be a damn thing left to eat. — John Steinbeck

For a few heady weeks of the year the steppe in a binge throws out a wilderness of flowers that tangle your hooves and confuse your horse. — Bryn Hammond

Tangle me up like Grandma's yarn, — Luke Bryan

I let my hands fall to the bed. Her mouth crafts a warm path to mine. There we share the taste of my tears as her top lip slides between my own and her tongue warms the inside of my mouth. Her hand slides up my neck, nails grazing the skin, till she finds purchase in my hair, tugging slightly at the tangle. Shivers lance my body.
Gone is any semblance of resistance. All the guilt that kept me from betraying Eo with Mustang is swept away in the chaos inside me. All the guilt I have for knowing she is a Gold and I am a Red vanishes. I'm a man, and she's the woman I want. — Pierce Brown

In this fallen world, and in their fallen lives, those who are alienated from God are a part of this age, which is now passing. It has no future and there are intimations of that in the depths of human consciousness where a tangle of contradictions lie, for we are made for meaning but find only emptiness, made as moral beings but are estranged from what is holy, made to understand but are thwarted in so many of our quests to know. These are the sure signs of a reality out of joint with itself. This is what, in fact, points to something else. These contradictions are unresolved in the absence of that age to come which is rooted in the triune God of whom Scripture speaks. He it is who not only sustains all of life, directing it all to its appointed end, but who also is the measure of what is enduringly true and right, and the fountain of all meaning, purpose, and hope. — John Piper

If the cells and fibres in one human brain were all stretched out end to end, they would certainly reach to the moon and back. Yet the fact that they are not arranged end to end enabled man to go there himself. The astonishing tangle within our heads makes us what we are. — Colin Blakemore

Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. — Primo Levi

and were willing to suffer pain if necessary." A young woman in the spring and summer of 1967 was walking toward a door just as that door was springing open. A stage was set for her adulthood that was so accommodatingly extreme - so whimsical, sensual, and urgent - that behavior that in any other era would carry a penalty for the daring was shielded and encouraged. There was safety in numbers for every gorgeous madness; good girls wanting to be bad hadn't had so much cover since the Jazz Age. San Francisco - glowing with psychedelic mystique, the whole city plastered with Fillmore and Avalon posters of tangle-haired goddess girls - was preparing for a convocation (of hapless runaways from provincial suburbs, it would turn out), the Summer of Love, through which the term "flower children" would be coined, while in harsh, emotion-sparking contrast, helicopters were dropping thousands of U.S. boys into the swamps of Vietnam. — Sheila Weller

Say something, Jess. Say anything.
And just when I'm about to think of what I should say next, my mouth goes into whacked overdrive like I'm possessed. "The graphic art in Clone Wars is my favorite," I say. "I love how they drew the characters. You know - how everything looks so angular and - "
My words tangle and freeze when my brain finally arrives to shut it down.
Say something but NOT THAT, you psycho!
"Clone Wars. Love it, do I? Yesss." He's actually responded in a Yoda voice!
I blink.
His eyes are kind, sparkling with laughter and still, all too green. Yoda green! — Anne Eliot

At dusk in the Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica, Melissa Overton barely heard the constant sound of crickets chirping all around them. Prowling through the dense, tropical rainforest as a jaguar, she listened for the human voices that would clue her in that her prey was nearby.
Waves crashed onto the sandy beaches in the distance as she made her way quietly, like a phantom predator, through the tangle of vines and broad, leafy foliage, searching for any sign of the poachers. Humans wouldn't have a clue as to what she and her kind were when they saw her - apparently nothing other than an ordinary jaguar. And she and her fellow jaguar shifters planned to keep it that way.
Her partner on this mission, JAG agent Huntley Anderson, was nearby, just as wary and observant. The JAG Special Forces Branch, also known as the Golden Claws, was only open to jaguar shifters and served to protect both their shifter kind and their jaguar cousins.... — Terry Spear

At that instant the hag's noisy breathing stopped and with it all other sound. Her eyes opened, showing only whites - milky ovals infinitely eerie in the dark root-tangle of her sharp features and stringy hair. The gray tip of her tongue traveled like a large maggot around her lips. — Fritz Leiber

You never can tell when a bad thing might make a good thing happen. I realized that good and bad were always there and always mixed up together in a tangle. — Ingrid Law

I was 23, and that was my first professional job. Anybody who has curly hair knows you don't want it to be brushed out because it becomes a never-ending tangle. — Judy Davis

Away in the distance, a train appeared behind the trees, all its compartments were lit, the windows were sure to be open. One of us started singing a ballad, but we all wanted to sing. We sang far quicker than the speed of the train, we swung our arms because our voices weren't enough, our voices got into a tangle where we felt happy. If you mix your voice with others' voices, you feel as though you're caught on a hook. (trans. Michael Hofmann) — Franz Kafka

And nobody wanted to tangle with my wolf from what I'd heard. She had a nasty temper and represented my alter ego with a proud wag of her tail. — Dannika Dark

Janey accuses me of chasing jailbait. She bursts into angry tears, asking if it's because she's getting older. It's true. She's aging more noticeably every day - while I am standing still. I prefer the stillness here. I am tired of Earth. These people. I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives. — Alan Moore

She was bad at love. There were people in the world who were good at love and people who were bad at it. She was bad. She used to think she was good at love, that it was intimacy she was bad at. But you had to have both. Love without intimacy, she knew, was an unsung tune. It was all in your head. You said, "Listen to this!" but what you found yourself singing was a tangle, a nothing, a heap. It reminded her of a dinner party she had gone to once, where dessert was served on plates printed with French songs. After dinner everyone had had to sing their plate, but hers had still had whipped cream on it, and when it came her turn, she had garbled the notes and words, frantically pushing the whipped cream around with a fork so she could see the next measure. Oh, she was bad, bad like that, at love. — Lorrie Moore

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies. — Roy Blount Jr.

And afterward, in the small cabin, they'd do this, this tangle of bodies, this blurring of the edges that kept people distant and lonely. — Libba Bray

You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse. — Marya Hornbacher

My father used to say that it's not enough to just beat an attacker off. You have to hurt them enough that they'll know not to tangle with you anymore. Or preferably kill them. (Wren) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

The loss is transformative, in good ways and bad, a tangle of change that cannot be threaded into the usual narrative spools ... It's not an emergence from the cocoon, but a tree growing around an obstruction. — Meghan O'Rourke

After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stooped in a group and splashed water in each other's faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other, with averted faces to avoid the strangling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time. — Mark Twain

It takes two to tangle.
-unknown — Swapna Rajput

There is a black-and-white picture in my hallway, of me, Nancy, and Lizzie in the bath, when Nancy was eight months old and Lizzie two-and-a-half. I am gently biting Lizzie. Nancy, in turn, is gumming my face. All eyes are on the person taking the picture - Pete, who was, as the slight camera-wobble shows, laughing. There we are-a tangle of half-shared DNA, all interlocking with each other; all being watched over by the one who loves us best. If I had to explain to someone what happiness is, I would show them this picture. — Caitlin Moran

Jay's large body covered her. Oh God, the welcome weight of him. His mouth descended on hers, not asking, not seeking, but demanding she meet his need. She wrapped her arms around his neck and arched up into him as her tongue darted into his mouth, met his, and mated in a hot, heady tangle. — Kate Kelly

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. — Emmet Fox

The human heart is like a big mess of embroidery silks, and the more you pull, the more they tangle. The thing is, the threads have only got one end, if that. You can't sort them all out into colors. You just pick the ones you want and hold one to them as best you can. — Rose Lerner

With thoughtless and impatient hands We tangle up the plans The Lord hath wrought. And when we cry in pain He saith, "Be quiet, man, while I untie the knot." (Author unknown, in Jack M. Lyon et al., Best-Loved Poems of the LDS People [1996], 304) — Boyd K. Packer

Yes, he would have done that for Tessa - died to keep the ones she needed beside her - and so would Jem have done that for him or for Tessa, and so would Tessa, he thought, do that for both of them. It was a near incomprehensible tangle, the three of them, but there was one certainty, and that was that there was no lack of love between them. — Cassandra Clare

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love," characteristically, combs the appearances of the word, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. — A.S. Byatt

Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of an arid landscape in his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the snow's edge with the voices of dead dahlias.
But there is no oblivion; no dream:
only flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a tangle of new veins,
and those who hurt will hurt without rest
and those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence. — Rumi

Perhaps because we knew we couldn't win against their might we turned on each other, riven by petty jealousies, split apart by treachery, our lives a dark tangle of fear. Victims often attack one another, they become chickens in a pen, bickering, frenzied. We did the same. Not only were our people besieged by the Romans but they were at war with each other. The priests were deferential, siding with Rome, and those who opposed them were said to be robbers and thugs, my father and his friends among them. Taxes were so high the poor could no longer feed their children, while those who allied themselves with Rome had prospered and grown rich. People gave testimony against their own neighbors; they stole from each other and locked their doors to those in need. The more suspicious we were of each other, the more we were defeated, split into feuding mobs when in fact we were one, the sons and daughters of the kingdom of Israel, believers in Adonai. — Alice Hoffman

My fingers draw up her back and tangle into her hair. "They'll never separate us."
"Never," she repeats.
Our lips crush together, our bodies pressed tight. An inferno of lips and hands and movements that continues to grow in heat. The blanket falls away as Rachel slides her legs so that she straddles me. On the verge of burning up completely, I groan and cling to her small frame. Her hands drift under my shirt, leaving a singeing trail.
We've become a wildfire. Almost unstoppable. I kiss her neck and the beautiful sounds escaping her mouth encourage me further. My hands skim under her shirt, up her back, linger for seconds near her bra, and I gently nip her ear when I feel lace.
Images pour into my mind of what she'd look like with her shirt off, then her jeans. My fist traps strands of her hair. "I want you, Rachel."
And because I do, I kiss her fully on the mouth - nothing left to the imagination. Every fantasy becomes a reality with that one embrace. — Katie McGarry

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws. — Richard Matheson

She wanted to tell him what happened wasn't really his fault, but she knew that wasn't the way this kind of guilt worked. Intellectually, he already knew that. It was his emotions that were tripping him up. The tangle of love and memory and what might have been. — Charles De Lint

And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us. — Lauren Oliver

Cole!" Cassandra smacked him on the shoulder.
"Wha-?" When he opened his mouth all you could see was half-chewed goo.
"How old are you?" I demanded. I threw shrimp at him and it got stuck in his tangle of wig hair. Bergman fished it out, wiped it off, and put it back on the serving dish.
"Now, thats disgusting," said Cassandra.
"Children!" Vayl's voice boomed in our ears, loud and sudden enough to make us all jump guiltily. "I trust you are all preforming actual work right now."
"Chill out, Vayl," I replied. "Bergman is just conducting and experiment to see how vampires respond to ingesting brown hair dye."
"That makes me curious, Vayl," said Cole in a sticky, goodie-between-the-gums voice that reminded me of Winnie the Pooh after a major honey binge. "Have you ever colored your hair? You know blonds have more fun."
"Not when they are in the hospital. — Jennifer Rardin

What does the novel know? It has no practical or educational aim; yet it knows what ordinary knowledge cannot seize. The novel's intricate tangle of character-and-incident alights on the senses with a hundred cobwebby knowings fanning their tiny threads, stirring up nuances and disclosures. The arcane designs and driftings of metaphor - what James called the figure in the carpet, what Keats called negative capability, what Kafka called explaining the inexplicable - are that the novel knows. — Cynthia Ozick

You long for life and try to settle the problems of life by a logical tangle. And how tiresome, how insolent your outbursts are, and at the same time, how scared you are! You talk nonsense and are pleased with it; you say imprudent things and are constantly afraid of them and apologizing for them. You declare that you are afraid of nothing and at the same time try to ingratiate yourself with us. You declare that you are gnashing your teeth and at the same time you try to be witty so as to amuse us. You know that your witticisms are not witty, but you are evidently well satisfied with their literary value. You may perhaps really have suffered, but you have no respect whatsoever for your own suffering. You may be truthful in what you have said but you have no modesty; out of the pettiest vanity you bring your truth to public exposure, to the market place, to ignominity. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A US firm with a large "government affairs" division dedicated to lobbying politicians in Washington, a Russian company founded by an oligarch with personal friendships in the Kremlin, and an Indian company finding its way through the tangle of decades-old licensing and bureaucratic requirements face drastically different regulatory environments from one another, let alone from a start-up seeking to enter an industry for the first time. — Moises Naim

And if you ask how I regret that parting?
It is like the flowers falling at spring's end,
confused, whirled in a tangle.
What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking
There is no end of things in the heart. — Ezra Pound